JHUS Staging

Tag: racism

  • TLDR – Jason Aldean: Small Town, Big Deal

    So the internet noise machine has been trending this last week or so due to an execrably antagonistic and jingoist track called “Try That In A Small Town,” recorded by country “singer” Jason Aldean.

    First, let’s be 100% clear: this song is just…junk. Musically it’s as cookie-cutter and formulaic as they come in every possible way. The video immediately validated my suspicion that country music in 2023 is just hair metal with steel guitars and flags. I swear they lifted part of this directly from Bo Burnham’s Country Song.

    Pictured: A rube propagating propaganda

    This all started because I heard the beginnings of the big controversy and just for grins I read the lyrics.

    Here’s the thing, man – to even take this song on without burning the lyric sheet and hoping it doesn’t summon a demon, either you’re the rube who falls for this junk, or you’re a carefully constructed façade masking a steel-trap mind engaged in the deliberate subversion of American cohesion and community by fearmongering and playing on racist and “othering” tropes while clearly holding the intelligence and culture of your audience in contempt (and not without some reasonable basis given that you do in fact have an audience, which is definitely contemptible).

    I’m gonna go with “rube,” and assign responsibility for the rest of it to the committee of faceless hacks who take responsibility for actually writing this dreck.

    First, let’s start with the dystopian fearmongering nightmare of the first verse:

    Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
    Carjack an old lady at a red light
    Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
    Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like

    Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
    Stomp on the flag and light it up
    Yeah, ya think you’re tough?

    “Try That In A Small Town”

    This is a master class in “agitprop,” agitating propaganda. Propaganda subverts critical thinking by appealing directly to emotion; agitprop specifically targets emotions like anger, outrage, and frustration, and can reasonably be seen as one means of engaging in stochastic terrorism.

    So in the first verse you’ve got the setup – “those people” are comin’ to “our town” to sucker punch meemaw while they’re jacking her 93 Tercel so they can go rob Jimmy’s beer store! Be afraid! All Is Chaos!”

    Let’s be clear: crime happens and that sucks. But these are cherry-picked, isolated incidents far less common than, say, unarmed young black men being murdered by police. The purpose is to make you mad and get your blood pumping, because ol’ Jason here is gonna tell you just how to solve that problem in a minute. Let’s take a look at the chorus:

    Well, try that in a small town
    See how far ya make it down the road
    Around here, we take care of our own
    You cross that line, it won’t take long
    For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
    Try that in a small town

    “Try That In A Small Town”

    It gets really creepy in the second verse, all about grampa and some firearms put to good use against those others who aren’t “our own,” with vague references of what’s gonna happen when “they” come to take our guns.

    I can’t help but think of how many “small-town” folks I know – I lived in Oxford, NC for many years, and I’m currently sitting where I was born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which isn’t exactly Midtown Manhattan – who aren’t drawling, drooling, bigoted, ignorant, stereotypes. The contempt these “songwriters” have for the intellect of their audience is palpable, and that audience should be insulted to know someone believes this kind of bigoted dogwhistle – and it is one, those details have already been more than adequately covered by others at this point – will appeal to them.

    Listen: If a ratty old “NO FEAR” t-shirt covered in layers of Doritus and beer stains that are almost invisible because the beer that was spilled on ’em is some crappy, watery thing in a plastic bottle suddenly became a song lyric, this would be them.

    If you need to know exactly how many pounds of copper wire it takes to get a box of cold medicine, this song’s got you covered.

    This song’s gonna get that back door fixed one of these days but who CARES, Bobbie Sue, it’s the BACK door ain’t nobody can SEE it!

    This song spent thirteen thousand dollars on new suspension parts trying to get their ’78 Nova to stop dog-tracking…and six thousand of that was because the struts had rebel flags painted on ’em.

    This song used to have long hair until it got tired of cleaning the remains of last night’s alcohol overdose out of it.

