Well, I was wrong. I thought that Heartiste would be the first Manospherian to come to the defense of fallen Fox News hero Cliven Bundy. Nope. Turns out it was W. F. Price of The Spearhead, who blamed Bundy’s fall from grace not on his crude racism but on the fact that the white rancher with the guns and unpaid bills … talks too much like a black person.
No, really.
Here’s Price’s argument, such as it is:
What I find highly ironic about the recent condemnation of Cliven Bundy is that he is being pilloried for speaking more like black Americans than urban whites. Even his name would sound black if you made a slight change from “Cliven” to “Clayvon.”
Well, no. Bundy talks a lot more like, well, a cowboy-hat-wearing white rancher at war with the government than he does a “black American” – as if all “black Americans” talk alike.
And are you really arguing that his name “would sound black” if it were a different name?
Mr. Bundy’s American English is so archaic that he still uses “Negro” (also used more by blacks than whites) and says “they was able to” and “didn’t get no more.”
And this is supposed to be how “American blacks” all talk? Phrases like these are common in various Southern/rural dialects spoken by more “American whites” than “American blacks.”
Hell, they’re common amongst a lot of urban whites. I lived in Chicago during the years in which our mayor was a fellow named Richard M. Daley, a man with what you might best describe as a casual sense of grammar. I’m pretty sure he’s never figured out the difference between “was” and “were.”
Also, if you read the complete transcript of Bundy’s remarks, you’ll see that he also referred to blacks as “colored people.” That particular usage isn’t very popular with anyone but white racists.
The content of Bundy’s message, which wouldn’t have been all that controversial if spoken by a black preacher, was deemed hateful partly because he didn’t say it in the proper, coastal elite way.
Well, no, it was “deemed hateful” because he suggested, among other things, that he was some kind of expert on “the Negro” because he once drove past a housing project. He also posited that these Negroes “abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never, they never learned how to pick cotton.” And that they might have been “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things.”
And then, in a move reminiscent of his magical transformation of “Cliven” to “Clayvon,” Price provides “translations” of Bundy’s remarks into what he thinks would have been more acceptable “newspeak.”
He thus proves conclusively that if Clayvon Bundy had said something different than what he actually said, without the word “Negro” and all those obnoxious references to “picking cotton,” it wouldn’t have been quite as obviously offensive as what he actually said.
Though it still would have been pretty fucking racist.
Here, for example, is one of Bundy’s remarks, untranslated:
Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were slaves, and they was able to have their family structure together, and the chickens and garden, and the people had something to do?
Here’s Price’s “translation.”
How can one say that the federal government serves African Americans any better than plantation owners under slavery, when at least they had families and the opportunity to work the land under that system.
Really? Regardless of how it’s worded, that’s an odious and ignorant argument. Slavery made stable family life impossible for slaves. For many years, slaves were forbidden to marry, and even after they were allowed to marry, couples were often separated from one another, living and working on different plantations; children could be sold to plantations apart from their parents. Slaveowners raped slave women and girls and enslaved the children born from these rapes.
It’s really kind of hard to have a decent family life when SOMEONE ELSE OWNS YOU AND YOUR SPOUSE AND YOUR CHILDREN. Or, even worse, several different someone elses.
Oh, but these days single black women sometimes raise children on their own. And living in big cities they don’t have the wonderful opportunities to garden that their enslaved ancestors had.
Price later seems to suggest that Bundy may be less racist than white New Yorkers in part because he doesn’t have to deal with black people as much:
In fact, Bundy, who probably has little if any negative interaction with black folks may be more positively inclined toward them than the New Yorker.
Apparently, in Price’s world, white racism is caused by interacting with black people. The more contact white people have with blacks, the more they hate blacks! Who knew? Maybe this whole “desegregation” thing was a horrible mistake!
In the comments, DruidV wins himself some upvotes by declaring that:
Bundy has the guts to say what a lot of critical thinking Americans have been thinking for over 150 years now. Namely: which form of slavery made American blacks happier.
After all, you didn’t see them running around gunning each other down (along with lots of police and innocents) while hopped up on crack or “lean” or whatever illicit drugs, pre Union war of aggression.
Laguna Beach Fogey, meanwhile, declares that “there’s something admirable about Bundy.”
