It’s fun to hate and look down on people we think deserve it and yes it was entertaining, but looking back after the turmoil we’ve been through – was it worth it?
About 10 years ago Top Gear had an episode that went viral, where they painted provocative (to Southerners) slogans on their cars and then got chased out of a filling station in the middle of trailer park nowhere by rock throwing country boys.
When I saw that as a newly-minted liberal, or progressive or whatever I was – I wasn’t sure what I was, only what I wasn’t – I was livid with rage. At Top Gear.
Not that I identified with the rock throwers. I knew what they were. I hate the term “white trash” that just reinforces their bitterness and keeps them hating, but let’s say poor ignorant white people. (I have my own problems with the word white, but I’ll save that for later.)
I hated those types when I was a kid. Guys who lived up to the stereotype, who would throw down at the drop of a hat, drink their futures away, mistreat their wives and kids, blame others for their self-sabotage. But at least I respected them enough to know they could be dangerous.
The guys in Top Gear were joking about trying to get each other killed. And then were surprised that it almost happened. If you lived down here you would know that absolutely could get you killed.
What did they expect? Humiliating people like that on their home turf is insane, even if you think they deserve it. Deep down they may agree they deserve it. Which makes them even more dangerous.
If you’re not going to try and improve their lot, LEAVE THEM ALONE.
I’ve expressed that sentiment before to my liberal friends and they never seem to get it. One friend’s response was “fuck ’em.” I don’t know what to say at that point. But if that’s the attitude our society is going to have, don’t expect anything to change for the better.
People who do understand those people are dangerous – and like it – will swoop in and use them for their own purposes. Condescending and humiliating media portrayals of poor white Southerners like that Top Gear episode helped get us where we are today.
I’ve been following these guys for a while. It’s fascinating to see how much they’ve changed. Just listening to a lot of different types of music can open your mind that much.
It’s been an interesting phenomenon, seeing the way reaction videos have proliferated on YouTube.
You have rap fans listening to rock, rock fans listening to rap. People from tribal cultures listening to techno. People reacting to stand up comics. Classical musicians listening to self-taught punk artists, young people checking out classics, old people checking out new bands way outside their comfort zones. So many possibilities.
At first I thought it was a bit much, but eventually I couldn’t help it. I got addicted. What will people who are different from me think of my favorite music, comedian or movie? Seeing someone discover them makes them feel new all over again.
It occurs to me that these videos are doing something very positive, opening people up to different cultures, points of view. There are some channels I’ve watched on and off for a few years and I can tell they’ve grown as people, simply by listening to a variety of music over time.
Ren, reacting to the reactors posting about his “Hi Ren” video. Ren is all about opening people’s minds and bringing people together, has encouraged reaction videos as a way to advance his career. They don’t have to worry about copyright strikes and it’s paying off.
I stood on a hill with many others, excited and terrified. The Rapture was upon us. Those found worthy would ascend to heaven. The rest would be left behind on a doomed earth.
The Rapture would take place inside a building in the valley below. I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside, but inside, it looked modern. Businesslike. I tried to put aside my doubts.
A loudspeaker directed us to a row of turnstiles, where you would learn if your name had been written in the Book of Life, or if you would be left behind to burn.
My name was called.
I was so relieved I didn’t think to ask questions. Like why was I not flying to meet Jesus in the air, like I’d been taught to expect? Why did God need technology, turnstiles, or loudspeakers?
The next part was jumbled. I was on my way to heaven when I realized I was lost in a maze. Then I had a monotonous job operating machines, then another, then another. Heaven never followed. I had to escape.
I’d been fooled. This was some kind of trap. A trap full of traps.
I don’t know how, but I found my way out. Only to find that everything was gone, charred, replaced by rubble, charcoal and ash. It looked like the aftermath of Hiroshima.
There was no Rapture. The building was a machine. Wealthy men built it to destroy the world, using our faith and labor. The machine was meant to eliminate the population so they could start from scratch. We had helped bring about the Apocalypse we sought to escape.
Last thing I remember I was wandering through rubble, feeling dejected and used. Feeling like a fool.