    This song’s gonna chest-thump and in-group and passive-aggressive all OVER you, and what are you gonna do about it, SITTY BOAH? Ain’t been doin these twelve-ounce curls all m’life for FUN, son. *belch*

    It’s just dumb and gross and needs to stop. All of it, including the mediocrity of the music itself. Spare me the arguments about whether or not it’s a racist dogwhistle, it very clearly and obviously is, everybody knows it, the only people pretending otherwise are the dogs being whistled for, and everybody knows that, too, including them.

    Enough.

  • TLDR 2.3 – Racism: Unfortunately, Yes We Can

    (Disclaimer: in no way does this article assert that

    • racism isn’t a thing,
    • white racism hasn’t been the root of horrific crimes and sins against humanity,
    • racism is “over,”
    • there is such a thing as “reverse” racism,
    • racism in communities or people of color is “just as bad” in terms of impact and harm inflicted
    • people of color have to “go first,”
    • any of the other nonsense I just know people are going to try to read into it.

    So save us both some wasted time and energy and just don’t. Please: Read what’s written, not what you expect to be. Thanks and I look forward to your thoughts.)

    There’s a popular, informal theory which says only white people can be racists. It’s white supremacist theory masquerading as advocacy for people of color. The appeal of the theory to people of color who are rightly frustrated to outrage at entrenched white supremacist power should be obvious. Unfortunately, it’s also toxic and plays on the very same impulses that fuel white supremacy.

    This notion was probably most prominently featured in the important, worthwhile, and influential 2014 film “Dear White People”:

    Black people can’t be racist. Prejudiced, yes, but not racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race. Black people can’t be racist since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.

    Tessa Thompson as Samantha White in “Dear White People” (2014)

    The people primarily advancing this theory don’t want to end bigotry, oppression, and racism; they want to be the ones benefitting from it. They look to destroy Orwell’s Boot by wearing it, which has always been a misguided and fundamentally evil goal.

    Most insidiously this rhetoric directly fertilizes more racist and bigoted psuedointellectual hogwash from white supremacists (including validating the questionable concept of “race” in the first place), often from cover of academic qualifications that are themselves a result of the very racism being denied by those producing it.

    The theory clearly only considers US and Anglosphere cultures founded on European imperialism in its assertions of dominance. This is immediately obvious from the most basic considerations:

    Even if you make the case for white dominance on a global scale, it still breaks down as you get closer to the ground and start looking at smaller cultural groups like nations. This theory roots itself in supremacist reasoning simply by framing itself as a universal rule when it really only applies to part of the population. So you end up with three problems:

    • White people aren’t the dominant ethnic or social group on this planet, yet in modern history they’re responsible for the most widespread, systematic, and egregious racism at the largest scale. That immediately negates the premise that the “dominant group” is the only one that can be “racist” in the theory’s definition.
    • Attempting to create relative merit distinctions between “racism,” “prejudice,” and “bigotry” not only attempts to justify ignoring racism by people of color, it further stratifies and ranks “types” whereby one “type” is judged more or less “bad” than the other, e.g. prejudice is “not as bad as” racism because, under the theory, the merely prejudiced can’t access abuse-able power
    • These narratives erase the multiracial community whose lived experience often draws from multiple cultures but emotionally identifies with none of them deeply (disclosure, the author is among this group), and often finds them discriminated against for being part of one group by members of another group that they’re also part of.

    Rather than challenging racism, the theory validates, energizes, and promotes it without ever questioning the basic premise that any particular “race” possesses inherently “superior” attributes, trivializes the power (malignant power is still power) of non-white cultures, ignores racist behavior found in nearly all cultures, assumes in contradiction to evidence that the US perspective suffices for the general case globally, and seduces people of color into employing the same excuses for their racism used by the white racists they’re fighting

    If you prejudge someone based on what you perceive as their race, you are a racist. What ethnic groups you’re part of or how much power you have to make your personal racist beliefs into a cultural norm isn’t relevant.

    Don’t fall for it. Anybody can be a racist, even if it never has any outward expression at all. Claiming otherwise is racists rationalizing their own racism and gaslighting anyone who speaks up about it.

    These narratives represent attempts by power abusers to con you into believing you can wear Orwell’s Boot safely.

