...for this experiment to work I'm going to have to ask for some volunteer Wing-Nuts. I don't have too many so I doubt it will work, but let's try it anyway.
It's sort of inspired by DistributorCapNY's Condoleeza Rice series and it's sort of inspired by that weird experience I had in Punta Paitilla/Johns Hopkins a few days ago in which I was discussing my mother's treatment in Spanish with her three doctors while in the background Lou Dobbs, Casey Wian and Kitty Pilgrim were getting pretty worked up about all the Spanish spoken in the United States and how the "immigration problem" was #1 in the voters' minds.
Lou Dobbs, Casey Wian and Kitty Pilgrim are White, Gentile Americans who do not speak Spanish. Dobbs may know a little because he hires illegal immigrants from Central America to do various menial tasks around his house but I'm going to bet that his accent sucks and he's not real comfortable with the indefinite past tense. Lou Dobbs's audience is White and Gentile and is pretty worried about all of these Spanish-Speaking immigrants coming to get them.
Lou and his bigoted audience aren't really part of this experiment. I just enjoy making fun of them. I may make some references, however, to Central American immigrant, though.
If you read Kelso's Nuts fairly regularly you know something about me. I'm a Jewish fellow with Brown hair and eyes. I'm 5' 7" tall. I'm normally proportioned. I'm 46. I live in Panama City, Panama. I'm fluent in Spanish. I hold a Bachelor Of Arts degree and a Master's In Business Adminstration. I make money gambling. I have a couple of friends here who are Panamanian but went to college in the United States. One is a professional online poker player. The other has a construction business but is a very good card-counter at Blackjack. Let's call them John and Arley for the sake of whatever. We're also all interested in finance. We'll get together a few times a week and play poker or blackjack or just sit around talking about stuff that interests us like international stocks, bonds and currencies or maybe baseball. Perhaps, now and again we'll party a little, maybe look for women, discuss the goings-on of the day. Maybe make plans to go to a poker tournament in Medellin. That sort of thing.
You are a suburban man of 40 or so. You're married. You have a couple of kids. You live in a middle-class community about 10 miles outside of Houston. You work in an office park, selling something or other, marketing something or other. Maybe your wife works. Maybe she doesn't. You have your friends and your hobbies. You go to the Baptist Church on Sundays. Are you worried about John, Arley and me at all? Do you worry we'll come up from Panama, steal your church, rape your car, etc.? Probably not. Do you think we know or care that you exist? If you do, you are one seriously grandiose person. We could not care less about you. You do not exist. You don't know about any of the subjects we're interested in. You don't have nearly as much money as we do and you certainly don't have as much education. Your wife is probably 40 lbs heavier and 15 years older than any of the women we date. When Sunday rolls around, maybe we're thinking about football and you are too. If we find a game we like we might bet a few thousand on it. You'll be rooting for the Texans. While you're in church, we're probably tearing off a little sex with our lady friends before kickoff. Or not. Maybe each of us will sleep in and make some plan for later. Perhaps, you do think that John, Arley and I are concerned about you or someone like you because you are a citizen of the greatest country on Earth -- The United States Of America. And you are a Republican. And you have a house somewhere where there are no Blacks or Latins. Maybe. Not fucking likely though. You might as well be a cockroach to us. Or merely a gust of wind. You do not exist. We don't care about you in the slightest. Does that bother you? Probably not.
Now, consider three Black men maybe 10 years younger than us. They're friends. They live in the 5th Ward. Maybe one is named Lorenzo and the other is D'Artagnan and the other is named James. Maybe they were lucky in life like John, Arley and I were. Maybe they have some money and nice cars and maybe some of it was ill-gotten. Maybe not. Maybe all three are successful insurance salesmen. They have their own interests and their own girlfriends or wives or children. Maybe they even go to church. Or not. Maybe they like to play cards and watch football. Maybe they like to gossip about the goings on of the day. Do you think they have any idea you exist? Do they care that you exist? No and no would be the answers. They'll probably go to their graves never seeing you once. So why do you have an electrified fence and all kinds of elaborate security devices to keep people out of your house that don't have the slightest interest in driving 10 miles out of their way, away from their girlfriends, away from their other friends and away from the things that interest them just to rob, rape and terrorize you?
No, really, why would you possibly believe that? Are you in a big hurry to drive into their neighborhood and rob them and rape their girlfriends? Of course not. So, why do these fantasies guarantee Republican victories across your nation? Why is "law-and-order" so signficant when your country is by and large pretty law-abiding? Why are there so many prisons and why are they so overcrowded and why are the police militarized and why are prisons privatized? Wouldn't it make more sense for Lorenzo, D'Artagnan and James to be maybe a little scared of you? Do you like that? I'll bet you do.
Fuck you. And fuck everything about you.
Kelso's Nuts love you
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
Your boy in Houston Ser Kelso becomes self important by believing the white nationalist idiots like Lou Dobbs [who is married to a lovely Latina btw thus “absolving” him of any possible racism] and Kitty Pilgrim [how apropos a name is that?] who constantly remind him that his daily bucket of privilege granted merely because of the color of his skin will be empty tomorrow if he does not support the Grand Old Party and its march toward ethical irrelevance also known as race based fascism.
White Americans no more understand the realpolitik of race than do canines. You hit the nail on the head when you mentioned how little these people matter [I especially found myself closing my eyes nodding after reading "a gust of wind" you are truly a brilliant man] yet to them they are the be all and end all of civilization because even in the reality of their mediocrity, in the concrete evidence of their disposable lifestyles and under the crushing weight of their lack of true Humanity they still are willing to give power to those of whom they swear they have moral sway over as ordained by a Higher Authority.