U2 – Until the End of the World
What it meant
That dream has haunted me for half my life. What was the Rapture Machine? I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to figure that out.
It took a long time, but I understand what the dream was telling me: The religion I knew, the one that taught me my values, had been seduced and hijacked.
The Rapture Machine promises a materialistic version of Heaven. You don’t have to die to get there, just be willing to sacrifice others or look the other way.
The Machine makes it easier by distributing the sacrifices widely. No one may opt out. They can only be cast out. How could any kind of spirituality survive that?
The Religious Right had turned Christianity into a doorway to The Machine.
I had that dream in the late 80s, when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was souring on the Baptist church.
Churches I attended in college only seemed to care about the offering plate. One church started every service with, “The Bible Teaches it, God Commands it: Tithing.” As a college student with no job and no money, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I went to Baptist Student Union events, hoping to make friends and meet girls, but ended up feeling lonelier than ever.
I couldn’t discuss my doubts with anyone. “Read your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit” was the signal to quit asking questions.
Meanwhile the influence of the televangelists, of Prosperity Gospel, was overwhelming the version of Christianity I learned in my little unadorned Baptist church, with its old farmers, teachers and other small town folks.
Poor Man’s Poison – Give and Take
It’s not just a Christian thing
What does the Rapture symbolize? Escape. Everyone is born in a vessel that must toil, suffer, fear and die. For Christians who believe in the Rapture as I once did, it’s a promise of heaven, the antithesis of suffering.
It isn’t just a Christian motivation. It’s universal. If you find yourself in a trap, you want to escape. Unfortunately, life is full of traps. Escape from one trap inevitably leads to another.
Promise of a better life is strong motivation, no matter your religion or lack thereof. Modern life, with conveniences our forefathers never dreamed of, will tempt anyone who wants to survive.
The Machine
The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the monster we refer to as the Machine. Or maybe it’s been with us since the dawn of civilization itself and modern machinery just raised it to adulthood.
I don’t know if it’s sentient (yet), but the Machine has a purpose: Never stop growing.
Now, with advanced AI threatening everybody’s livelihoods, it seems we’ve decided to make The Machine smarter than we are, when most of us already serve it without knowing. Feels like my old dream coming true.
The ultra-wealthy only think they control it, but they’re in a trap just like the rest of us. The more they have, the more they feel like targets. They grow their castles to keep out the poor and before you know it, they’ve built their own prisons.
The rest of are kept in The Machine by promises of heaven or wealth. Someday, always someday. False promises are the carrot, Poverty is the stick. Miserable, degrading poverty.
Premonitions and Predictions
Was my dream a premonition? Did my dream predict the future? Almost certainly not. My head was stuffed full of science fiction and literature as well as religion. My unconscious made an educated guess.
I think the unconscious part of us, the part we mostly deny in the “rational” West, can solve problems and draw conclusions based on fewer clues than our conscious minds. The problem is, the unconscious communicates through symbolism we cannot easily understand consciously.
Just discovered another amazing bit of culture from the Adrar region of Southern Algeria. I’d like to know more about this tradition. Looks fun as hell.
The polyrhythms with the clapping remind me somehow of Flamenco dancers in Spain. Hard to do. Looks like there’s a competitive element to the dancing.
Just read about Craig Robertson, the 70-something man in Utah who got killed by the FBI as they were serving a warrant. Based on his social media content where he threatened to assassinate Biden and other officials, it looks like the FBI did what it had to do.
On one level, he got what he deserved. He asked for it and he got it. But I got to thinking, what would this man be like today if America hadn’t made this lurch to the right?
Would he have been bragging about his sniper rifles and Ghillie suit. I imagine he’d be your basic, slightly racist grandpa. Maybe not the greatest guy, but fewer guns and a good Santa for the grandkids.
Or maybe I’m wrong and he just was what he was. Who knows.
It got me thinking about how shitty it is that a sophisticated propaganda machine decided to weaponize people like that guy. Most old men, even those with a shit ton of guns, would never do something like that.
