Loser

All the blather these days about Critical Race Theory has inspired me to come up with a theory of my own: The Critical Loser Theory.

There are many types of losers, Gracious Losers, Good Losers, Indifferent Losers, Poor Losers, Sore Losers, and Complete Losers, to name a few. I confess that I HAVE BEEN the last four. Many times. I have also been the first two. Rarely. Because of my inexperience in those categories, Good or Gracious Losers will not concern us here except for a brief statement: Good or Gracious Losers are also Winners. However, my long lifetime of experience in Indifferent-, Poor-, Sore- and Complete-Loserhood enables me to make fine distinctions between those groups. In a nutshell, the principal difference between an Indifferent Loser, a Poor Loser, and a Sore Loser is one of degree, the amount of anger or emotional upset. A Complete Loser refuses to admit a done-deal defeat.

I’ve had several long losing streaks, and I don’t just mean at Monopoly or Scrabble. I take comfort in the certainty that I’m not alone. I mean, no one wins all the time, except possibly at board games. I confess that if I ever met someone who always won, outside of board games, I would be tempted to lose my pacifist principals.

Beginning in third grade, I had a secret—because it was known only to me—competition with Jane K. to see who could finish our in-class written assignments first. I don’t remember when the competition ended, fifth grade or so. I lost every time, but, Complete Loser that I was, for several years I refused to graciously, or even grudgingly, admit that Jane was smarter and faster. The result was that I could not break my habit of scribbling furiously, and, while Jane had elegant and effortless handwriting throughout grade school and high school and, no doubt, into adulthood, I developed, without the bother of going to med school, a nearly illegible and painful scrawl. 

In my baseball years, beginning at age 12, only in the very first game I played was I on the winning side. The demise of that impressive–to me only–winning streak wasn’t entirely my fault, although in my second game I could have made us winners. I was at bat with two outs in the last inning with the tying and winning runs in scoring position. The game was on my slumping shoulders. People in the stands, family, friends, and strangers, cheered me on. But I was too nervous to swing the bat and took three straight fastballs—little-league fast—down the middle, and Poor Loser that I was, I complained loudly to the umpire each time he called a strike and more loudly when he called me out and the ball game over. I eventually stopped being a Poor Loser, as far as baseball was concerned. With practice, I became a better hitter, and, with practice, rose in the Loserhood ranks from Poor to Indifferent: I expected that my team would lose and my expectations were not disappointed, not once.

Yes, I have lost many times in my long life, but only in my own small-potatoes way, except when I was on the losing side in a war. Losing a war is a big deal. Again, it was not entirely my fault. A quick internet search reveals that there were about 2,700,000 other losers on my team in that war. None was entirely to blame either. Perhaps many of the low level losers, including me, were Poor Losers, but only the glorious leaders and top brass were Complete Losers. Gen. Westmoreland, famous for enlightening us on the fact that the Vietnamese didn’t feel or mourn the loss of their dead, was the brassiest, stating in front of a camera: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”

What kept me from being a Sore Loser was that I truly did not care if we won or lost. Neither was I an Indifferent Loser—only sociopaths are indifferent about war—due to my single-minded goal of getting back to the world in one piece. My second goal was to make it back alive, even if missing a few pieces. My third goal was to get my buddies back to the world but not in boxes draped with Old Glory. I was nearly a Complete Loser because, when I was involved in that losing proposition and read that we were losing the war, I objected. Semantically. I didn’t see us as losing so much as being in command yet not winning. And after the last GIs left by helicopter from the roof of the embassy—six years after I picked up my pieces and returned to the world—I still didn’t consider that we lost. We didn’t really lose the war so much as our will to keep at it, which I thought was a good thing to lose. A quick internet search shows that about 58,000 Americans were wasted—a euphemism but descriptive. Nearly half of that waste occurred the year I was there. Supposedly, we wasted ten times that number of the enemy, and the collateral damage—a Complete Loser of a euphemism—was uncounted, which is to say, didn’t count. I know we often lied about kill ratios, usually exaggerating the number of enemy fighters we wasted, but N. Vietnam authorities estimated that we wasted over a million of their soldiers and another million or two civilians. In any case, it seemed clear to me that statistically we won. Which made me a Nearly Complete Loser. But I was gracious and wise compared to our glorious leaders and top brass who dragged the peace talks out for six years.

When it finally sank in to our glorious leaders and top brass that we would have had to kill just about everybody to win—a not-to-be-thought-of solution proposed by a retired Air Force general and failed Vice Presidential candidate—our glorious leaders declared peace with honor and sounded retreat. Never admitting defeat. We picked up our toys and went home. Well, we left quite a few toys behind in the form of landmines. As well as an ocean of Agent Orange. As far as Losers go, I was a piker. The goal of our glorious, Complete-Loser leaders had been to stop communism, to stop the dominoes from toppling. Well, WE toppled three, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And I’ve adjusted my semantics such that I now freely confess that we lost that idiotic war.

