The New Ugly Americans and Their World Series Syndrome — Part Two
A screenwriter's all-too-public American-centric blunder withers in comparison to the damage done by Meghan Markle.
This is the second part of the fourth and final essay in my Establishing Shots series that are the pillars of wisdom, or lack thereof, that support my approach to the deconstruction of Wokeism.
Please read Part One first, or you might get halfway through and think, “Wisdom? This makes less-than-zero sense. I thought it was insight into my baseball addiction.”
This is where I bend the knee to the requirements of Substack and ask that you please
“WHERE THE FUCK IS INDIA?”
One of the biggest regrets of my life is also one of my biggest public embarrassments, along with everything I wrote and published in the 80s and 90s; this is up until 1995, when I wrote the essay for the New York Times Travel Section on New Year’s Day about Varanasi — the holiest city in Hinduism and the oldest living city in the world — and they so botched the edit that I stopped writing articles for legacy media altogether.
While in development on my first film in 1988, I met an editor of Bombay Magazine — the erstwhile New York Magazine of pre-Mumbai — at a cocktail party, and raved about my experience thus far as the only American screenwriter in Bollywood. She proposed that I write about it, so I banged out three thousand words in my nascent jaunty, snarky style, without getting approval from Muzaffar Ali, the director I was scribbling for. I peppered it with tidbits about Bollywood stars I’d met so far as blind items hiding their identities, with an American forthrightness that I assumed Indian readers would agree with.
I imposed my attitude about British colonialism on another former British colony with basic American ignorrogance, a portmanteau for ignorant arrogance that I’m now deploying to describe New Ugly American prejudices, Woke revisionist attitudes about White colonialism, and the casual racism about Whites in general. I eviscerated the British and mocked Indians I’d met who affected cut-glass RP accents and deep affinities with England, her people, and customs.
Americans don’t understand just how much of a religion the Revolutionary War for Independence and its attendant lore has become for us. That much is evident by the trite, cruel comments the weekend before last on Twitter, and in the comments sections of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, in response to articles and opinion pieces about King Charles’ coronation.
Among other convenient cherry-pickings of history, we forget that the Revolutionary War, the military conflict of the Revolution, was fought over taxation and parliamentary representation. America only became the great experiment in modern liberal democracy after four years of deliberation; the corrections and tweakings of that experiment are ongoing, a wonderful thing that nobody has cause to lose faith in, ever.
Most importantly for my natal Yankee world in particular, perhaps the most prejudiced when it comes to assumptions of British tyranny, there are a number of historians who agree with me that it was really the First Civil War, Englishmen against Englishmen, a bond that has remained intact ever since. We’re merely another accent, like Scottish or Irish, the fifth nation of the United Kingdom, albeit the dominant one, which would make the UK the fifty-first through the fifty-fourth states. We can be diplomatic and call it a “special relationship,” out of respect for Bamm-Bamm America’s need to view things a certain way, but the reality is it’s more of an unbreakable union.
The backlash to the certain way I viewed the British in my article was swift and outraged. The production office phones rang all day with calls asking for my head. Thankfully, I’d also delivered the second draft of a script that was already the buzziest in a town that made films without pre-written scripts; they were based around song-and-dance routines, the dialogue handwritten the morning of production, usually by Urdu-speaking Muslim scribes, and given to actors working on so many productions at once they rarely knew their characters’ names.
Muzaffar had ambitions to bridge the chasm between the West and India, and couldn’t do it without me — he refused to bow to pressure. But he was as angry with me as I’ve ever seen him, even under the heat of production in a conflict zone a year later in Kashmir.
The worst World Series Syndrome blunder of my life haunted me for a long time. A few years after the article was published, I was in a car in Delhi driven by Vikas, the finacé of a friend of mine. Unable to contain himself, he pulled over to the side of the street and said, “I have a bone to pick with you. I was in the waiting room at my dentist, and I read an article you wrote for Bombay Magazine…”
Ain’t it always the dentist's waiting room? A veritable archive of writers’ embarrassments.
I can’t explain just how bad something has to be for a soft-spoken, upper-crusty Brahmin to confront a guest in his country that way; Gandhi was all about nonconfrontation. I apologized profusely, said it was the biggest regret of my life, and hoped to hell I wouldn’t see much of Vikas again. Ten years later, my sister married his younger brother. I’m reminded of my ignorrogance every time I see him.
