Woke

 Guest Post rant,
 by a cranky old guy who has lost patience for the bullshit.



Ralph Bowman is hard for me to categorize.  He is a retired teacher, sort of a socialist, a union guy, a guy with liberal instincts who grew up in multi-ethnic poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles. I have had to clean up his language, since sometimes he talks the way kids talked about other ethnic groups back when he was a kid. Sometimes he sounds to me like Walt Whitman. Sometimes like Allen Ginzberg. Sometimes like Archie Bunker.

Things make him angry and frustrated and he sends me incautious comments. I consider them a document, a primary source.

This isn't analysis or reflection. This is a suitable-for-publication version of his original rant about woke-ness and Blacks and trust fund White people who screwed up the BLM movement by making a Halloween party out of it. They dressed up in costumes, burned stuff because they could, then slipped back to their safety-netted-lives and let things get even worse for the Black people. That angers him. Or as he would more typically put it in comments to me, it pisses him off.

Ralph lives with his wife in an assisted living community in Grants Pass, Oregon, a place that is a hotbed of red state rural conservatives and marijuana growers. He is surrounded by Trump voters he considers brainwashed by Fox. He is frustrated and angry with liberal dilettantes.  

Ralph Bowman's comment: 

"Woke" is the new N-word, a problem word. I resent this word, an easy definition for a complex set of ideas. It's demeaning. Cute. Not clever.

Blacks use the word "woke" to keep them focused on the injustices. "Stay woke."

Handy word for liberal Whites, shorthand for moral superiority, shorthand for White educated, and bleeding heart, and tree huggers. "Woke" is used to aggrandize the insights of the comfortable about the plight of the underclass they aren't in and the sexual diversity they are sometimes in. I visualize a person with large eyes and an open mouth who deserves a pie in the face. That would wake them up. 

The White Awoke justice warrior is morally superior, educated, an enviro organic tofu eating', tit suckin' trust fund baby who used to burn incense in a lotus position, but now thinks they are changing the world with their daily vlog, sponsored by some whole-something cereal, gluten free and non GMO, costs extra but OK. Woke is a fad word, their fad, like "intersectionality."

Woke people are so good, sympathizing like they do with the underclass, making donation gifts, hoping for weak laws that will pacify them, changing the world by marching around with signs filled with platitudes, and then slipping into the back of the crowd before the cops arrive so they can run home and check their stock dividends. They aren't involved but oh, boy are they intellectually aware. Some wake up to woke-hood with fantasies of revolution, ready to be arrested, gassed, or shot with rubber bullets, willing to be chained to pipelines, offering services at food banks, willing to teach prisoners.

Dump this "woke." Quit playing. Change real things. Be angry, not good. Start jamming the levers of power. 

"Woke." Republicans use it as a weapon to demean the snowflake Democrats. Democrats use it against the un-woke deplorables. 

"Can't we all get along?" No. Times haven't changed much since Rodney King, cops still hammering away on Black people and nothing that happens in the universities makes it any better, just worse.

Woke. Fuck woke.

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Meanwhile, as the campaign winds up President Trump has engaged with a new enemy, one that traditionally has a deep well of credibility with the public: doctors.

"Our doctors make more money when somebody dies from COVID. You know that, right? Doctors are very smart people. So what they do is, they say, 'Im sorry, but you know, everybody dies of COVID.' But in Germany and other places if you have a heart attack, or you have cancer, you're terminally ill, you catch COVID, they say you died of cancer, you died of heart attack. With us, when in doubt, choose COVID."

Doctor groups have protested.