privilege

The Chool Bus (ch17)

CHAPTER 17: Professor T explains the rationale for his research.

Professor T has some well defined opinions about the nation’s fibrillating heart. Indeed. But also, he tries to keep personal opinions to himself when discussing research as a general rule. After all, it’s about the study’s participants and data, not the researcher. That said, he’s fairly open with the Forks and Buck, especially after a couple of margaritas. Something about returning to his grunge-metal roots in Seattle filled him with a blustering swagger that can only be interpreted as flow state channeling.

To set the scene: It was the gang’s last night in Seattle. As a fitting sendoff, they chose a place frequented by their favorite artists, the Central Saloon.

“Woohoo, air-fried vittles and libations!” Jack was hungry and the gang was stoked to commune with their favorite grunge ghosts. This was the place. In the 1970s the Central Saloon helped introduce live blues and rock to the neighborhood. In the 1980s it played a role in the rise of Grunge, hosting shows by the genre’s leading lights.

“Yup… that sounds like a solid plan,” said Mork T.

Now, when Professor T gets all liquered up…deep into one of those no-holds-barred-rages…he starts grumbling about the Great Flyover. He’s been known to echo the likes of HL Mencken, lamenting how sectors of the rural South and Midwest are vast, Dollar General wastelands where intelligence is a mark of shame and systemic prejudice clings like barnacles on the ship of culture.

“We are what we think and the American media is currently a swamp of rot and resentment,” said Professor T. “The national heart isn’t just skipping beats… it’s in a full-blown, fibrillating code-blue emergency.” According to the Professor, a glowing ember of white resentment turned into a goddamn inferno the moment an intelligent, scandal-free black man ascended to the White House without an Anglo-Saxon overseer holding the leash. This sent the small-town bourgeois…those without skills to join the laptop/air travel class or too proud to mount the struggle bus…into a total psychological aneurysm. “Many find themselves lifetime members of the doomed underclass… they know it and somebody has to pay. This paves an express-lane for demagogues promising retribution.” Mork T was approaching a tequila-fueled angry flow state.

Through the din of house music (a bit too loud) and the compensating murmur of the bar patrons, Professor T, fueled by top-shelf blue agave continued, “Let’s get down to brass tacks. This tooth-gnashing fury, in part, can be traced to the degradation of an indispensable social asset…whiteness…it’s a bank account that’s fast approaching zero.” Practically yelling over the din, and channeling Mencken, he referred to the phenomena as anthropoids reacting to civilized humanity… a primal, beastly shriek to reestablish an hierarchy nature was busy flushing down the toilet. “I actually feel a twisted sort of compassion for their apprehension. Imagine the sheer, bone-chilling terror of realizing a person from a traditionally marginalized demographic was actually the smartest person in the room, especially if that person is a woman, and you’re standing there with nothing but fading ethnic/gender privilege and a bad attitude for consolation.”

“And that’s just one pole of oscillation,” Jack was familiar with Professor T’s 19th Century Wildian musings regarding the attractive and repellent forces of science and religion.

“Right! Religion, the opiate of the masses,” Professor T extended the segue. “You have that end times doctrine… the ultimate supernatural shell game. It’s a beautiful grift, really. The apocalypse has a 100% failure rate, but hustlers never run out of marks,” said Professor T.

Jack was beginning to tap the flow. “It’s a perpetual motion machine of dread. Every time the world doesn’t end the year and month predicted they chalk it up to a clerical error by a god who apparently can’t read a Mayan Calendar, and the believers line up for more disappointment a couple years later.” Jack was yelling to be heard over the din just as one song was ending and before the next began. Of course nearby patrons heard the outburst and turned to look at the Forks’ table. Some snickers, some frowns, mostly disinterested staring. It was Jack’s second pint of Imperial IPA, so he was feeling particularly uninhibited. In response, he gave the gawkers a take a picture, it lasts longer countenance, sorta dancing in his chair to the next song’s groove.

“Why do they buy it?” asked Billie.