    You can’t, and to even try makes you one of the bad people, no matter what color your skin is or what language or dialect you speak or what shape your eyes are.

    Don’t be seduced by these bias-pandering theories. They’ll just keep you stuck in the same cycles of bigotry and conflict until the species ceases to exist at all.

  • Morning Me, May 18 ’23

    Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

    Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

    Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

    Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

    Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

    Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

    Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

    I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

    The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

    They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

    They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

    We refuse.

    Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

    Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

    Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

    Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

    Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

    When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

    That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

    I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

    What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

    And we…aren’t.

    Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

    That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

    NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

    Those are your “American Values.”

    When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

    Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

    In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

    As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

    Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

    Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

    So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.

  • Can’t You Take A Joke?

    The ongoing discourse about “cancel culture” and how to “take a joke” provides a chance to reflect on our continuing evolution.

    All humor is based in pain. Much of it, in the pain of others. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

    Humans are always evolving as emotional and social creatures, always learning more about ourselves as individuals and a group, always moving forward. This means that some things lose their humor over time, again among individuals and in the culture at large.

    One of the shifts we’re currently seeing is away from the schadenfreude of humor – the taking delight in someone else’s harm, rather than laughing with them and thereby at least in part at ourselves.

    Consider the movie “Airplane!” There are three classic scenes in this movie, which still are funny in my opinion but would never get filmed in 2022: the “jive dudes,” the little girl with the coffee (“No thanks, I take it black. Like my men.”), and the panicking passenger getting the crap beat out of her. These scenes still play funny to me, and from what I see online people in 2022 watching them still laugh, if with a bit of cringe at the little girl.

    Oh stewardess, I speak jive.

    If you tried to put the jive dudes over as original work in a script today it would be shot down. Appropriation, patronizing, othering, racism – is it? or is it a joke on racism? or simply a bit of fun with caricatures of cultural difference, and the ‘racist’ aspect is something we’re superimposing because the men are black and they’re using a parody (they made up the lines) of what was called “jive” in the 70’s and we’d now call “African American Vernacular English” after figuring out “ebonics” wasn’t cutting it? – and great white hopes, portrayal of black men as incapable of communicating “properly.”

    If my job is to vet project content for the probability of negative publicity I’m all over this, here in 2022.

    Nobody – nor nearly nobody, I haven’t seen anyone take it on – is trying to “cancel” that retroactively, but if you tried to put it through a studio today they’d never let it pass…and it quite likely *would* create a bunch of rancor on social media as people debated whether Mrs. Cleaver was really an avatar for white supremacy.

    The argument has merit, although I’m not sure you could really bring it home conclusively. You could make it strongly enough to cut the scene today using today’s values and mores, is the point.

    This is the evolution of humor. We understand in 2022, because of 42 years of discourse between that scene and now, that while there is still humor there it’s also important to hold the ugly part to account and talk about it and understand it and maybe it evolves into something where perhaps if someone rebooted it today it’s more the white stewardess who couldn’t understand “jive” that’s the butt of the joke, something to mitigate the implication of punching down in the original.

    I’m not trying to kill or cancel that scene, but I’m trying to say that humor, like all creative expression, *evolves* and when it evolves it’s generally because enough people finally figured out that the pain contained within some humor is a weapon, not a release; that people can truly be hurt by our words and portrayals of our perceptions of them so maybe we should try a little harder to not be dicks.

    When I hear comedians, especially people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle who have been to some extent taken as progressive thought leaders, going on and on about “cancel culture” and “nobody can take a joke anymore” even as they crap all over everything people liked about them, what I hear is people who have become lazy, complacent, and selfish. They want to coast on EZ mode, doing the same routines (or at least sticking to minor variations on the same proven themes) over and over, while the audience is moving forward without them.

    Humor is an expression of pain, and there are ways we can joke and reflect on being human and feeling pain, without inflicting it. With that said, those ways are going to change and shift and evolve too, and maybe something that’s pitch perfect today will be seen in twenty or forty years as almost criminally obscene, for better or worse, right or wrong.

