Every time I come through central Texas, I stop at a cafe just north of Austin’s angering traffic, across the street from one of those make-it-yourself pottery shops and some visibly competent black hair services.
The drinks are good (you still have to ask the people pretending to be baristas these days for “extra hot,”of course, unless you like your latté lukewarm), and there are enough microbrews and hippie tonics to keep any liberal happy.
The atmosphere is open, with plenty of space between the tables, and rarely is there some white woman’s dog lying in everyone’s way.
Squeak.
Sorry to suddenly hit you with race like that. The new priesthood even has me doing it now. It won’t happen again.
I mean from me. It most certainly will happen again.
I only said that about unwelcome dogs in cafes because
a) I’m white, so I can, by the new rules, and it’s embarrassing to see, because
b) when an uninvited dog is brought into a place where humans eat and drink, the owner is white approximately 100% of the time; and
c) I want the reader to know that I do ascribe certain rude behaviors to specific groups in America, even tho I don’t believe in 90% of the ones we hear about. I think I’m also trying to prove I know much more than the new priesthood of racial experts does, because I actually interact with the world.
Finally, I love dogs, and I think it’s a self-absorbed act of entitlement to take advantage of Americans’ love of dogs by bringing yours into an establishment that doesn’t specifically have a sign on the door saying dogs are welcome. The people who do it know this. They sense they’re violating common courtesy every time, and they do it anyway. Every time I see it I think, Wow, thanks for proving right the people who say white people feel more entitled.
You could call it a pet peeve of mine. But I’m not trying to talk about race relations or entitled dog owners. It’s just something that keeps irritating me, keeps distracting me from whatever I’m trying to do. What was I trying to do?
Squeak.
When I first visited Austin at the beginning of this year, stopping in this cafe for my mid-day matcha and gluten-free coffee cake, the front door was squeaking as it closed. The door arm shutting it announced everyone who walked in, by following their entrances with a slow, piercing sssquuuEEEEEAAAAK, embarrassing many first-time customers who felt like they had brought the annoying sound with them into a space where everyone was trying to have a conversation or work.
The next time I was here, a couple months ago, the squeak was still here! I was surprised, nay, confused really. I could hear it through the noise-blocking headphones I put on whenever I go to cafes to be around people. Why hadn’t anyone fixed it?
Squeak… And now another person is walking in, behind the last. Squeak…
In April, I brought a can of WD-40 with me, just in case the squeak was still happening. It was, and I asked the manager if she would let me spray the door arm’s joints, “real quick, just stand up on a chair and take five seconds.”
She said she wasn’t comfortable letting me do that without approval. She said there is someone who usually takes care of “those kinds of things,” and that she could “let them know it’s a problem the next time they come in.”
“I think everyone knows it’s a problem,” I said without thinking, and saw the other baristas smirk behind her in what looked like agreement, but might have just been entertainment. I added quickly, “It’s just WD-40. I promise it won’t hurt the door.”
Did that just sound even more condescending? How am I messing this up?
“I’m just not comfortable letting a customer do that. We have a protocol.”
I gave her a thumbs-up gesture because I didn’t trust saying more words, and walked back to the car, not wanting to work in the noisy and now maybe resentful atmosphere. Her answer made sense too. I’m old enough now to know there are good reasons for having protocols, so I tried to imagine a reason not to spray the door arm with squid oil. (Or is it krill? Is WD-40 krill oil? Are we de-squeaking stuff with shrimp?)
I imagined it could drip from the squeaky joints even after I wiped away the excess, and that even a tiny bit of that slick stuff could cause someone to slip on the hard floor. Or maybe the “they” who takes care of the cafe’s repairs will determine the whole door arm should just be replaced.
As I walked out, I went through the door that’s used less often, which has started to thump and bounce when it closes, like when you drop a heavy rubber ball. Next to me, someone walked in, looking at his phone, and I didn’t want him to run into me. As we passed by each other I kept my head lowered, so I wouldn’t obligate him to nod or say hi.
Squeeeeaaaaak. THUMP! Thump, thump-thump-thump.
I thought, They’ll probably just replace both door arms. I’m glad I told her. Maybe she really hadn’t noticed it.
But I’m here again, almost two months later, and “they” haven’t fixed anything, either because that anti-confrontational Zoomer manager, the one who also doesn’t do anything when people tell her the soap is out in the bathroom, decided the real world is too effort-y to participate in enough to address a problem she doesn’t absolutely have to address, or “they” who take care of “those kinds of things” don’t care that the business’s front door has been squeaking loudly for half a year.
