White Dudes

White dudes holding a fish in their profile picture on Facebook is a thing. You’ve seen the photos, a twin-outboard boat in an ocean, river, or lake, on a dastardly sunny day, dude, Caucasian, wearing a bucket hat and a shirt specifically designed for fishing, holds up the poor gasping creature for the benefit of the cameraman. Smiles all around. I’ve always wondered the purpose of this, and also: do these dudes use the fish photos on dating app profiles? Look at moi, clever and strong, able to provide this delicious bass for my family. Now, I haven’t fished since I was thirteen, in a pond. I don’t have any peckerwood hobbies. I don’t fish, I don’t hunt turkeys or deer, I don’t ride ATVs, and I don’t watch college football. I never took up these passions in part because I thought women would not find such a man sexually attractive—my ambition was to be like Mickey Rourke in 9-1/2 Weeks with a closetful of expensive suits, buying $500 scarves for girls at street fairs. Joke’s on me—women do find these men sexually attractive. They like a guy with a little dirt under his fingernails. Ugh, dirt.

Then again, I play underground house and techno music, music that tends to be enjoyed by white people of various persuasions, mostly Europeans, Eastern, Western, and Central. I don’t have a hip-hop bone in my body. Still, electronic music is generally considered to be more highbrow than either country or hip-hop, and if you don’t get it, I can’t explain it to you. Some people tell me that my music all sounds the same. I would say the same about country music or modern hip-hop. Maybe I am a heel, uncultured to the core. I confess to liking late 80s/early 90s hip-hop, along with the rest of the civilized world. The new stuff doesn’t speak to me, and I think it is all a pretentious act. The only time I am exposed to it is at basketball games. They wouldn’t play it if the players weren’t listening to it. Unlistenable.

There is peckerwoodism of the Wall Street variety—lacrosse! I was short lacrosse in 2004, and I am still short it to this day, as it is reaching new heights of popularity. Lacrosse looks like fun. You have a stick with a net, and you can more or less beat people with the stick. Or you can brain someone with a five-ounce rubber ball. While it is enjoyable to play, it is brutal to watch on television. And people think that baseball is boring. But as everyone knows, lacrosse is less about the sport itself and more about the social climbing involved. Make the junior traveling team, play in high school. Distinguish yourself in high school, you’re rubber-stamped into an Ivy League School and ultimately, into a seven-figure job. This is the thing that has always amazed me about lacrosse players: they all know each other. It is a stronger fraternity than any fraternity, and you drop lacrosse on your resume, it is sure to be a conversation starter. Wall Street people fish, too, and listen to Phish, the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, and literally nothing else. What woman would find this sort of thing sexually attractive? Thousands of them do.

Here is the other thing about white dude culture: the politics are predominantly conservative. The fishing, the hunting, the lacrosse generally lend themselves to a right-of-center worldview. When we were young, we thrived in the counterculture, like Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine. The vast majority of those Gen Xers are now chasing a little white ball around. I never stopped with the counterculture. If I pull up “Killing in the Name” in my office, I get goose bumps. Then again, I’ve always been the contrarian. I, myself, am right-of-center, but of the libertarian, supply-side variety. Trump is a menace. About the only good thing to come out of this election is that we’ve taken the language and the culture back, and that’s no small thing. Anyhow, liberal white dudes have a lower propensity to fish or hunt. What do they do? Tennis, I guess. Cat owners. Musical theater. I’m not privy to this sort of information. But I doubt that the crew on the offshore vishing vessel is extolling the virtues of a progressive tax code. It is known that college football is a conservative sport. It is known that basketball is a liberal sport. Baseball is right down the middle, though most of the baseball writers are very far-left. Jeff Passan wrote a puff piece on Oakland A’s catcher Bruce Maxwell, who was the first baseball player to kneel for the national anthem. Stunning and brave. A few days later, Maxwell was arrested for waving a gun at a pizza delivery guy. I let Passan have it on Twitter, but to his credit, he left the tweet up like a trooper. In any event, white dudes have been vindicated in the culture wars, though I doubt we’ll show the uncut version of Police Academy on TV anytime soon.

When I was in Mississippi last month, I walked into a white dude haberdashery, Neilson’s on the square. I looked around. Pink, pastel blue, and green as far as the eye can see. Lots and lots of pink—the Southern male aesthetic. Anyway, I was wearing my usual all black, with jewelry and my hair in my face, and I walked in there, thumbing through the pink polo shirts, and a salesperson came up to me and asked, “Is everything okay, sir?” A minute later, another salesperson: “Is everything okay, sir?” Happened two more times. I get what is going on here—I’m getting profiled. Happy to say that was the only Deep South thing that happened to me while I was there. I exited hastily, and ripped a fart on my way out. But yes: polo shirts, khakis, fleece vests, loafers. Hermes and Ferragamo ties. I have literally worn all black four days in a row. I have two suits for when I need to go on TV, and nobody has asked in a long time. Again: what woman finds this sexually attractive? When I was going through my Neil Strauss phase, I read that women liked rock stars. Ergo, dress like a rock star. Tattoos, scarves, jewelry. I hear that David Coverdale got a lot of ass back in the day. I have heard from some people who watched the Motley Crue documentary—oh, my heavenly days. Maybe we have moved on. Maybe the next hit band will be wearing pink polo shirts and pleated khakis. I will say that I have been a DJ for 17 years, and DJing has not got me laid once, even by my wife.

The odd thing is that most of my friends are actually white dudes. Most of my friends hunt and fish and listen to Phish. I can travel freely in that culture and simultaneously be a critic of it. And honestly, I would like to see Phish someday. I talk about contempt prior to investigation all the time—I would go and see what the fuss is all about. It is only fair. But I wouldn’t be caught dead in a pink golf shirt. Speaking of which, we have not yet discussed golf. At this point in my life, golf would be some real physical exertion, even if I didn’t walk the course. I would be sore for a week. And I am so fantastically uncoordinated that we’d have to let seven different groups play through. Maybe before I go play a round of golf, I should head over to TopGolf and hit off a tee. TopGolf—what a business. They have one here in Myrtle Beach, you know, a stone’s throw from my old office, and they had one adjacent to the club where I played at the MGM Grand. Anyway, there is already a very good movie that came out in the late 70s that lampooned white dude golf culture, and you have probably heard of it. RIP Lacey Underall.

According to 23&Me I am mostly white dude, with some Southern European and Native American and Arab mixed in to create my exotic bad looks. Before I went gray a few years ago, people couldn’t figure out what I was. When I went to Greece, the Greeks spoke Greek to me. When I didn’t answer, they would speak Spanish. Finally, they would try English. That tells you everything you need to know about my appearance. Therefore, I will never drink an Old Fashioned, and I will never be photographed holding a fish. You shouldn’t kill things, anyway, even if they have a brain the size of a BB.