Stuff White People Don't Like: Stuff White People Like

As the blog Stuff White People Like soars past fourteen-million hits, there's a very real and unique situation developing in the genetically commodified world of blog procreation: no 'satirical', ironically titled blog has yet risen to counterpoint SWPL's amazingly popular formula of jokingly deriding the normal and banal. I'm not rising to fill that void, but I'll post a few observations.

When SWPL talks about white people, I'm assuming it means middle-upper-class Gentiles. Annie Hall would be a white person (though a white person imagined and scripted by a non-white person). Having known many such people, I can tell you they have, on the whole, more dislikes than likes. So the blog Stuff White People Don't Like is nigh on the horizon. The URL's already been 'parked', meaning some idiot (probably white) is hoping to cash in on it. But here's as good a place to start as any, so on with the first instalment of Stuff White People Don't Like: Stuff White People Like.

White people don't like blogs like Stuff White People Like. They don't like them for a couple reasons: 1) the blog is incredibly successful, and the owner/writer is all over the news. He's not making any money off the thing (he says he's made fourteen bucks), but you can bet some (semi-literate) Hollywood agent is phoning with a three-screenplay offer. SWPL The Movie! It takes us from a loft to a bistro to a reading to a jazz bar to a book store--then back to the loft. This could end up in a bonanza (a great word), and white people don't like that. White people are petty and jealous (see: this entry), and they really don't like it--they don't like it at all--when other white people succeed doing something the second white person feels he could've done just as well--or, for the average deluded white person, better. The idea's so simple. Why didn't they think of it? This, you know...I mean...it sucks; 2) the author is expressing himself creatively. White people don't like that. They lurk on messageboards and blog sites, posting anonymous comments in which the acuity of their literary flexing power is put on full display. So you'll read comments on SWPL like, "Your blog sucks. You're a real dick"; or "F*ck you." Isn't that terrific? Obviously SWPL hurts these people in a very serious way--a way that can only be expressed tersely during the time it takes for their Halo game to load in the background. Again, this probably follows from the first point. White people don't like it when other white people like a thing that white people shouldn't like. So they launch their ad hominem attacks. What else are they supposed to do? Not actually read the blog? Stop...you're crazy.

SWLP is a pretty WASP-ish, vanilla site, with insights and jokes that make white people happy. I'm sure it'll spawn a brood of sites with names like stuffjewslike.blogspot, and stufflgbtlike.blogspot, etc. And those people will take an hour out of their day, sit down, and compose a great entry on something so intrinsically racist, hateful, and/or anti-semitic that it'll be sure to please the stellar readers who hunt through the blogosphere for their dose of fun.

I'm not sure why SWPL is such a hit, but let's take a second for some serious commentary: the things it lists as swpl are so ordinary that most of them haven't even become cliched. Like dinner parties. A dinner party is people getting together to eat dinner. It's not a white institution; they don't hang signs outside WASP dining rooms saying "If your skin is swarthier than this paint sample, do not enter." Could white people like other crazy things like pants? Dishwashers? Spare tires?

But I guess, in the end, white people like satire. It saves them from actually having to do anything.