“Isn’t it your picture in the newspapers? Didn’t I see you on the video this morning? Are you not the poor victim of this horrible new technique?” – A Clockwork Orange
I hear he was convicted – I hope he didn’t beat himself up over that.
One of the very recurring themes in this blog has been a fight against victimhood. This has mainly been at a personal level on Friday posts in the same way that when I, in second grade, went to my parents’ door and said, “I’m scared,” Pa Wilder sat up. He paused, like a man who wasn’t interested in nonsense, and said:
“Go back to bed.” The tone of his voice was such that I was, at that point, a hell of a lot more afraid of Pa Wilder than any shadow in my bedroom.
Victimhood is such a subtle and vile personality trait that I think that fathers, especially, jump on it like Whoopi Goldberg on a sandwich: it’s messy, vicious, and you really don’t feel like eating after seeing them at work.
Pa Wilder was an especially good teacher of this lesson. I remember whittling something and cutting my thumb. My first reaction wasn’t fear at the spurting jets of blood from my thumb. Nope. It was, “Oh, no, Pa’s gonna take away my knife!” The idea of death was only slightly more scary than the thought of being unmanly before Pa.
I guess I found him Travolting.
To be fair to Pa, he was a kind and caring man. Mostly. But if he thought you were being less than manly, and if he smelled even a whiff of it, he’d react in a fashion to let me know that it would never, ever be accepted to hear me whine or complain about being a victim.
Ever.
That’s the message I’ve taken with The Boy and Pugsley. To be fair to them, our society is one that’s built on exceptional care for feelings. The other night I was watching a YT video of an arrest (it was a hoot) where the passenger of a car tried to fight the cops.
Yeah, it ended with a Tasin’®. The cop then, calmly asked the guy that he had just tossed to the pavement, “My pronouns are he and him, what are yours?” The dude looked like a dude, and said “he/him” but later said “his” name was Julia.
I wonder if when Levine’s wife kicked him out if he packed up her things and left?
My thought was that this cop had been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that, “Tasin’® a he/she is okay, but don’t you ever, ever misgender them.” The idea was that he could have pulled the trigger and sent a few thousand more volts through “Julia” a dozen times, and that would be cool. But to misgender “Julia” would have been a career-ender.
He’s probably (in June of 2023) right. Break an arm or two? That’s okay. But violating a victim’s sense of victimhood?
For shame!
At least part of the problem we’re seeing with people today is that society (schools, teachers, psychologists, cops, Bud Light®, the military, the Governor of California, the media, the Internets, etc.) encourage them to be victims. And it makes life awful.
As I told my X-wife (X rather than ex because she came from another reality and was X-Files® worthy), “Here’s a hammer and three nails. Why don’t you nail yourself up to another cross?” Apparently, I’m now known as a jerk by all the soul-sucking vampires.
Mea culpa.
My X-wife made the same mistakes again and again, since she lacked reflection.
Regardless, that might have been a sign that the marriage wasn’t going well because one of the things that fills me with disgust is victimhood. And here, in 2023, I see the push back.
The Bud Light® trans-marketing (it only identifies as marketing) fiasco was the spark. A fire requires fuel, oxygen, and a spark. This was the spark. The fuel was the consistent pushing of victimhood, the oxygen was the Internet. The only thing left? A spark. From that point, every bit of victimhood is on the table: racism, speciesism, agism, colonialism, and sexism. And if it ends with “phobia”? Pound sand, we don’t care.
We don’t care about the grievances of any group. Suck it up, Buttercup, and do your job. Rub some dirt on it, crybaby. Put on your big he/him or she/her underwear and deal with life.
We don’t care.
The primary idea of the Left was to make people think that they were alone. Heck, marketing professionals seemed to think that the only real people were the rainbow-flagged companies on LinkedIn® and on Twitter™. They thought that people really didn’t mind the creeping victimhood permeates our culture like capsaicin coats my mouth after The Mrs. makes traditional Wilder green chili which has been known to be hot enough to melt steel.
The answer is that it simply isn’t true. The vast majority of people in the country are despised by the marketing people running major companies, but the people they despise were meant to believe that they were alone, that their voice didn’t matter.
I was walking across the street and I saw my X-wife getting run over by a bus, and I thought, “Wow, that could have been me,” but then remembered I don’t know how to drive a bus.
But it does. One of the big events that let the velociraptor of responsibility represented by the Right on the kitten of victimhood championed by the Left was at least partially enabled by Elon Musk burning a few billion of his spare dollars on Twitter®. His cutting loose on the mouths of people muzzled by the algorithm has been transformative.
Admittedly, there’s no chance of a “small” Twitter© account having a Tweet™ exposing actual Truth go viral, but we can see each other again. We can speak. And we can do that thing the Left hates more than anything – point out the weakness of the victimhood that all of the groups wanting something for nothing.
I hope my agent is reconsidering his life choices.
When they are denying that they’re responsible for the positions they find themselves in, that just stirs up the thing that they fear most: the accountability of people who aren’t afraid to confront them and deny that people who are living their lives are somehow responsible for every little hurt felt by every little group in the world.
The “Expired By” date for all of that victim nonsense is dated 2023.
Thank Heavens. Pa would have wanted it that way.
