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.
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