    Three words makes all the difference

    Our job as people is to make sure we’re honest enough with ourselves to, in those moments, own our errors and do our best to set them right. Some of that has to do with the nature of our harm perception in retrospect; it’s hurtful but does it do harm? It’s hurtful to sexualize a pre-adolescent girl for humor, but was she harmed by it? Traumatized? (Did she even get the joke? And by the way, is it funny or not? Why?) What about the social impact, do we think there was a spike in human trafficking of little white girls to Africa in response to the coffee joke? (Let’s not forget the racism in play here, too.) The most likely reasonable answer to those questions is “no.”

    Oh, just remembered the whole bit with Peter Graves and “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Have to include that one, in this discussion. (Similar to the ubiquitous racism in two of the clips above, that one catches the casual homophobia prevalent at the time too.)

    The entire humor in both of those bits is the uncomfortable, inappropriate tension. That’s the whole thing about it that makes you laugh. But it is too inappropriate to even tell the joke, in the light of our evolving understanding?

    These kinds of questions are *always* in play. For instance I’m not sure George Carlin’s routine about the n-word is something he’d have done in the last decade of his life because we evolved to understand that word is hurtful coming out of a white mouth and directed at a black person, regardless of whether it’s “meant to be” or not. Carlin being a linguistic genius and also a bit of a trickster god on it, may have still done the bit…but I’m not sure. I think he would’ve put a great deal more thought into whether the joke (or the deeper points behind it) would be obscured or mitigated or negated by his use of that word, and most importantly whether his work could be used to “punch down.”
    I’m glad to have cultivated an audience that seems to have a pretty good instinctive grip on where the lines are and why.

    When you stick to principle – “don’t punch down” – you’re less likely to make even an honest mistake, one borne of naive ignorance rather than malice, that hurts someone, and less likely to be whining about getting “canceled” while you’re selling out venues and appearing on every late night talk show. It’s still not easy mind you – knowing when you’re punching down is a function of empathy, which is also always evolving and refining – but it’s a good basic principle, and if you keep it in the back of your head while you’re doing your thing you’ll probably avoid saying anything you’ll wish later that you hadn’t.

  • I Shouldn’t Have To (2010)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BfxTj7_V8c[/embedyt]

    “I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English, this is America!”  Another recurring theme that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.  As you can see from the screenshot/featured image for this article, which was captured on 25-March-2021, it’s still occurring.

    I’m not even going to bother with all the reasons this kind of bigoted, ignorant thinking sucks; anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows the arguments backwards and forwards.  This video is pure bias reinforcement, shot spontaneously outside my home in Kalamazoo at the time.  It’s not likely nor intended to move any bigot who thinks this way.  It’s intended to be something others who feel the way I do about this ignorance can share when they encounter it in the wild, to reinforce and normalize the idea that we’re out here and not going away, and we won’t be gaslighted into hiding in a closet to please bigots.

  • The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game!

    The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game!

    Ain’t No Party Like A Savage Party

    (Originally published 24-April-2009. At that time, unbeknownst to me, Ms. Edwards’ career had – recently, then – been basically ended by plagiarism charges. She published two more novels after this article was written. As Stephen King said, no great loss.)

    I’m a reader. I read everything, from the Bible to the Qur’an to the Book of Mormon to Dianetics; from Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb to Shakespeare, Dickens, Lovecraft, Poe, King, Heinlein, Straub, Bradbury, Nicholas Sparks, John Grisham, Mark Twain…if it’s written down, I’ll read it. I don’t care if it’s a multi-volume novel or the back of a cereal box.

    This rather undiscriminating approach led me to discover what may possibly be the worst published writer I have ever read: Cassie Edwards. The fact that this woman gets paid to write is a stunning and mortal indictment of everything the western world stands for. This is the kind of author who makes you think “Jesus, I could be on the USA Today Best Seller list, if this is the criterion!”

    I’ve read exactly two of her books. Part of one was called ‘Savage (Something),’ and it bears the distinction of being the first book ever in my life that I just could not finish. It was that bad. Cookie-cutter plot, stereotyped characters that are so poorly-written that you’re not just offended at the racial stereotypes (we’ll get in to those below), but simply at the fact that someone got paid to write this crap.  The other part of one was pretty much the same thing.  And the one in my hand right now.

