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Page added on November 2, 2015
Kunstler: Good Little Maoists
Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.
America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.
There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.
At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive history of this unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is, higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive across American life these days. But in promoting the official suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to civilized life.
I had my own brush with this evil empire last week when I gave a talk at Boston College, a general briefing on the progress of long emergency. The audience was sparse. It was pouring rain. The World Series was on TV. People are not so interested in these issues since the Federal Reserve saved the world with free money, and what I had to say did not include anything on race, gender, and white privilege.
However, after the talk, I went out for dinner with four faculty members and one friend-of-faculty. Three of them were English profs. One was an urban planner and one was an ecology prof. All of the English profs were specialists in race, gender, and privilege. Imagine that. You’d think that the college was a little overloaded there, but it speaks for the current academic obsessive-compulsive neurosis with these matters. Anyway, on the way to restaurant I was chatting in the car with one of the English profs about a particular angle on race, since this was his focus and he tended to view things through that lens. The discussion continued at the dinner table and this is what ensued on the Internet (an email to me the next morning):
On Oct 29, 2015, at 4:37 PM, Rhonda Frederick <rhonda.frederick@bc.edu> wrote:
This is what I posted on my social medias, am sharing with you and your agent.
Yesterday, novelist/journalist James Howard Kunstler was invited to give a talk at BC (see his bio at http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/calendar.html#1028).
At the post-talk dinner, he said “the great problem facing African Americans is that they aren’t taught proper English, and that … academics are too preoccupied with privilege and political correctness to admit this obvious fact.” No black people (I presume he used “African American” when he meant “black”) were present at the dinner. I was not at the dinner, but two of my friends/colleagues were; I trust their recollections implicitly. Whether Kunstler was using stereotypes about black people to be provocative, or whether he believed the ignorance he spouted, my response is the same: I cannot allow this kind of ignorance into my space and I am not the one to cast what he said as a “teachable moment.” I do think there should be a BC response to this, as the university paid his honorarium and for his meal. Here’s some contact information for anyone interested in sharing your thoughts on how BC should spend its money:
Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College (http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/about.html)
+++++++++++++++++
Rhonda—
That is not quite what I said.
I said that teaching black Americans how to speak English correctly ought to be the most important mission of primary and secondary education for blacks in order for them to function successfully in our economy. Moreover, I said that anyone mounting an argument against this was hurting the very people they pretend to help.
I stand by those statements.
Your attempt at Stalinist thought policing is emblematic of something terribly wrong in higher education, especially since you were not present.
Jim
James Howard Kunstler
“It’s All Good”
So I was subjected to attempted character assassination via social media by this Rhonda Frederick person — faculty or student, she did not say — who admits to not having been present at the incident in question. This is the new fashion in academia: slander by Twitter and Facebook. It is fully supported by the faculty and administration. While they have been super-busy constructing speech codes and sex protocols, it seems they haven’t had any time for establishing ethical norms in the use of the Internet. As it happened, I offered to come back and publically debate my statements about the benefits of teaching spoken English to black primary and secondary students — they’d have to pay me, of course — but received no reply on that from Rhonda Frederick. I also received no reply from James Smith (smithbt@bc.edu), director of the Lowell Lecture Series, when I emailed my objection to being vilified on the Web by his colleague.
Now, as to the substance of what I said to this table of college professors. I’ve written before in books and blogs about the issue of spoken English and the black underclass, but for the record I will try to summarize some of my thoughts about it (trigger warning).
True, there are various dialects of English among us, but it must be obvious that they have different merits and disadvantages. There is such a thing as standard grammatical English. It evolves over generations, for sure, but it shows a certain conservative stability, like the rule of law. It tends to be spoken by educated people and by people in authority. This implies people in power, of course, people who run things, but also people at large in the professions (medicine, engineering, etc.) and the arenas of business and government. Standard grammatical English tends to be higher status because competence in it tends to confer the benefits of higher living standards.
It also must be self-evident that there is such a thing as a black English dialect in America. With perhaps a few lingering regional differences, it is remarkably uniform from Miami, Florida, to Rochester, New York, to Fresno, California. It prevails among the so-called black underclass, the cohort that continues to struggle economically. Despite its verve and inventiveness, this black dialect tends to confer low status and lower standards of living on those who speak it. In popular mythology and culture, it is associated with violent criminality and other anti-social behaviors. If you don’t believe this, turn on HBO sometime.
