MENOPAUSE AND PARANOIA | 2006-10-15
I like to describe one of the banes of my life this way:
I think out loud about a subject that strikes me as important. The person I am talking to then says, "So what you're saying is that my mother is ugly."
He then goes into an enraged explanation about what the subject was and how my reply could be interpreted that way. I have spent a major part of my life trying to tell people I was NOT talking about their other, and even apologizing for having put my comment in a way that, from another point of view, might be interpreted that way.
This seminar is an enormous relief.
When I was doing WhitakerOnline for different audiences, it was always a lot like trying to give a lecture to a group of menopausal old maids, most of them male.
WhitakerOnline began as a part of the League of the South website. It became by far the most-read part of that website. But as Southerner descended from Jamestown Southerners, the place where the South originated, I had some remarks to make about the Calvinists, including the Pilgrim Fathers, who were supposed to have "founded" America.
Actually, the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock were trying to reach Virginia, which had already elected its House of Burgesses and was a going concern.
I caught hell for that. You see, the League of the South was founded and run by people who are total Calvinistic theocrats. To them, Calvinist theology as represented by the pilgrims and LATER by the Puritans was what their idea of an independent South was all about.
Below you will find a piece called "Agents" in which I wrote about decades of nasty little people who have planted rumors about our comrades by saying they are "agents." I put it in a Stormfront thread. Suddenly the lady who started the thread said I was being "vitriolic" towards her.
This is a woman I have helped out and who has thanked me for it. But she decided to take what I said as a personal insult to HER. It had nothing to do with her. So I had to spend a good deal of time writing a placating reply to whatever the hell it was she though I had said about her or her mother being ugly or whatever the hell it was I was guilty of.
Now, after eight years, I have a group that does not act like a group of paranoid menopausal nutcases. You could hardly take it as a compliment that I do not regard you as a group of nasty nutcases.
But you can appreciate what a relief you are to me.