Follow-Policing: Anti-social socially acceptable social freak behavior

Here it comes the Substack Cancel Culture essay

I’ve recently gotten into tattoos, which I understand is pathetic and late, but my life has changed a whole bunch in the last few months and I’ve been fixating on an array of things in absence of one thing (alc*h*l). None of these things are new: skating, buying a camera for skating, doing my job good, being nice to people, buying a video camera, and tattoos. God is a bit of a new one, but I always knew He was there. I just fixated on punishment, on His striking down of my opps and adversaries, which is an attitude that is not actually very spiritual despite what people your age might say.

So I’ve followed a lot of tattoo artists on Instagram. Instagram is slowly becoming a very fast-paced Craigslist for small business, where artists and t-shirt sellers remind you they exist periodically so you might buy their wares. These reminders are often personal, or political, but are mostly mundane. Something I’ve recently discovered is that a lot of cool tattooers have insanely alienated 2018 politics.

I have never encountered so many land acknowledgments in bios. I get them. I do feel they’re often means to shirking responsibility for your relationship to an institution, where you preface your talk at Yale by mentioned a group that got genocided by Yalies, so that no one thinks about the fact that your paycheck is coming from Yale. In the least charitable interpretation, a land acknowledgement is like high-stepping into the endzone, making clear that every aspect of your life is as such because of a genocide. Or something. They’re just weird, especially from white people.

The way these tattooers I’ve recently followed do land acknowledgements is by putting their city’s name within quotation marks. One person I had something like “working on Lenape land in ‘Manhattan’” even though Manaháhtaan is literally a Lenape word.

Anyway - these are not my kind of people. I’ll say that. It’s ‘corny’ and feels disingenuous, though you know anybody still doing it in 2022 is definitely being genuine. But it’s mainly because of other attitudes, like, y’know, the canceling. It’s hack, but canceling is no good. It is inhuman and antisocial behavior. To respond to an indiscretion by depriving someone of livelihood and community is to doom your target to repeat those indiscretions in a new space. What comfort can you find in a scene or a town or a “found family” if they’re ready to throw you out for exhibiting a character defect? That’s not a way to live. It’s a miserable way to live. And it leaves us no functional way to actually hold people accountable for doing awful shit. How are you supposed to even talk to somebody about what they did wrong if your social standing could plummet if someone knew you were talking to them? And what about the people who are literally just talking about ideas? The people who are not rapists, or racist, or anything, they just philosophize about things? Are we not allowed to literally contemplate anything should it not echo your misunderstood XOJane-in-2015 view of social issues?

Anyway, this morning on the toilet at work I saw somebody posting about Clementine Morgan, who is like, the Crumps of these sort of people, in that she can read and write and has a heart and a mind. It was a screencap of a Clementine post about how the idea that every white person is inherently white supremacist isn’t the path to liberation, which, full disclosure, I agree with. I do not aspire for white peers to prostrate themselves in front of me, to police their language rather than consider their actions, to pay me more for services than black people. I don’t think that’s on our path to freedom. I actually think that’s CIA bullshit they proliferated to screw the Panthers and the like, right before they decided to just kill Huey and Malcolm and everybody. Maybe it’s not racism in the Berkeley sense, but it’s a way to disconnect you from your fellow poorly-fed working-class victims of a disgusting health industry and housing market. You can’t do this stuff alone.

Beyond social justice hullabalo I just think that stuff is fucking strange and people that act like that are strange. You’re looking people that share systemic hardships with you, class shit, addiction, housing stuff, and jumping immediately to something they can’t relate to you about. You’re looking at a society of people who are two or three awful circumstances from death, just like you, with scorn. That’s weird, man. You should not aspire to look at everybody around with hate. You should not aspire to attach your bad experiences and your traumas and fears to unknowing strangers. Because it’s mean or whatever, but it’s also just lonely! You’re alienating yourself on purpose.

Anyway, this tattooer, white, wrote under the post something like “Can’t wait to see which of my friends are so desperate to hold onto white supremacy that they follow Clementine.” And my heart sunk. You’re not an ally! You’re a cruel person and a bad friend, and you’re deathly afraid of questioning any line of thinking that isn’t prescribed to you by friends of whom you are afraid. How dare anyone think deeply about the way they conduct their lives. How dare anyone think deeply about how white supremacy, this thing you apparently care so much about eradicating, manifests. Living like this is a quick and easy way to loneliness and misery in an ever-tightening bubble of yes-men and losers.