It is taking me a long time to come up with a reply to Traeger.
Normally I would feel guilty about this, but the fact is it takes me a while to think of what I want to say to something important.
And this is even more important: I no longer work on a schedule. I no longer work on obligation.
Since I threw it all up, my blood pressure has dropped twenty points. People want their names remembered. People want diplomacy. People want prompt replies.
I no longer provide any of those things. And my blood pressure is down.
Too much of what I say sounds like a quip when it is deadly serious. For decades when someone asked me, “Is he friend of yours?” I have replied, “I don’t know know. I am a friend of HIS.”
This is not a quip. This is many years of hard experience talking.
Traeger never required any of those things from me for him to remain a friend of mine.
I have always known this about practically everybody else except Traeger: the person who says he’s my friend is always one sentence away from despising me. What is called friendship by most people is a very slippery thing.
I no longer worry about this. Common courtesy comes to me from my upbringing, but pretending to admire nonsense or respecting standards that mean nothing to me is like constantly smiling for the camera. If you are a sociopath, it is easy. If you are an honest man, it wears on you.
If you are a monomaniacally, obsessively honest man like me, it is a burden you must eventually lay down.
Whitakeronline had the world’s deadest list. Through the years I begged readers to put my ideas into newsgroups. A vanishingly small handful sometimes did that. Their time was devoted to Clinton’s immorality, to Iraq, to the front pages. They kept e-mailing me comments from great leaders who were saying again what other writers had said repeately my entire lifetime.
I cannot list the number of Great Crises like Clinton and Iraq that I have had to listen to people obsess about through the weary decades. No one who was obsessed with them a decade ago can even remember them now. But what I was trying to tell them, upstream against the torrent of Latest Things, is still as current as tomorrow’s history book.
And nobody noticed.
I am not talking about how hard this was on me. I am talking about how this led me into TWO nervous breakdowns and was heading me into another.
When I announced my retirement I asked people to read my archives and THINK about what I said and how THEY could USE it.
I could count the number of people who are doing that on one mutilated hand.
All I ever asked was an outlet for my ideas. I’ve got that now.
I do the blog because it is a two-way street.
For now.
I have already said far more than can be swallowed by people who put me tenth in a list of priorities which consists of eight items. No one but me understands what I am doing. That is why it is so effective.
I work hard to boil concepts down as far as it can be done. Then I sometimes get replies that say, “I agree with you.”
Big deal. Then I get e-mails quoting other writers they agree with.
If other writers are doing the job, why should I knock myself out?
I now have my blog and Stormfront and may be some easy internet radio shows I am STILL trying to get set up for.
I need very little little help with this, but I am still tenth priority in a list of right, so it is all frustration.
And I am out of the frustration business.
Did I mention that my blood pressure has dropped?
#1 by Peter on 09/19/2005 - 11:47 am
“Common courtesy comes to me from my upbringing, but pretending to admite nonsense or repsecting standards that mean nothing to me is like constantly smiling for the camera. If you are a sociopath, it is easy. If you are an honest man, it wears on you.”
On the other hand, those of us who do not have ADHD find that smiling and respecting others’ feelings makes the day go by EASIER.
#2 by Peter on 09/19/2005 - 1:10 pm
I’d hate to have ADHD. I’ve seen something of the disaster that’s inside their heads. When I was seven, I was playing with a kid. One minute he was happily playing with blocks, but in a flash, his brain farted and he started kicking and BITING. I happened to be the closest person to him, so he gouged the middle of my left cheek, and until I was eleven and half I had an ugly scar on my face.
In school, I got to know more about these ADHD people. Since the teachers saw me as the most cheerful and friendly kid in class (Lord help us), they would sit the ADHD kids next to me, thinking that my nature would somehow rub off on them. Right. When I was in elementary school, no one called them “ADHD kids;” we called them “brats” or “monsters.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to sit next to them the whole year. Since I went to a private school, these kids would eventually be held back a grade or kicked out. ADHD kids have it rough.
It doesn’t get much better as adults either. I once knew a guy with ADHD who teaches Junior High School. He kept getting fired for kicking TV sets and cussing in class. He couldn’t kick one of the kids, so kicked the TV sets. The last I heard from him, he had picked up a kid by the skin on the back of his neck. Fortunately for my friend, there was then no principal at the school, so the kid’s parents had no one to complain to. This man got tenure, and I think that scare shaped him up for a while. By the way, this man is brilliant and a member of Mensa.
