Parasitism Feedback Loop (ROUND 2)
Let’s workshop this prophetic jeremiad that, aiming to wake up those under the spell of wormtongues in ally clothing, calls for black Americans to choose dignity rather than narcotic of victimhood.
scent of the day: Vetiver Nocturne Absolu, by Bortnikoff
Just got this so still formulating my thoughts
This belongs right there with Sir Winston given its tartness and ambergris glow. /sweet grass like in chypre chiam but more tart in vetiver nocturne / thick and rich—opulent twist on vetiver that many will not read as vetiver—extremely different style than Sultan Vetiver or Vetiver Insolence or Sycomore or Encre Noire etc / a strange sweet style oud in here / Apple jasmine tea / soft and round in dry down / honeyed mentholated green apple from sweet oud and jasmine and vetiver / jasmine here has pissy aspect./ there is a green apple aspect too: not Promise’s synthetic apple, something more real and exotic here / briney-pickly quality of africa olifant here / dirty natural peppery grass / diaper peed aroma but amounts to a more unisex vetiver / champaca infused sandalwood oil gives s bit of Chinese incense mall store that sells Buddhas and incense cones / combines creamy and tart and luminous / vetiver is dirty but more dirty grass than roots / rosey facets come out / boils down to a typical Boertnikoff ambergris scent / The ambergris is beautful and an wonderful to have, but it is quite common across Bortnikoff’s oeuvre
Parasitism Feedback Loop
Do not believe the wormtongue. The door to your freedom is not locked. Do not succumb to its lies. You do not need to keep hunting for a key. Resist its agency-crippling and handout-entitling gospel. You are not a perpetual underling. It is not your friend. It apologizes, over and over, for the wrong part of itself—for its whiteness. That is distraction. It is not your ally.
The wormtongue takes on diverse forms: social-justice tears, algorithm reels, bureaucrat decrees—its whispers coming, now more than ever, not just from white mouths. You can spot it, however, by its actions. It will loop the same reels of suffocation, again and again—ABC, CNN, TikTok (the complicity list goes on) all recirculating the same Machiavellian theater, stoking a moral hysteria: black families rehearsing “the talk” at kitchen tables, fathers and mothers instructing sons through anticipatory tears like an atom-bomb drill. “Always keep your hands up. Always say ‘Sir’”—the insidious subtext being what carefree algorithms amplify to raging chaos: our nation has declared open season on you. PSYOP whispers become chants, chants become psalms. “It’s not your fault. You fail only because the game is rigged against you.” Who could resist such a spirit-stultifying mantra, such a dignity-destroying lullaby? The alibi reposes. It is sweet enough to tempt, like puerile pussy for the priest, even the most disciplined at respecting their future selves, humans—our fury for fast food and fossil fuel says it all—having been groomed (from even before the nights huddled in trees) to take the calorie-minimal easy way out whenever we can—come what may in the wake of short-term gains.
The wormtongue piles its bribes high, love-bomb cherries tumbling over the banana split of readymade excuse: subminimal expectations, handouts, first dibs, moral superiority. Seeing how it fattens and softens you into such comfortable entitlement that all colors and creeds around the world suffer with a mean case of black-American fatigue, what sober mind would fail to call such a decadent sundae “poison”? And seeing how it makes you a target of bitterness by those who have to shut up and watch—like the abused stepchild, licking her lips in hunger—you get the cream of the crop even as they are muzzled from saying certain words and made the butt of the cultural joke in a collective lampooning (blue-haired wormtongues in ally attire denying fellow white people with braids entry on grounds that their appropriation violates safe-space norms), it would be hard even for a skeptic averse to conspiratorial thinking not to see psychological abuse: something similar to when the drill instructor, standing tall with his shit-eating grin, heaps upon one man a cornucopia of rewards (candies, time off) while the rest of the platoon must pay for his mistake.
Do not take the wormtongue’s bait. Follow the money. The distracting lies feed the prisons as steadily as fast food feeds the hospitals. If there is an inside link (organic or planned) between the medical industry and the fast-food industry, then there is definitely one between the prison industry and the antiracist industry of blue haireds and their black puppets repeating that not blacks themselves but rather some sham bogeyman is responsible for the despicable values and fuck-tomorrow attitudes: pathetic scores, low ambition, resisting the law, uncivil behaviors, shooting opps numbed on suppository Perc 30—all turned aspirational in song. The rot in the marrow of black American culture—thuggery, whorishness, drug abuse, anti-intellectualism—is not a matter of race. All you need to see that is to see the shining glory of African and Caribbean children whose intellectual and moral intelligence eclipses the white adult median in America. “Punctuality and inside voices and mathematics and hard work are all standards of whiteness insensitive to the native modality of the black body.” That is what the whiteknight wormtongues repeat. “Demanding black students control themselves like white students would be just as racially terrorizing—especially in light of the historical context of white people’s addiction to controlling black bodies—as holding up blue-eyed blondes as the pinnacle of beauty.” It is a race for the minds of children. The spoiling and the excuses, the soft words and the softer expectations—these only nourish the rot. If there was any gang to kill, it would not be the cops. It would be the predominant form of the wormtongue: the “allies” in their tartan scarves—easily pluckable, headshot blue, from the belltower of any campus near you.