I argue that black people who seek to succeed socially and economically would benefit from learning to speak standard grammatical English, not solely because it is associated with higher status and living standards, but because proficiency with grammar, tenses, and a rich vocabulary helps people think better. After all, if you employ only the present tense in all your doings and dealings, how would you truly understand the difference between now, tomorrow, and yesterday? I submit that it becomes problematical. You may not be able to show up on time, among other things.
Some of my auditors have argued that “code switching” allows black Americans to easily turn back and forth for convenience between two modes of speech, black and “white” (i.e standard grammatical English). I’d argue that this is not as common as it is made out to be. Not everybody has the skill of entertainer Dave Chapelle, a master amateur linguist (whose parents were both college professors).
It’s my opinion that American primary and secondary education does not put enough emphasis on teaching standard spoken English to those deficient in it. The pedagogues have been hectored and browbeaten by the hierophants in higher ed not to press the matter. It is not regarded as important (probably because the task seems too painful and embarrassing and may hurt some feelings). The results are plain to see: academic failure among black Americans. (Not total but broad.) Instead, we concoct endless excuses to explain this failure and the related economic failures, the favorite by far being “structural racism” (despite having elected a black president who speaks standard grammatical English).
Now to the touchier question as to why this is. After all, other ethnic groups in America are eager to fully participate in the national life. For example, I gave a talk to a large honors freshman class at Rutgers University a year ago. Due to the current demographics of New Jersey, the class was overwhelming composed of Indian (Asian, that is) youngsters, many of them as dark-skinned as Americans of African ancestry. They had uniformly opted to speak standard grammatical English. They were all succeeding academically (it was an honors class, after all). They were on a trajectory to succeed in adult life. What does this suggest? To me it says that maybe some behavioral choices are better than others and the color of your skin is not the primary determinant in the matter.
Here’s what I think has happened to get us where we are today (second trigger warning). I think the civil rights victories of the mid 1960s generated enormous anxiety among black Americans, who were thereby invited to participate more fully in the national life after many generations of hardship and abuse. (If you argue that this was not the sum, substance, and intention of the Voting Rights Act and Public Accommodations Act of 1964-65, then you are being disingenuous.) However, they were not comfortable with the prospect of assimilating into the mainstream culture of the day. They either didn’t believe in it, or feared it, or despised it, or worried about being able to perform in it.
Many would attribute this anxiety to the legacy of slavery. Can a people get over a particular historical injury? American blacks are not the only group traumatized by circumstance. When do you decide to move forward? Or do you nurse a grievance forever? Anyway, it was not a coincidence that in the mid 1960s a new wave of black separatist avatars arose around the time of the civil rights legislative victories. Malcolm X, Stokely Charmichael, the Black Panthers, to name a few. That was the moment when much of the black population slid into what has become essentially an oppositional culture, determined to remain separate. Language is part of that picture.
The diversity cult of the day is a smokescreen to disguise this fundamental fact of American life: much of black America has simply opted out. They don’t want to assimilate into a common culture — so common culture has been deemed dispensable by the confounded keepers of the common culture’s flame, the university faculty. Much of black America doesn’t want to play along with the speech, manners, rules, or laws of whatever remains of that common culture after its systematic disassembly by the professors, the deans, and their handmaidens in progressive politics — heedless of the damage to the basic social contract. We remain very much a house divided, as Lincoln put it, and he could see clearly what the consequences would be.
Is it racist to try to air these abiding quandaries in the public arena? Apparently so. And why is that? Because of the awful embarrassment of political progressives over the disappointing outcome of the civil rights project. Black news pundits such as Charles Blow of The New York Times constantly call for “an honest conversation about race,” but they don’t mean it. Any public intellectual who ventures to start that conversation is automatically branded a racist. Hey, I couldn’t even have a conversation at a private dinner on the merits of speaking standard English with three college professors whose life-work centers on race. They had a melt-down and used a proxy (who wasn’t even there) to slander me on the Internet.
They are cowards and I am their enemy.
33 Comments on "Kunstler: Good Little Maoists"
Plantagenet on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 3:37 pm
No doubt many leftists will get their knickers in a twist over Kunstler standing up to the PC thought police, but I applaud his courage in speaking up for his own point of view and refusing to be cowed by childish name-calling.
Cheers!
apneaman on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:07 pm
Fuck you planty, you play the PC card every time it’s convenient (which is a lot), but not over in the forum where for some reason you let your guard down and your conservatardness comes pouring out. Did you think no one would notice? You feel safer there? BTW queen of reading comprehension, Khunstler is not talking about “childish name calling” in the least bit. It’s something altogether different – something dangerous. Fuck are you ever thick.