It’s frustrating me, making me theorize things like maybe the next generation exists half in the digital world, so they’re only half-sensitive to, like, the physical world, the, like, for-real IRL world.
Or maybe this is the end of Western civilization, because no one wants to take responsibility for anything, because that would mean displaying initiative and require taking action, and taking action you haven’t been commanded to take is risky, and risk could get you in trouble, or cause mistakes, or get you labeled as toxic, or get you passive-aggressively outcast from the chill club, or canceled.
It also embarrassed me, because there’s a sticker on the entrance telling customers the cafe is “woman-owned.” I’m not a woman. I’m just looking out for y’all. I’ve seen more than one male face look up at the repeating squeak and then exchange a look with other men—a look that we exchange now, silently.
(Can I say male face?)
I’m distracted now, gazing at a plant by the entrance where they’ve placed one of those new pride flags—the kind with the segregated black and brown stripes leading the invasion of special identity groups into the rainbow that once symbolized all of us, harmony, tolerance.
I notice the two latin guys—because racial consciousness is important—sitting at my table are talking about stuff I know about. They were just strangers a minute ago, and now they’re having the kind of conversation strangers used to have sometimes in cafes: spontaneous, about common interests. Informative. Informal. Normal.
I slide down my headphones when one mentions he had just been visiting Uvalde. I ask him if he is from Uvalde and when he says he is I express my sympathy for what happened there.
It was apparent no one wanted to talk about Uvalde, so I went back to work, wondering if there really is anything to say about such a massacre, or if Americans no longer think there is any point in talking about a large number of children getting terrorized, tormented, and murdered in front of each other.
It’s the loudest sound in the country now, those intermittent gunshots, intermittent scenes we don’t want to imagine. So we’ve become numb enough to it that we can focus on other things, by necessity.
Squeak.
I don my anti-conversation device again, but the door traffic is heavy, and the squeaking is pausing conversations around the cafe, reminding me that the irritation will keep returning as long as I am here, whether I ignore it or not, whether I play Enya and Erika de Casier in closed-ear Bose stereo or not.
It’s now Sunday, the day before Independence Day. I remember the last time I came here on a Holiday weekend, when the Uvalde massacre had just happened and the flags in Texas were at half-mast for eighteen days and this cafe was closed for repairs. There were no cars in the lot, just repair trucks. A sign taped to the door said they weren’t sure when the repairs would be done.
Now it’s open again, everyone’s back, working and talking, and no one has fixed the problem everyone wants fixed.
Squeak.
Matthew McConaughey is from Uvalde too. He spoke at a White House press conference about his view on the gun debate. He started by mentioning it was in Uvalde, Texas that he learned “responsible gun ownership,” maybe because he’s figured out that personal responsibility is the common ground gun control advocates share with gun rights advocates.
Maybe he’s figured that out because he really cares, enough to think on what really can and really should be done. Maybe that’s why when he made that speech about the shooting, he didn’t sound like all the commentators in the so-called liberal media, so quick to respond, so quick to blame.
As McConaughey described the children lost, his voice shook. His dramatic expression style, dramatic as the expression style of most actors I know, came through in force. When he said one of the girls whose story ended early could only be identified by her shoes, he thumped his fist on the podium and said, “How about that s#%&?”
On the Right and in indy media, some commentators mocked McConaughey’s style, referring to it as a performance. One called McConaughey’s fist thump a “flourish”, and then moved on, ignoring completely the content of his speech.
Another called it an example of the “Showbizzing of America”, and pulled up a clip of McConaughey giving a public speech on gun violence four years ago, in which he advocated for banning “assault weapons” (in quotes because even after researching for my next review—on our response to the recent mass shootings—I still have no idea what assault weapons are).
Yes, sir, McConaughey did change his view on gun rights and on effective solutions to the mass shootings crisis. Maybe he should not have spoken in 2018 before doing more research on the matter, but it is a good thing that his view has evolved. That’s called growth. He learned more about an issue, and changed his mind.
(And I’ll save the list of knee-jerkings from the Left for my upcoming piece, as we all saw them or can imagine them anyway.)
(I wonder what McConaughey meant when he said “we are not as divided as we are being told we are.”)
(No I don’t.)
After the end of McConaughey’s speech (if you Iisten to the clip I linked to), you can hear some mindless tribalist in the press scrum call out a question as the actor walks off, the insensitive taunt of a troll who did not come to listen, and did not ask his question to learn, but instead came to frame whatever McConaughey said as a self-serving performance. Notice the irony:
“Were you grandstanding just now, sir?”
Grandstanding indeed, you tape recording of a man.
