Bully! or Mykel Board's Post MRR Column no. 34

Mykel's

Post MRR Column no 34

“A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.” --Criss Jami

Bully

by Mykel Board

It's 1958. The school yard at Lee Avenue Elementary School... in Hicksville. I'm off in a corner, as usual... trying to avoid being dragged into some sport, like baseball (I like watching, but hate playing)... or football,... (I detest on all counts).

Harvey McConnell... who, in my 8-year old mind is Harvey O'Jerk... has cornered me in the playground. Harvey probably isn't very tall, but he looks tall to me... tall and wide as a house... with a blond crewcut and the kind of square face only the goyim have.

“Okay, you little faggot,” he says.

I have no idea what faggot means, except that it's not something nice.

“Your mommy gives you money for lunch,” he continues. “I watch you sometimes. You hardly eat anything... just suck up that milk and have a slice of bologna... I eat lunch. I need your lunch money. You don't.”

“Fuck you! If you want it, you're gonna have to take it from me,” I don't say.

Instead, I reach into my pocket and pull out three crumpled dollar bills. I hold them out to Harvey. He laughs, takes them from my hand, turns around and heads toward the guys playing baseball.

FLASH TO NOW: I sit here at the Toshiba thinking about bullying and how fashionable it is to complain about it. In liberal circles, The only way you can establish street cred is to talk about being bullied. You're nobody unless you've been bullied. The more, the better.

If you played football in school... you're a loser. If you had kind parents, were never bothered by your classmates, had a smooth childhood... you're an unfeeling robot who can never understand what it's like. It makes no difference what IT is... you can still never understand it.

So me and my flip-fone and my barely-this-century computer with my MS-DOS database, need to establish ourselves before I continue with my story. I did. Okay? Do I have my cred?

Yeah, I want to talk about bullying? It's all the rage and people are right to be concerned... but not in the way you think.

Let's review:

I've written about the verbal war I have with the lefty no free speech to those who would deny it to others people. They believe it's not censorship if the government isn't the censor. As if getting fired for saying something is less damaging in America than getting fined for the same thing. Can you say Imus and Curt Schilling? That's not censorship... that's the market place, they say.

On the right, people say it's not censorship, if iTunes, Amazon and Walmart-- the only source for music for many Americans.... require changes in cover art, or lyrics before they sell something... as if that's less intimidating than a visit from the Sheriff of Mayville.

Lately, I've been in facebook debates with progressives^® who say that slavery is where people are forced to work and the benefits of that work go to someone else. Yet these same progressives^® think some good ole boy Southern landowner with a whip is more of a slave master than hunger... that Southern Negroes were slaves because they had to work to live... but modern McDonald's workers are NOT slaves, even though if THEY don't work, they die. Raise your hand if you hate your job! If you work only because you need to have food and shelter, tell me you're not a slave.

It occurs to me that slavery is the ultimate bullying. Legal, as well as physical threats. You work or you're whipped. Or maybe I'll whip you for the hell of it. All depends on whose history of slavery you read... or believe. But bullying didn't end with slavery. Even slavery didn't end with slavery.

When I was robbed in that playground... my lunch money ripped from my hands back in 1958, of course, that was bullying. These days people worry about more. We hear about microaggression (aka microbullying). A snicker, an elbow nudge, a raised eyebrow. In New York... according to a recent law... the use of a wrong gender pronoun is bullying. Bullying is something white hets do that makes others feel uncomfortable. Anything they do.

FLASH TO MIAMI: I'm with my friends in Wynwood... a fashionable part of Miami, gentrified through graffiti. Instead of building ugly new buildings and keeping them

pristine through jail for artists (like Guiliani did in NY) or with graffiti-rejecting paint (like in San Francisco)... Wynwood has embraced graffiti artists, turned 'em loose, turned the town into a sea of color... a river of big eyes, sexy ladies and sexy men... funny aliens... slogans... a feast for the eyes. It's a joy to be here.

The only problem is parking. Richard is driving. He's a Cuban-American pal who knows Miami better than I do.

He drives around the block... another block... back to the first. We're trying to get to Wynwood Brewery, fine makers of one of my favorite American Porters.

Ah here's a parking space... Richard slides in.