    A collage photo of fifteen Cassie Edwards novels, every one of them featuring a heavily stereotyped, shirtless, Indigenous, American man and a somewhat less melanated woman. Hair flows, etc. Every single title features the word "Savage," e.g. "Savage Mission," "Savage Passions," and "Savage Honor."
    There’s like 85 of these, and that’s just the “Savage” ones…I donated a stack of these to the local library and the county’s average IQ dropped 38 points.

    I’m sure she’s probably a nice lady and all (this is me trying to be too nice. she’s not a nice lady, nice ladies aren’t raging bigots generating billions of dollars in revenue by perpetuating horrible and ignorant stereotypes -jh, 2019) but this woman is to literature what Pauly Shore is to brain surgery. She’s so predictable and cliche that she doesn’t just get one drinking game, she gets a whole party.

    Disclaimer: Please Drink Responsibly. I emphatically do not condone or endorse the levels of alcohol you will ingest if you take this game seriously. I mean it. Alcohol kills people. Be careful.

    That said…on with the show!

    The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game – EZ-Mode~!

    This one’s simple: Open any Cassie Edwards novel. If you see an ellipsis – you know, the three dots? Like…this? Drink. This is actually how I came up with this idea – I found one of her “books” in a box, and thought, “I bet I can open this to ANY random page and find at least one ellipsis.” I tried literally a dozen times, and succeeded every time. I’m holding one of her books in my hands right now, I’ll test the theory just for you! The title of this book is “Her Forbidden Pirate.”

    (Safety note: I was tempted as I constructed this to say ‘drink for each ellipsis.’ DON’T. Do not even think about it. You’ll die of alcohol poisoning before the end of the night. I promise. Even if you’re playing the game with water.)

    1. Page 250-251. Ellipses: 1
    2. Page 296-297. Ellipses: 4
    3. Page 72-73. Ellipses: 0~! (For your party, now pass the book to the next person)
    4. Page 346-347. Ellipses: 7
    5. Page 196-197 (weird the 6-7 keeps hitting). Ellipses: 1
    6. Page 368-269. Ellipses: 8
    7. Page 162-163. Ellpses: 15. FIFTEEN FLIPPIN ELLIPSES IN TWO PAGES! THERE ARE MORE DOTS IN HERE THAN A DAMNED SEURRAT PAINTING! I bet if you ripped all these pages out of the book and pasted them on cardboard when you back away from it it’ll look like the old grayscale newspaper photos.
    8. Page 360-361. Ellipses: 2
    9. Page 126-127. Ellipses: 4
    10. Page 270-271. Ellipses: 5

    So that’s the EZ-mode game. I promise you, if you have enough alcohol you will not be able to play this game for an hour without getting so hammered that you can’t SEE the friggin dots anymore.

    Expert Mode: General

    This is a little tougher, because it requires you to actually read this useless garbage. Fortunately you’ll be blackout drunk before you finish, so you won’t remember any of it.

    Step 1: Head to a used bookstore and find the Cassie Edwards novels. Close your eyes and select one at random. If it has the word ‘Savage’ in the title, find a designated driver.

    Step 2: Drinks are assigned for each of the following ‘plot’ points. I’ve broken these up into three categories: “Savage,” “Non-Savage,” and “General.” The “Savage” points apply only to books with “Savage” in the title, because all of Edwards’ “Savage” books apparently revolve around some bizzaro-world version of Native Americans, and there are some special things to go with that. The “Non-savage” list applies, obviously, to her filthy and witless wanderings outside of the ‘ME JOHN BIG TREE’ sub-genre. “General” applies to both.