McConaughey spoke about politicians acting on values, instead of on worries about re-election—meaning worries about getting canceled, for committing to nation instead of tribe.
I must have just focused. I forgot about the squeak, even as a long line of customers formed.
What else is floating around in my mind… What’s something it would naturally focus on, if I let it…
I could write about how I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon.com in over a decade and am just fine without that particular company… How we didn’t see or hear anything from the actors in Don’t Look Up during the the past two years except for that movie, while so many others in Hollywood were advising us like they were doctors…
How Justin Bieber casually closed his good ear the second he said his facial paralysis was caused by a “virus” (don’t bother trying to find that moment in other news clips)…
Oh! Tesla, the American company that has led for years in the electric car and battery industries, just got dropped from the ESG club. Why? I guess because it doesn’t matter what good Tesla actually provides for our environment (the E in ESG) if they don’t hire Diversity, Inclusion & Equity activists as permanent staff and buy full-page ads of brown-skinned kids flying kites in the clean blue skies their company totally cares about keeping clean, Shell.
They’re trying to say it’s because Tesla had racial complaints—unproven—and because they had a little bit more emissions than Exxon, which is still ESG-approved. Some notice the timing: Tesla already had had a couple violations of the Clean Air Act.
And the racial complaints had already been investigated and resulted in nothing. (But that’s re-opening soon, because two employees are certain a whole Tesla plant is a racist workplace. Two.)
But Musk did recently move to buy and privatize Twitter. Is there no connection between that and his company’s delisting from the ESG Index? I don’t know—are electric cars more damaging to the environment than Shell Oil?
I guess it depends on if you believe in grey governance (the G in ESG). Grey governance is what I call shady governance, of anything, like of who rates well on an index that strangely groups Environmental, Social, and Governance together in one score—all vague metrics that can be broken down into so many little mini-ratings that it would be easy to hide favoritism and invisible agendas that shift how companies are judged, whenever they want, in undisclosed and indiscernible ways.
Grey governance is how Islamic jurists can decide that a specific person should be whipped for a certain crime in one case, in one area of Iran, on one day, but someone else should be set free for the same crime elsewhere the next. It’s how our own federal government can reserve the power to violate people and small businesses according to its own drug law, by not aligning that law with what is going on in the States. The power is in maintaining a grey area, keeping those not in power uncertain.
According to Forbes's embedded ad for Q.ai’s ESG-focused investment fund, the executive in charge of ESG ratings for North America said, “While Tesla may be playing its part in eliminating fuel-powered cars, it has fallen behind its peers when examined through a broader ESG lens.”
Tesla may be playing its part. Notice the phrasing: it mentions the company’s contributions, vaguely, so it acknowledges the company’s contributions, kinda, but without discussing or estimating the value of those contributions.
Tesla has been leading the world, making mistakes and messes while inventing and advancing technologies that I’m sure the investment companies with invulnerable memberships in the ESG club are looking forward to helping China steal, but through a broader ESG lens, you see, meaning when reassessed at the politically convenient time with a shifting set of subjectively biased metrics by which the ESG club decides who is cool and who is not, Tesla’s Musk is making too many waves and exposing too much hypocrisy.
His meddling might expose massive corruption next. So his solar battery and electric car company is bad for the Environment. I mean bad for the Social. I mean, for Governance… Why are transnational corporations involved in governance again?
Forbes mentions the allegations of “harassment” and “racial slurs” that have allegedly occurred at a Tesla plant in Fremont, California, and for further information on them refers only to a Guardian article. (Sigh. They both used to be so solid.)
(I said, SIGHHHHHHH!)
(They heard me.)
Workers sometimes referred to the plant as “the slaveship” and “the plantation.” We don’t know what race of workers called the plant those names, or in what context those comments were made—if they were just nicknames made in normal blue-collar humor about a workplace, like I’ve heard a dozen times at a half dozen jobs no one at the Guardian had ever had—and a couple or maybe even three workers decided that any reference to the history of slavery is absolutely off limits and so is humor.
Maybe black workers really were disturbed by the use of those terms. Maybe those words were used too much, by grinning white coworkers who thought they were being funny. In my experience, it takes about one black coworker then, to say, “no more of that slaveship stuff, y’all,” and it’s done, forever. But maybe these two or three workers, tops, did not want to communicate directly with their enemy I mean white coworkers.
But that’s fine, this is America. We who know and care, and want and can afford electric vehicles, will purchase Telsa and ignore the options from ESG-approved car companies, because the hour is late and the vampires have grown too comfortable before the dawn. But I forgot to finish the racial stuff:
“One Black worker reported hearing racial slurs as often as 50-100 times a day, being called the ’N-word’, and ‘hood rats’, according to the complaint.”
