Hold the Nachos, You Down Dogs, You

I’m starting to warm to all this “cultural appropriation” bushwa. I knew if I held out being as blandly white, heterosexual, Christian, and male as possible for long enough, I’d come back into fashion again. And I have!

First, it was decided that white people should stop eating Mexican food.[1] Good. The only variation in Mexican food is how the ground beef and vegetables are wrapped in the tortilla. Everything is ground beef, vegetables, and tortilla. I’ve never seen the appeal. That, and I can’t digest any spice stronger than pepper. So this is good for me. Before, when I told people I didn’t like nachos, they’d give me this look like I’d told them I wasn’t overly fond of women’s suffrage. “WHAT?” they’d cry. “How do you not like nachos?!” “Because they’re soggy corn chips swimming in a pool of molten hot processed cheese,” I’d tell them—alas, to no avail. But no more! The next time someone suggests ordering nachos as an appetizer I’m going to put on my best look of abject horror and ask them why they’re still so intent on degrading and subjugating Hispanics for their sick ethnocentric fetishes.

Then we were told it’s not right for white people to do yoga.[2] And that’s absolutely right. It’s a form of Hindu meditation, and white people who dangle Rosary beads from their car’s rearview mirror look totally ridiculous doing it. There’s no better proof of the total spiritual corruption of the West than the fact that we perform other religions’ rituals as a form of recreation. And I don’t buy the “mindfulness” nonsense. If you want to cultivate inner peace, try going to a High Mass at an Anglo-Catholic church or chucking your iPhone off the Harbour Bridge. Plus, it’s very hard for me to be a yuppie when doing yoga is as much a requirement as drinking chardonnay every afternoon with lunch and wearing loafers without socks. (Though I must say, I excel at the latter two.) I’m about as flexible as a Sydney real estate agent—I can probably pencil you in on 6^th of next March between 3:15 and 3:20, but otherwise I’m pretty much booked out for the rest of the decade.

Brendan O’Neill’s in a tizzy about all this,[3] but he’s a Marxist. Conservatives should see a rare opportunity to stop white people from doing non-white people things for the sake of doing non-white people things. I don’t believe anyone ever really enjoyed yoga or enchiladas—not really. In fact, I think they are trendy exactly because they’re so unpleasant. Who wants to tie himself up into a pretzel while fighting off a bad case of E coli? Self-hating lefties mostly.

No doubt there are some white people who are convinced by the theology and meditative practices of Hinduism, and I wish them all the best of luck pursuing a life of strict prayer and asceticism on the path to Enlightenment. And maybe some sincerely enjoy a big, greasy beef-and-avocado wrap from time to time. Good on ’em. But let’s stop pretending they’re indicators of some splendid, progressive sensibility. They’re not. Ninety percent of the time they’re indicators of a collapse in our Western identity that we fill with touristy souvenirs from other cultures.

So we’re clear: no, we shouldn’t object on behalf of those whose culture we’re appropriating. At least not until Anglosphere cultures are given the same protection, with the Japanese being told not to wear neckties and Pakistanis to shun cricket. We should object because our culture is too rich for us to spend our days neglecting it in favor of superficial trinkets from Asian, Latin American, and African ones.

Too often multiculturalism means no culture at all, just shallow dips into the most superficial aspects of immigrant cultures. Only a Leftist could think that embrace does those immigrant populations serious harm, while only conservatives have consistently pointed out that it means the slow erosion of our own traditions. And none of this is to say that non-Anglo-Celts need to integrate fully and unambiguously into our culture. (God, do I really even have to say it?)

Anglo-Celts and other Australians, Brits, and Americans of European extraction have exactly as much right to immerse themselves in their heritage as non-Europeans. It almost makes sense, doesn’t it? Anyway, now that we’re not allowed to be multicultural, we need something to do with ourselves.