I know the tricks. They charge for parking, sometimes hide the meters. You gotta go to a machine someplace, get a receipt, put it in the window. The city makes a ton of cash by towing cars whose owners thought they got free parking. Richard pulls out his smart phone. 

“Who're you gonna call?” I ask. “Can't it wait? Let's get some beer!”

“Mykel,” he says. “I gotta pay for parking.”

“I got quarters,” I tell him.

“Mykel, Mykel, Mykel,” he says, shaking his head like a parent wiping the face of a chocolate-guzzling toddler. “You can only pay by phone. You need to download the app, register a credit card, then put in your location and pay.”

Richard points overhead. I look up. A sign: To pay for parking, please use PARKPAY. If you don't have the app, download it to your smartphone at parkpay.com.

What if you don't have a smartphone, motherfucker? This is bullying! I can't park here if I don't own a smartphone. I'm being bullied into buying something I don't want. How much longer before I won't be able to get into a movie theater... or board an airplane without a smartphone?

This extortion... several hundred dollars if you include the contracts, the accessories and the other shit... is worse than any innocent white guy calling his wimpy classmate “a faggot.” It's certainly more expensive.

“What?” I say. “The city bullies you into having a credit card, a smartphone, and downloading an app that knows where you are every second?”

“BINGO!” he says.

“I have no smartphone,” I say. “Does that mean I can't park in Miami?”

He nods, pointing his finger at me in a YOU GOT IT gesture.

BINGO! is right.

THAT is the kind of bullying people should be complaining about. I got over my lunch-money theft decades ago, but technological bullying never ends.

Is this the first time?

You bet your walkman it's not. You're too young to remember when we were bullied into buying CD players because companies stopped making vinyl... or into buying DVD players because of the end of videotape.

The bullying never ends.

FLASH TO THE SCHOOL I TEACH IN: It's my first class of the day. I stumble through a hangover haze from last night at BAR BACON.

My brain feels like it's trying to escape my skull. My stomach is so churned it doesn't know which end is up... and doesn't care as long as it can spill something. I can feel my eyebags dragging on the floor. Kiko, the receptionist, squints as I enter.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “Your first class was canceled.”

“What???”I say, trying to both speak and hold down the vomit at the same time.

“I sent you an email,” she says.

I should be glued to my email ... my computer, my smartphone, my brain-implanted chip? I should check my email, or respond or be ON 24 hours with a PING if something new comes to gmail or if someone LIKES my vasectomy photo on facebook.

I'm being bullied into NOT using email as a convenience... sent, like a letter, when I'm able to... responding in time. They're making me a slave to email.

Other people say DON'T SEND EMAIL AT NIGHT, don't text me after 10. Why? Because they don't shut off their smartphones! They're already slaves... slaves to the technology. On the plantation, THOSE slaves could sleep at night. They could stop and eat, the slavemaster had to keep them in good shape... they were expensive. They had plenty of time to sleep to get ready for the next day of cotton picking.

Slaves of today are as disposable as videotape players. Use it up, hire a new one... there are more where they came from. Today's slaves are on call 24 hours. They don't have to be cared for. Waddaya mean you want to sleep? I sent you an email.

This is the bullying you need to worry about. You'll get over your boss frowning when you say my partner. You'll get over someone complementing your ass when you walk up Fourth Avenue. You'll get over someone using the “wrong” pronoun when you ask directions.

But you WON'T get over technological bullying. You won't get over being forced to BUY BUY BUY and then throw out what you just bought. You'll get over having your lunch money stolen on the playground. You won't get over the extortion from Apple, Amazon, facebook, Microsoft or Google.

Don't talk to me about how my “privilege” (penis, roundish eyes, easily-sunburned skin) protects me from being bullied. Bullying is the name of the game, and if you live in the modern world... you have to play the game.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me by email at god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available by subscribing to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

-->Who needs Trump dept: The Pew Research Center reports that more Mexicans are leaving the US than entering.

Says the report: From 2009 to 2014, 1 million Mexicans and their families (including U.S.-born children) left the U.S. for Mexico. This according to data from the 2014 Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (ENADID). U.S. census data for the same period show an estimated 870,000 Mexicans left Mexico to come to the U.S., a couple hundred thousand fewer than went the other way.

