You’ll Never Be Happy
A letter to the MAGA loving goons who stormed the Capitol in the name of a purer, whiter America.
by Rich Herschlag
There are all sorts of thought pieces out there now about bridging the gap between left and right, progressive and conservative, urban and rural, white and blue collar—however this massive, destructive, deadly and potentially irreversible so-called culture war is labeled at the moment. And that’s fine. I’m all for it. I’m all for metrosexual fresh air funds where you take a bunch of guys with fine arts degrees, toss them into the woods, and outfit them with paintball gear. I’m all for sticking a bunch of Blue Ridge Mountain rednecks on a condo board on the Upper West Side to debate what varieties of sedum to plant on the new roof garden.
But there is a new program afoot. It’s not about seeing things from a different point of view for a few minutes while tanked up on moonshine. It’s about literal compromise. And it goes a little something like this. You want to kill a million of my people. I want you to kill none of my people. So we compromise at your killing half a million of my people. That’s fair. We meet right in the middle. Nothing positive can happen if both sides don’t give a little.
This isn’t me being sarcastic, at least not to a great degree. In the aftermath of the mass murder of mostly Black Americans in a Buffalo supermarket, there were pieces on FOX News and Newsmax calling for a better understanding across the divide. There were David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart urging more dialogue. As far apart as various media platforms and pundits were on specific solutions, there was a broad, implicit consensus that some sort of give and take was necessary. The underlying premise is that if we can somehow chit-chat a bit and steer our way to giving these raging white folks at least a portion of what they’re asking for—namely, a simpler, whiter, more homogeneous, more rural, more heterosexual, blander, more predictable, more Bible-based, more churchgoing environment not only in their communities but also our own—we may eventually be rewarded with a decrease in the size and frequency of racially motivated massacres.
As far as any sort of compromise is concerned, this approach has always been and will always be futile. You don’t have to take my word for it. To confirm, please see the entire history of Western Civilization. Take a look at the sublime, Zen-like state of countless nations granted the racial homogeneity today’s faithful viewers of Tucker Carlson would envy. For instance, the Hundred Years’ War. If you think a war lasting a hundred years is an absurdity and an obscenity, consider that this one actually lasted 116 years and was started by a bunch of angry white people who wanted to kill a bunch of other angry white people.
Of course, there was a real issue buried in there somewhere. Back in the early 1300s, a full 670 years before cable news, English kings were of French descent. Those same English kings therefore owned large amounts of property in France, which the French royalty resented. Meanwhile, the English kings resented French royalty telling them how to manage their affairs, and one day when a childless Charles IV of France died, there was some confusion over whether he would be succeeded by French or English royalty.
So, they settled it the only way they really could—with over a century of decapitating each other, impaling each other with large spears, drawing and quartering opposing combatants, and burning entire villages to the ground. They took a couple of timeouts to deal with the Bubonic plague and dig mass graves, but one must give credit where credit is due for sustaining a mutual massacre several generations without a reason or a cause anyone not dying from bloodletting could even remember. It was perhaps the all-time heyday of angry white people killing other angry white people. And for some strange reason the lily Caucasian strictly traditional binary Christian nature of both France and England did not seem to mollify combatants crushing each other’s skulls with axes.
As inventive as they were, the Anglo-Normans learned from the best. As far back as the Pelopponesian War in the fifth century BC, fair-skinned peoples from Athens and Sparta—inconceivably dissatisfied with their own fertile islands, nascent democracies, and limitless opportunities for sexual union with both dominant genders—took to leaving their own idyllic homes to rape, pillage, and plunder fair-skinned folks from other islands. Try as they might, there was no affirmative action program to blame. No Olive Lives Matter. Not even Al Sharpton was around to kick. These raging white people who worshipped gods playing harps, who spent lazy afternoons throwing the discus and pondering the principles of buoyancy got so bored of paradise they developed possibly the world’s first scorched earth policy while incinerating folks who looked just like them.
