“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.
I ranted a while back on how I felt victimized because Scientific American had gone woke over the years and started publishing an “opinion” column. Here’s one they ran on victimhood. I still feel persecuted because they stopped their Amateur Scientist column and started aping Psychology Today instead.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unraveling-the-mindset-of-victimhood/
When Scientific American is neither.
Well said, Mr. Wilder! I couldn’t agree with you more! The victimhood mentality in today’s world is beyond ridiculous. At some point (like now), we just have to stand up and say NO MORE! Each person is responsible for their own life. Choosing to believe you are a victim of (insert today’s nonsense here) doesn’t help you or anyone else. Accepting that you are responsible for the crappy choice(s) you’ve made, learning from it, and adapting to overcome those things is what makes you YOU. Acting like a victim gets you nowhere. Catering to the out of control victim mentality gets you nowhere. Unless your goal is to lose your entire customer base and put yourself out of business, that is. If that’s the case, then AB got it entirely right with their choice to utilize the girly boy on the Bud Light cans. Although, doubling down on that choice when the SHTF was a ballsy move, even for them. Stupid, but ballsy nonetheless.
Especially when the victims don’t drink your beer. I guess nobody does, now. They’re in a pile of Schlitz.
Bravo John..but buses are really easy to drive. Just sayin’
Jaybo, agreed with one caveat:
Buses ARE easy to drive, they are NOT easy on you when you get run over by said Bus.
On a completely unrelated note, in my former Profession I was hired into a very unique position. There was at that time one other position like it in the whole US of A. Needless to say with a total population of skilled workers who knew how to do that job being 2 or less AND the fact that after 12 years of doing that job I had acquired enough knowledge and skill to be able to do it well (most of the time) I wrote a manual so that someone who took over for me could know something about what was required day in and day out…Unlike I did when I started.
I titled it Grumpy’s Bus Book and told my subordinates where to find it if the Bus found me.
MSG Grumpy
I tried to, once, but found that idling busses are exhausting.
I do hope you’re right about that particular red tide turning. The controllers prefer us as dispirited serfs, regardless of our pronouns, but I believe that there’s still enough spirit left in the American populace to prevail, and that we’ve been pushed about as far as we’re going to allow.
I must grudgingly admit here that the NRA got (probably only) one right in the past century or so with their “Refuse To Be A Victim” ad campaign. Just don’t tell “Pepe La Pew” LaPierre that I said so. By the way, is he still alive? Does the NRA still exist? I think we got tired of being victimized by them a while back, iirc.
Let’s do that again with Mordor on the Potomac!
The Right has woken up – they know they’re not alone. There are many, many implications of this.
It comes down to people believing they deserve better, and no matter how good they have it they deserve more so when they don’t get more? They are a victim. You don’t deserve sh!t in this world, no one owes you anything. That attitude might explain why I found Calvinism so appealing back in my church going days: you suck and deserve misery.
The Lutheran and Catholic churches as well. Not sure how many of the Protestant churches still acknowledge the entropy of human nature.
Yup! Deserve is a word each of my kids never uses. They know better.
“ 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”.
That’s funny shit right thar.
Thank you!!
King of Swamp Castle: This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo.
Leftists don’t do ‘happy’. And to their way of thinking, there is nothing but crying in baseball. They remind me of the emo kids in high school who try so hard never to crack a smile and get visibly upset when anything goes their way. Wallowing in self-pity is the perpetual victim’s ablution, and Only Happy When It Rains is their anthem. Eff ’em. Eff ’em all and the reparations they rode in for.
On the nose. Pain is part of their religion, and they enjoy it.
All we ever had to do was say, “I don’t care. No!”
That would have sufficed 20 years ago. It would have stemmed the tide 10 years ago.
Now? We have to start with saying, “No. No! A thousand times, no!” And then we need to make it stick.
Yup. And if we would have mined the border and had a few MG nests, we wouldn’t have the illegals.
Damn I was thinking about where to rustle up some chili just yesterday. Haven’t had it in decades. Then you start bragging about how you already got yours.
Finding chili in a remote third world village won’t be easy. And no I do not prepare food do I look like your mama?
Ha! Yeah, The Mrs. made a green chili chicken thing tonight. Excellent.
M’ pop was an iron worker. When I came to him (once) with a nasty cut, he said “I’ve had worse than that in my eye”.
Yes! A thousand times yes!
I’m ready. After dealing with mollycoddled, self-indulgent, entitled, weak, ignorant, piss-poor excuses for men during my last years of construction, an improvement was definitely needed. Life is hard, ignorance is harder, and playing victim is always the losing strategy.
Agreed, with my favorite Quote of all time:
“Life is Hard, it’s Harder if you’re Stupid!”
By John Wayne
The beauty? We just have to not put up with it anymore.
Right on mama
Yup!
Ah, John, that takes me back a ways. Specifically, to when I was, I don’t know, eight years old or so, and the proud owner of a brand-new Cub Scout knife. I was also enjoying a weekend at the grandparents’ house. Grandma told me to be careful with my new knife, and that boys who cut themselves got their knives taken away. I paid much more attention to the threat than the safety thing. Thus, when I decided that it would be fun to stab Grandma’s maple tree to death, and the knife quite predictably closed on my index finger and cut it to the bone (not that far on a kid’s finger), my first and only thought was to evade detection. But that finger was bleeding “profusely,” as they say, and I knew I needed to get it to stop, or face detection.
So I stealthily wandered Grandma’s house, trying paper towels, toilet paper, Kleenex, whatever, in a futile attempt to stop my own bleeding. No good. (Serious cut — I still have the scar and will take it to the grave with me.) Grandma wasn’t an easy woman to fool, and it didn’t take long before she noticed that every wastebasket in her house looked as if it had come from a slaughterhouse. I ended up experiencing the dreaded Professional Medical Attention. I did not, however, experience knife confiscation. Grandma was a soft touch after all.
I miss that woman.
And that reminds me of Grandma McWilder. Miss her, too. Great lady. Great homemade noodles.
Perhaps it’s not so much that she was a soft woman, as she perhaps figured that you’d suffered enough already – and maybe learned a lesson or two in the process.
I used that technique with my oldest son when he did something he shouldn’t and ended up with a ‘road rash’ covering most of his belly/chest. He still is amazed that I didn’t punish him for the thing that caused his injury. I just figured that the scrapes were lesson enough – and fortunately, it turns out that apparently I was right. 😉