It is possible that white people are kind of spoiled.
I have this friend-not-friend who’s a white man, circa late sixties, incredibly dissatisfied, incredibly vain. This in itself is not—though it sounds dangerously likely to be—a recipe for spoiling, for SPOLIAGE (a word I am making up but because I believe someone should; think analogous to foliage, in that it denotes showing off being spoiled, not showing off leaves and branches.)
My not-friend-friend seems, I am devastated to have to say, utterly SPOLIAGED.
He proclaims from the rooftops at the end of every hyperlink in every email from The Economist or The Guardian or, heavens, even that liberal rag The New York Times, that the world is coming to an end. Before the link has quite finished being typed in he adds that he sees and understands it all clearly; then in seven or eight tight-fisted punchlines, he cites scientific evidence in support of the coming Anthropocene annihilation. The usual suspects: Climate Change, Politicians, Capitalism, Republicans, Whiteness, Male Spoliage, etc.
And before you’ve had a chance to cry out that you really kind of don’t have time to read so many links in one email, he’s already taken off to the Himalayas or to Kilimanjaro to climb the highest peaks in the world while eating cricket bars.
The logic of these verbal and ideological acrobatics seems as follows: “Look at me, I know everything and everyone sucks, which makes me better than the unknowingly sucky, and I know how someone should fix this suckiness, but that someone won’t be me because I won’t be getting my hands dirty actually tackling all the things I pontificate about, because, well, I don’t feel like it, and also I like a little bit too much the life I have of comfortable retirement after decades of working for an American Corporation.”
So I had to ask one day, a day of especial hyperlink-chasing fatigue, why talk about the world going to hell in a handbasket so much if he didn’t want to do anything about it.
Instantly, I was BrownGirled. He said, “Because I can.” And to add salt to the wound, reminded me to “Be Brilliant.”