It could easily seem like a conspiracy when you consider the wormtongue’s works altogether.
Rampant undereducation and unchecked violence it blames on “the oppressive chokehold of white supremacy,” sending those of you whose energy for justice survives the why-bother subtext of the demoralizing message charging like bulls at red capes in pursuit of cures—fruitless, too often toxic. Police defunding it packages as a cure despite the spike in teary wails from so many black mothers. The luminous ideals of the European enlightenment—objectivity and scientific inquiry, rationality and skepticism, diligence and hard work, foresight and planning, self-reliance and personal responsibility (the very ideals that pull everyone toward excellence)—it mocks as “whitewashed virtues,” as “hallmarks of whiteness.” Math courses and classical music programs (and so many other sturdy ladders to physical and intellectual flourishing) it “dismantles” on ridiculous and racist grounds: that they are “inimical to black styles of knowing”; that they are “designed—as just one of the many weapons of psychological warfare—to humiliate black youth while making whites feel superior.” “Western civ,” cradle of emacipatory norms that shelter the most vulnerable and suppress the might-makes-right laws of the jungle, it condemns for being “unbearably white”—even though Goethes and Bachs, Einsteins and Lockes, lift us all; even though science and medical technologies protect us all.
Sober minds understand that the relentless harming in the name of helping is less likely an evil conspiracy than just an organic unfolding toward money—natural as mildew, predictable as mold. But a boulder rolling down the cliff, aiming to reach the center of Earth’s gravity, still will crush your house even though it has no desire to.
Will you believe that mathematics is poison, that Mozart is humiliation?
Will you believe that discipline is a weapon, that asking for self-control is oppression?
Will you believe that foresight is a trick, that only the oppressor plans for tomorrow?
Will you believe that excellence is exclusion, that mastery itself is a crime against your identity?
Will you believe that law is a trap, that justice is nothing but a mask for domination?
Will you believe that the very forces by which humanity rose—work, order, curiosity, discipline—are all conspiracies against you?
An aim is an aim, planned or not—and the wormtongue has its aim. It aims to hypnotize you into a perpetual leaner. Its spiral twirls so that you find yourself, lose yourself, centered around the existence of the so-called “oppressor”—a boogeyman fabrication fueled by opportunistic greed. Understand where that hypno-spiral pulls you. It pulls you—even if, especially if, laureled and lauded (MacArthur Genius Grants and all the rest they hand out to empty suits)—not only to becoming a lifelong parasite, dependent on the help of others, but to doing whatever you can to legitimize the fiction that you are being kept down by forces from without. Keeping your persecuted identity intact might just amount to citing as evidence the very social and intellectual deficits bred by the super-citizen coddlings. That would be bad enough. But we all know the lengths that addicts will go, stealing their mother’s own TV, to fulfill their ever-growing thirst.
Look into the mirror. Look for your agency. Look deep into the mirror. Would you like to see yourself scrambling like a pathetic addict to stoke Frankenstein life into the phantom oppressor you are groomed to orbit? Would it really be okay to see the person reflected frantic—especially when the grooming is complete and, like the once molested child who grows up unable to orgasm without rapey chokes—to sustain the fiction that you are, and will never not be, a victim of the contagious pathology known as whiteness? Will you push your luck in your need to sustain this drama? Will you risk baiting the majority population, automatic ammo and survivalist cunning on its side? Know that the penalty is much more than what comes when the college coed, wanting to amplify her on-top-of-the-world feeling, takes those extra jello shots that have her waking up in her own vomit stretched by inconsiderate fingers? The white world has shown the strength not just to conquer the globe but even to serve as the difference-maker to ending the addiction to slavery that haunted humanity from before there were any black people, when skin was pale beneath chimp fur. Will you keep pushing it into tightening corner, pushing it at risk of tipping your cushiest high into a wooden-chest overdose as final as fentanyl?