How to lose friends by having fun

No drinks necessary!

Dear L,

Every so often I get a letter on Facebook, and it generally reads like this. “J, I love you, but ever since you became a Republican you’re an ass.”

This just isn’t true. I insist I’ve been an ass my whole life and the main reason these people delete me is because I switched sides. The issue is I’m no longer their ass — and if I continue to make fun of Christians and Republicans and other such “salt-of-the-earth respectables,” now it's mostly liberals on the hit list. This means, inadvertently, that the jokes also involve black people, and trans people, and fat people, and feminists.

Why? Because white liberals talk about minorities like inmates at the psychiatric ward talk about their invisible friends. Dylan Mulvaney is a real woman! There are hunters out there and they’re hunting black people and it’s legal! Donald Trump is literally Hitler and he’s going to throw the Muslims in Auschwitz! That’s nice, Makayla, now it’s time for your meds.

I can’t tell you how many times I cross them a day. One minute I’m kicking back after a long morning reading Montaigne and mowing the lawn and working on my biceps like an adult, and the next second I’m hearing from some escaped lunatic about how good Lizzo looks in a bikini, or how we should get rid of grading because it’s racist, or how black people are just as good as white people even though we have to get rid of grading (!), or about how women would rather share a trail with a bear than a dude, or about how Boeing has the most diverse team of woman engineers ever — and no it’s not their fault the planes are falling apart. It happens every day, all the time, and nobody’s getting hauled off in a straitjacket. And what do these liberals want me to do about it? Believe me, they don’t want grade records or FBI crime stats about race*. They want me to not laugh.

Good luck with that.

People love to throw around stupid ideas about “minorities” and get offended when you call them out on it. And when you make fun of the idea, they pretend you’re making fun of the minority they had the “great idea” about** — an ego trip which proves they can’t even tell the difference between minorities and themselves.

(Note: That’s why minorities stepping "out of line” with the liberal position makes them so mad. They consider minorities to be an extension of their own identity and moral standing, and any contradiction puts them into a state of total crisis. “Why doesn't this black person acknowledge me as his hero?” I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Susan).

Take a look at this meme, as an example. It was the last straw for a friend I’ve had since high school.

This isn’t making fun of Elliot Page at all. It’s making fun of the fact that white liberals don’t have eyeballs. My high school friend wrote, I assume with tears in his eyes,

[J], while I've loved and respected you as a friend over the years, I don't think that I can continue to follow you and your desire to demean those not like yourself any further. I often wonder how you would feel about me as a person should I have been gay instead of a successful man married to a woman, and that’s not a quality that I really want in my friends anymore. Maybe I misread what you mean as a joke, but it tends to be insulting to see the incredibly hurtful and negative things that you've gotten into in the last few years. If I'm misreading the room on this, I am very sorry, but if I'm not, please let me know[.]

The first tendency when you get these letters is to call attention to the actual target of the jokes — usually white liberals. But after years of getting these letters you realize resistance is futile. No matter what you say, any criticism of pro-trans ideas is going to look anti-trans to these people. So I gave up trying to placate him and wrote the following.

Hey [D], I love you and I wish you the best. I'm a little worried that you think I pick my friends because they're married and straight. If those were two qualifications for sharing my company I would be the most boring person in the whole world. And quite frankly my standards would be too low.

My qualifications for friendship are a regard for my well-being, a moderate to high level of intelligence, a fair amount of honesty (but not too much), good manners (hence the slight fudging of honesty), and a solid sense of humor. Above all a friend can’t be boring. Quite frankly your success at business means nothing to me in terms of our friendship. What, are you going to buy me a car? If you fit the above qualifications, I would enjoy your company if you talked like Liberace and you worked self-checkout at Walmart.

Also, I did some thinking about what you said, and over the past ten years or so I've actually softened in regards to "people who are unlike me." I said way more "offensive" things in 2012, many of which I no longer agree with, and the main difference seems to be that back then I was sanctimonious about people I perceived to be backward, and now I'm cracking jokes about them. In other words back then I was having a bad time, and now I’m having a good time. I was also getting zero attention back then, and getting deleted by people I liked. Now my friends are getting a good laugh, and I generally get deleted by people I don’t like. Today your case would be the exception. I’d prefer to keep you.

Who knows where I'll be in ten years? For all I know I could be totally repentant over this year’s behavior. I’m constantly growing. My optimism leads me to hope I’m constantly improving. For this reason of personal change I recommend staying friends but unfollowing me — if I find out you're right, I'll send you a personal email and we can pick up where we left off. But until then, my friend, enjoy your life, congrats on the upcoming kid, and try to laugh as much as you can at people you believe to be crazy: the alternatives are sadness and self-righteous indignation — two things nobody wants for their friends.

A charming letter, I think, but to no avail. I have yet to receive a response, or even a confirmation my letter had been read. The aforementioned traits I look for in a friend — the good manners, the honesty, the warmth, the looking out for your comrade but keeping it lighthearted — were all outweighed by something of greater (and maybe greatest) importance. And that’s whether or not I think Dylan Mulvaney’s biggest fans are funny.

Yours,

-J

P.S. Am I entirely without remorse here? No — I suspect that in making fun of liberals I may be a real jerk. Sometimes I remember that my friends and acquaintances and aunts (poor bastards!) are opening up their Facebook just like me; and whenever they see me skewering a moron in some sense I’m poisoning their minds like the moron poisoned mine. I got a good dose of vitriol, and instead of leaving it be (as I probably should), by taking it head-on I’m spreading it around. And being honest, sometimes my attacks aren’t wholesome, and I end up praying to Jesus for forgiveness.