I had no excuse for my expressing opinions about the British that were insensitive and stupidly provocative; worst of all, I didn’t even believe them. As a dual national with Australia, I was born a British subject as well as an American citizen, until the Australian Citizenship Act of 1984 officially changed our status from British subjects to the less oppressive-sounding ‘Australian citizens.’
Nevertheless, King Charles continues to be my co-head of state, with Biden. I went to what was then called St. George’s English School of Rome for eight years, a long time for a child to spend being influenced and educated exclusively by British teachers in the English school curriculum. I regularly visited my maternal grandparents in London as a child; Grandpa Archie’s remains are now a rose bush in Sussex.
I can probably trace the particular prejudice that led me to write that bit of pre-Internet clickbait to my British schooling. As one of two Americans in a class of ninety or so — I was never too sure about the other guy — I was often put on the backfoot about being American. We were pulling out of Vietnam at the time, tails between our legs, pelted with rotten tomatoes by the world, most of all by our youth at home. After a particularly punishing lunch-table conversation one day about America delaying its involvement in World War II until two years into it, I asked my naturalized American mother why the world hated us so much.
“They’re just jealous, dahling,” she said in her Australian-inflected Mid-Atlantic accent. It really didn’t seem that way to me.
All of which is to say I know how hard it is for Americans to wrap their minds around the realities of British colonialism: there are still 56 Commonwealth countries covering 2.4 billion people, mostly former British colonies, 15 of which are realms with King Charles as sovereign, all willing participants who are grateful and nostalgic for British rule, albeit less so now, thirty years after I wrote that article, with direct experience of the Empire fading and Wokeism rewriting history as “urgently” as it can. The Secretary General is a Black woman.
The British Empire was nothing like the Nazi chamber of horrors that the Woke World Series Syndrome and its wobbly Bolshie franchise in the UK make it out to be. However harsh and shockingly incorrect and all sorts of burn-at-the-stake heresy my truth is, the British united and civilized the world. America is simply continuing her caretaker duties. To think we aren’t doing an exemplary job under the circumstances, like the super-violent death throes of two massive fascist dictatorships in Eurasia, to call us “imperialist” is entirely the ignorrogance of the angry unworldly.
As Francis Fukuyama has rightly stated, mankind has agreed out of its collective free will to adopt Anglo-American-style liberal democracy as its preferred style of government and to follow American leadership. Wokeism’s attempt to paint this as White imperialist tyranny is, ironically, the only truly quaint anachronism in the conversation, an original Che Guevara poster from a late-60s Haight-Ashbury be-in scored at a rummage sale for $10 that we’ve all paid too much for at this point.
As a new Temperance Movement trying to implement a formless, unfocused new Prohibition, Wokeism’s judgments about Whites and our ancestor’s outsized role in shaping modern world history are pure World Series Syndrome, cherry-picking the inevitable negatives in all historical events to prove the guilt of the entirely innocent, people who had no direct experience of, or impact on, events that happened largely before they were born, of the sort that would make them guilty of the crimes they are accused of. They’re not even real crimes, mostly abstract concepts like “microaggressions,” “whiteness,” “privilege,” “reparations” and so forth, fantastical demonizations so absurd they would never even be taken up as a case by even the most desperate criminal lawyer, much less brought to trial. And that matters when you’re accusing anyone of crimes they didn’t commit and seeking justice, sweeping changes, and outrageous compensation.
I’ve lived a combined 18 years in Los Angeles, where this country’s foundational Yankee settler-colonist culture has been diluted, added to by German-Scandi immigrants, and blended with considerable *gulp* Southern inflections during the Westward Expansion, to the point that it’s as influential and cousinly as Australia’s. If we are talked about or remembered at all, it’s in quaint, burlesque tones. We’re invariably portrayed as caricatures: even the Pierce family in Succession, the only accurate representation of us since perhaps the 60s, notably created by an Englishman, is the brunt of jokes.
Calling them “Grey Gardens” made me cough with laughter; that documentary made me squirm when I first saw a bootleg copy the Kennedys hadn’t seized and burned in the 80s. The joke about the eccentricity and prevalence of mental illness in the summer community I grew up in is, “It’s in the water.” It’s actually in the culture; in the UK, it’s merely being British.