Professor T put on a disinterested, deadpan countenance. “The outlook is grim. For one, Their Rapture represents a cosmic revenge for disenfranchisement. It lets the ‘pious’ picture their godless neighbors being slow-roasted in a lake of fire while they sit on a cloud playing their golden harp.”

Billie snickered, “Good one,” she winked. She had always marveled at doomsday ravers’ ability to willingly suspend disbelief regardless of how many end times deadlines come and go.

“It’s a bitter-kiss theology of spite,“ Professor T chimed in. He had always found the whole thing absurd. “You’ve got people who swear the world is ending next Tuesday yet they’re fighting like cornered rats to control the local library board on Wednesday,” nods from the table. “It’s not about saving souls… it’s about will to power exercised with willful ignorance,” said Professor T.

“Right.” Jack was hanging in there. “The Evangelical Ethnonationalist is just a person who wants the Kingdom of Heaven because the Kingdom of Earth…with its books, its reason, and inconvenient facts…is too goddamn hard to navigate.”

Buck, attentively taking it in, offered his take. “It seems we’ve gone from bread and circuses to grievance and retribution, politics designed to keep the populace alarmed and clamoring for a leader to save us from an endless parade of imaginary threats. One day it’s a Black man in high office… tomorrow it’s holy war waged against a veritable parade of boogiemen.”

“The circus never leaves town because the customer never changes,” said Professor T. The former bourgeoisie still remembers when the world handed them all privileges at the front of every line. But now, they’re being asked to make room for formerly disenfranchised minorities. They fear the truth and revel in the freak show.” Professor T was fading.

As if a powerful amphetamine-laced turbo-hallucinogenic mind-jacking recreational street substance had suddenly taken hold in Billie’s brain, she gave the boys a look that can only be described as lucid, psychotic, reptilian predation. She addressed Jack first. “Were you going to let the good professor leave it at that? What about the war waged in kitchens and bedrooms everywhere, always. Have you forgotten about the fact that Western Civilization only granted women personal agency in the last century.” This made a significant impact. The room was still quite noisy so Billy had to up the volume several notches above her comfort level. But there was no indication of physical strain, and she didn’t appear rattled, but the boys knew, they were in for an ass-chewin’ like they haven’t experienced since their porch-monkey days.

“I’m sorry, Billie.” Jack knew there was only one logical response to this oversight, contrition.

“In fact, the rise of Feminism and the reactionary Manosphere are factored into the survey and focus-group methodology,” said Professor T. “We haven’t begun looking for patterns as we’ve only just launched the focus-group tour.” Professor T realized his explanation to Buck and Billie had not included this element, but he knew the advocates for Patriarchal dominance was playing a big role in the social/political disunion.

“It seems to me, this may be the most impactful conflict right now,” Billie was on fire. “The idea of society digressing, shoving women back into subservient roles, turning the clock back on Women’s Suffrage, the feminist bra burning of the 1960s, and all those Rosey the Riveters getting a post-war taste of bringing home the bacon, enjoying the independence that comes with earning her own way.

Buck was no stranger to the phenomenon of strong women, his mother’s sister was an architect. But not until an unfortunate scene in her first marriage convinced her to go back to university.

The scene went thusly:

HUSBAND (Jake): “If i wanted your opinion, i’d give it to you.”
AUNT JASMINE: “Excuse me?”
JAKE: “That’s right, look (he throws a pair of his jeans to the floor)…
I am the dictator and you are the subordinate. We’ll have sex when i say so, and you’ll serve up the sandwiches on command. This is a one-way monogamous relationship. You stay home, tend to parenting, my libido, my sandwiches, etc, and i’ll take care of whatever side action i please. Someday, when the world finally wakes up and takes the red pill, i’ll take multiple wives. And that’s how it is. You can contradict these dictates as soon as you can put on those pants… (he points to the jeans on the floor).”
AUNT JASMINE: “Thank god i’m not pregnant.” (she plans her escape)

“I wonder why she didn’t see that coming before the marriage?” said Jack.

