Barbara Kay on a recent Maclean’s article that may indicate a change of editorial direction for the venerable Canadian magazine:
I never thought of Maclean’s as a satirical magazine, but perhaps they are testing the waters on a rebranding. I cannot otherwise account for the bizarre article just published under their aegis by Scott Gilmore, “Thank God I could Enjoy the Age of Mediocre White Men While It Lasted.” This self-flagellatory apologia for being a successful white male reads like a parody of our cultural moment.
I laughed when I read it, and checked the URL to make sure I hadn’t stumbled on a piece from The Onion by mistake, but no, it was indeed a Maclean’s piece. Sadly, I am all too aware that in these fanatically anti-white male times, a lot of identity-politics activists — including white men who pee sitting down to prove their wokeness — will not only take it seriously, they will applaud him.
Gilmore’s thesis is this in a nutshell: simply being white and male gives you such an advantage in life that for all of human history, other people, so dazzled by male whiteness that they are rendered oblivious both to white-male mediocrity and their own inherent superiority, willingly hand things over to you, things like their bodies, their possessions and their national sovereignty, and of course all the good careers. Your skin colour and sex are your ticket to ride. That state of affairs is now ending, Gilmore says, and this piece is effectively Gilmore’s thank-you note to history for allowing him to have benefited from this remarkable deal, and as well an expression of gratitude that white males are now headed to the dustbin of history, where they belong.
The first problem with the article is that Gilmore never defines “mediocre.” One dictionary definition is “of only moderate quality; not very good.” Let’s go with that. Let’s assume he means white men are dumber, lazier and of lesser character than all women and all non-white men. And yet, “being a white male has been the bee’s knees for about 2,000 years. We have been giving all the orders, taking all the credit, and pocketing all the money since Caesar told Cleopatra to pipe down. We wrote the history books and we built the empires (well, other people did the actual building, but we oversaw a lot of it from our sedan chairs). We drafted all the laws, and made sure to always stack the cards in our favour. And, for a truly impressive long time, we were able to keep all the fun to ourselves.”