Before the dawn of social realism in cinema beginning in the late 50s, Yankeeness retained its influence over America and our worldview, which was considerably more sophisticated than today. We can see it reflected in the themes and story choices of the vast majority of the product coming out of Hollywood’s film factories.
Following the massive changes brought by the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s, a more diverse type of American perspective emerged, solidified by Californian culture itself. It was subsequently commodified and formulated by the blockbuster era ushered in by Spielberg and Lucas. While more representative of America as a whole, it narrowed the nation’s global perspective, producing the World Series Syndrome we have today.
Hollywood takes all the credit for that, but they were merely tapping into what the ticket-popcorn-and-theme-park-buying public clamored for, and it wasn’t more Bette Davis.
Twenty years ago, I was fretting about another public fracas that was kicking off for me in India with an atypically glamorous Connecticut Yankee producer over lunch one day in Brentwood, this time over an American-Indian co-production that I was developing. This incident had committed the irredeemable sin of spilling over into the Hollywood press, drawing the attention and fatal intervention of CAA.
“Where the fuck is India?” she asked.
“It’s a subcontinent of over a billion people in South Asia.”
“That’s not what I mean, you know that.” In other words, it didn’t matter what or where it was from the perspective of CAA: India wasn’t on the map, much less anywhere near where were sitting, in the center of the creation and global dissemination of American culture. That I’d put it on CAA’s radar for the span of a few phone calls that killed the project was my fault; I should’ve known better but didn’t precisely because of my crypto-elitist Yankeeness, my refusal to connect with what Hollywood demanded.
There were only so many Merchant-Ivories the fringes of the prestige indie market, to which Yankee content had been relegated, could take. Where once our stories and archetypes dominated — Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, FDR, et al. — and our Mid-Atlantic accents were, if not quite authentic and a little too RP-inflected, the Hollywood standard, we are now down to Whit Stillman’s occasional Jane Austen-obsessed fare and, well, under-produced filmmakers like me.
And yet, as we have seen from the incubation in the collective womb of Neo-Maoist antiracism and Marxist-feminist gender-queer programs at bastions of Yankeeness like Harvard and Princeton, and the subsequent unleashing of Wokeism on the world, our influence remains undiminished, albeit passively. Is the creation of the New Ugly American Yankeedom’s unconscious, misguided attempt at relevance, again? I don’t discount that it’s partly that.
The irony that Yankeedom injected its own values into creating an instrument of its demise is a small thing compared to our culture’s primary concern, echoed after the first step on the moon: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
For now, the Selfie Era obsessions of the New Ugly Americans are focused on the first clause. When America’s generational revolutionary churn has subsided, they will understand the entire part, that essence of the Anglo-American spirit that is eternal and will be here even when Yankeedom is no longer: “Dominion belongs to individuals who put all of mankind before them.”
Also, reports of the demise of Anglo-America are greatly exaggerated.
“She came from nothing. But aren’t girls who come from nothing ready for anything?”
— ‘Jeanne du Barry’
TANGLED IN THE FAIRY TALES OF THE SELFIE AGE
When I heard Prince Harry was marrying an American TV actress I’d never heard of, I immediately thought about Wallis Simpson and what a disaster that was to the monarchy, initially: It was more than balanced by the good it did by removing Germanophile King Edward VIII at the right moment, paving the way for arguably Britain’s greatest sovereign and the Second Elizabethan Age.
I don’t share the mindless Bolshie disgust and compulsion to abolish the British monarchy. My practical, mercantile Yankee mind sees far more benefits than negatives: it’s a stabilizing focus of national pride and culture; they truly are the senior management of a tightly run corporation, “The Firm,” who have been bred and groomed to perform a specific function and are therefore the best qualified for their jobs, which they have no power to mess up thanks to guardrails that would pass muster at the most demanding American corporations; most critically for the country’s fragile economy, as the longest-running, most successful, lavishly produced semi-participatory theater production on the West End, they more than earn their keep with the amount of tourism income they generate — the direct annual tourism spend in London alone is ~$40 billion, which keeps tens of thousands employed.