    • If the female protagonist is under 18, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is a virgin, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is a pure, untouched virgin, unfamiliar with the ‘sight’ of a man, yet cheerfully casts off her clothes and schtupps the male protagonist out of his wits within the first five chapters, drink.
    • If the female protagonist’s mother is dead at the beginning of the novel, drink.
    • If she’s not dead at the start, but dies before chapter 8, drink. Drink twice if the female protagonist is absent for the death because she’s illicitly snuck off to be with the male protagonist.
    • If the female protagonist’s father is an outrageous bastard, drink.
    • Drink every time you see the word “throbbing” in connection with any part of the male anatomy (especially that part).
    • Drink every time a bosom heaves.
    • If the female protagonist has a friend who is described as “not beautiful in the conventional sense,” “thick,” “bawdy,” or some other variant of “unattractive but we’re trying to be performatively polite about it,” drink.
    • If the female protagonist is raped by the male protagonist and enjoys it, drink (I’m not even kidding).
    • Any time a phrase describes something that simply cannot happen while simultaneously invoking a bad romance novel cliche, drink. (Example, “‘Oh, Royce, I love you so!’ she sighed breathlessly.” You can’t sigh breathlessly. You have to breathe to sigh.)
    • If the male protagonist is cast as some sort of criminal – pirate, grifter, highwayman, etc. – drink. Drink again if it turns out he’s not really a pirate/whatever.
    • If there is a subplot suggesting that the male and female protagonists may actually be brother and sister, drink twice. If it turns out they actually are, drink twice more. If they continue having sex in spite of that, please consider donating a bottle of MD 20/20 to the “Help Cassie Edwards Move Home To MygoshijustLOVEmyfamily, Southwest Virginia” fund.
    • If the male protagonist’s muscles ‘ripple’ at any point, drink.
    • If the male protagonist is described at any point as ‘chiseled,’ drink.
    • If the word ‘loins’ appears referring to anything but a steak, drink.
    • Any time a character speaks out loud to themselves in place of a block of thought, drink. (I’m convinced that Edwards is aware of no other literary style with which to render thought.)
    • Any time a sex act is described as ‘filling her,’ drink.
    • Any time female genitalia is described as ‘her wetness,’ ‘her dampness,’ ‘her moisture,’ or ‘her heat,’ drink. Drink twice if the word “dewy” or “dew” is used to redundantly describe the aforementioned moisture.
    • Any time male genitalia is described as ‘his hardness,’ ‘his need,’ or ‘his love,’ drink.
    • If the ‘plot’ of the book involves finding lost treasure, a misplaced inheritance, or rightfully reclaiming one’s birthright, drink.
    • If the female protagonist’s father dies, drink. Drink twice if he’s dead before Chapter 7.
    • Every time you see a snippet of verse from an obscure poet that reads suspiciously like doggerel from a Hallmark card, drink. Drink twice if it’s the preface to the first chapter! (Thanks Katie!)
    • If the mother or father of the female protagonist turns out not to be her mother or father, drink. Drink again if her mother was kidnapped by her father but decided to stay with him of her own free will because she just loves the bad boys.
    • Any time you see dialogue that rolls off the tongue like a brick – thick, stilted, unnatural, heavy, and in no way related to any mode of speech ever employed by a human being, drink. (Bonus points may be involved; see the ‘Non-Savage’ section)

    Racism Bonus Mode! ‘Savage’ vs. non-‘Savage’

    ‘Savage’

    • Any time a Native American starts a sentence with “Ho,” drink.
    • Any time a Native American speaks in his ‘native’ language, which is rendered as a series of italicized syllables with dashes between them, drink. If he repeats the sentence in English, drink again. If the phrase turns out to be a secret nickname for the female protagonist that ‘translates’ to anything involving flowers, sunrises, does, or bodies of water, drink twice more.
    • Any time a Native American’s skin is described as “bronzed,” drink. Drink again if it’s “shining.”
    • If the female protagonist has a medical condition caused by an obscure combination of herbs assembled by the male protagonist, drink.
    • If the male protagonist (and the Native American is always the male protagonist) is described as a ‘chief,’ ‘brave,’ ‘shaman,’ or ‘medicine man,’ drink.
    • If the male protagonist at any time wears a loincloth, drink.
    • If the male protagonist reluctantly but necessarily kills the father of the female protagonist, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is in a near-death situation and the male protagonist revives her by singing or invoking any form of smoke, drink.
    • If at any series of concurrent events the male protagonist is described as carrying a bow and arrow, hatchet, AND machete, drink.
    • If at any time the male protagonist is depicted wearing a headband, drink.
    • If the female protagonist is assimilated into the male protagonists tribe, at first treated with loathing and suspicion by the other tribeswomen but charming them within two chapters, drink.
    • If the male protagonist already has a wife, drink. If he maintains two ‘homes’ in order to avoid any suggestion of actual kinkiness so as to avoid offending the strange people who actually enjoy reading this crap, drink again.

