If It's Gray and Gay That's Me
I'm black and straight that's panther
Continually perplexed at people’s ubiquitous + irresistible reflex to aggressively respond with some variation of ‘it’s ALWAYS been that way!’ to negative aesthetic observation. Why are you angry I don’t like muted netflix dfilm color palettes?
Really can’t track the specific conditioning that would generate personal offense to the notion of taste but very consistently manifested. Intuitively know part is [criticize present = romanticize past = reactionary = bad] and part class acceptance demands holding explicitly incoherent and immediately irrational views, an initiation producing a concrete (though incredibly irate) acquiescent loyalty with the educated, the current, the modern, the accepted, the experts, the valid source, the decidedly unquirked whiteboy: chest; concave and something as innocuous as criticism of modern media, even outside any political context, is somehow translated internally as countersignaling this vibe: that they are.
If It’s Gray and Gay That’s Me.
A bizarre personal identification with the times in isolation of its content, a radicalized one I think unique to our era.
“Nothing has ever been better and nothing has ever been different, though it’s been worse, in fact if it ‘has’ it’s worst, and any ‘is’ that’s bad ‘has’ been so eternal, but actually it is good, sorry rather what was good is bad, and it always has been.” (Daenerys Leibowitz, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Identity” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34 (2022): 89–97.)
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