Learning to act right (45)… a racist
old white guy
Torrey Orton
Dec 04, 2014
I’m swearing at the tube again…
I’m becoming a racist old white guy, much by the same process of my
stopping being a homophobe years ago. Daily I’m confronted with objectively
powerful white guys (and some white gals) bemoaning aggressively their perilous
condition, if they are not spurring other white guys and gals to fear their own
perilous condition as members of a threatened dominant species – white folks. The
amount of scaring other white guys and gals they do is proportional to their
power – those in government and corporate leadership are more aggressively
scarifying than those out of it.
That I’m a white-on-white racist is exposed in my frequent resort
to expressions like “white, Christian fuckwits” (our current national government
is notably avowedly Christian, undoubtedly white and undeniably male, but for
one minister) while watching the news.
Few count as “old” in the normal sense of the term, but they aren’t
young. They are unified in my appreciation by an absolutely consistent refusal
to speak ordinary English and acknowledge that anything they have said might be
wrong. It may turn out that this refusal has crystallized into an inability.
Whichever, this is particularly galling when they are hiding invasions of
others’ freedoms and rights – notably, the usual suspect refugees, unionists, et
al.
As one of this government’s
cheerleaders J. Albrechtsen said in The
Australian (261114) of the ABC funding fiasco:
… But instead of working through that initial error, the
government played condescending word games. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann
declared: “These are not cuts.” The PM, in question time on Monday, refused to
answer the question of a broken promise about cuts.
This utter nonsense leaves voters fuming. When the
government doesn’t respect them with straight-talking honesty, voters will
respond with even more disrespect.”
Some of us think such mis-spokes (see Bigotry-is-OK-Brandis for
another whopper out of the same kettle) actually occur because they do not respect
the voters or working families or the community, full stop, not because they
are having failures of rhetorical competence. The right wing argument for
freedom of speech so often comes down to unintentional, unaware, unconscious
(?) authorisations of vile speech (bigotry, etc.) rather than just acknowledgment
of it as part of the speech practice spectrum. Dog whistling to the pub
standard??
Speaking of bigotry, now that I can draw on its implicit authorisation
by the government and the IPA* (surrogate for a beer style of imported
popularity from a place over there which specialises in bigotry, racism, classism….),
I’m noting that my disdain for the current crop of middle-aged white guys
leeches out into the current opposition, driven partly by their being the
initial authors of the great moral scandal of our immigration policy and
practice and they too being often self-espoused Christians, but more gender
generous in their composition!!! And the leeching goes further since the
institutions of their belief (the various churches) never act with consistent
moral fervour or ethical precision to publically embarrass the hypocrisy of that
policy!!
And. in the end it’s the repetition that gets me…of weasels’ words and
wishes and the blind and dumb refusal to follow the evidence of their effects,
while creating the conditions in which their effects cannot be perceived,
hidden as they are in the closet of neo-liberal plus PC plus anti-terror speechifying.
And, most irritating / enraging are the powerful who deny their power either outright by lying or
covertly by keeping their processes from us. Deception is a far greater threat
to a relationship than a misdeed, or even deeds, for they can be known and that
is a kind of certainty. Uncertainty is the greatest threat to stability in all
(?) things.
But the coincidence of their behaviours with numerous challenges of
deep and broad sorts - climate change, economic conflicts, ethical
transgressions – regresses me in rage, itself fuelled by endless public
reportage inflammations of all manner of human events into tragedies and
smash-ups and truth flipflops and…. My rage is not far in its inarticulate name
calling (“white Christian fuckwits” being the higher end of my expressive
spectrum in this matter) from that of the anti-abortion fundamentalists at the
Fertility Control Clinic, though our terms of condemnation differ. Ah, we are
on common ground at last!!
*IPA = Institute for Public
Affairs, a self-anointed think shop with a thought range from Ayn Rand on the
right to Hayek / Friedman on the left.
