…a fantasy of Anglo-Saxon righteousness, redolent of Rudyard Kipling [the "white man's burden"] and The Marquess of Queensberry. The old imperial myth undergirding that fantasy — the belief that a program of plunder and subjugation was, in spite of everything, a noble crusade…
Whiteness was the glue that held the package together…
A while ago I posted ten installments of an aborted novel which I titled "Communion." With my relieved endorsement, the person who commissioned me to write the story took over the writing and has continued to this day. He wanted, and has turned the story into exactly, what the New York Times reporter wrote above about Carlson's text. My commissioner calls to read me installments as he writes them and asks what I think. I am politely honest.
I have posted here occasionally how happy I am. I have not posted any of that in four months. My commissioner's writing has disturbed my quietude in exactly the same way that Carlson's text disturbs the Times reporter. Both of us have learned things about the authors of the texts that we did not fully grasp previously. We both knew enough to connect the dots. It was willful blindness on both of our parts. My commissioner's writing is full of "Anglo-Saxon righteousness", of Christian righteousness. (My commissioner identifies first as a Christian.) "We did a lot of good in Vietnam", he has said to me a couple of times. I let it pass. Out of politeness at the expense of honesty. My commissioner has written "a fantasy", one that is ahistorical and anti-historical--"There aren't going to be any bullets", he said to me more than once. A very few times my exasperated nausea at what he has written has bubbled up in conversation. "This is our story," he said to me once. "Leave me out of this! I will deny that I had anything to do with this!", I said jocularly and seriously. I specifically told him that his story was imperialistic and about the white man's burden. His kidnappings are "rescues." A white man double the age of a non-white, under-privileged, underage girl who fall in love and marry and have sex and who move to the West--all of that is not predatory,--"I don't think anybody would take it that way."--it is a beautiful love story. His story is one of doing self-disinterested good, of bringing "Peace, Prosperity, Health and Education" to those who need the white man's aid, even if they don't know that they do and even when they understand the aid offered, do not want it. "It's for their good, they just don't realize it." It has been disturbing and I have not been the happiest person on the face of the earth in four months.