-->Special Congrats Dept: My very long-time friend, performance artist, and half of my blog proof-reading staff, has finally graduated from Columbia College in Chicago. I was there, and Sid's fish-hat/mortarboard was the hit of the show! Sid Yiddish, (who it's looking more and more like I'll be voting for for president) got his Masters in Interdisciplinary Art... while the bachelors looked on. Omedeto, Sid!

-->Right again dept: I'm often wrong in my predictions. Can you say, “America will never have a colored president?” So when something comes out right, it brings an ear-wiggling smile to my face.

Several months ago I wrote a piece about the left's tendency not to binge and purge, but to purge and purge. All lefties better get used to watching their backs, because being a lefty requires a tattoo of a target there.

Now I hear that Gilman Street, the totalitarian club started by Tim Yohannon at Maximum Rock'n'Roll (bands have to submit their lyrics for approval before they can play there), is the victim of a boycott.

The boycott organizers didn't like that some bands were offensive. This is PUNK ROCK! It's SUPPOSED to be offensive. But these humorless overlords don't get it.
I'm glad to be right this time.

-->Speaking of Bar Bacon dept:

I had a great Drink Club a Bar Bacon. Great crowd and great irony that there were two Jews and two Muslims (among others) together in a Bacon Bar.

     One of the Muslims was the great Joe Kidd. In case you don't know, Joe Kidd is the Malaysian Luk Haas. Mr. Punk Encyclopedia, Joe is the hero of everyone in Asia. He's written about them all. He's lived on more islands than I have, and taken the obscure and let everybody know about it. He writes (used to write? I don't keep up with the purges anymore) the Malaysian scene reports in MRR. You can contact him on facebook... and you should.

---->Your cheatin' heart dept: A Spanish mattress maker called "Smartress" has invented a mattress that "detects rhythmic patterns."

Any... er... extra curricular rhythmic activity will be reported by smartphone. In order to avoid "false positives," the mattress also reports the number of people on the mattress at the time of the rhythm.

Yet another reason to keep smartphones out of the hands of spouses, lovers, and other jealous people.

--> Keeping the Pressure on Dept: I want to thank reader George Metesky for suggesting a continuing Bring Back Mykel effort directed at Maximum Rock'n'Roll for censoring me.

As their revolving editrixes move on to commercial ventures, each blames her predecessors for my demise... as if they had no control over the business... and couldn't simply invite me back.

Send your comments to mrr@maximumrocknroll.com (or post on their facebook page) with the subject line: BRING BACK MYKEL! Let me know how they answer.

-end-

Privilege and Stripping or Mykel Board's Post MRR Column no. 33

Mykel's

Post MRR Column no 33

America has Race Fever. It's not an actual race war, but a sort of racial Cold War. A grinding war of nerves. And it's impossible to escape. A race war would be anticlimactic at this point... Let's cool down just a tad. We don't need MORE sensitivity. If we got any more sensitive, we'd all break out in a rash. --Jim Goad (copped from another of my columns)

Privilege and Stripping

or

Stripping the Privilege

by Mykel Board

Part 1: Privilege

It's the circus... an arena for kids and adults to be amazed by some performances... amused by others.

A small car comes from the tent-wing and drives toward the center. Smaller than a smart car, it's somewhere between a kiddie pedal car and a remote controlled drone car. The door opens... out comes a man... tall... a red fringe of hair around a bald head... face and head painted white. Then comes another... bright colored clothes... big shoes. Then another... and another... all faces painted white. So many people from such a small space. How do they do it?

One of the men whacks the other on the ass. It's a slap stick... makes a loud sound and the kids laugh. A mother next to me talks about the slapper.

“What a clown!” she says, casually as scratching her ass.

I cringe.

I think of the make-up... the caricatures... faces painted white in a parody of European-Americans. Whiteface... people playing the fool... the victims of violence from a slapboard to a rug pulled out from underfoot.

Happy clowns, mean clowns, evil clowns, every cliché of the dumb, malicious, whiteguy book...there... accepted by the world.

In never ending parades of whitefolk clichés, clowns tell the world that European-Americans aren't like other people. They're either scary or funny-- evil or stupid-- but not like the rest.

