Biloxi Blues in Identity Dixie’s Comboxes

The benefit of discipline is that it will win this war for us; therefore, until you learn that fact, I’ll just have to keep teaching it to you.

Sgt. Toomey to Private Jerome, Biloxi Blues

I’ve noted before the effect that “Americanism” has on far too many people, even on people who are putatively on the right side of the political and social spectrum; it convinces them/us that we are all “equal,” and that our opinions are somehow all equal or of equal validity, as a by-product of our inherent “equality,” one supposes. It also convinces people – some more than others – that they are “a law unto themselves,” and not in a good way; that they may say (or, write) anything they want to anyone they want, in any ol’ way they want, with impunity. Or, rather, that they ought to be entitled and are in fact authorized to do so with impunity.

To my knowledge, Identity Dixie’s resident “outlaw” and pestiferous gadfly, Josey W., has had one (1) of his comments deleted by our admins during the eight months or so that he has been commenting at this site under his current nom de plume. I remember it well, mainly because he “lost his sh*t” over the deletion in a follow-up comment, yapping about “CENSORSHIP(!!!)” and “FREEDOM OF SPEECH(!!!),” and blah blah, thereby betraying once again, as he is so often prone to do, his unruly nature and lack of self-restraint or self-control. I tried to calm him down a bit by pointing out that Identity Dixie is a Southern Nationalist website; that, as such, it is not a democracy, and that most of us here tend to be authoritarians or authoritarian types, who, although we might not like to and are generally long-suffering authoritarians, will in fact exercise discipline and our authority when necessary, for the better good of us all. But trying to convince the likes of Josey that censoring him for cause is always justifiable, is about as effective as beating your head against a brick wall to get rid of a headache. In fact, you’d probably have more success with the headache thing than with the other thing. But I digress.

By all appearances to date, our Josey is one of those persons who has imbibed those particular principles of “Americanism” I mentioned above. I’m quite sure he’s imbibed others as well, but that is a subject for another time and perhaps another article. The lesson he is going to have to learn, however, in lieu of serious introspection and learning to exercise a tad more self-restraint than he is used to exercising in comboxes at least, is that he is just a commenter here – a valued commenter who has valuable things to say, but merely a commenter nevertheless – and that there is a hierarchical order here; that, as such, he is a guest who must conduct himself and act accordingly or else.

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do”; “humble thyself and learn of me,” I’m sometimes tempted to say to Josey. It cannot possibly be lost on him that I never answer his insults or his libels in kind, regardless of how “tempting” or easy it might be to do so. And while it would certainly be easy to do so, truth be told, such as that is not even remotely tempting to me; I think of those sorts of things as the acts of a juvenile or products of a small mind who doesn’t have an argument, so he resorts to what he is best at – insults and libels and false accusations, etc. It is also a crime, and a serious one, to falsely accuse and libel people. What exactly about “thou shalt not bear false witness” do the Josey’s of the world not understand; what exactly about several of the six things, yea seven, that God declares to be an abomination unto Him, do such persons not understand?

When I was in the Air Force, I sometimes had the misfortune of having to work under a Master Sgt. who possessed a very nasty disposition and temperament. Everybody disliked him, and I was no exception. I was an electro-environmental specialist – one who works on the electrical and environmental systems on airplanes; whereas he was a crew chief, most times acting in the capacity of flightline supervisor for my or other shifts. On the day in question, he saw that I had written up a broken cam lock on one of the access panels at the nose of one of our airplanes. He didn’t bother to ask me why I didn’t replace the broken part rather than write it up (which I normally would have done), he just flew into a rage like an overgrown child having a fit, except that he was using more curse words and in various combinations that most children haven’t had time to add to their vocabularies, or at least haven’t learned to rattle off with such rapidity and with such cutting precision. I said nothing in my own defense until he had finished with his tirade, at which point I simply told him, in front of God and six human witnesses, that “you need to read a book on human relations; I have one at home I’m willing to loan you if you think it will help.”

That is all I said; nothing more, nothing less. I didn’t even offer an explanation for my actions with the broken cam lock, since, well, he never bothered to ask. This enraged him even more than before, and he began telling me (yelling it at me, rather) about how much trouble I was in for speaking to him that way. To which I simply replied, “get the shift supervisor out here.” I had to repeat that request two or three times in between his incoherent rants, before he finally called him on the radio. Once the shift supervisor arrived, we three had a discussion about the incident  – what was said, why it was said, and all that – apart from the other witnesses. During which time he told the shift supervisor that I had cussed him out and called him bad names. He even told him which expletives I had supposedly used. When the supervisor asked me if that was true, I answered, disgustedly, “Of course it isn’t true; you know me better than that; you know I don’t need cuss words or insults to make a valid point. And my only point in this whole thing is that he needs to learn how to, and how not to, talk to people. That is all. But, there were six other witnesses who saw and heard the whole thing, start to finish, ask them which of us was doing the cursing and name calling, and which of us wasn’t; they won’t lie to you to get in his good graces.”

I didn’t get into any trouble over that incident, but my accuser received a verbal reprimand and was told to apologize to me for cussing me out and for libeling me. Which he did, on the spot, and which I accepted, half-heartedly, because we both knew he didn’t mean any of it. But I didn’t particularly care whether he meant it or not; my concern was with the injustice he was attempting to perpetrate upon me, and I certainly cared about my vindication against those false charges above all else, regardless of whether he meant any of the things he said in his apology or not.

I told that story because it of course relates to the ongoing feud between Josey and me. For all I know my supervisor in that incident *really believed* he heard me using curse words and bad names towards him, just as Josey perhaps really believes that I have said the 2nd Amendment is “nonsense,” and things like that. Emotion-driven people are notorious for hearing or reading something that was never said, and/or of saying things that they never realized they had actually and really said. My own mother (who is very emotion-driven) once cussed out a woman over the phone and in the presence of my wife and me. The woman hung up on her. My mom immediately called her back, demanding to know why she’d been hung up on. The woman answered, “because you called me a bitch.” My mom replied, and I quote, “I never called you a bitch, bitch!” To which insult, of course, the woman hung up on her again. Then my mom turned to me and said, “she accused me of calling her a bitch; I never called her a bitch!” I retorted, “I beg to differ; but you did in fact call her a bitch, among other ‘mean and hurtful’ things.” My mom knows I wouldn’t lie to her about something like that, so she instantly got this look of confusion on her face and in her eyes, and said, in a very defeated but sincere tone, “I did?; I don’t remember calling her that.”

The bottom line in all of this is that there are, and there have to be, consequences for bad behavior. Show me a home where there is no disciplinarian and therefore no discipline, and I will show you a home that is severely dysfunctional, and where the adolescents and/or the “independent woman” “rule the roost.” The same applies to our little oasis here at Identity Dixie. Indeed, I’d have to call it by another descriptive than “oasis” if that weren’t the case. There is also a hierarchical order here; I’m not at the top of that order, but I’m not at the very bottom of it either. Someone among us needs to learn his place.