As I’ve occasionally explained my view to my many leftist British friends: “They don’t come for the prices, the food, the sex, the beaches, the thrills, and certainly not the weather. They come for them.”
Despite my appreciation for the positive aspects of the British monarchy specifically — it doesn’t extend to the Vatican’s absolute monarchy, or to the Saudis — Markle being mixed-race didn’t even register as important or unusual. Most modern Whites raised in educated, enlightened social groups like the upper crusties of Britain and their counterparts in Northeastern Anglo America are so resolutely antiracist that race isn’t something we think about more than fleetingly, and never discuss. As I’ve stated before, if something is not a threat, it’s not a preoccupation, and that applies to the entire animal kingdom. Race isn’t a preoccupation for most Whites.
Markle and Harry’s engagement also reminded me of when Prince Andrew almost married American actress Koo Stark. Unlike Markle, Koo was a fellow native New Yorker living in London and part of my global social swim; I spent a fair amount of time with her in India in the early 90s, ten years after her relationship with Andrew, some of it with Camilla’s brother, Mark Shand, who was riding around the country on an elephant, whereas I’d just finished a similar three-month journey circumnavigating the Subcontinent in a rickety diesel van with art photographer Marcus Leatherdale.
A month or two after the engagement, I found out the morning after an alcohol-infused showdown with my boyfriend on the street outside the house at half past closing time — a scene of Masterpiece Theater’s Classics of Gay Drama — that the upper-crusty Black guy in the Beemer at the center of the kerfuffle, who’d apparently been picking up Wes’ bar tab chasing Wes for a few weeks, was Markle’s scene partner and a close-enough friend that he was attending the wedding.
That plugged me directly into Markle’s reality by virtue of our shared world — Greater Hollywood — and into a remake of the Koo Stark scandal. It was same-same as they say in Asia: the pretty, charming, petite American actress engaged to the better-loved brother of the heir to the throne. There were two essential differences, however: Prince Andrew was the second in line to the throne, not sixth as Harry was at the time of his marriage — so not really the “spare” at all, ever in his life, in fact — and royal approval, which wasn’t accorded Koo the way it was Markle. The finale of this modern remake of the Koo-Andrew relationship, a triumphant climax at the altar of a dreamlike royal wedding, was something Koo never got to have. A shame: she was temperamentally far better suited to the role than Sarah Ferguson, more like Kate Middleton.
Without being aware that Germaine Greer made similar predictions a few days before the wedding about Markle’s likely future split with The Firm and return to Los Angeles with Harry in tow, now that I had a fuller picture experientially, I too assumed that we’d be seeing Markle back in Hollywood sooner or later. There was no question about it; from this vantage point, there was nothing for her in England. And it went without saying that she was Harry’s getaway vehicle from the life of The Incredible Shrinking Royal. I just didn’t expect the deliberately staged Wokeist wreck that it would turn out to be.
After Harry quit his job, he relinquished his corporate titles, as every exec anywhere does. It was a more logistically complex resignation than others, but not without precedent, and likely greeted with more compassion and understanding by his fellow executives than we are led to believe; sixth in line is by no means an essential element.
However, the company in question is an ancient global entity that includes the entirety of the UK and substantial board control over Australia, Canada, and 12 other countries. It seems other board members were more taken by surprise by the split than either Germaine Greer or I, but their view of Hollywood is in line with my mother’s, diametrically opposite Markle’s: Theatrics and the arts are a hobby, summer stock, a bit of fun, not serious work.
I took it as merely sensible PR that they pretended to settle in Vancouver, an image-saving temporary detour designed to ease them out of the Crown’s jurisdiction via Canada. I had no doubt the catalyst for the final leg of their relocation to their secretly intended destination would need to be some threat-elevating excuse — “it’s not safe” — that would leave them with no choice but to move to her hometown, where they would be just another pair of A-list celebrities surrounded by the finest, century-old private security apparatus in the world.
The title of his memoir, Spare, says a lot about Harry’s outlook, even if he likely just approved someone else’s idea. “The heir and the spare” is a quip likely coined by Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, one of the more dazzling of the dollar princesses, super-wealthy Northeastern establishment women who by the end of the 1800s made up one-third of the wives of peers in the House of Lords, creating an iron umbilical cord between the upper crusties of the Northeast and London that’s still there, albeit so rusty it’s barely recognizable.