Google “white guys” and you'll see Donald Trump in an open-mouthed harangue... or Clint Eastwood... with a gun.

Watch any TV program... cop show... major movie. Unless it's a Jackie Chan film, most of the dead guys will be white. White lives don't matter. They're as disposable as tissue paper: bleached white to show that you should throw it away.

Half of the murder victims in the US are European-Americans. We don't hear about that.

What do we hear?

Flash to a blond girl... long Prell hair, blue sweater tied loosely around her neck.. She looks directly in the camera. “Fresh is a walk through the woods on an early spring morning.” Cut to a more housewifey lady in a white gossamer gown. Her skin just this side of pink. “Fresh is a gentle breeze, that takes you by surprise.”

 

And what exactly is so fresh? Their twats! They're pushing SUMMER'S EVE, “feminine deodorant” now available in “doctor recommended vinegar and water.”

After five minutes of Walking Dead or some other show I'll never see, comes commercial two:

Cut to an elevator. A young guy-- whiter than Justin Bieber-- shares an elevator with an older crewcut European-American... the latter very boss looking.

“Sam,” says the boss, “glad you got the memo.”

Sam looks at his phone. Sees MEETING CHANGED TO 8AM... in red... on the screen. He puts his briefcase on the elevator ledge, opens it, pulls out the Gillette Deodorant, runs it under his shirt... no sweat!

What do these commercials tell the world? WHITE PEOPLE STINK.

Google PRUDE and you have to scroll down mighty far before you see the first person who isn't white. Clowns, prudes, nerds... these are the images that the world has of white people. These are the images in the brains of people who look at you as you shop for cereal or scratch your balls on the street. Those are the glasses coloring the vision of everyone you meet... or don't meet because they're afraid of you... or you disgust them... because of your race.

What's written in history books? What do we see? WHITE Vikings slicing through the bodies of their helpless victims. Invading flotillas of WHITE people, conquering the peaceful Redman in America. European-American pilots dropping atomic bombs on helpless Asians.

Check out mass murderers for entry after entry of white people. Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, The Columbine Killers. Their white faces are splashed across every paper in America. Think: Who are the killers? Answer: WHITE PEOPLE.

When the world thinks of BLACK, they think NELSON MANDELA, MUHAMMAD ALI, or HILLARY CLINTON. Who do you think has an easier time entering the Knicks' lockerroom, Jesse Jackson or Noam Chomsky? It's BLACK-PRIVILEGE.

The prude-clown-murderer... that's what the world thinks of EUROPEAN-AMERICANS. Selective history, stereotypes, non-stop bombardment with disparaging images... this has got to stop! I have a plan.

Put it in a museum. A single place... a monument to European-American stereotypes and cliches. The Betty Boops, the Bozo the Clowns, the John Wayne Gacys, the Elmer Gantrys. The statues of naked whiteboys with granite preserved genitalia. White boys as nutty professors and white boys nailed to a cross. WHITE HINDRANCE. Most European-Americans don't even know they've got it.

When people ask why European-Americans need their own safe spaces... point to that museum.

When they ask why white people can't associate with everyone else... or act in a human way... point to that museum. When people call that white kid THE CLASS CLOWN or say HE GOT AWAY WITH MURDER, it's time to call them out... to bring 'em to that museum.

Part 2 Stripping:

BOOM chaka BOOM chaka BOOM BOOM. The speakers blast at the usual levels. An inch and a half from my nose is a coffee colored ass. I can see every pimple... every spot of rippled flesh... every raised bump, looking like an unpeeled orange at nose level. Here in Miami, it's all the way. No pasties, no bikini bottoms, you got it all... the whole kit... the whole caboodle. I reach forward to put a bill on that little shelf where the beautiful brown buttocks wiggling in front of me attaches itself to her body.

I pucker my lips and place a smackeroo on the right cheek. Her face turns to me. She smiles. I put another dollar up there as I kiss the other cheek. She turns around, showing me her shaved taco... looking tight as a Florida parking space.

I look up at her. Her perfectly styled hair, curled to flow just past her shoulders. I look at her face... her smile. I look into her eyes... I see it... a negative it... something missing. Her smile is there, but something about those eyes. Like I'm a vampire looking into a mirror. No refection....blank... like the light behind those eyes dimmed... flickered... went out.

