Psycho Dish and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

Psycho Dish found a dead black youth in his backyard last Friday. It was the capstone of a remarkably awful week.

His mom died the Sunday before. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone – she’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a long time, and it had been plain for the last year or so that it was only a matter of time before she went. When death comes slowly for someone, the people around them begin the process of mourning and letting go long before they die. When they finally do, it’s almost a relief. Not that anyone’s happy about it, but if there’s such a thing as an easy or pleasant way to leave this world, Alzheimer’s certainly isn’t it. Now that ordeal was over for her, and, in all honesty, for Psycho Dish’s dad as well; he’s getting up there in years, and taking care of her was constant, hard work that would have been tough even for someone half his age. But now she was at peace, everyone said; things could start going back to normal, and they could all remember her the way they wanted to – young and full of life and energy.

Psycho Dish is between jobs (again), and since he didn’t need to be anyplace in particular on Monday, he threw a gym bag with some clothes in it into his old rattletrap of a car and drove the 250 or so miles up to his parents’ place. He stayed for a couple of days, and everyone appreciated the effort, but all the arrangements had already been made well in advance and his dad and sister had been emotionally prepared for this for a while, so they didn’t need much by the way of a shoulder to cry on. And so on Thursday he said his goodbyes, with hugs exchanged all around, and drove home. He got in late, worn out from the drive and from the weight of sad and reflective thoughts, and had just enough presence of mind to take the trash out for collection the next morning before he flopped into bed and passed out.

The next morning, Psycho Dish woke up early, put on some coffee, and went outside to drag his trash cans back in. That’s when he spotted the dead black youth lying face-down in his grass, patches of which around the body had been stained red by pools of semi-congealed blood. He walked back inside, called 911, and occupied the time until the authorities arrived by washing out a couple of extra coffee mugs for the policemen who he figured he’d be spending the next few hours talking to.

As anyone who read the story I wrote about him last year already knows, Psycho Dish is the sort of guy who’s perpetually broke. There’s some bad judgment involved with that, along with some genuine hard luck. But no matter the reason, the result is that he’s a part of the large population of poor whites who can’t afford to pay the premium that more affluent whites pay to not live around black people. Or, put another way, the premium they pay so that their kids never end up discovering a bullet-ridden corpse on the lawn when they leave the house for school in the morning. Psycho Dish lives in a bad neighborhood in a city that’s seen far better days. It’s the sort of neighborhood in which, if a loud noise is heard, the question of whether it was a car backfiring, a firecracker, or a gunshot is not an idle one. It sucks, but it’s all he can afford, and he’s lived in worse places.

Psycho Dish hadn’t heard anything that night, but he had been exhausted and had his mind on other things when he went to sleep, so it’s not a surprise that nothing woke him up. Besides, the police said that the dead black youth had most likely been shot outside a place a few houses down, and stumbled down the sidewalk for a while before he collapsed on Psycho Dish’s back lawn and bled out. They told him the dead black youth was 22 years old, lived with his grandmother a block or two away, and had a few convictions for petty crimes on his record. They mentioned his name, which was one of those that you’d never hear and think it belonged to a white man. As for the neighbors – pretty much all black – nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody knew anything, which appeared not to surprise the policemen at all. In fact, everyone involved with the investigation seemed to approach it with a weary sense of routine, as if they had seen this kind of thing countless times before and knew exactly how it would go. By lunchtime, they were all done. They gave him a printed handout with some contact information on it and told him to call them if he found out anything new. Then they left, and things started going back to what in that neighborhood counts as normal.

This past Sunday, exactly a week since his mom died, Psycho Dish went to church and talked with the congregation about everything that had happened to him in the past week. (I’m terribly unfamiliar with how Protestant worship services work – at my own church, the Mass is sung in Latin – so whether this was a part of the service itself or was part of a meeting afterward was a part of the story that I wasn’t clear on, but didn’t bother asking more about.). He also asked for help; yet broke as he is, his request wasn’t for himself. The grandmother of the dead black youth, he had learned, is an elderly shut-in who needs assistance with daily tasks. With her grandson gone, she had nobody around to take care of these things for her, and he pled with the congregation for help on her behalf. As his church is solidly white and middle to upper-middle class, full of generous and good-hearted folk with some extra income to spare, I’m sure that such help will appear.

What Psycho Dish did was a decent thing to do – a true act of Christian charity, and I’m sure that God smiles on him for it. It isn’t only the matter of him trying to find material help for someone in need; it’s also that his thoughts were with someone else and their problems even in his own time of grief. Beneath his gruff exterior, Psycho Dish really is a good guy, and I have not a word of criticism to offer for what he did. And yet…

And yet a troubling thought or two linger that I cannot quite rid myself of, no matter how much I’d prefer to see things with only charity and forbearance in my heart. Though I would rather not harbor these thoughts myself, for the sake of honesty I will nonetheless share this rotten orange with my friends. And so, in the presence of all of you, I ask these questions:

Why is it that the lingering consequences of this this situation – and many more like it, for stories like this are not uncommon – end up falling to white people to deal with? Why are the efforts of blacks themselves not sufficient to shoulder these burdens? Why is it the job of white people, like the policemen who spent Friday morning drinking Psycho Dish’s coffee (and unlike an entire neighborhood full of black residents who all saw nothing, heard nothing, and knew nothing about the crime), to seek justice for their murdered youth? Why is it the job of white people, like the good-hearted Christians at his church (and unlike an entire neighborhood full of black residents who live a few steps away), to find ways to care for their needy elderly? Why, instead of relying on white people to help them, do they not take care of each other, as Psycho Dish’s family did through his mother’s long illness?

