Bad Shit

Occasionally I glimpse the deep, inner workings of the soul of a southern white man and know that we are doomed. They say that emotional injuries suffered early enough in life can play out horribly because they aren't objectified and understood as incidents but construed existentially.

Or, in another parlance, archetypally, as manifestations of a world of primal forces of mythological cast, where everything is fraught with sinister import and significance. So a sickness or injury isn't that but an indication that the world is always offering up annihilation, extinction and oblivion.

Slavery is America's early childhood injury. It's the thing that we process archetypally and can't objectify or see for what it is, a massive moral fuck-up but still an incident, a thing that happened, the consequences of which can be addressed rationally and directly rather than by analogy.

The souls of southern white men, driving their brains from the archetypal regions, take them to libertarianism and other laundered versions of the same old racist crap, white male power and privilege, with property being pivotal, as in the distinction between owner and owned, slave and free.

In this analogical, parallel world of hobgoblins and bogeymen and red herrings everything is processed unconsciously and partially, as a means of evasion and avoidance. So the Confederate flag, for example, isn't racist when it is, voting rights aren't diminished when they are and so on.

This is morally corrosive stuff, since it cracks the door to a world of wishful thinking, defensiveness and unreason, a world which is most likely accepted as real because the true source of the fear, being unaddressed, will always find other homes, like an illness propagating itself among hosts.