And minor Manosphere celebrity The Fifth Horeseman, with some sadness, writes that
Cliven Bundy is a metaphor for the self-reliant, small government America being displaced by the big government, feminist, obese America.
The end of an era both inspiring and natural, into a sordid, misandric, obese one.
I’m not quite sure how obesity fits into all this, but evidently Mr. Fifth Horseman here hasn’t noticed that Bundy is himself, well, obese. Hell, his belly is even bigger than mine. He’s not being displaced by obese America. He is obese America. Just like me.
Anyway, all this is yet another reminder that, in the Manosphere, as elsewhere, bigotries (and bigots) flock together.
P.S. After I wrote this post, I discovered that Davis M.J. Aurini, the self-described “author … strategist … neoreactionary monarchist, and … entrepreneur” who blogs at Stares at the World has offered up a dramatic reading of Price’s “translations” of Bundy’s remarks, along with an impassioned defense of Bundy, whom he declares to be a misunderstood hero and “the best friend that the blacks have right now.”
The convincingness of his argument is undercut slightly by the fact that Mr. Aurini’s “look” is basically “young Anton LaVey,” and that he also seems to be a graduate of the William Shatner School of Overemoting.
Also, it’s interesting to note that the commenters on YouTube who seem to like his video the most are actually pretty straightforward black-people-haters; one of them is the creator of a racist video “warning” about the supposed “health risks” to white women of interracial dating; another praises Birth of a Nation and agrees with the film’s stance that “the klan was justified in trying to stop all of those murderous blacks.”
Anyway, enjoy.
You know, the kind of bullshit I’m seeing here about immigration makes me really glad I read one of the recent Blue Beetle comics where immigration is dealt with in a really endearing way. Also with superhumans and punching because SUPERHEROES.
Jaime Reyes > these chucklefucks. Even though he’s FICTIONAL.
I wonder what Vox Day thinks of Cliven Bundy.
No, no I really don’t.
I can do a translation of what Cliven Bundy said into acceptable, mainstream Republicanese:
“In our inner cities in particular… men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”
Note what Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan did there: replaced “Negro” with “inner city”. And this particular translation is particularly amusing because he shifted from the most common punching bag of white racists everywhere, ie Black Women, to “just generations of men”!
Speaking of the Black family, to be historically accurate, even with the burden of slavery and the violence of rape and the threat of separation, the family unit among African Americans stayed relatively strong even on plantations and certainly after the Civil War, when literally hundreds of thousands of people who had been separated from each other either by happenstance or force made amazing, and seriously tear-inducing, efforts to find each other and reunite and recreate their families. The thing that has injured Black families, without a doubt, has been the specific kind of dire poverty of urban life, along with multiple other roadblocks, like wild overimprisonment and the “war on drugs”, that the broader white society has created. So pointing the finger at slavery specifically for the state of the modern Black family isn’t entirely accurate– if you actually look at how Black folk lived from 1865-the 1980s, you get a picture of very family oriented life that survived a certain amount of migration from rural to urban places, and then started to crumble from outside pressures.
Slavery and “The South” makes a convenient bogeyman, but frankly it doesn’t hold water, and it really doesn’t give African Americans the credit they deserve.
@LBT: I’ll admit I haven’t see any of the comics in a long while but I always thought the Blue Beetle was cool myself when I was watching the “Batman: The Brave And The Bold.” TV show.
(P.S. some trivia for you: the same guy who voiced the Blue Beetle in Batman: TBaTB was also the same guy who was behind Terry McGinnis in Batman Beyond, another fave cartoon show of mine. =) )
@cassandrakitty
This made me burst out laughing because I have the alleged Sterling tape playing in the background and it’s so hilariously melodramatic.
RE: alternasteve90
@LBT: I’ll admit I haven’t see any of the comics in a long while but I always thought the Blue Beetle was cool myself when I was watching the “Batman: The Brave And The Bold.” TV show.
Yeah, I was one of the old Blue Beetle fans who got all sulky over his death, so I didn’t read Jaime’s run until long after it’d come out. Which is a shame, because it’s really good! But then the New 52 shit happened and that was kinda ruined. Jaime Reyes’s Old 52 Blue Beetle series is full of the stuff I wish the Big Two did more of: funny, heartwarming, populist, with bright colors and face-punching and a teenage superhero who’s out to his family and friends, and they are AWESOME.