Except for one important detail: again, Harry hasn’t been the spare for the past ten years, since Prince George was born; in fact, he never was the spare because William only recently became the heir. There is no reason for him that would cause him to grow up assuming that a rare catastrophic failure of both Princes Charles and William before he married and had children would necessitate Harry stepping in, the equivalent of double what happened in the case of his great-great-uncle, the Duke of Windsor, when he chose to abdicate to have tea with Nazis.
It made no sense to me that Harry, by his own admission a step beyond the dimmest bulb in the box toward more of a flickering candle, raised with strict interpretations of the world and his lofty place in it, would be festering with such resentment about his place in line to the throne. Being so far removed from it after the birth of William and Kate’s kids only gave him more freedom to gambol about doing as he pleases, bar dressing up as a Nazi for Halloween, again.
This was clearly a lensing — Wokeish for “convenient reframing” — of Harry’s reality that turned him into a victim of institutional oppression, complete with a fairy-tale “wicked stepmother.” Markle became the admitted stand-in for his mother, Diana, whose grievances were far more justified than Markle’s nonsense assertions of racism, which were later recanted.
Doesn’t matter: When Woke Cerberus is released, especially in its aspect of White racism, the damage cannot be reversed; if you ask most Americans, George Floyd’s murder was racially motivated, even though it wasn’t. BLM needn’t have gone to all that trouble photoshopping Derek Chauvin’s face on actual racists at White supremacy rallies.
My assumptions that Markle would be back in Hollywood soon were different from Greer’s, who reasoned that it would be because of “endless vistas of boredom.” From my point of view as an American and a filmmaker living in Markle’s Los Angeles, her motivations, however subconscious, were the result of her conditioning as a good American who was exercising her entitlement to the pursuit of maximum public attention by “being seen,” one of the more difficult Selfie Age entitlements for Yankees to digest — it’s self-centered and unseemly.
Markle had no substantive experience with English culture beyond sharing a language. Harry’s family must’ve seemed like a thrilling but abstract fairy tale — most stories in that genre feature royalty — something she might have viewed much the way I do: as a long-running, fully immersive regional theater production with breathtaking permanent sets and costume jewelry made with real gemstones. But in the hierarchy of her thinking, Hollywood was where the real power lay.
From the perspective of a native Angeleña with the longing and certainty of her manifest destiny among Hollywood royalty, marrying Harry was the starring role in a major production that Markle deserved, nay, that she was owed after all those motivational affirmations in the star-trailer mirror every morning, the positivity aphorisms from instructors during the child’s pose winding-down of yoga classes, and myriad goal visualizations tacked to boards under the guidance of life coaches who’ve accomplished career miracles for her friends.
The likely reality is that Meghan’s upbringing and mental training, which instinctively turn every person and event into an opportunity for personal advancement, unconsciously prompted her to manufacture her version of Jussie Smollett’s faked abduction and hybrid racist-homophobic victimization in order to justify her breach of contract with the royal family, retool her public visibility for better roles, and elicit sympathy from the Black Hollywood establishment, which is more powerful now than ever.
Once she managed to extricate Harry from The Firm, Markle executed the climax of the manifestation of her ambitions: Her triumphant rentrée, as the French call a re-entry, to Hollywood. The daughter of a makeup artist turned yoga teacher and a gaffer, the chief gorilla of a lighting department, she’d left town as a TV actress improbably snatched away from a future of repetitive set work in variations on the same role until the phone stopped ringing by the world’s most charming prince. She returned as the unmade sequel of a timeless, well-loved fairy tale, Queen Cinderella and the Pumpkin-Haired King. It reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor’s processional entrance into Rome in Cleopatra, a scene so costly it almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, as leery as I am of statements like that from Hollywood studios.
And just like that, Markle was back in Hollywood at her very own coronation, kneeling in confession before Oprah in an interview, wiping away tears, baselessly accusing the royal family of racism as a way of renouncing all other royalties but Hollywood’s. When Oprah blessed her story as “this is your truth,” she anointed and crowned Markle as Hollywood royalty.