But then I think otherwise. The garbage liberal mindset, their loves, their hates, their tastes, perversions, causes and half-baked theories are inescapable at this point. Their views pervade not just social media, but “respectable” media too — the movies, the colleges, the music and the newspapers — pretty much every avenue of art available unless you don’t have electricity and you ride a horse to market. Thus I recognize that whether or not I say something, everyone’s going to catch a whiff of it. No — they’re going to have it rammed down their throats.

Thus when I speak up, I’m not bringing anything new to their attention — somebody already microwaved a fish in the breakroom and took a shit in the wastebasket. I’m just having a good laugh at her expense. The fish and the turd are still there, and they reek: I just destroy the haughty pretense that it was a holy and genius idea, and that we ought to respect — no, to appreciate — the stinker for it.

Is this attitude Christian? Is it uplifting, and full of good vibes? No — not entirely. But neither was the American Revolution or the execution of John Wayne Gacy, and the high doses of vitriol still pay well to this day.

Random note: Facebook is a chicken pox party for the mind. You show up and catch whatever disease is going around, and the virus sticks with you forever. But also like a chicken pox party it’s better than getting hit with it unprepared in old age. The party means chicken pox (hopefully) instead of shingles. On Facebook it’s talk (hopefully) before it’s policy.

*Oops! Here’s a chart from the FBI about black-on-white crime! Don’t download it or share it! And don’t think of 13% while looking at it!

**Liberals actually love it when a minority gets caught in the crossfire, because to them minorities are basically human shields, and if you hit them shooting back, you can get in serious trouble. No surprise from the people who champion Hamas.

***Americans have been ridiculous forever. I actually believe most countries are full of dunces, but this is the country I know best, so I know and skewer its particular brand most. I also believe it might be the worst. Probably the best thing ever written about it is H.L. Mencken’s essay On Being An American, the best parts of which I’ve posted below:

Apparently there are those who begin to find [being an American] disagreeable—nay, impossible. Their anguish fills the Liberal weeklies, and every ship that puts out from New York carries a groaning cargo of them, bound for Paris, London, Munich, Rome and way points—anywhere to escape the great curses and atrocities that make life intolerable for them at home. Let me say at once that I find little to cavil at in their basic complaints. In more than one direction, indeed, I probably go a great deal further than even the Young Intellectuals. It is, for example, one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs, reached after an inquiry extending over a score of years and supported by incessant prayer and meditation, that the government of the United States, in both its legislative arm and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting—and from this judgment I except no more than twenty living lawmakers and no more than twenty executioners of their laws. It is a belief no less piously cherished that the administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity—and from this judgment I except no more than thirty judges, including two upon the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is another that the foreign policy of the United States—its habitual manner of dealing with other nations, whether friend or foe—is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable—and from this judgment I consent to no exceptions whatever, either recent or long past. And it is my fourth (and, to avoid too depressing a bill, final) conviction that the American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and that they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day.

So far I go with the fugitive Young Intellectuals—and into the Bad Lands beyond. Such, in brief, are the cardinal articles of my political faith, held passionately since my admission to citizenship and now growing stronger and stronger as I gradually disintegrate into my component carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, calcium, sodium, nitrogen and iron. This is what I believe and preach, in nomine Domini, Amen. Yet I remain on the dock, wrapped in the flag, when the Young Intellectuals set sail. Yet here I stand, unshaken and undespairing, a loyal and devoted Americano, even a chauvinist, paying taxes without complaint, obeying all laws that are physiologically obeyable, accepting all the searching duties and responsibilities of citizenship unprotestingly investing the sparse usufructs of my miserable toil in the obligations of the nation, avoiding all commerce with men sworn to overthrow the government, contributing my mite toward the glory of the national arts and sciences, enriching and embellishing the native language, spurning all lures (and even all invitations) to get out and stay out—here am I, a bachelor of easy means, forty-two years old, unhampered by debts or issue, able to go wherever I please and to stay as long as I please—here am I, contentedly and even smugly basking beneath the Stars and Stripes, a better citizen, I daresay, and certainly a less murmurous and exigent one, than thousands who put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and Anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and believe with the faith of little children that one of Our Boys, taken at random, could dispose in a fair fight of ten Englishmen, twenty Germans, thirty Frogs, forty Wops, fifty Japs, or a hundred Bolsheviki.

Well, then, why am I still here? Why am I so complacent (perhaps even to the point of offensiveness), so free from bile, so little fretting and indignant, so curiously happy? Why did I answer only with a few academic “Hear, Hears” when Henry James, Ezra Pound, Harold Stearns and the emigrés of Greenwich Village issued their successive calls to the corn-fed intelligentsia to flee the shambles, escape to fairer lands, throw off the curse forever? The answer, of course, is to be sought in the nature of happiness, which tempts to metaphysics. But let me keep upon the ground. To me, at least (and I can only follow my own nose) happiness presents itself in an aspect that is tripartite. To be happy (reducing the thing to its elementals) I must be:

a. Well-fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion.

b. Full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of my fellow-men.

c. Delicately and unceasingly amused according to my taste.

It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country on the face of the earth wherein a man roughly constituted as I am—a man of my general weaknesses, vanities, appetites, prejudices, and aversions—can be so happy, or even one-half so happy, as he can be in these free and independent states. Going further, I lay down the proposition that it is a sheer physical impossibility for such a man to live in These States and not be happy—that it is as impossible to him as it would be to a schoolboy to weep over the burning down of his school-house. If he says that he isn’t happy here, then he either lies or is insane. Here the business of getting a living, particularly since the war brought the loot of all Europe to the national strong-box, is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forhanded man who fails at it must actually make, deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of æsthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.