But a lot of them have gone far enough right to alienate their children and grandchildren. Which is a tragedy in itself.
Why am I lucky? Because I was born right in that generational sweet spot. Too young to get hooked on Fox News, too old to get sucked into the Manosphere on social media. Aloof enough to avoid parasocial attachments to my favorite entertainers who decided to catch the wave of crazy, for the money or the crazy.
Old enough to remember Walter Cronkite and actual journalism. Young enough to enjoy the Internet, when it was a place to open minds rather than close them. Old enough to get a college education, while that was still in reach.
Lucky I had the teachers I had, read the books I read, had the parents I had. Lucky I was able to tell the Republican party was a runaway train and jump off early enough so I can sleep at night.
When I was 12 years old my dad bought me a microscope. Nothing fancy, but solid. I spent hours at a time with my eyeball glued to that thing. I kept a Mason jar full of water from the nearby stock tank or the mud puddle in the driveway.
I looked at all the obvious things first. Salt, sugar, leaves. But nothing was better than a dropful of muddy water. So many little dramas going on that we can’t even see.
What must it be like? One second you’re munching on a protazoan or a blob of algae and next thing you know, you’ve been sucked down some rotifer’s gullet. None of them know about fish, or people, or air, or the stars. Not much thought going on down there, just pure survival.
And the poor things are so tiny they can’t even tell they’re on borrowed time. They’re battling it out in a drop of water and they’re all going to die when it dries up.
I’ve thought about getting a new microscope for years, but it’s a lot easier to watch YouTube videos. Besides, my interests have broadened. I always wanted to be an inventor, for example. Unfortunately, I am the opposite of technical.
But I didn’t give up. A while back I started getting into mysticism and psychology, read a bunch of philosophy books bought a couple of Tarot decks and I invented something: a psychroscope.
It took a long time to come together and it’s still not perfect, but I’m seeing more all the time. It’s like a microscope, but pointed outward, toward the psychic medium. And what did I see?
Same thing I saw in those drops of pond water. Life. Creatures of thought, Unaware of what they are or where they’re going, swimming through unspoken thoughts and little kids’ dreams. Narratives nested inside nested narratives, meta meta meta narratives.
Entities that live both inside and outside of us. Gods or monsters we all create together. Moving images we project onto the world, filtered through our fears and desires. Are they real? Depends on how you define real. If enough people think they are and act accordingly, they might as well be real.
I think they’re a bit like the cosmic horrors Lovecraft wrote about. You might call them “Elder Gods” but they’re not older than us. We made them. They’ve grown up with us. Whether they are evil or benign depends on us.
I thought this was an interesting interview. I knew what she was going to say and I what the comments would be like.
It got me thinking about language and how we use it to rank each other, sometimes without knowing it. Dialects are judged to be “low” or ignorant. As informal writing proliferates, the same thing happens with written language.
Elitists and old people are like, “No! Stop! You’re doing it wrong!”
I have a BA in English, so I learned a lot about the rules, how English “supposed” to be.
But I took one Linguistics class in college and that changed everything. I learned how languages change and evolve. And I learned something my grammar nazi mother absolutely hated: Rules follow usage.
When enough people do it, it’s the new rule. I also love language. I like playing with slang & doing it wrong on purpose if it works. Gen Z is treating language exactly as you should expect. Adapting it to their environment.
It reminded me of the NBC video clip I saw a while back about Gen Z doing away with the period. I had the same knee jerk reaction as a lot of people: Damn kids, learn how to write! But after watching the video I’ll be damned if it didn’t end up making sense. It’s texting. I don’t end texts with periods half the time.
It’s adaptive. They’re learning how to make a notoriously unexpressive media convey emotion.
I love language. I love the way you can mold it and shape it. I love how it adapts. I only know a little Spanish, enough to read signs and packages, but if I could go back in time, I’d learn a dozen languages. I bet I was a linguist in one of my alternate dimensional lives. I wonder how many I learned.
Language is almost metaphysically important if you think about it. The language you speak determines what you can even think about, what you think is real or possible. How mindblowing is that?