    Non-‘Savage’

    • If any character of African descent is featured with a name ending in ‘-i,’ ‘-ey’ or ‘-ie,’ drink
    • Drink once if any Black character says one of the following:
      • afadin’ (“fading,” especially when used as a euphemism for sleep or death)
      • any variant of “you be” or “I be” when the verb should be “am” or “are”
      • fo’ (“for”)
      • y’all. Drink twice if “y’all” is used to refer to a single person. Drink three times if it’s rendered as “y’all” and “ya’ll” on the same page. (I’m not kidding. Page 250 of Her Forbidden Pirate.)
      • Reference to either protagonist as “miss,” “missus,” “mister.”
      • Drink twice if “mistah” or “mistuh” is involved.
      • Toast Stephen Douglass if “Massa” makes an appearance.
      • ‘Fore (“before”). Bonus drink if this appears in the same book as “fo’” (I’m not kidding.)
      • “Fret” in place of “worry”
      • afta (“after”)
      • sho (“sure,” usually immediately following “fo’.” A legitimate quote: “He’ll be fit to be tied, Massa Saul will. He’ll come afta’ us fo’ sho’!”)
      • “Land sakes”
      • Yes’m
      • and of course, the ultimate in badly-written dialogue for black characters, “sho’ nuff.”
    • Drink if you can’t quite figure out whether the Black characters are slaves or servants.  Bonus drink if it’s obvious that they are slaves, but the word ‘slave’ is never used.
    • Drink if any reference is made to whipping.
    • Drink twice if it involves “whuppin’,” “whupped,” or “whup.”
    • Bonus drink if this “whipping” business is referenced, close together, by the same character in at least two different ways. (“Massa he goan whup me, I’s goan get a whippin’ fo’ sho’!”)
    • Drink if a Black character refers to themselves in the third person.
    • Bonus drink if the character adds the descriptive, “Ol’” to their names, as in “Ol’ Mazie’s goan fix you right up!”
    • Drink three times if this Steppin’ Fetchit pantomime of Blackness offends you even though you’re as Caucasian as Al Gore.
      • Add a couple of you’re politically conservative and still offended.
      • Add one more if you or any living relative under 65 regularly uses perjorative slang for Black people (e.g. the “n-word”) and yet you somehow manage to STILL be offended at how casually racist this woman is. I am. I’m almost offended at myself for even mentioning all of this, but this woman’s insane caricatures of ethnic minorities need to be drug out into the light where they can be properly examined before being beat to death.
    • This next one is a little tough. Make a two-shot cocktail for the whole party for every page (NOT every instance, see the safety warning above) where you can find linguistic anachronisms in which a black character jumps back and forth between badly-rendered and obnoxious colloquial “black” speech, and badly-rendered, unnatural, and artificial non-colloquial speech. The only way to really explain this is to quote some of it. Please note that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the quotes in the list below is spoken by the same character, the same who spoke the “fit to be tied” sentence a few bullets up:
      • “Massa Bryce will arrive soon, posing as a Doctor Jamison. There is a new doctor in town with the name Jamison, one Massa Saul hadn’t met yet. Massa Bryce will disable the true Doctor Jamison momentarily until Massa Bryce will have time to get you on his ship.”
      • “Miss Natalie, your father depends on me to keep a watch on you while he’s gone…Land sakes, if anything’d every happen to you while he was gone, he’d take a bullwhip to me fo’ sho’…probably until I’d neva’ walk again.”
      • “You’ll stay on the estate grounds, won’t you?…I don’t like the look in your eyes. They be adancin’, Miss Natalie. Since your return from your outing yesterday you’ve been a different young lady. Did you by chance make the acquaintance of a man? Is a man why you are behavin’ so strangely…so defiantly?”
      • “Old Tami ain’t gonna do nothin’ to stir up trouble for Miss Natalie…The years have made you my own.” The idea here is to celebrate the insane juxtaposition of the oh-so-richly offensive colloquial “Black folk”-speak, or proto-AVE or what the hell ever nonsense this woman is trying to stuff into these poor caricature’s faces, often in the same sentence as speech rendered, by the same character, in such precise diction that it seems unlikely even a classically-trained butler would employ it. We’re not talking about code-switching; we’re talking about glaring continuity errors in writing, aside from the outrageous stereotyping

