Patchouli

Oprah famously said on her talk show that she loved giving away stuff because "GIVING FEELS GOOD", in a not-so-veiled reference to the compulsiveness that drives the lives of so many celebrities. Who doesn't like a new car?! Right? It's sort of like a shopping high, except you and your audience participate in the buzz of "new car smell" together, like a bunch of giggly girls at a sleepover sucking on helium balloons and doing bad cartoon voices.

After the hangover from her giveaways, Oprah was stuck with an African lawsuit alleging sexual abuse (herself a victim of molestation as a young girl) at the all-girls boarding school she famously built in Africa to make better female Africans, as weird a gesture for an eccentric rich American to make as ever. Much like Mark Zuckerberg's condescending attitude about giving "free internet" to those poor Africans (what about us here?), it's a do-gooder pose that hides, if not malicious intent, then some seriously disordered intentions.

At the local free library, such cheap easy sentiment runs rampant through their special needs policies (to attract local, state, and federal funding), that includes someone else cleaning up the messes from their ridiculous build-a-bag-from-newspaper workshops for retarded adults. They pander to brain disordered people without actually giving a fuck about the abuses tied to their presence at a place for advanced learning (which a library used to be), including not monitoring heroin users on the nod at their public access computers. That's distasteful and not part of their job!

It's okay to pad their typically empty building with Down Syndrome people, or day residents from the local psych center who need healthcare over stupid craft projects, because that's what makes them FEEL GOOD. The lady with carpel tunnel and OCD can feel proud that she shelves books all day very precisely, over those poor unfortunates struggling to use a mouse without her benevolent help. It keeps their corrupt system of co-dependence in place, so everybody who's sick benefits without actually calling it that.

That would be "labelling" and they don't do that in their "judgment-free zone", except for this: every book and media product in a library is very carefully assigned a Library of Congress category (by people like me) for the purpose of classification, bar-coded (also by people like me) for the ease of finding it by corresponding subject at their very place of employment. The dysfunctional pattern they're trapped in is so bad, that the disabled people working there were separated to me from the handicapped patrons they condescend to only by the distinctive blend of arrogant social "do-gooders" everywhere, saturated as they are by the scent of patchouli, a hippie's classic olfactory weapon of choice. See you in the stacks, kids.

The White Man's Grave

Years ago, I read a fictional novel by Richard Dooling about the hazards that the rich white man faces while trying to impose his cultural constructs upon Africa, resulting in the loss of his soul. When a local cabbie picks up a generic-looking businessman at the airport, the first question the white man asks him is: why is that big old tree in the middle of town hung with so many brightly-colored flags? He'd never seen anything like that before! What did it mean? The cabbie smiled at the sweating, overweight, red-faced white man sitting in his backseat, dressed too formerly for his trip in a "power suit" and corporate-approved necktie. "That's a 'witch' tree." Another warlock is born.

You see, the tree's decorations were caught in the branches by flying witches on their nightly midnight rounds, leaving their tattered garments hanging from the ancient tree that only other witches could see. The white man had come back to his own heart of darkness. He was looking for a relative working overseas that was said to have been lured into the bush by evil spirits, which naturally unleashed his arrogant condescension upon a nation that had him down cold a long time ago. Sure enough, out came his expensive leather briefcase full of American money, to better expedite his superior search with bribes. But, witches don't feed on just that alone. They wanted his soul.

And they got it. He was so poorly prepared for the cultural shift that he lazed in a dopey haze on the plane ride over there, with not one single true fact in his head about countries that were there long before his boardrooms and executive meetings. He'd make appointments with native people that were never kept, bribing warlords and government officials who laughed at his silly currency, until he realizes that those gleaming eyes in the bush are also calling his name. And so to goes his fate, the same as the pushy social do-gooder with a matching sense of overblown entitlement towards the world about needing our "relief", when they wanted our guns instead. That's where most of the money went to, anyway.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15788.White_Man_s_Grave