I’ve been thinking back on the “edgy online atheism” phase I went through in the early ’00s and why I quit doing it. Not that I became religious again, but spiritual isn’t a dirty word for me anymore.
In fact, some form of spirituality could be very healthy.
The angry phase lasted for a few years after I completely lost my religion. I had already abandoned my cognitively dissonant fundamentalism and was hanging onto the idea that God had a plan and I was in it.
Then life circumstances walloped me upside the head and made that impossible. Sometimes a tragedy is just a tragedy and no “mysterious ways” argument can ever justify it. Disasters happen because the world and the universe have no morals.
So I went hard on the atheism. I spent way too much time virtue signaling to other atheists online. I got into people like Richard Dawkins and Matt Dillahunty.
Whatever you think of him, Dawkins deserves a lot of credit for coining the term “meme”, long before anyone ever made one online. Funny how memes as we think of them now illustrated his point about the replication and evolution of ideas.
Back then I had that edgy online thing going. I thought I was so smart. I had figured it all out (again). I was in my 30s, too old for that kind of attitude. But I realize now I was just angry. Not “angry at God.” Angry because I’d been lied to.
Angry because I was grieving.
It’s a phase you have to go through when your worldview gets yanked out from under you. Pissed off and betrayed. You want everyone to know what horseshit it all was.
But ultimately the fire burned itself out. I support and agree with atheists most of the time, but that can’t be my tribe. I needed to move on. Atheist felt like a description, not an identity.
That’s all it really was. Grief.
You probably know about DABDA, the stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. You don’t always go through it in order, but I went through all of that when I left Christianity.
If you can make it to the last stage of grief – Acceptance, you can maybe acknowledge it wasn’t all horseshit. You probably got something of value out of it or you wouldn’t have grieved over it. That’s where I am now. I don’t believe it, but I’m not angry. If anything I’m sad.
It occurs to me that grief could also explain why Christians seem to be angry these days. Why get so angry when others won’t believe what you do? Why do you wish so hard that they would just STFU?
Could be because they’re in the first stages of grief: Denial. Deep down, maybe it’s not as meaningful as it used to be. They’ve got some causes and some firebrand preachers to whip them into a frenzy, but maybe it’s not enough.
Folks who weren’t raised religious might not understand, but having your world view ripped out from under you is a terrifying prospect. Even if you know deep down it’s something you have to face if you want the truth.
I’m beginning to understand that science and rationality, while important, are not enough to hold a society together. Westerners – Americans in particular, are suffering from a lack of meaning and it shows.
I’ve been afraid to read Nietzsche because of his fans (adding him to the list), but now I understand what he was trying to warn us about. Christianity was the glue holding Western Civilization together.
I’m never going to back, but I no longer want Christianity to disappear. After all it’s where I got my values. I want it to change, into something that plays well with others and still provides a sense of meaning and community.
Perhaps go look at some of the early Christian sects, when the influence of Neoplatonism was stronger, see what might have been discarded that could be brought back.
Lately I’ve been a big fan of Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher John Vervaeke. He’s been talking to a variety of thinkers in various fields. He hasn’t disappointed me yet.
He published a 50-episode YouTube series, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” where he goes through the psychological developments that underpin Western Civilization. I’ve already learned a great deal. Not even halfway through yet, but I’ll get there.
He also has some interesting and frankly ominous things to say about Artificial Intelligence and the massive ways it could impact our society.
Lajitas was a good place to camp back then, when you wanted to do West Texas stuff in the Big Bend area. But back then there weren’t that many people around. There were times when it felt like you had the whole desert to yourself.
I spent a number of weekends there, so the memories get jumbled together, but I miss that era that will never come again. Back in the ’80s when the border was (mostly) chill.
I remember hanging out in front of the old Trading Post at sunset with my uncle and his friends. There were bullet holes in the ouside wall, from Pancho Villa’s men, so they told us.
There was a pool table outside. Not very level, but you could play when the store was closed. I remember somebody put on the Willie Nelson version of “Pancho and Lefty,” which felt like a perfect way to close a day.