Having to behave and act cheerful when they feel otherwise is hard for all the ADHD people I’ve known. You can see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. They try so hard to behave like the rest of us, that they can be the very nicest people you will ever meet. But be far away when they have had too much, and can’t do the act anymore!
For me, smiling and acting cheerful helps make me feel cheerful even when I am down. It also gets others around me to behave a little better, too. When I was fourteen, I had a paper route. I got myself up at 4:30 four days a week (then six), and had to collect my own subscriptions door to door. I discovered that the people who were never home when I scheduled to come by all had Medusas (sp?) on their door. But I also found that these people, Jews, loved to chat. So if I came by when I did not schedule a visit, I could engage them in a chat for a half hour or an hour, and even get a tip! Of course, I eventually got sick of this abuse, bought the best 12-speed in town and quit. Just remember that although cheerfulness works for most people, it often doesn’t for those with ADHD.
The point is that ADHD people behave in ways that are completely over the top for most of us. They are aware of this, and try to behave. This works and as I said, at times they can be the nicest people you will ever meet. But this act is exhausting for them. When you see one coming down — get far away if you really want to keep this person as a friend. When they are down, most people get mad at them, and cut them off forever. For the few of you who are sadistically patient, the ADHD person will cut YOU off forever in one of his fits.
Someone who is obviously brilliant and who does great work for the Cause is worth keeping on your list of friends. They do this work at an unimaginable price to their own emotional well-being. Just remember that we all have our pain, we all have our shortcomings. But we are in a desperate fight in world-historic times. Respect all who give themselves to it.
And keep smiling.
#3 by joe rorke on 09/19/2005 - 8:28 pm
I sincerely hope you will continue to do what is good for you, Bob. Keep that blood pressure down by all means. You sound like a fine person to me. If you have planted seeds I think it is up to other people to cultivate them now. You can tell a man 10,000 times that he is making a mistake and he won’t hear you. When I was a young lad a man once said to me with reference to friendship, “look at your hand. Count the number of fingers. I you have that many real friends during your entire lifetime, you will have had a good life at least in terms of friendships”. Of course, he meant real friendships as opposed to so many superficial friendships that we see today. What force was it that commercialized and materialized our culture to the degree that it has reached today? Real friendship is a good thing.
#4 by Trager Smith on 10/02/2005 - 11:25 am
Thanks for the tribute, Bob. Friendship is a rare and precious thing. C.S. Lewis, in his little book, _The Four Loves_ (1960), listed Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. He said:
“Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”
This is the most perceptive thing Lewis said in his book, and it is true that our friendship is mostly silent and that we share a common interest in advancing the White race.
But Lewis misses something Emerson caught when he said “a friend is someone with whom I can be sincere.” I have a lifelong friend in my first-year roommate at the University of Virginia. We share a great love of classical music and intellectual curiousity generally.
It wouldn’t matter to our frienship, though, if we ceased to have these interests. We can be sincere with each other. He always listens, and even if he doesn’t open up with me much, he knows he could.
And that’s what’s friendship means, and it’s what we have with each other.
Our friendship could be broken, Bob, if either I or you became a race traitor, but it has survived your return to Christianity. I’ve been an atheist since I was 14 when someone (not really a friend) aske me if I believed in God. Yes. Why? I didn’t have an answer and suspended my belief. It’s been in suspension ever since, though I’ve read a great deal about the subject. This quick dropping of a belief happened again when I met you at U.Va. in 1966, as I recounted earlier.
I could point out that there are two Jesuses in the Gospels: one who blasted the hypocrisy of his day but still talked about rules for living, and another who thought the world was to come to an end in six to eight weeks. Tweaking the establishment was more than enough for them to engage in a typical act of rent-seeking and get the government (Romans) to do away with the competition, but it took St. Mark to meld a story together about the troublemaker, the apocalyptic thinking that was pervasive at the time, Old Testament prophecies, too many dense and sequential parallels with Homer to have been coincidental, and the resurrection business (though not so prominent in Mark).
I could also point out that Hell was very vague for the Jews and never a burning issue with them. A self-respecting White person should feel anger, not gratitude, to Jesus (or Mark) for inventing this Hell and then offering a way out of it by abandoning reason and asking forgiveness.
But this won’t unsettle our friendship.