Not A Liberal on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:25 pm
What you see at the end of any empire is focusing on the trivial instead of the essential. America is no exception. It is exactly why nations like China are doing so well, they care about actual mathematical and scientific learning. Silly Westerners sitting in the lap of luxury bitching is like a king bitching about peasants. It’s ludicrous to everyone except themselves, i.e. liberals.
What Kuntsler and most fail to realize is that people make up nations. Nations with Africans being the majority tend to be failures whereas nations with Japanese majority tend to be successful. Of course everything is “racist”, you’re dealing with pimps, status-whoring by trying to call everyone a “racist” and virtue signaling. They are delusional fuckheads that should be ignored. That’s why I ignore them 98% of the time because fuck them.
If they spent half as much time as they did bitching in the last 50 years into solving issues like Peak Oil then it would probably be solved by now.
Pennsyguy on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:33 pm
I wish that academic bullies were our biggest problem. This from a guy who spent over 34 years at a college and often had his lunch money taken by both lit. and theater arts professors.
bs on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:33 pm
I live in Hawaii. Pidgeon has developed from the various languages spoken here. When I first meet a local (dark skinned), they speak standard english. When speaking to each other, they speak pidgeon (I understand if they speak slowly).
This is also my experience speaking to blacks on the mainland. Unless they come from the hood, they are capable of standard english. But I suppose they want their own identity.
The only place I have lived where blacks get a decent shot at a decent job is Chicago. Standard english is spoken at work. So James has a point.
idontknowmyself on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:44 pm
In western countries total obedience is demanded from the white male because he is the main oppressor of everything and everyone. Free speech is now heavily punished and the following narrative should not be questioned.
First Feminism narrative. Women were oppressed by man in the past (especially by white man) and this is why it is totally acceptable to fuck over a man in divorce and alimony court. It is also totally acceptable to make false rape accusation on any man.
Race narrative. White man is really violent and the cause of all world problems. White man should be a shame of being white and should work hard at fixing his past by giving free shit to women and minorities.
Emotional narrative. White man is seen as emotionally insensitive. It is a white man duty to make another person feel emotionally bad. You can get fire from a job to get a another person feel emotionally bad.
This guy was fired because he made a women emotions bad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKkAL1AEam8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx2A7b50Xog
We also live in a matriarchal form of governance where emotions are everything and not logic don’t matter.
Hello on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:44 pm
>>> It’s my opinion that American primary and secondary education does not put enough emphasis on teaching standard spoken English to those deficient in it
Why teach English to apes? It makes no sense.
Davy on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:44 pm
“That is why China is doing so well”. Not liberal, please explain how China is doing so well? I see nothing but decay and ecological destruction. Please enlighten me.
GregT on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 4:57 pm
“Why teach English to apes? It makes no sense.”
Most likely because it is too difficult for them to learn say Chinese, or Japanese. White people don’t generally have as high an IQ.
idontknowmyself on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 5:17 pm
Race narrative. White man is really violent and the cause of all world problems. White man should be a shame of being white and should work hard at fixing his past by giving free shit to women and minorities.
This narrative is now playing itself in Germany where Germans people have to provide for Arab refugees. German white people are not allow to speak or protect their own people. Germans have to provide for the Arab refugees because we are bad people.because
onlooker on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 5:43 pm
“At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms”. Well said, how typical as the entire American culture has descended into a quagmire of banal trivialities. None more evident then the hot button issues of the past few Presidential elections. Abortion, gun control, gays and of course the unending racial brew. Well guess the epochal and epic problems this country and the world face will just have to wait a little longer. Time for my warm milk and going to sleep as I am yawning already.
Plantagenet on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 5:43 pm
@Apneaman
You are such a dope.
Re-read Kunstler’s article. Its all about the PC speech codes in college today. Your reading comprehension skills must be about zero for you to have not figured that out.
Cheers!
GregT on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 6:16 pm
Are you seriously that dense planter?
Perhaps you might want to make another attempt at reading the article, before you stick your foot even further into your mouth.
onlooker on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 6:20 pm
Wrong Plant, AP is precisely correct. Kunstler is in fact mocking this banal trite that has become University culture and life. Here is this quote in case the one I quoted about the epochal truly important things went over your head. I quote ” But in promoting the official suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to civilized life” He is talking about the demise of higher education and how critical matters confronting this nation are marginalized by the overblown emphasis on personal rights and grievances and even more by a cloud of uniformity and PC that suppresses dissension and novel/original thought. It is just that the majority of his essay is explaining how this actually works.
