Blog P.I.

Stuff White People Like, the meteorically ascendant concept blog categorizing fetish objects, stereotypical behaviors and obnoxious trends of what one might call the “typical white person,” has a conservative slant. Really.

I’m sure that wasn’t the intent of Christian Lander, a Canadian copywriter living in Los Angeles who started the blog on a whim in late January and already has a book deal. But it certainly has the effect.

That’s because his ongoing list avoids going after the kind of “aw shucks” Middle Americans Jeff Foxworthy tenderly mocked in his rise to relative stardom more than a decade ago. Instead, Lander zeroes in on the accoutrements of the kind of upper-class, highly-educated, self-conscious white people variously known as Lexus liberals (Prius liberals?) or latte liberals. What David Brooks would call Bobos, minus twenty years. Like Foxworthy, he’s making fun of himself. But he also does so in greater detail, and with more bite.

Take for example #62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People:

White people spend a lot of time of worrying about poor people. It takes up a pretty significant portion of their day.

They feel guilty and sad that poor people shop at Wal*Mart instead of Whole Foods, that they vote Republican instead of Democratic, that they go to Community College/get a job instead of studying art at a University.

It is a poorly guarded secret that, deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Or #82 Hating Corporations:

One of the more popular white person activities of the past fifteen years is attempting to educate others on the evils of multi-national corporations. White people love nothing more than explaining to you how Wal*Mart, McDonalds, Microsoft, Halliburton are destroying the Earth’s culture and resources. …

When engaging in a conversation about corporate evils it is important to NEVER, EVER mention Apple Computers, Target or Ikea in the same breath as the companies mentioned earlier. White people prefer to hate corporations that don’t make stuff that they like.

And we’re not even talking about the kind of cultural affectations that any economic libertarian city-dweller might recognize as themselves, too. See #6 Organic Food:

Because of the balance of global wealth and power, there is a general assumption that white people are pretty shrewd. And for the most part, history has proven this to be true. But white people have one great weakness: organic food.

As seen by the image on the left – when faced with eating food that has been processed and loaded with nitrates, sodium and saturated fat, or organic rat poison, 10/10 they will take the rat poison.

I’m not just cherry-picking from the blog. In a Los Angeles Times article published barely a month into the blog’s phenomenal run, Lander evinced a disdain for the provincial lefty superiority he mocks in his blog posts:

Lander is less concerned with cross-ethnic and racial relations than he is with how whites treat each other. As a onetime graduate student in the Midwest, he got tired of coastal condescension of the fly-over states and the glib assumption that “red staters are evil and stupid.”

“Too many white people don’t like to be reminded that they’re white. They like to think that white people are those evil corporate right-wingers or the uneducated masses who vote the wrong way. But ‘enlightened whites’ are white people too and have just as much of a group mentality as they think the red staters have.”

But, let’s not make too much of this. From the same article:

Lander doesn’t want you to think he’s angry or taking himself too seriously. “First and foremost, it’s satire; it’s funny,” he says. “I’m trying to make people laugh.”

Yet on the rare occasions where Lander does take a swipe at conservatives or conservatism, it still veers back toward making fun of liberals post haste. Take #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report:

White people love to make fun of politics, especially right wing politics. It’s a pretty easy target and makes for some decent humor, but white people are actually starting to believe that these two shows are becoming legitimate news sources.

“Oh, I don’t watch the news,” they will say. “I watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. You know, studies show that viewers of those shows are more educated than people who watch Fox News or CNN.”

Like so. One could also see this as liberal humor at its best: avoiding easy jokes about President Bush mangling his words (yes, Jacob Weisberg is still riding this horse into the ground — so far he might make it to China in time for the Olympics) and looking inward to mock one’s own absurdities. And that would probably be true, but they’re not mutually exclusive options.

Let’s also stipulate — the next time someone says there’s no such thing as conservative humor, just point them to Stuff White People Like. If they’re white and liberal, chances are they will enjoy a joke at their own expense. If they’re white and conservative, chances are they’ll find it even funnier.

A better question would be: Could a conservative do this just as well? Anybody who’s read one of P.J. O’Rourke’s classics — think Parliament of Whores or All The Trouble in the World — can say unequivocally, yes. But it’s also possible a lesser talent could really screw it up. In fact, it’s more than possible.

I suppose a symmetrical analogy for black people could be Bill Cosby’s complaints about the self-abegnating habits of lower-class African Americans. But Cosby isn’t trying to be funny. The real analogy was Comedy Central’s brilliant Chappelle’s Show. But Dave Chappelle famously walked away from that, fearing he was doing more harm than good. Which is too bad, especially in a world where Black People Love Us! already existed.

In the meantime, I’ve just discovered Michael Cobb’s Stuff Black People Like. Where’s his book deal? Oh, that’s right — he’s a conservative.