the huckleberry conundrum

aka the problem with the white guy problem

How many demons can dance on the head of a pin. How many stoned narcissistic boomers does it take to fuck up a birthday party. How many white guys do you want in your lifeboat. Scratch that. How many do you need. How many cool white cowboys do you need to kill the bad white cowboys. These are not meant to be trick questions. Demons don’t dance. They vibe. Anybody with a pulse knows that just one get off my lawn white boomer dude sniffing his own farts in your kitchen may be too many. And you always want as many cool cowboys on your side as you can find. As for the lifeboat question, it depends. Are you organizing a search party in Montana. Are you squaring off with Ike Clanton and his unwashed gang. Are you rebuilding society or tearing it down. Are you talking out of your ass about the specter of another American civil war.

One is the loneliest number.

If you’re searching for a missing kid in Montana and you need warm bodies to walk six feet apart through tall grass hunting for torn clothes or signs of life then you take all the white guys you can find. If your car is stuck in the mud you will take an assist from the first white dude with a truck and some rope who happens along, even if you suspect him to be a proud boy. On the other hand. If you’re working a twelve hour shift on a psych ward in the deep south you really only need one white guy on your crew. His primary function is to deal with the racist asshole white sociopaths who turn up on every shift. His secondary task is to deal with black female patients who can’t stand to take direction from black male staff but love to flirt with white guys. Or the elder black male patients who call the black male staff uncle Toms but for some curious reason baked into their cellular memory they fall into line and say yessir bossman when the white staff comes down the hall. Likewise there are always white female patients who hate the white male staff but light up for the black guys on your crew. The staff exploits these prejudices nonsensical or not as needed to keep the peace and it helps to keep in mind that psychosis, dementia, schizophrenia, mania all tend to bring out deeply buried and sometimes bizarre or uncharacteristic moments of racial paranoia.

Note. The ideal staff to crew a psych unit is five men and two women. One of each representation black, white, gay, Spanish speaking, ASL, ex-military and gang affiliated. Also good to have one or more recovered addicts. And when you’re in the soup and staring into the eye of a whirlwind of psychosis, on a full moon Saturday night, you truly don’t care who any of your crew voted for.

But if you’re watching a talk show in 2024 and the panel of expert analysts is four white guys in their 50s you probably roll your eyes, god knows I do. Especially when they all have the same square head same haircut same beard and they say embarrassing nearsighted shit. And if you flip on c-span yeah it sure is a lot of old white guys gaming the stock market and arguing about whose reality is more real. Anyway the stoned white boomer in question is Bill Maher. To give him his due Bill has had his thumb on the politically correct idiot pulse for thirty years. A voice of reason back in the ‘90s. Never particularly funny and he’s kind of a dick but he is sharp and clever. He has mastered the art of ironic snark and he calls bullshit when he sees it. He was the only person on mainstream television with the minerals to speak out against the Iraq war in 2003 and it cost him his original late night slot. He bobbed back to the surface pretty quick with HBO where he could come to work high and swear freely and and if nothing else he’s been consistent and he tends to skewer the far left and right with equal pleasure. But last week he said one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard him say and the thumbnail clip of it is already everywhere on the internet. The topic was the prospect of locking up the orange Jesus for his various crimes and how the magastan faithful will lose their collective minds, perhaps sparking civil war. Which is absurd. Nobody cares enough about Trump to go to war for him. Or maybe they do, there is definitely a cultish core to his fanbase. Not the point, though.

Bill Maher’s exact words: “A civil war in this country becomes a race war.”

Sigh. Fuck me. Bill has been tucked away in Laurel Canyon or wherever the hell he lives behind a security gate for too long. Because no, it fucking doesn’t. One unfortunate truth in the fallout of January 6 is that it’s become near impossible not to speculate on the likelihood of another civil war. Everyone seems pretty certain or polls indicate that an armed American on American conflict is coming but nobody can agree exactly what it would look like. I don’t personally believe civil war is coming but I’ve certainly gamed it out in my head more than once. If anything we shall see something resembling the troubles in Northern Ireland. There could be sovereign citizens versus the feds, skirmishes like Ruby Ridge and the slaughter at the Koresh compound or terrorist militia actions like Oklahoma City and the Boston Marathon and I expect these might come from both radical left and extremist right fringes. I would not be shocked to see Texas national guardsmen facing off soon with US army regulars in some clusterfucked border dispute turf war. Florida and Tennessee have already sent troops to back them up. If anything they need to be building shelters and refugee camps. And if the right manages to sweep the next election and takes the senate, the house, and the presidency, then I’d expect to see bills brought to the floor that will codify the US as a christian nationalist ethnostate with murky but racially charged definitions and phrases like legacy citizens that will indeed set the stage for conflict.

But it will not be a race war.

If anything so organized as team X versus team Z with home and away jerseys were to take form, it still won’t be a race war. And it won’t be red v blue or MAGA nation crucifying the lefty libtards or whatever neocon nazi fantasy Steve Bannon can dream up. If anything it will be a class war, with the long suffering poor coming for the heads of the one percent, folks like Bill Maher. But the most likely flavor of civil war 2.0 would be the “real” Americans declaring open season on the illegals and the dreamers and their sympathizers, and even against the proper immigrants, the ones who jumped through the labyrinthine new citizen hoops. Anyone with a foreign accent or an impossible to spell last name or brown immigrant parents would be shot first, questioned later. If there was one thing Alex Garland nailed perfectly in his flawed but necessary near future Civil War film it was the scene with everyone’s favorite dead-eyed ginger, the actor Jesse Plemons. The one that will be a meme for the next twenty years, in which Jesse wears pink sunglasses and cradles an AR-15 and idly scratches his jaw before asking ominously uh huh what kind of American are you.

The white guys among us like that Jesse P character are legion. There are thousands of them. I’ve worked side by side and broken bread with them and so have you. Some of them are assholes and some are sweethearts and they are far more complicated than they appear. They have a system of ethics, warped and dysfunctional or not. They may be racist to the marrow and they may despise all things left and queer. Or they may not. They might believe women ought to shut up, to stay barefoot and keep popping out white babies, but they will say yes m’am and give up their seat on the bus. They might be evangelical christians who hate muslims on principle but most if not all of them would acknowledge Muhammad Ali and even Malcolm X as being real Americans. Their grandfathers may have spit on Jackie Robinson and cursed him for infiltrating white baseball but they recognize number 42 as a legend and a real American regardless. It may sound crazy but there’s nothing more American than batshit counterintuitive logic. This is how they think: If you were born on American soil and your parents speak English without a suspicious accent then you’re a real American, black or white. If you’re a third generation brown Texican you’re probably alright. Don’t try to reason with these dudes in the wild but maybe understand how they think. The patriotism thing is hardcore with some folk and their belief system goes to the bone, it’s in their DNA. We all have our demons and they don’t dance, they vibe. Take comfort that they are not the majority but don’t be surprised if the dust settles five years from now and you look around to see there’s a white guy in your lifeboat and he offers to be your Huckleberry. You may not want his opinion but you might just need him. His job will be to talk sense to the dude in pink sunglasses coming at you around the bend.

peace.

*Doc Holliday art found on the internet. If you recognize it or claim copyright please let me know.