The area got to feel like a neighborhood after a while. Distances are relative. On the River Road was “Big Hill.” Just a yellow highway department sign really, but we made it a proper name.
You made sure to see “DOM,” letters scraped into a cliff face during the filming of Fandango, my favorite Kevin Costner movie.
There was a place on the side of the road where you could get out and look down at the Rio Grande, waaaaay down. You might go to La Kiva restaurant in Terlingua – still remember the bones of a “Penisaurus Erectus” embedded in the wall.
There was a village across the river in Mexico where you could pay a few bucks and a man with arms like tree trunks would row you across, where you could eat dinner at Garcia’s. In an adobe building with no running water. The food was delicious.
There was a blonde teenager they called Panchita who spent most of her time on the Mexican side in a little curio shop with no customers, listening to corridos and rancheras on the radio.
When I read Terrence Poppa’s Drug Lord, Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin I wondered if Panchita might’ve been the daughter of an American lady mentioned in the book.
From what I was told, Lajitas and the village were basically connected. Tourists went to dinner in Mexico. Families from the village would cross the river sometimes just for something to do, like watch bootleg American movies before the copyright cops put a stop to it.
I’ve been wrestling with thoughts about what it means to be a progressive in MAGA country who saw it coming. The inner conflict, the feelings, the divided loyalty… You just can’t win.
Someone recently asked Beau of the Fifth Column if he expected Trump to win in 2016 . Beau, who lives in Florida and is as rural a Southerner as they come, said no, he “didn’t think it could happen here.”
I was a little surprised, because I did know. I didn’t know at first, but by November 2016 I knew.
One night I jolted awake thinking, “Oh my God, we’re gonna do it again aren’t we?” Horror, dread and grief washed over me.
“Why must we always sign up to be the bad guys of history?” I thought. “They use us for power and money and leave our culture in shambles? Why do we do it?”
Shame over the past masquerading as pride…
Interesting that I thought “we.” I spent most of my life trying not to be country, or Southern, or redneck – as if I wasn’t raising hell on the back roads as a young man, just like my snuff dippin’ beer drinking friends. Who exactly did I mean by we?
Like Beau, I came up in the country. Not as country as him, but close. Texas isn’t exactly “The South,” but we’re kissing cousins. We once waltzed into a meatgrinder together on behalf of The South.
I knew Trump was going to win. Maybe because I was a newspaper reporter who covered small towns for 20 years.
Or perhaps it was because I’d quit wanting talk to people I considered close as brothers over the hateful things they said on Facebook, and got the cold shoulder from others over my anti-Trump memes.
I had an inkling that we were headed in a bad direction during Obama’s presidency. I was hearing more racist jokes. Infowars turned up at a boring ass economic development meeting, shouting conspiracy theories. Tea Party members almost scuttled plans for a college campus our poverty-stricken town needed desperately.
I felt dread when Hillary got the Democratic nomination, Hillary who was synonymous with Coastal Liberal disdain in my part of the country, going way back to Rush Limbaugh. Rush used that very hook to fool me at first: “We’re nothing but ‘flyover country’ to them.”
I knew because Coastal Liberals who chose Hillary over Bernie didn’t know how badly the well was poisoned against her or didn’t think it mattered.
I knew when Hillary made the fatal mistake of uttering the words, “basket of deplorables.” And didn’t seem to know it was a mistake – or care.
I still voted for her in the general. She would’ve been so much better for America – and the South, whether they knew it or not. Almost anyone would’ve been better. But I knew my neighbors.
I knew because wealthy Coastal Liberals who have controlled the Democratic Party, as well as naive city liberals who supported them didn’t understand how they are perceived and don’t know how to talk to us without stepping on every cultural tripwire.
I knew because Trump might be a buffoon, but he’s a talented conman. I interviewed a local conman once and I learned how it works: Find out who your mark hates and you can take him for every penny.
Liberals were sure they were going to win because they had a better candidate – they did. Anyone would have been better. But future MAGA knew the Democratic Party didn’t care and Trump (who also couldn’t give a shit but pretended to care) got to them first.
Late Boomer's Den 
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