Parasitism Feedback Loop (ROUND 3)
Let’s workshop this call for black Americans to awaken from the wormtongue hypnosis of so-called “antiracist allies” and choose dignity, discipline, and mastery over the narcotic of helplessness.
scent of the day: Oudh Infini, by Dusita
Rough draft. Still working on this even though I had it for awhile
Oudh Infini (2016, Pissara Umavijani)—a skanky-floral throwback fragrance that, wrapping a classic French skeleton in ladyboy silk, is made not for polite company but for those who like their indole-rich florals scraped across crotch-cricket haunch fur as if it were Charmin—
gives us two honey-sweet florals in petal-to-stem holism (dewy-peppery May rose, waxy-perineal orange blossom) lifted into an operatic cloud of vintage animalism (sundried-urine civet, ass-cheek sweat musk) and then twisted from the European boudoirs of romance novels to the Southeast Asian super-gonorrhea holes of sex-tourist nightmares by means of a Laotian oud that, so deep and steady it can easily be overlooked, here comes off as more metallic-mineralic and woody-lacquer variety (even with some shitty-hay like vibes typical of Assam oud) than the scorched-bandaid and burnt-clutch variety of Laotian oud we get in Tauer’s L’Oudh,
this musky-sour ferality ramped up rather than toned down in queasiness (tonally whiplashed to the border of vomit tones, in fact) in virtue of being set upon a creamy-nutty sandalwood (the sandalwood rose combo actually reading like one of those minimalistic indian attars) smeared with gourmand sweetness (velvety-vanilla siam benzoin, boozy-caramel bourbon vanilla)—
the overall result being a animalic floral fragrance whose spotlighted rose seems of the highest quality (green, honeyed, dewy) and whose co-star civet seems real (sour, musky, pissy) and whose oud, despite seeming recessive in its bass-thrumming omnipresence (and perhaps also in the fact that it is neither super-barn nor super-cheese forward like many expect from oud), is up there with Bortnikoff in terms of quality, the vintage-style tartness of the whole (an old-age-home sourness like we get in Civet de Nuit, only here more feminine and more poopy than pissy) persisting throughout the life of the fragrance even as it shifts from bright citrus (think: civet paste freshly rubbed by civet cat to mark territory on a tree) and then to lychee-like potting soil tartness (think: civet paste now covered in earthworm dirt);
the overall result being, in other words, a fecal-sweet rose fragrance that, perhaps not only due to the civet and oud but to unstated skunk oil and hyrax, vacillates from whole roses (green-sour tilted roses) muddled in a diabetic-sweet urine browned with a small dose of poop to something more like rose growing through grassy cowpat, its putrid zoo tartness and pissy-poopy snarl never contravening its femininity but rather presenting us with a non-Disney primordial version of femininity (which involves perineal tears and inadvertent pop while infants and placentas a squatted out upon the earth).
*I worked throughout the whole today
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 the gospel that turns agency to ashes and dignity to handouts. You are not a perpetual underling. You are not part of a “protected group.” Look at this pale scum. See the soul beneath the sweet words. It incentivizes grievance over growth. It is not your friend. It apologizes, over and over, for the wrong part of itself—for its whiteness. That is distraction. It wants its profits, not your health. It is not your ally.
The wormtongue takes on diverse forms: social-justice tears, algorithm reels, bureaucrat decrees—its whispers multiplying, now more than ever, not just from white mouths alone. You can spot it 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, syndicating panic and 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. The game is rigged.” Disparate outcomes, the wormtongue insists, admit only one cause—at least when it is black people who get the short end of the stick. No, the answer is never cultural attitudes or family values or genetic aptitude. It will say your failure to meet the standard is racism’s fault: “The white world has made it impossible for you to gain the requisite skills!” It will even slander the standard itself: “It’s insensitive to black ways of knowing to expect black students to be proficient at math!” The catechism of helplessness is not only enshrined in culture. It appears, if only subtly, in law too. Under the disparate impact doctrine, any standard that produces disparity in outcome must be justified as genuinely relevant. Well, it must be justified, as we see when we take stock of its racist implementation, only really when the outcome disfavors nonwhites. And because the relevance of some standards—arithmetic, punctuality, indoor voices—seems resistant to even the cleverest sophistry, the lecherous temptation becomes to attack the standards themselves (even though that means starving excellence).