With her sexy ginger prince by her side — a newly minted Woke hero who selflessly sacrificed his senior position in the most royal of royal families to protect her honor and keep her safe from the genetically coded racism of Whites she had to remind constantly that she was half Black because she knew perfectly well they were Dory the Blue Fish about her Blackness — Markle ascended to her place on a loftier stratum than Tom Cruise’s.
Where the fuck is England?
But you see, Oprah, the way my truth lenses the situation is the only thing that really changes for Harry and Markle is the weather: The version of Los Angeles that she and I share is mindless and banal, ethically opportunistic and studiously dull, a creative and intellectual wasteland nonetheless jammed with the highest standard of brilliant creative professionals stuck in abusive relationships with colic celebrities and orc-souled executive overlords with too many opinions slogging around in tarpits of malice, hamming it up on rolling calls, brokering, borrowing or stealing the prestige of the talent they claim to worship, with attitudes and jargon inspired by the wolves of Wall Street, trailed by Mini-Me minions aching to be just like them one day, despite regular Friday emotional cyclones destroying their humanity silently by the copier machine, weeping out the last of their self-esteem, surprised they have any left, and all of them, all, master craftsmen of mediocrity — for, as you know better than anyone, in America ‘originality’ means a different take on the same-old-familiar — proudly overrepresenting the worst of the New Ugly Americans with insincere fervor, in between exercising, smudging, aum-ing and juicing through bespoke spiritualities and other quick-fix delusions attempting to explain Existence, performing life in a single, unbroken diorama of pharma-grade narcissism a hundred thousand strip malls wide, but the upside is the constant churn of stadiums full of aspirants prom-king-and-queen beautiful and porn-star hot; the drugs are Emirates First Class Suites deluxe; and the sex is like nowhere on earth because it’s heaven.
And, while I might be tired of all that, I’m sure Markle wouldn’t want her life any other way; she’ll take her upgraded Los Angeles over Frogmore, the ten-bedroom cottage she and Harry lived in before they went into self-imposed exile, even if it meant burning bridges by throwing the royal family under the bus for the sake of lensing her villainy and betrayal into victimhood and heroism, and plugging into the feverish Wokeism of this town.
There is a kernel of truth in Markle’s paranoia about bias: the British upper crusties orbiting the Windsors are a tough bunch to be around even if you’re one of them. I imagine there was a partially cocked eyebrow and a restrained snicker or two over silly things like the appropriateness in the name of their new home, reminiscent of another canonical fairy tale, fashionably adapted with the sexes reversed so that it’s the prince who kisses the frog, revealing the hidden princess.
I don’t blame her if she was suspicious about the jabs at her lowly birth by the distinctly un-Californian snarkiness of those orbiting upper crusties, raised with five hundred or more hidden protocols and bloodlines that bound them together, and all of them in turn with the Windsors in an invisible chain of unbreakable secret handshakes. Meghan’s spiritual forebears Consuelo Vanderbilt and Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome from Brooklyn, likely experienced far worse. It was purely a class thing, a hazing of the outsider peasant. Racism, it was not.
I’m not picking on Markle out of some hackneyed moral outrage over her actions and basic Hollywood worldview. I don’t care about what she did or does any more than I cared that her scene-partner friend was pursuing Wes: The point that night was to get him into bed so that he would be at work the next day at his new job, not because I was jealous or insecure about our relationship. I believe I said something like, “He’s never going to sleep with you. Forget about it. Please just call it a night so he can get to work in the morning, or they’ll fire him.”
It’s a writer thing: Markle’s story and persona make her an archetype for the New Ugly American of the Selfie Age, the way Jay Gatsby personifies the mindless hedonism of the newly wealthy in the Jazz Age. It’s not what she did — I expected that — it was how she did it, how her exploitative lying made the deeply flawed and racist modern antiracist gaze on Whites all the more valid and entrenched.
As for Oprah, between that interview and exec producing the CRT rewriting-of-history showcase The 1619 Project, which no historian of any substance has endorsed, she’s more the Trump kind of anything-for-ratings, personal-brand-obsessed traditional Ugly American on-air personality who confuses revenge with justice, and doesn’t let the truth stand in the way of opportunity.