GregT on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 6:26 pm
You’ve probably just made things even more confusing onlooker.
idontknowmyself on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 6:29 pm
Emotional narrative. White man is seen as emotionally insensitive. It is a white man duty not to make another person feel emotionally bad. You can get fire from a job to get a another person feel emotionally bad.
This guy was fired because he made a women emotions bad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKkAL1AEam8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx2A7b50Xog
South park capture that narrative really well in it latest episode
http://watchseries.lt/episode/south_park_s19_e5.html
HARM on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 6:51 pm
I’m one of Planter’s “leftists” and yet I agree with Kunstler, and my knickers remain puzzlingly un-twisted. How to explain this strange situation?
ghung on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 6:52 pm
https://youtu.be/7KPTASFZ30Y?t=54
makati1 on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 7:14 pm
Divide and conquer…
Whites vs blacks vs Mexicans vs gays vs feminists vs poor vs rich vs Republicans vs Democrats vs Southerners vs gun owners vs greenies vs doomers vs …
America today.
idontknowmyself on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 10:15 pm
Sorry, Social Justice Warriors: Political Correctness Has Peaked
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426452/political-correctness-peaks-social-justice-liberals
I am not sure why I commenting so much on this post.
Sorry, Social Justice Warriors: Political Correctness Has Peaked
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426452/political-correctness-peaks-social-justice-liberals
I dont need to add more to this that I already did
idontknowmyself on Mon, 2nd Nov 2015 10:15 pm
I forget to add this to my post
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uveb8-L3YHY
BillC on Tue, 3rd Nov 2015 7:51 am
Hi Jim,
Sorry to see you caught up in all that liberal bullshit.
Your conservative friend,
Bill
Richard Ralph Roehl on Tue, 3rd Nov 2015 1:06 pm
Over the last twenty years… I have ruefully discovered that some of the most sexist, racist, bigoted and intolerant people in society are leftist control-freak ‘progressives’… imbued with a vicious and meanspirited Stalinist mindset. And I rest my case with feminist sexism, affirmative action racism… and racist/bigoted black KKKlowns promoting ‘ONLY Black Lives Matter’.
theedrich on Tue, 3rd Nov 2015 2:51 pm
Again, Stalinist maggots of academe on parade — this time attacking even Kunstler, a Jew and lifelong member of the Demonic Party. The Revolution consuming its own children. Your tax dollars at work. The entire charade of “education” in the anti-White departments of English and the social “sciences” is seen here in a nutshell. The servile cowardice and insidious treachery of these instructors, who scurry back to their recesses and cravenly give falsified reports to a venomous Negress running “Black Studies” (another façade of collegiate anti-Whitism), clearly betray their carefully camouflaged bloodthirst, so typical of the Left. The tragedy is that these vicarious mass murderers of Whites are shaping the mushy minds of so many of the young.
But then, this ideology of anti-White hate comports perfectly with the slow collapse of the West, where genosuicide is the true psychodynamic of society’s elites.
apneaman on Tue, 3rd Nov 2015 6:53 pm
theedrich, only blind retards think PC is used exclusively by the left. For sometime it has been a tool of all those trying to gain power – anyone who can uses it. Those with the real power could care less. You are so narcissistic that you think all the worlds problems just happen to be caused by your personal pet peeve. Sorry retard, but white people still run the world and they are not ivory tower liberals (they are simply tools useful idiots the same as anti science conservatives). The people who run the world are apolitical and only care about cultural wars insofar as they can use them to divide and rule. Power is all they care about. Your sniveling and moaning is getting so loud that Klan members and white supremacists would be irritated to the point of wanting to curb stomp you just to shut the whining up. The level of your meaningless self important bellyaching, that permeates everyone of your stupid fucking comments, knows no limits. All the shit you go on about is a small matter in the big picture and most of what you think was lost falls under the category of a golden age that never existed.
theedrich on Wed, 4th Nov 2015 3:30 am
Well, apeman, granted you’re frozen in your Hongcouver political correctness, but you and your blatherings are utterly irrelevant. Of course the biggies like Sörös pull the strings, but their anti-White KGB mules are the ones carrying out their orders. You and your hordes of leftists like to ignore that little fact, because you like what the mules are doing. Perhaps you have a guilty conscience because you divorced a White woman so that you could copulate freely with non-Whites (presumably females)?
The only weapon White civilization has left is the truth. That is why your genosuicidal ilk hates it so.
idontknowmyself on Wed, 4th Nov 2015 8:17 pm
In my previous comment I said.