(P.S. some trivia for you: the same guy who voiced the Blue Beetle in Batman: TBaTB was also the same guy who was behind Terry McGinnis in Batman Beyond, another fave cartoon show of mine. =) )
Wow, really? *checks web* Wow, and he voiced Deadpool too, damn. I think he did a good job, but not gonna lie, I kinda wish the job had gone to a Hispanic actor. Part of my liking for Jaime is just seeing a kid like the ones I knew back in Texas.
Then again, this is the party that brags about their connections to Lincoln and MLK, yet they have people like Rand Paul who would vote against the Civil Rights Act, Michelle Bachmann’s comments on slavery and the “blah people” comment. That’s probably what helped give him the confidence to say that crap.
Okay guys. This seems as good a place to draw upon the collective powers of the Mammotheers as ever.
Can anyone recommend to me an apologia of slavery that is (if you ignore the horrifying foundation) logically consistent and superficially reasonable (again, if you ignore the horrifying foundation that some people are property)? I’m writing a story, and I’m trying to write a technologically advanced society that still sees the right to property as a huge deal, and slavery is a thing, and I want to read up so the people living in that society can argue for it.
Normally I would ask one of our trolls, but they couldn’t sell ice to polar bears in global warming.
@LBT Take a look at the Preface to “The Story of O.” The preface is entitled “Happiness in Slavery” and compares the D/s sexual dynamic to actually slavery. You can find partial copies of it on Google Books.
I have some issues with the book in general and a lot with the ideas touted in the preface , but it might give you a view into the mindset.
RE: bbeaty
Oh god, The Story of O. I probably SHOULD read it, for education if nothing else, but… but… oh god so many of the “classic” kink narratives are just SO FUCKING CREEPY TO ME. D8
*sigh* The library probably has it though…
LBT: A lot of it depends on what type of slavery your society has. But some general ideas that occur to me as potential arguments or lines of attack:
1) Freedom isn’t necessarily a good thing. A free person has to worry about getting a job to afford food and roof over their head, a slave doesn’t.
2) The concept of natural rights is a relatively recent one and there’s no reason that your society should have developed it. Or, if it has, that is would view rights the same way that our society does
3) Slaves-as-property is only one model of slavery, and it needn’t be the model your society has adopted. Serfdom is essentially a model where slaves are part of the land, like the rocks and trees and rivers. They can’t be bought or sold apart from the land, and aren’t viewed as distinct from it.
4) An oldy but goody: some people “need” to be slaves. They aren’t mentally fit to be free people, they make poor decisions and have loose morals, so they need to be strictly controlled for their own good.
5) Complete dehumanization. This is a model I saw used in the massively triggery but very good Stone Dance of the Chameleon. A subgroup of people has been so effectively dehumanized that they are literally not seen as human. Our narrator frequently refers to them as subhuman and bestial and it’s not until the second book that you get confirmation that they actually are human beings (it’s set in a fantasy AU that has dinosaurs, so a species of humanoid beings with no real intelligence is plausible). If this model is invoked, your characters can respond with confusion when told that slavery is wrong because it’s like saying that using horses for manual labor is wrong (which, yes, is an argument to be made and one I’m inclined to agree with, but most aren’t).
Yeah, that’s how I felt about it, too. It seemed like something I *should* read , if only to say I’d read it. But once read, it can’t be unread. Such an odd combination of creepiness and predictability and mansplaning about how this thing that turns some men on is something that women “naturally” find hot, and how women are happier when they fully accept their “naturally” submissive position.
I don’t have a problem with power plays etc in relationships, but the whole novel as such a patronizing tone.
And then this weird detour into bird masks at the end. Just …. no …
Leum’s comments reminded me — for a light-hearted take (and some good brain bleach after “O”) check out “Small Gods” by Terry Pratchett. The slavery portion is a small part of the novel, but about half way through, the main character travels from his oppressive theocracy to an enemy land.where there are slave. The slave serving the main character talks about the various benefits (including two weeks “running away” time each year) and how he is saving up to buy his freedom.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, perhaps?
LBT: I fell really in love with the Jaime Reyes version of Blue Beetle, even though I still do miss the first one. ( He was hilarious in Keith Giffen’s Justice League. ) I think Reyes version definitely measures up, but I hate most all of the New 52, outside of Swamp Thing and Animal Man.
(Squeeee! I loved Batman Beyond.)