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
—Maurice Switzer
WHEN AMERICA SNEEZES, THE WORLD CATCHES A MIND VIRUS
While it’s not hard to come up with the right combination of words to provoke a mental image of India in readers or listeners, nothing can prepare Westerners for the way it overwhelms and subjugates their perceptions, assumptions, emotions, and all five senses, seemingly at once.
Conjuring impressions versus experiencing India is like describing New York City to people who’ve never been there and watching their reactions the first hours after they step out of the taxi: the sensory overload, the shock to every atom in their brain invariably proves how description-prompted imagination is no match for the intensity with which the City describes herself in person.
Throughout this essay, from the first section in Part One, through my own cringe-worthy World Series Syndrome debacle in Bombay Magazine, to the riff on “my truth” about the Hollywood Markle and I share, I’ve presented my case for the dangers of subjective reality and the need to question them, preferably using evidence-based data points, or firsthand observation via immersive experience.
I’m often called ‘a contrarian’ by people whose personal or communal truths — all of them religious beliefs of one form or another — I’ve taken a sledgehammer to. The implication is that I get some sort of Dennis the Menace, good-ol’-bad-boy pleasure from upsetting people. Boosting that assumption is the style, phrasing and tone of my writing, which a new subscriber who has never met me described the other day as “ferocious.”
People who know me personally can hear the timber of my speaking voice in my writing, and visualize my expressions; while I rattle them, too, from time to time, they don’t receive what I’m saying as being nearly as threatening as people who are interpreting my voice through the prism of their experience. They’re more inclined to receive my particular lensing of a situation and mull it over.
Received subjective opinion is at the core of Wokeism’s success in a culture that places too much value on personal religions, that is allowing individuals and communities supremacy over the rest of mankind — identity over humanity. If we take at face value the certainty that I share with an increasing number of prominent academics and public intellectuals that Wokeism is 98% nonsense, it’s pretty clear that it’s anti-progressive and downright destructive.
Since the outbreak of the Woke mind virus, I’ve been constantly reminded of another incident that happened in my early years in India, this time in New York.
India in the late 80s and early 90s was a closed, semi-socialist society. It was a glorious witch’s cauldron swirling with realities that challenged every Western assumption about mankind; it only had maybe six makes of car; rudimentary infrastructure even in the big cities; and no Western products, not even basic ones like Coca-Cola.
When I returned to New York after extended periods, the culture shock would be so intense that it would take me weeks to readjust, after which I usually began making plans to go back to India. As a wandering German hippy I found one morning sitting on my lawn in Kashmir rolling a joint said as he passed it to me for a toke, “You have to be a misfit in the West to fit into India.”
What made my severe culture shock all the more remarkable and important to my point about individual perspectives is that I’d been raised in constantly shifting realities. When you speak another language fluently and automatically, without needing to consciously form the words to express what you want to say, you plug into the realities of that culture; you share the experience of them directly, rather than interpret them through the prism of your own culture. I already spoke three languages fluently when I went to India. Now I speak five, including Hindustani — my interpretation of India is all the deeper as a result.
The event that Wokeism often reminds me of happened when I was on a rattling, grimy rollercoaster of a New York subway ride in the early 90s with someone from my community Upstate, one of those very Anglo-Americans who shares my culturally mandated good intentions toward all mankind, unquestioning devotion to justice and fairness for all, and abhorrence of the abuses of privilege, the very qualities that have allowed Wokeism to flourish and proliferate.
It’s not just good intentions, it’s accepting bad-faith thinking and actions in good faith, naively assuming an ethical and intellectual common ground that is simply not there.
This was during the time when homelessness was the cause du jour, a movement again born in America, in New York specifically, and spread throughout the Anglosphere. Comic Relief was still a popular annual telethon fundraising event. London even launched a magazine with a title that echoed how important homelessness was at that moment: The Big Issue.
Several times during any subway ride in that era, panhandlers would enter the car and either perform a routine or robotically rattle off a tale of woe, all well-fed, decently clothed, perfectly healthy people. As my father pointed out at that time, a homeless person could get three square meals a day at 17 locations in Manhattan alone.
I’d just come from a place where I was constantly assaulted by begging children with bellies bloated from malnourishment, toxic slums miles in diameter, beggars who’d been brutally maimed at birth, and lepers who didn’t need to let the disease spread that far but like the maimed mendicants were bound in contracts to petty crime bosses.