Race narrative. White man is really violent and the cause of all world problems. White man should be a shame of being white and should work hard at fixing his past by giving free shit to women and minorities.
Someone is trying to sell his movie by using this narrative
http://www.breitbart.com/video/2015/11/04/tarantino-police-brutality-is-ultimately-a-problem-of-white-supremacy/
Tarantino: Police Brutality Is ‘Ultimately’ ‘A Problem of White Supremacy’
apneaman on Wed, 4th Nov 2015 10:05 pm
Oh mighty whitey American, theedrich how far you have fallen.
I think what really pisses off the fallen white supremacist pleb American is not that American blacks and latinos have caught up and thus things have equalized. No no no they have equalized because white privilege based solely on the colour of ones skin no longer exists to the enormous degree it once did. Now most of the working class whites are just as impoverished as the masses of poor blacks and latinos – middle class following smartly. To get ahead in this world now, you actually have to have some real skills, discipline and talent, in addition to a personality that can take neo corporate servitude. That’s why most of the talent is imported from Asia. Doctors, engineers, scientists, tech people, etc, etc. White kids have marketing and human resources degrees. A few of them even have jobs. All the “good” manufacturing jobs like grandpa had were exported a generation or two ago. Look who does them now. Raggedy uneducated 3rd world peasants, which should tell you all you need to know about how unskilled and overpaid grandpa really was (lucky). Yet they paid the tax that built the infrastructure that enabled more advantages to the kids and grandkids than at anyother time in history – security, healthcare, food, shelter, education and a shit load of goodies. So who’s fault is it that it was wasted? Thrown away, and all that time and energies spent watching sports, movies and playing video games while getting fat and sick. What more advantages could you have been given? A personal educator come to your house? If the magnificent white race could not make it with every advantage possible, then fuck em. Whining sniveling fuck wads looking for any scapegoat to hang their own failures on. Anything but taking that long overdue look in the mirror and admitting they had every advantage and opportunity and blew it – wasted their time amusing themselves. Whatever the so called white race once was is long gone and the current crop are complete fucking losers for selling out for a few trinkets and baubles. Anyone with any real character does not go blaming those below them in the hierarchy for their troubles. Too cowardly to go after the real culprits – the white masters you bent over for.
theedrich, I wish you a long long life. I hope you get to experience as much as what’s coming as possible. I guess all us whites may soon get to feel what the Indians felt 500 years ago when hordes of unwashed devils starting appearing upon the shores. ROLFLMAO. BTW if you think I am a leftist you are even stupider than you appear.
Dooma on Thu, 5th Nov 2015 12:19 am
There is absolutely no difference between white trash and the way African Americans speak. Just watch COPS and double negatives such as “I wasn’t doing nothing” abound. Plus the US has butchered the English language with words like “color” and so forth.
theedrich on Thu, 5th Nov 2015 1:23 am
Amusing diatribe, apeman. What your type ignores is the simple fact that there is a difference between life and death, existence and non-existence, self-preservation and extinction. All of you anti-Whites revel in the prospect of White mass suicide, with none left over. That is why you concentrate on the low end of the White bell curve and pretend it is the norm for the whole of Caucasia. You glory every time the MSM cherry-picks some seeming offense against some supposedly fragile lower type and floods the wavelengths and print with its propaganda. And you are unable to see that the entire political-correctness war on Whites is little more than cultural camouflage for the massive robbery of White civilization by megathieves. Above all you prefer to ignore the simple fact that the self-destruction of the White race will lead ultimately to the end of all higher civilization, to be followed in a few centuries by the end of higher life on earth.
Rather, you like the Christian idiocy that all humans and human races are equal “in the eyes of God,” and must be not only saved from themselves but given everything Whites have. Whites must never, never defend themselves against annihilation. Well, your country has just elected a joker who believes just as you do. We will see what fun you are about to experience under his reign.
Roman on Thu, 5th Nov 2015 5:17 pm
So… peak oil ??
Roman on Thu, 5th Nov 2015 5:19 pm
Also even if your brain genes suck the Holy Spirit can make you smart. Just think about that.
GregT on Thu, 5th Nov 2015 7:02 pm
“Above all you prefer to ignore the simple fact that the self-destruction of the White race will lead ultimately to the end of all higher civilization, to be followed in a few centuries by the end of higher life on earth.”
The higher civilization that us “whites” have created, is already leading to the end of “higher life on Earth”. Whitey fucked up bad theedrich. Whitey not very smart.