Keep your head up. It is hard news. But it is not all on you. For who could resist such a spirit-stultifying mantra? The alibi reposes, always there whispering: “You know, Jamal—none of this is your doing. None of it is really in your control.” It is sweet enough to tempt even the most disciplined at respecting their future selves. For we are humans. And our fury for fast food and fossil fuel says it all. We were 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.
Who could resist such a dignity-destroying lullaby that trades effort for absolution? Who could—even without any added bribes? But the wormtongue piles them high too, love-bomb cherries tumbling over the banana split of ready-made excuse: subminimal expectations, handouts, first dibs, moral superiority. The narcotic of grievance fattens the story that you are owed and empties the muscle that gets you free. Seeing how it 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 trail. The distracting lies feed the prisons as steadily as fast food feeds the hospitals. People say there is an inside link—maybe planned, or maybe just organic—between the medical industry and the fast-food industry. If that is true, then there is definitely one between the prison industry and the antiracist industry—blue haireds and their black puppets repeating that some sham bogeyman is responsible for the underperformance and the despicable values and the fuck-tomorrow attitudes of black America. You shoot opps with glee, numbed up on a suppository Perc 30—white persecution made you do it; the songs that render such violence aspirational had no role. And when it is not that excuse, some of the wormtongues will even say that such behavior—low ambition, resisting the law, uncivil conduct—is a form of rebellion against the white world. Spit in the face of such a false dichotomy. It makes a mockery of all those black Americans who have risen to the heights!
A slap to your face is perhaps in order. Follow the incentives. There is money in outrage, tenure in slogans, ratings in despair. A whole economy springs up around the story that you are stuck and someone else must carry you. But you are not stuck. Your inheritance is deeper than any algorithm’s appetite: discipline, curiosity, mastery, love of truth. These are not “white virtues.” They are human engines—and they belong to you.
The rot in the marrow of black American culture—thuggery, whorishness, drug abuse, anti-intellectualism—is not a matter of race. To see that, look to the shining glory of African and Caribbean children whose intellectual and moral intelligence eclipses the white adult median in America. “Punctuality and manners and logic and hard work and Shakespeare are all idols of whiteness, of oppression.” That is what the white-knight 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 bell tower of any campus near you.
Taken altogether, the wormtongue’s works can look like conspiracy.
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. it mocks as “whitewashed virtues,” as “hallmarks of whiteness,” 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). 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 emancipatory 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?
Or will you remember the way out has always been the same: set an aim, do the work, keep going, help the next person up the ladder, and refuse the narcotic of easy alibis?
An aim is an aim, planned or not—and the wormtongue has its aim. It aims to hypnotize you into a perpetual leaner. Behold the demon on every Disney screen. Behold its spiral. That 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)—to becoming a lifelong parasite, dependent on the help of others. It pulls you to do whatever you can, to stoop even to the lowest lows (spray painting Nazi symbols into your own cars under cover of night, blackening your own eye)—all to legitimize the fiction that you are being kept down by forces from without and thereby the gravy train whose toxicity makes Kool-Aid seem like pomegranate juice. Keeping your persecuted identity intact might just amount to citing as evidence the very social and intellectual deficits bred by the super-citizen coddling. 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.
The wormtongue wants your life circling a phantom oppressor. Break the orbit, not the mirror. Look into the mirror. Look for your agency. Would you like to see yourself scrambling like a pathetic addict to stoke Frankenstein life into a debilitating lie? 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?
Look deep into the mirror and name what you see. You might not have the strength to see it, but there is a word for the luminosity beneath the ghoulish narrative—the luminosity that can shrink but can never die unless you die: “capacity.” If a system profits when you give up, stop paying it. If a narrative fattens when you call yourself powerless, starve it. Take back the right to be excellent—and make that excellence contagious.