Will it ever not be the job of whites to deal with the seemingly-endless problems of, and to clean up the seemingly-endless messes left by, black people? If so, when? How? Under what circumstances? What will be the secret ingredient that finally makes it happen after decades of fruitless trying? More ethomasochistic self-flagellation on the part of whites? More kowtowing before window-smashing protestors? Another black President, who presumably will have that last extra bit of magic that the current one seems to have lacked, despite all the promises he made when we elected him?

Blacks have been in this country for four centuries, have been free for a century and a half, have been legally equal in every sense for half a century, and have had the full coercive force of the Total State kicking down every door and destroying every opponent that stood in their way for decades now. They have for a hundred years been sent to free public schools which by law they must attend. Moreover, free public libraries, cheap and universally-available internet service, and taxpayer-supported public television and radio give them access to a limitless store of cultural, historical, scientific, economic, and philosophical knowledge. So when are they going to start acting like white people, as the Blank Slatists long ago promised that they would once unfair laws stopped oppressing them and they were liberated from the shackles of ignorance by access to education? Or, if that question seems a bit too culturally imperialist for you, when will their actions, their attitudes, and their social structures stop resembling those of genetically-similar but geographically-distant Africans more than the whites who surround them in America? Why in black-run or majority-black places in America do we see “Big Man” cronyism, endemic corruption, warlordism and tribalism in the form of urban gangs, and loose sexual morals under weak matriarchy – all features of life seen commonly in sub-Saharan Africa or the black Caribbean, but not in white communities just a few miles away in a majority-white country?

Why is it that, if anything, the process of black acculturation and assimilation into our majority-white society seems to have backslid dramatically over the past half century? Why is it that, fifty years ago, blacks gave their children names like “David” and “Lisa”, but now give them names which, like that of the dead black youth, one would never find attached to someone of any other race? Why is it that, as Mencius Moldbug pointed out, in every big city in America there is a feral, burned-out ghetto that was once a thriving black business district? Why is it that the more coercive the laws establishing utopia at gunpoint become, the farther away anything that any rational person would call a decent and functional society seems to get?

We are told – those who style themselves our moral betters make sure we hear – that “Black Lives Matter”. To whom, I wonder? Judging by the rate of black-on-black murder, and by the rate of abortion among black women, not to blacks themselves. And if not to them, why to me? If they can’t be bothered to raise their children (Why was the dead black youth living with his grandmother? Where were his parents? Dare I ask?), protect their young people, and care for their old and infirm, by what right do they burden me and mine with those tasks? Do we not have enough to do in caring for our own?

Yes, there is Christian charity. But nothing about that stops me from asking questions about the assumptions of individual and group equality that serve as the foundations of the society in which all of this has happened. It doesn’t stop me from noticing that decades, or even centuries, of actions based upon these assumptions have made things worse instead of better. It doesn’t stop me from seeing that, in the name of bettering things for blacks, whites killed each other by the thousands at places like Shiloh and Chickamauga, allowed our own ancient and hard-won rights (such as those of free association and commerce) to be taken from us by laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and spent trillions of dollars that could have gone into space exploration, medical research, or high-tech public transportation – and yet in the end all of these seem to have been wasted efforts that have gained us little except insufferable moral bragging on the part of those who have championed them and who react to their manifest lack of results with neverending calls for “More! More! More!”

It doesn’t stop me from wondering: How much is enough? By what deadline will we either attain success or admit defeat? What precisely has to happen – how many more years of dismal, pointless failure have to go by – before we are allowed to call into question the doctrine of universal human equality? Before we are allowed to ask: “Where is the proof – scientific, historical, or otherwise – for this belief? Where, even, is the proof that belief in it has made things better in any way other than letting some people feel good about themselves for believing in a comforting dream?”

What happens if – when, really, for unreality can only hold reality at bay for just so long – we finally do? And what do we do until then? What about poor whites like Psycho Dish, who can’t afford to flee from the perpetual disaster that is black dysfunction in America? Do we just tell him to accept stepping over dead bodies on his way to take his trash cans in as normal?

The human capacity for holding on to pleasant delusion until reality comes crashing down on us seems to be limitless, so I expect that’s what will happen in this case as well. Events are in the driver’s seat, and things will play out as they will, which will almost certainly be extremely unpleasantly. I think it would have been better for everyone just to have kept our society based on observable reality all along, but nobody (or at least, nobody in a position of power) asked me.

Well, then, I will do the only thing I can do, which is to extend my condolences to Psycho Dish for his serie noire this week. I’ll buy beer the next time we get together – though, I hope you understand, I’d rather we meet somewhere other than your place.