Looking Back on When I..
Conversation for Adults
Jimi Izrael is a phenomenal dude. He is one of the most emotionally intelligent and generous people I know. I have been rapt by his ability to coax the most honest and poignant vignettes out of folks on his podcast Conversation For Adults. It’s genuinely hard for me to listen to them nonstop, because I keep pausing the tape to throw up my own answers to his questions. Needless to say I have been waiting for this to happen for a long time.
If you click the Cobbski button, you get two hours of talk which is quite fun that covers not only my stuff leading the Conservative Brotherhood but some other adventures as well. That would include my work as the Boohab, as Mellow Mike and various other personae adopted for the various performances of my online life.
Notes
What I never mentioned in all of this was that I was aiming in my anti-racism to always say the same thing to blacks as to whites and other players in the game. This was originally aligned, or so I thought, with the aims of Adam Serwer and the Race Traitor folks. I still like the Race Traitor slogan, ‘treason to race is loyalty to humanity’ but there were devilish details.
The other black internet entrepreneur I was trying to remember was Malcolm CasSelle and his property was Netnoir.
The LA author of Understand This I was trying to remember was Jervey Tervalon, but it also bears mentioning that my other favorites during the Unleashed period were Greg Tate, Umberto Eco, Hinton Als, Stanley Crouch, Marshall Blonsky, Nelson George, Paul Beatty and Darryl Pinckney.
I’m still warming up to Jimi's conversation-style podcast, but enjoyed this one.
What caught my ear was something you said:
"Dr. Luke says 'Listen here. Americans respect the Japanese. If you go back to the war time cartoons, they've even censored it because they were so racist and hated those Japanese so much that they wouldn't let ordinary Japanese people walk around the streets in America. But the Japanese stood up to Americans and they said 'You're going to have to kill me first.' And when the white man recognized he had a mortal enemy who was willing to kill him, that's when the respect started."
This reminded me of something I read in Eric Hoffer's book (1951), "The True Believer."
"It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life."
Whether America's position in the world is born of arrogant or objective exceptionalism is hard to say. Maybe both. And as I've watch events unfold over the past several years, world views stitched together with confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance have given rise to odd beasts that demand but are not deserving of respect: Exceptional and professional victims whom the majority do not respect but give wide berth and the corporations leverage as useful idiots. They are killing us softly and I wonder if, as a nation, we'll ever notice.