Moving forward in history we have the Troubles, which ostensibly refers to intermittent terrorist activity between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland between the years 1969 and 1998 but which more generally refers to every nation-state headed up by white people over the past three millennia. As a Jew I never quite got the need to blow up someone’s car over a wafer, but then again I’ve watched haredim lose their shit over an exposed knee. The troubles in any era are almost always about white folks who have it pretty good but apparently not good enough. Don’t even get me started on Russia’s current holocaust in Ukraine.
So take it from me, a sort of white guy (depending upon whom you ask) pushing 60 who’s had it pretty good most of his life but who has from time to time engaged in self-pity and been given short shrift—you will never be happy. Life has many happy moments but is not about being happy. It’s about fending off a half-dozen kids who tease you after school every day over your light bulb-shaped head, pleasing teachers and parents who charge you with saving the world when you are merely a B-plus student jacked up on Frosted Flakes, losing your virginity in a Tijuana brothel at age 20, living in a roach-infested basement studio apartment on a civil servant’s salary, and watching your young bride experience multiple miscarriages.
It’s about finally getting the job you want and watching it evaporate in three years because a con-artist real estate tycoon bribes key members of city government. It’s about taking 20 years to develop your own little consulting business to support your own little family only to realize just as it’s beginning to take off you are completely burned out to the point of being an insomniac and mildly delusional.
Life’s happiest moments are serendipitous, and if you are either too busy, too angry, or some combination of both you will miss them entirely. The wage-earning, the constant housekeeping, the difficult advice you give your children in their darkest moments, and the occasional good bloodwork rewarding your low cholesterol diet are not exactly sources of happiness but rather sober efforts to stave off looming disaster. Because at its essence life is pretty difficult, and the happiness you derive one afternoon from hearing your favorite Alice in Chains song on the radio on the way back from the hematologist is indeed welcome but as ephemeral as the song itself, totally unplanned, and not replicable.
Nowhere in this sometimes seemingly random tapestry of everyday grappling would an uptick in the racial, social, sexual, religious, or cultural purity of your surroundings render you, me, or anyone even one percent happier for more than an hour. The difference between me and you raging white folks storming the Capitol is that I know it and you somehow, unbelievably, pretend not to. So hear me out. When you eventually achieve this racial, social, sexual, religious, cultural purity surge, it will be your crack cocaine. You will experience a brief rush. And when that fades you will become even more angst-ridden, inconsolable, and violent than before. So you will make things still purer, whiter, more absolute and that will not help. And finally somewhere down the road, probably sooner rather than later, you will go marauding on nearby islands, decimating across the channel, incinerating down the lane, hypersonic missile launching over the border, and unloading an assault weapon in a neighborhood supermarket.
It’s not that I want you to be unhappy, and I certainly don’t want you to commit a single act of violence against another human being. But the formula you have presented me and my fellow moderates, progressives, compassionate conservatives and just plain rational decent folks is complete and utter bullshit. You know it. We know it. History proves it. So good luck with the wife and the kids and the mortgage and the restraining order and the pulled groin muscle messing with your bowling average and every other imaginable difficulty life on earth may be sending your way at this particular time but do not dare ever mention this crap to me again.
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Members Only: Republicans Are Building Their Paramilitary Wing
The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are the rapidly organizing paramilitary wing of the Republican Party.
by Justin Rosario
In Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” you will find many useful lessons to both thwart the GOP’s incipient fascism and for resisting it if we fail. The one that stuck out the most for me was #6: Be Wary of Paramilitaries.
Snyder is referring to groups like the Nazi Brownshirts that work outside the law to sow fear and violence against their political enemies but are openly embraced and controlled by a political party. The GOP has been laying the groundwork for their Brownshirts for decades and is on the precipice of taking this important step on their path to true fascism.
You’d think we’d be talking about it a bit more… Continue reading here.
Outstanding piece - magnificently well written. Thank you.
Well done. My sentiments exactly. Need to print and tuck under the windshield wipers of the trucks at the next rally.