Whew. I’m okay now. Had to get that out.
The Story of O, blech. That book made me want to punch the author in the face. Here’s the thing about kink – it’s one thing to have an individual kink that you like and act on it with a happily consenting partner, and quite another thing to pretend that your kink springs from some sort of universal gender/race/whatever related dynamic that’s “natural” and that people who don’t agree are in denial. For some people the “it’s universal because bullshit reasons” seems to actually be a part of the kink, and I almost always end up wanting nothing to do with those people (yes, even the ones who’re into femdom). It’s what makes the Gor people so obnoxious (and potentially dangerous), that refusal to acknowledge that no, actually, your kink isn’t somehow built in because of your gender or whatever, it’s just a you thing.
LBT,
It depends on what you mean by slavery. If you’re talking about the notion of people screwing up self rule and the logic of having an elite run things, I’d go with Brave New World, Asimov’s Foundation series or season 4 of Angel.
Did anyone see Cliven Bundy’s reasoning for why Mexican people are better than black people? It had something to do with Mexican families picnicking together. That’s just bizarre. What is his evidence that black families do not picnic? I grew up two blocks from a park and saw black families picnicking there every weekend of the summer. Why is picnicking a sign of goodness in the first place though? Eating has always been a major facet of socializing. Gathering together and eating outdoors is something people of all races and ethnicities do as far as I can tell. WTF does it have to do with anything?
I suppose his point is that Mexican families are more likely to have two parents, although I don’t why that’s necessary for picnicking. Racists seem to think that no black couples get married ever. It’s weird.
LBT, in my long running D&D campaign, I had the party encounter a society / culture in which people were either owners or owned. The way it worked was established by both tradition and law as reciprocal; both had certain rights and responsibilities. In short, the owned were legally children who would never become adults, and the owners had the legal status of guardians. They received economic advantages, being entitled to whatever income their dependents produced, but were obliged to maintain them in a certain degree of comfort. People were able to move between classes under certain circumstances. Being an owner was considered more work than being owned.
There were a couple other slavery-based societies, but they were different shades of horrible.
I remember one Libertarian who was of the free-market branch who was for slavery (at a forum I used to frequent). Since the rights of the property owner automatically trumps the rights of the other person. Thus, you have the right to do what you want on your property and the government has pretty much no right to stop you.
@ Weirwoodtreehugger:
Oh, I saw that, mostly because I’ve come across a few wingnuts who were complaining that Bundy was taken out of context. They insisted that if I listened to his remarks in full I’d realize that he was making an anti-racist statement rather than a racist one. They claimed that the fact the media played the brief clip that they did, while omitting what Bundy had said about Latino immigrants, was just evidence of the liberal media’s dishonesty.
I watched the clip in full and, having done so, I have to wonder whether or not the wingnuts in question watched the clip themselves as the context did absolutely nothing to make Bundy look less racist. If anything, I came away convinced that Bundy was even more racist than I had previously supposed. I guess that the wingnuts think that because Bundy holding up Latinos as a model minority in order to bash black people somehow proves that he’s not a racist. I really don’t understand their logic.
Well, there’s your problem right there. You used the words “understand” and “logic” in the same sentence.
Of course, I know no other words you could use that would make it any more comprehensible. You lack the elements of nastiness and a very special worldview that would allow a meeting of minds.
Face it. You don’t actually want to be the kind of person where a meeting of minds would be possible.
Mythago: Here’s the link(s) to the Bundy family history
If using “was” instead of “were” = talking like a black person” (which one? Lupita Nyong’o? Neil deGrasse Tyson? Omar from The Wire? That guy in the White House) then about 1/5 of my fellow Brits talk like black people, at least some of the time. Lots of us also use the past participle as an emphatic, too “I seen him” sounding stronger than “I saw him.”
Mr Bluecat used to sing in a choir in rural Norfolk, which is still about the least ethnically diverse part of the country. They were doing a classical-ish setting of “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho” and the choirleader could not persuade most of the singers not to change ‘fit’ to ‘fought’. Cos most of them grew up in Norfolk villages in the 50s with parents and teachers trying to drive out of them anything that made them sound like farm labourers.
So, are people complaining about Bundy because he sounds too British? I thought the whole guns and militia business was to defend the ex-colonials from the evil machinations of King George III.
Oops, typo in the HTML Bundy family history