After a loud, intrusive panhandler who hadn’t even bothered to look dirty that day crashed through our car into the next, I said “That’s a mockery of poverty.”
Stunned, my friend recoiled a jot; his mindset, like almost everyone in my natal world, Conservatives included, is described in the poem on the plinth of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a far cry from the defamatory characterizations of us according to the malicious-mendacious doctrines of Wokeism, which state that even the science and technology invented or discovered by Whites and White-adjacents are constructs created solely for the oppression of Nonwhites. Like all auto-antonymic branding, it’s the narcissistic-lensed opposite of the truth.
From my perspective, informed by years plugged into the matrixes of other communal realities, Wokeism is a mockery of oppression — nobody in the West is truly oppressed.
A final example that illustrates the buggy viruses that resentment-filled Bolshie assumptions have injected into the collective Western narrative and perspective: The ubiquitous, completely inaccurate interpretation of the Vietnam War.
Whenever it comes up in conversation as a commonly accepted example of the horrors of American “imperialism,” I say, “Have you ever asked a Vietnamese what they think?” Nobody has ever said “Yes.”
There’s a reason they’re either the nation that loves us the most, or consistently in the top five: They think of it as “a good war.” We tried our best to push back Chinese-backed communism, even after France caved to Coca-Cola Marxism at home and abandoned us to continue their fight. The Vietnamese would’ve been happy with an armistice-divided nation like Korea, but they were taken over by a truly oppressive, corrupt totalitarian regime.
That is pure American World Series Syndrome. That is Wokeism, a demonizing narrative that is the opposite of the objective truth, like “systemic racism.”
The doors of perception are many; they line the corridors of a confusing, constantly shifting and evolving maze that obscures, warps, or outright misrepresents objective reality — yes, despite the tepid reasoning of the same postmodern philosophers who brought us critical theory and Woke Cerberus, there is such a thing as objective reality, or the science and technology that we rely on unquestioningly wouldn’t work.
In the Selfie Era, we acknowledge the dangers of mistaking subjective interpretations of reality by specifying “your/my truth,” but that kernel of self-awareness is supplanted by the corrosive belief that identity and personal truths take precedence over evidence-based data and observation.
I’ll look deeper into human nature versus philosophical constructs in a forthcoming piece entitled ‘Maybe We’re Born With. Maybe It’s Make-Believe.’
TYING IT ALL TOGETHER, BRIEFLY
For right now, let me sum up my approach to Wokeism via the four Establishing Shot essays according to the traditional Six Ws of Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How.
Who, What, When, and Where are covered by both The Three Heads of Woke Cerberus, which explained the three categories of Wokeism — modern antiracism, MeToo feminism, and gender-queer activism — as well as pinpointing who invented them (Judith!), when and where they emerged; and The Meaning of Orthodox Atheism and the Three Forms of Religion, which elaborated on the view shared by most true freethinkers that Wokiesm is a religion based on specious beliefs. One of the requirements of ‘true freethinkers’ — I never use that term about myself — is they must be atheists or their judgment risks being influenced by group fictions that are not shared by all mankind and have no grounding in objective truth.
Why and How are covered by both The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood, which explored the dangers of becoming locked in illusory safe spaces informed by personal and community narratives of victimhood, and this essay, which explores the danger of imposing views informed solely by the American experience on all of mankind.
Since its transformation from an unthreatening game of philosophical 3D chess on French intellectual talk shows, through becoming a set of intersecting disciplines at America’s top-tier universities, to spilling out of academia, infecting the nation and the rest of the Anglosphere with violence, divisiveness and social exile, I’ve always thought of Wokeism as a series of silly, spoiled-adolescent tantrums.
For too long now, Americans have overvalued the opinions of highly impressionable kids whose neural pathways haven’t yet settled, and devalued the wisdom of older, more experienced minds; if I read one more article about Biden’s age my head will snap off from shaking it in consternation. Combined with the lopsided interpretation of the nation’s foundational Anglo-American ethos, which places the needs of an individual’s selfhood above the common good, it has produced a toxic form of groupthink that has been a far greater threat to the nation than any foreign antagonist in generations.
Thank you for reading.
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