Somewhere in the sea that is churning with thoughts on this maggot of reason you have slipped into my brain by way of my eyes this morning is a jewel in a box that no one knows is there. The victory is ours Ser Kelso, yours and mine, because what has that white man in Houston earned other than the right to say "nigger" in his air conditioned Ford F-250 where no one else can hear his fetid cry when he is cut off on I-10 trying to merge onto the 610. These people have given up everything body and soul for the illusion of being somehow set apart from the Human Beings. They are stuck with this and a tattered banner that says Mission Accomplished having become slaves to their ideology even as the rest of Terra knows they are so very dreadfully wrong. You and I though Kelso we are free, you as a man and I as a demon we are free citizens and we need not suffer Americans who think and act and live for slaughter, and segregation and hypocrisy. Their days are numbered both on Terra and kept in skin bound ledgers here in Hell. If it is one thing we do well here it is keep accounts.
The place you describe is a place that I have been. It is called The Woodland, Texas and it is just north of Houston, gated lily white, save for the “help,” and rabidly pro-Bush.
Good shit Kelso. I'm inspired to write now.
cavalor ypu are also worthy of acknowledgement I have not read a post so well versed in quite some time. You have colorfully written everything i thought better than i would have said or thought.
Kelso it is strange that I was talking to my girl and we were discussing modern names and how they embody the evolution of a unique identity (Black America)- I brought up D'Artagnan "What ever happened to D'Artagnan"?- cosmic...weird man...weird.
Right wingers (and especially the religious right-wingers) deperately cling to their turf/money/power via fear, that is their only platform.
Well stated post, and I've packed up my things and will be moving into your house next week, hope you don't mind.
Ser Boss: Thanks for the kind and supportive words. About the only good thing I can say about The Woodlands is that Sam Houston Racetrack is located in its city limits. 9/11 did indeed "change everything" but not in the way the Republicans and the MSM presented that change. What's happened is a coalescing of THE REST OF THE WORLD around some set of shared values of skepticism, capitalism, social justice, and fatigue with THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. Funnily enough, the exceptions, China and Russia, not a tremendous amount to admire there, are the ones actually doing the heavy lifting!
As far as the other big player, Saudi Arabia, is concerned, I really don't know what to make of it. It's sitting on ready to make a deal with Israel yet the vestiges of American power are preventing it. For now, thank you Saudi Royal Family for overpaying us for Austin's Mom! She was an OK racehorse. She was sound physically. We did a good job of putting her in spots she could dominate and look better to the general public than was reality. And Allen Iwinski (best wishes wherever you are) did a marvelous job training her. She had fuck-all for bloodlines. Maybe they were deceived by the name of her breeder, Mr. Farid Sefa, who from what I can tell is more of a Michigander than a Fundamentalist Muslim. Read Michigander any way you like.
Dave: Thanks a million! You know I don't like to dip in that pool because it's not mine. During election season I try to make the effort, though.
A couple of years ago I read the Monster Kody biography and found it quite affecting, especially on this very point. It should be, I think, required reading for everyone. The book was a necessary palliative to that horrorshow Superpredator nonsense that William Bennett and John D'Iulio wrote some years earlier.
Billymac: Why bother? Come to my house, lounge by the pool and join our Blackjack team!
d'Artagnon, one of Dumas' Musketeers, was based on Charles de Batz-Castelmore.
when I think of d'Artagnon i think of the d'Artagnon company's famously and thoroughly delicious Foie Gras.
on a more serious note, you are so right kelso. so many americans are SO THOROUGHLY narcissistic, ego-centric and ethno-centric it is un-fucking-believable.
i saw tucker carlson on tv a few months back and he was interviewing some author who was from canada. he talked to the guy like he was from mars. 'so, what do you canadians do for fun?' ... or, 'do you guys go to school there?' ... i exaggerate, of course, but the canadian guy though carlson was SUCH an idiot.
I had been thinking about the Citizen Cope song "D'Artagan's Theme" and the erstwhile New Orleans Saints defensive back, D'Artagnan Martin
Dave: One day we got to do a joint post on baby naming in the Jewish and Black American communities because ours are the only American ethnic groups whose ethnicities are readily identified by FIRST NAMES rather than SURNAMES.
Want to figure out who the Jew is? Never mind names like Jacob or Joshua or Eli or Sam. Look for ANGLO surnames used as first names. In our parents' era, we used the familiar Morton, Murray, Howard, Sanford, Barnett, Bennett, etc. These days your Jewish boys are named SCOTT, GLENN, ROSS and MILES.
I'm sure there are loads of equivalent little tricks among African-Americans, the purposeful off-spelling of a common Anglo first same, the Latino or French first name combined with the the Anglo surname, and so on...Including the biggies, the Arabic and African names.
I confess to being kind of a shirt-pocket linguist. You know, of course, that Jews have their own surname equivalents to the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Jacksons, etc., don't you? Whether free, indentured or just ghettoized we were not permitted to have our real surnames, so we took the common ones available, the ones you know: Friedman, Goldberg, Weiss, etc. Common German nouns or adjectives. This differentiated us from Europeans who had specific family names. And thus, those are Ashkenaz "slave-names." Sephardic "slave-names" generally followed the same rules: common Spanish nouns or adjectives: Rosa, Leon, Rosado, Maron, Malva or any of the common "son-of" surnames but with an "s" instead of a "z": Vasques, Velazques, Rodrigues...
Shockingly but not surprisingly, the JJ Walker joke applies yet again in this realm. In the absence of Blacks and Jews, people can IMPROVISE. You can always tell a North England name: professions or common noun adjective combos--Watchmaker, Shuttleworth, Fletcher, Cartwright, Ramsden, Butterworth...
I think it's a fascinating topic but I am a very boring man.
Post a Comment