Like many people, I have spent the past year trying to avoid an illness. It is an illness from which over 600,000 of my fellow Americans have died. I did everything that was advised, to the great detriment of my emotional health, social wellbeing, and career. So far, I have not contracted the plague.
I have also spent the past three or four years attempting to avoid damnation of a different sort. I have kept my head down. I have used the right words. I have endeavored to play by the ever-changing rules of a game whose winners constitute an ever-narrowing circle. At the beginning, my participation in the social justice movement was genuine. Fervent, even. But I began to notice sinister realities— the attacks on common sense, the surreal hypocrisies, the absolutist intimidations, and the constantly increasing constrictions on free speech.
I had started thinking about going into journalism, but I did not want to assent to this agenda. Neither was I of the right, at least at that time (I would now say I have shifted significantly rightward). I knew that in order to live in a city where most journalistic institutions are located, I would need to make a certain amount of money.
My first years were spent in Meco, New York, an agricultural hamlet of Fulton County. It is an economically depressed area, and consistently votes Republican. My great-grandmother worked in a glove factory and my great-grandfather in a leather tannery. My father was raised in the Pilgrim Holiness Church, a Methodist community that follows the Holy Spirit and performs faith healings. I spent a lot of my childhood wandering through meadows alone, unsupervised, free. In many ways, when I think of it now, this seems like the ideal America, a place where one could live simply, smell the dirt, and worship God.
When I was six my mother got a job at an elite academic institution in New England. We moved. I did not feel out of place at first, but over the years I have come to realize that this was the first of many times I tried to fit into a culture that was not my own and that in fact was antithetical to everything I believed in.
Our new town was only two hours east of Fulton County, but it may as well have been the other side of the moon. The first harbinger of the schism came when, several days after the move, my father brought me with him to run errands. With several large bags of trash and recycling in the trunk of the car, we reached our destination and he stopped to ask an elderly woman, “Excuse me, is this the dump?”
The woman, taken aback and peering over the rim of her glasses, looked aghast. “No, Sir,” she intoned. “This is the landfill.”
I spent the rest of my childhood in that town, and after college I worked in retail for a long time. I had seen the evils of academia— how it is so often about prestige instead of inquiry— and I wanted no part of it. Plus, I like clothes. I like talking to people about them. I like hearing about people’s lives and what they’re looking for. Some have asked why I worked in retail for so long, but there is nothing wrong with working in a store. The only difficult part is that in most cases, it doesn’t pay enough for an adult in a city to live on. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I worked in retail to keep my mind free.
There may be a kind of perverse value in pre-canceling oneself— in ensuring that one can never be hired by one of the social justice-strangled institutions that now populate not only academia and journalism but also big business. It is surely another way of keeping one’s mind free. Over the summer of 2020, articles appeared about young people who chased the virus— who went to Covid parties, hoping to infect themselves and so have done with it. This is an extraordinarily terrible idea, and in fact, some died as a result. But what if cancellation were a virus one could run toward headlong, in order to ensure intellectual immunity forever?
Columbia professor John McWhorter often speaks of the Elect— the awakened group of people that now determines what is socially acceptable and runs our elite institutions. I will never be a part of the Elect, and I no longer want to be. It isn’t worth the salary. If things go south, I’ll go back to Meco and rent a shack. I can no longer envision a future in which I chase career prestige, or even a decent living, by meticulously stepping over landmines of things I’m not supposed to say. The landmines keep moving, and that’s precisely what the Elect want. It’s a pure exercise in power. And to ascend that empty tower, I’d have to hide all my incongruous thoughts, my Christianity and any conservative values I may have, and become a sterilized version of myself. I’d have to conceal all the wildness of my mind. Looking for a job at The New York Times or Vogue now would be like shopping in a safe, clean supermarket, where all they sell is tofu, and knowing that I’d eventually die of anemia. No thanks. I’d rather take my proverbial gun and head out on the frontier in search of red meat.
So screw the “landfill.” I am essentially white trash, and the dump is good enough for me.