Something is dead in there. Something that her life... this display... this parody of love... has hurt. Every night... how many different lips on those ass cheeks. How many rides on how many laps? How much has what should be so close, become so mundane... so ordinary? Going beyond sadness... this enters the realm of something closer to death... to murder.

I feel my body begin to drip with sweat. I look around the room at the sad old men... the just post teens... the jocks out for a night of beer... at whose expense? This girl... looking at me...smiling... dead smiling.

What a load of bullshit! From the red I to the red g in smiling. What I wrote above is what feminists and Christians want to hear. And it's a lie.

I love strippers. I know strippers. I know the NYU students who would rather strip than waitress tables for a bunch of hipsters. I know the Thai strippers who would rather shoot an egg out of their twat than serve one au benedict to some farang tourist lady with no chin.

Human trafficking? You want human trafficking? Check the nail salons. That's where you'll find it. Check the maids, the au pairs, the people catering to the rich. More strippers like their jobs than do Walmart associates.... MANY more.

The only reason liberals and Christians get on their high horses about strippers (or prostitutes, for that matter), is SEX. Get it? Sex is bad! MEN are bad. These girls service men with sex... no one would do that willingly, right? It MUST be human trafficking.

Yeah, right.

No matter who has control, the PRUDES win. Liberal or conservative, the prudes, yeah the WHITE prudes, win.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me by email at god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available by subscribing to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

→Thanks dept: I want to thank my pal Tony “Anonymous Boy” Arena for telling me about the Jim Crow Museum that inspired the White Cliché Museum I wrote about in this blog. Tony also told me that Betty Boop was originally black! Hollywood whitened her up to make her more acceptable to the general population. It doesn't change anything in what I wrote, but it is an interesting bit of history.

-->Deep in the Heart Dept pt 1: California Republican Shannon Grove said that the first rain after a Texas drought was God thanking the legislature for the passage of a strict anti-abortion bill. Grove talks about the night of the passage:

“It rained that night,” she said. “God's hand is in the affairs of man.”

-->Deep in the Heart Dept pt 2: Texas police forced 7 and 8 year old sisters to shut down their lemonade stand because they didn't have a permit. They reportedly were raising money to buy a Father's Day gift, but the police said they needed to apply for a permit “because of bacteria that can grow in lemonade.”

--> Deep in the Heart Dept pt 3: Rick Allgeyer was the Director of research in the Texas Health and Human Services Commission. He co-authored an article for the New England Journal of Medicine on how state cuts to Planned Parenthood have reduced the ability of women to get health care.

        He was fired when the article appeared.

-->Nice new suit dept: Chicago cop Robert Rialmo murdered a 19 year old colored guy who had no weapon. He also killed a neighbor "by accident." Now the cop is... get this... suing the estate of the kid he killed for 10 million dollars. Why? He suffered "extreme emotional trauma" because of the deaths and he blames the kid for "forcing him to shoot."

--->Where exactly are you putting that pen dept: The BIC company has announced a new line of pens called "For Her." They come in pastel colors and are thinner than normal bic pens. They're also about 70% more expensive. Predictably, reaction has been cynical.

-->Going to your head dept: Massachusetts' law prohibits wearing hats or head covering in driver's license pictures unless, "they're worn for religious purposes."

So Lindsay Miller shows up wearing a pasta strainer on her head and demands a picture. Why? She's a PASTAFARIAN. After a threat of a court case, the Massachusetts DMV relented and she got her picture.

The actual name of the sect is "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster."

Wait for MY picture with a nylon stocking over my head. "Robin Hood Church of Bank Robbery."

Got any other ideas?

--> Keeping the Pressure on Dept: I want to thank reader George Metesky for suggesting a continuing Bring Back Mykel effort directed at Maximum Rock'n'Roll for censoring me.

As their revolving editrixes move on to commercial ventures, each blames her predecessors for my demise... as if they had no control over the business... and couldn't simply invite me back.

Send your comments to mrr@maximumrocknroll.com (or post on their facebook page) with the subject line: BRING BACK MYKEL! Let me know how they answer.

-end-