Okay, one person. One person reported hearing racial slurs, fifty to a hundred times… per day… and never got a single recording of them. No one did?
Then who was using that word?
Because I very much doubt that white co-workers were doing that and so does every American who hears claims like this. I don’t care what Morgan told you; I’m telling you she doesn’t really believe a bunch of whites were being racist all day.
Why? You know why. Because some Social Justice-heads decide the way to play out their personal issues or satisfy their need for attention is to accuse white people of something those whites cannot disprove.
Or, because terrible people do something wrong, like beat up some restaurant host who won’t let their friends with fake vaccine cards in, and then those terrible people use pretending the host was being racist as an excuse… as tho it’s an excuse.
Every single news outlets starts the security footage of that incident at Carmine’s in New York after the moment it started, for whatever reason our news media always avoids showing the part that incriminates the people falsely claiming to have suffered racism (to divide us).
So watch the beginning of the full security footage for yourself and decide who started the fight and if you believe the host used the n-word, after letting them in, after letting their first set of black friends in, and then after stopping their second set of black friends from entering.
It was unfair discrimination that led to that situation, yes, but not racial discrimination. And if we could talk honestly about what we believe and don’t believe, we could dissolve both the bull$%@# and the unnecessary tension, and achieve the understanding that direct communication can achieve, without Al Sharpton in between, without an Inclusion priest translating for us.
The YouTube video of binaural beats I had playing has ended and all I can hear now is my fingers typing.
I wonder if the reason federal investigators didn’t find anything “substantial” in the claims of racism at the Tesla plant is because they interviewed the workers there, black and white, and once those workers could speak privately, meaning freely, they told the investigators that their co-workers, the people they know, aren’t racist, and that the allegations are just stories made up by a few psychologically unstable bullies, members of a new self-entitled priest class who insert themselves as middlemen to profit from perverting the conversation we all need, who make whatever reparation our country might be possible to work out today for what set some of our fellow citizens back less possible with every false accusation; with every unchecked lie that destroy’s a person’s living; with every divisive, toxic new program.
I don’t know if there really was racist graffiti at the Tesla plant or if the seeming racial segregation among the workers isn’t just the typical self-segregation you see at so many high schools now. I’m just telling you why no one, and I do mean no one, genuinely believes claims of racist speech anymore. We need video proof now.
Okay I believe this lady used the n-word. But I could find you dozens of examples right now of people pretending someone was racist, and only a few examples of people being racist, and even those few are never of people using racial slurs against a coworker or customer or classmate.
My phone is vibrating on the table. It’s one of the few friends I kept through the social culling of the past two years’ panic-demic. He probably wants to talk about the trading card game that just hit Kickstarter, but this is no time for geeking.
I know why it excited me that Tesla got dropped from the ESG Index. It’s been incongruencies like this that have been going viral and revealing to us that we’ve been misinformed, hoodwinked, bamboozled. Here’s a link to Vivek Ramaswamy’s diatribe on wokeness in the corporate world.
I am not recommending his company’s services and no one should ever take financial advice from me anyway. I don’t even know if Ramaswamy would agree with me on how to beat corporate wokeness. But I suspect he’s figured out what I’ve been yelling at my friends for years, that our dollar is our real vote, that it makes a huge difference what we buy, what companies we buy from, and where we bank—and in the case of people with money to invest, what companies we invest in.
My yelling at the three people I know who own stock, urging them to find out at least where their money is, what kind of business it’s supporting, has only ever fallen on the deaf ears of hypocritical minds. So I wish Ramaswamy luck advising the investor class. I’ll just keep studying what companies not to buy products from. Nike.
I like any effort to educate people about the powers we have to improve our society. I like reminders that human beings have always changed what seemed impossible to change; check history. I also like how when I start typing quickly my back forces me to sit up straight.
It’s past midnight now and I’m lying on a couch in an Airbnb house, listening to my people blow stuff up illegally. The sound has always comforted me, echoing my childhood when we huddled in basements in Tehran as the Iraqis dropped bombs from borrowed jets.
It’s a comfort only children of war can understand, I’ve discovered. Most people just think I’m traumatized. But I love that this is how we celebrate our independence, with miniature replications of the fighting that got us here, the bombs bursting in air, the rebellion against authority we didn’t need. I wasn’t even born here and I can say “we.” So can you. That’s what this place means.
Happy birthday, America. It’s time for honest people to speak.
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