    Conclusions & Further Analysis

    So there’s your game.

    The process of assembling the ethnic stereotypes really brought home to me how truly ignorant, obnoxious, and offensive this woman’s writing is. This isn’t Mark Twain faithfully rendering the language of the antebellum south and the Black slaves who inhabited it – it’s not even clear that this novel took place in a time of slavery, only that it was pre-industrial.

    This isn’t even Stephen King letting loose with a string of racial epithets spoken in the head of a black sub-protagonist by an evil hotel trying to keep him away.

    This is an ignorant, unskilled, suburban white hack who has likely never so much as heard a live black person speak in any context…and from the way she writes dialogue, she’s never heard anyone else speak either. Her non-white characters are a throwback of every advance past stereotype our collective consciousness has taken in the last century.

    I really didn’t start this article to write some hard-liberal politically correct diatribe, and that’s really not who I am (ed. note: in the language of 2009 “hard liberal” would have been accurate, but “politically correct” never has been and still isn’t. I don’t avoid the use of slurs to be politically correct; I do it to not be a dick. I don’t care in the least what people think is “politically correct” or not. -jh, 2021).  My own background is a mix of over a half-dozen ethnicities that I know of, including Black, at least two Native American tribes, and several flavors of European ancestry. I’m not averse to a little off-color (no pun intended) humor now and then, as long as there’s a purpose to it and it’s not just some stupid racist ‘joke.’ I certainly have no problem with honest, historically-accurate portrayals of non-white culture – the Geers, for instance, write some really excellent historical Native American fiction.

    But this woman legitimately offends me, and I just don’t even use that concept very often.

    Worst of all, this is just one facet of many that make this woman a walking offense to the concept of movable type. The dialogue of her white characters isn’t any less ridiculous, forced, unnatural, and just plain crappy – it’s just lacking the colloquial quality that marks her as not only an idiot, but a bigot too.

    But it’s not just the nearly belligerent bigotry in her portrayals of minorities or her utter inability to write dialogue that doesn’t sound like a poorly-written play for grade-schoolers. Every character is a bad cliche. Every sentence she writes looks like it came straight from the diary of a slightly insane Nazi boy of thirteen whose entire concept of female sexuality is based on Porky’s movies.

    And do I really need to point out the patently ugly, sick, and thoroughly evil nature of constantly portraying women who are first forced into sex, and then fall deeply and forever in love with their attackers?

    People play ‘cruel tricks,’ hands ‘flail,’ color ‘drains’ from faces, blue ‘swims’ in eyes, everything is ‘damnable.’ Lips are inevitably ‘forced apart’ by tongues, there is always the obligatory ‘tangle of limbs,’ and slight, spineless women are ‘swept up’ into bulging, rippling, bronzed, shining, chiseled, heroic arms. Heartbeats thunder, one always ‘rises’ from a bed, heat rises in loins, hearts skip beats, and everyone is almost afraid of the next paragraph.

    Whether you’re like me and read basically anything that crosses your path, or you’re a romance novel aficionado, I can not say it strongly enough: avoid this woman’s “writing” like the plague. She is the ultimate embodiment of every bad cliche in the genre.

    Enjoy your drinks. Responsibly.