Our glorious Complete-Loser leaders neither admitted defeat nor learned the proper lessons from that loss. Instead, they learned denial, qualifying them for the Complete Loser laurels. They are the best. They did learn one lesson from that loss, that the PR battle on the home front was the most important battle, and they began imbedding reporters who generally reported the desired version of battles. In 1991, Geo Bush the First, after our first Iraq War, said, “…by god, we’ve finally licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” That went so well that a decade later his son in a photo op after the invasion of Iraq had a banner draped on an aircraft carrier that said, “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”. He also gave a pep talk to troops in Afghanistan and said, “Mission Accomplished.” And now Iraq and Afghanistan are the envy of the world.

In a war closer to home, the American Civil War, the Slave States, slavers, and racists, also have a long and enduring history of Poor-, Sore-, and Complete-Loserhood. They lost the Civil War—not the fault of Johnny Reb so much as their glorious leaders and their top brass. In case you’ve forgotten, let me remind you that losing a war is no small-potatoes kind of thing. Behaving like Losers after losing a war can be a smoldering problem ready to burst into flames. Think of all the Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Germans who opted for anger and denial when their glorious Kaiser and top brass surrendered to end WWI. In the memorable lyrics of Tom Lehrer: “We taught them a lesson in 1918/ and they’ve hardly bothered us since then.”  

The slave states lost the Civil War. Lee, like the Kaiser, might have been gracious when he surrendered, but the slavers and racists opted for anger and denial, and for the next century and a half, they have continued fighting that lost cause. The Bloody Bushwhackers in Missouri and Kansas, Cole Younger and Frank James, along with Frank’s younger brother Jesse, became bank robbers and mythic heroes to Confederate symps. Because Lincoln and the abolitionists were Republicans, white southerners became Democrats—in our political musical chairs, when the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations passed Civil Rights acts, the white, racist southerners, et al, became Republicans—and they promoted the myth only recently and incompletely busted that Reconstruction was a great evil, that Blacks were incapable of voting and holding office, and all white northerners who went south were corrupt Carpetbaggers, especially those who supported the right of Blacks to vote and hold office. Those Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Democrats succeeded in ending Reconstruction 12 years after the end of the war and they’ve been busy writing their own version of that history, which the Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Germans did after WWI. Throughout the South statues and monuments were erected to honor Confederate Brass. Schools and plazas and even military bases were named after prominent Confederates. The Confederate flag was prominently displayed at events like NASCAR races and college football games while bands played Dixie.

Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers donned white hoods and evolved from the Bloody Bushwhackers who robbed banks and merchants into the Ku Klux Klan, often under the command of bankers and leading merchants. Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers instituted Jim Crow in the south. They called it separate but equal, but it was apartheid without homelands. It was a campaign of terror that included public lynchings and private rapes.

Embedded Hollywood producers, directors, and writers perpetrated the Poor-, Sore-, and Complete-Loserhood myths in Revisionist and pro-Confederate movies such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Buster Keaton’s The General, and, in modern times, Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw and Josie Wales. Oh, those poor persecuted white southerners! And don’t forget all those heroes at the Alamo.  

The war was over, the slaves were free, but governments, businesses, and financial institutions continued battling to keep them from rising, socially and economically.

These are facts. This is our history.

And this is where my Critical Loser Theory comes in. Key to my theory is calling a Spade a Spade. Let’s come right out and say that the blatherers and bellowers about Critical Race Theory are racists. They are the pseudo-intellectual descendants of the Poor, Sore, and Complete Loser Confederates and their sympathizers that have plagued our nation for a century and a half. They are Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers lamenting the loss of a war by that terrorist organization, the Confederate States.* They are the descendants of the Bushwhackers and the KKK and all the revisionists who erected brass monuments to the Confederate Brass and glorified those terrorists in print and film and prevented a Black man or woman from being hired, promoted, or buying a house.

Critical Losers do not want school children to be taught a history in which white people did truly evil things. Which they did. Just ask Native Americans. Just ask the victims of the Master Race. Well, 7 million of them, mostly white but not white enough, were killed and cannot speak for themselves. Just ask the victims of the White Man’s Burden.

No one is saying all whites are evil, not the proponents of Critical Race Theory and not this 77-year-old white man. We are saying that we should be honest and open about our history, genocide, slavery, and all, which might even make us Winners. If we don’t admit our errors, well, confess our crimes, we cannot redeem ourselves; we condemn ourselves to a Loserhood that will metastasize, and we risk losing our democracy. Witness the January 6 Complete Loser Insurrection.

*Interestingly, the Poor, Sore, and Complete Losers in Congress, still upset about the outcome of the Civil War, were also Clueless Losers. When they rushed through the Patriot Act—without reading it—they charged all their heroes in that losing war with being members of a terrorist organization. They decreed that flying the Confederate flag or putting up a statue to commemorate a Confederate general is Material Support of a terrorist organization.