“They need to include red flag training in high school,” said Professor T.

“We need to elect a woman in the White House,” said Billie.

“I’m sorry, Billie, i won’t forget the battle of the sexes ever again,” said Professor T.

NEXT WEEK:
The Forks crash through the dense Oregon forests, dodging Sasquatch and coastal pirates.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links

Audiovision: All Hail!

In the grand pantheon of Oz’s legal history, none… not the fabled Tin Man Cyborg nor the Third Goldencalf Lion… had ever ascended with the peculiar, almost manic gravitational pull of Wizard Oscar Ambrose. He was, by acclamation and political fiat, the wisest of Oz’s supreme jurists, a man sworn into office by Glinda the Good herself in a ceremony so drenched in faux-humility it bordered on the obscene. It was a spectacle of political triumph, a testament to the idea that you can, in fact, become the most celebrated arbiter of law in the land despite a childhood that read like the annotated memoirs of a sentient bruise.

Oscar was born into a family so poor it made other Oompa Loompas look like robber barons. His biological father, a man possessed of a profound and fatalistic wanderlust, had one day simply run off with the circus, taking with him a single, beverage thermos and the last shred of his dignity. His mother, a perpetually anxious woman of diminutive stature and profound despair, had subsequently crumbled under the Sisyphean pressure of being an orange woman, a role that was, in itself, a kind of oppressive agony. Young Oscar and his big sister were promptly dispatched to a foster home run by a man whose very name… Jack Ketch… was a synonym for “ragman.” He was, in a cruelty-rich land, a veritable paragon of it, and the children were subjected to a ceaseless, grinding abuse that left them with psychological scars shaped like handprints.

The world outside the foster home was no kinder. As a schoolboy, Oscar was bullied with a relentless, pathological glee for being “a little too orange”… a color-based bigotry so bizarre and yet so utterly common in Oz it was considered a conversational staple. The taunts, the shoves, the sheer, bone-deep loneliness of it all drove him to seek refuge in the Quadling Holy Order. He became an Acolyte Attendant, a kind of spiritual gofer, where the monks and nuns, for reasons entirely unrelated to charity or goodness, pushed him to strive for a kind of purified excellence. He found, in their rigid doctrine and ceaseless demands for perfection, a perfect incubator for a nascent “I’ll show them all” supervillain shoulder chip. He promised to become the very first Oompa Loompa priest.

But it was not to be. Even within the supposedly hallowed walls of the monastery, he was bullied, again for the color of his skin. His faith, a fragile thing held together with the spiritual equivalent of chewing gum and duct-tape, was crushed. He bailed, leaving behind a monastery and a God he no longer believed in, his shoulder chip now growing exponentially. The foster family, upon learning he would in fact not be the very first orange priest, exiled him with the casual cruelty of a bored farmer flicking a bug off his sleeve.

In a bizarre twist of fate… the kind of bureaucratic, affirmative action initiative so beloved by governments with a guilt complex… he was accepted into an all-Quadling private school. The bullying, a constant in his life, continued unabated, a new chorus of taunts about his skin color and his diminutive stature. But he endured. From there, he parlayed his academic prowess into a spot at Oz’s most prestigious academies of law.

Upon graduation, the big-money firms, populated by a parade of perfectly coiffed, perfectly insipid Quadling partners, rejected him. To “show them all,” he found a shorter, albeit less lucrative, path to eminence through the short line of minority hopefuls vying for powerful conservative top government posts. In the process, he came to hate these very initiatives and, more profoundly, to loathe himself for the possibility that regular Quadlings might regard him as a “welfare hire.” The thought, the gnawing, gut-wrenching possibility that they might not see him for the genius he was… that he got where he was merely because he was orange and short… was an insult so deep it became a personal mission.

And so, he set his sights on the Wizard’s office, not for the prescribed two-term maximum, but for a permanent… a lifetime appointment. His path was not without its bumps. Opponents, armed with a morbid curiosity and a penchant for the political low-blow, tried to derail his ascension by bringing some of his more peculiar personal predilections to light. They paraded his victims before the public, a gaggle of witnesses whose damning testimony was meant to destroy him. But he was a master of the turnabout. He painted himself the victim of a “high-tech lynching,” a political assassination attempt of the purest kind. It worked. “The personal,” he argued, “…must never be mixed with the political.”

And this is where his partner and intellectual north star, a woman by the name of Dorine of Omaha, emerges. Dorine, a paragon of Quadling conservative holy-warriordom, was the other half of this premier Oz power couple. On the surface, they appeared to be in lock-step with their political beliefs, but those in the know… outsiders who watched their moves with the meticulous fascination of birdwatchers… knew that she had indoctrinated him. She was the brain… he was, as a lifetime Oz supreme-jurist, the muscle, and this power couple was, in every sense of the word, at war with their political opposition.

Dorine was brought up in the plain vanilla provincialism of a small Quadling town, an environment that provided her with the kind of privilege that only the vanilla bourgeoisie could truly understand. She was a “good girl”… no mead, no poppies, just good grades and a deep, abiding sense of superiority. She was, as she liked to say, a “late-life oops,” a child born to aging parents and raised among the “Jerkers,” a group of culture warriors who believed that “politics is war.” She was, in every way, a product of her environment, one who idolized the Wicked Witch of the West and her particular brand of female disempowerment. Dorine waged a quiet but fervent war against the female autonomy movement (FAM), convinced that a woman’s rightful place was in the kitchen, churning butter and producing perfect, obedient Quadlings. At age twelve, she was already writing letters to Oz newspapers, a harbinger of the ambition, hard work, and mission-driven focus that would come to define her.

But Riviera City, a teeming metropolis of chaos and moral ambiguity, was not the best place for “good” girls. The harassments began… petty, pointless cruelties that chipped away at her carefully constructed facade. She became an angry shrinking violet, a woman whose rage was in direct inverse proportion to her confidence and agency. And so, she did what so many lost souls in Oz do… she joined a “self-help” cult. But, as cults will often do, they began the “body shaming” therapy (sans clothing), and Dorine, a woman whose every movement was driven by a deep-seated revulsion of personal over-sharing, bailed.

Like the ram-headed Ronnie Hays, when Dorine was in, she was IN. Her bag, her one and only focus, was to “destroy the enemy,” especially those who shamed her in her time of personal vulnerability. She was, and is, at war with more than half of Oz’s eligible voters. And when she met Oscar, she knew he was the man of her dreams. A fully converted Oompa Loompa! This unique combination promised to raise her social stock in a BIG way.

The pairing was perfect… he was against the universal rights movement (URM), and she was against the female autonomy movement (FAM). They were a perfect team for sticking it to the counter-culture of their formative years. And her family, a group of people whose approval was more fickle than a summer wind, decided the orange guy was okay once his opposition to the URM became apparent.

When Oscar’s bid for lifetime supreme jurist was in jeopardy due to his deep and troubling sexual perversities, her advice was simple. “This is WAR.” Duh. The nominating committee had to pay. The Ambroses made a pact… they would deny, deny, deny, and lie, lie, lie, because the ends always justify the means. And when the gods are on your side, you always double down because your cause is righteous. They played the ultimate race card… a privilege, of course, reserved only for them. “The Judge” used every tool in the book and laughed all the way to the Wizard’s throne.

The power couple’s schtick was now down to a science. Oscar must pose “above” politics, a man of profound wisdom and stoic judgment. Dorine, meanwhile, gets out there and brays their shared politics with a jumbo bullhorn, her manic talking-points designed to discredit anyone who dares oppose Oscar in the realm of Ozland power. And of course, she denies any and all conflict of interest, because a conflict of interest, like a lie, is only a problem when the gods aren’t on your side. And the gods, in their world, were definitely on their side… now and forever.

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privilege

The Chool Bus (ch17)