Stuff White People Like - Christian Lander [51]
If you need to impress a white person, merely mention how you got hurt on a recent trip to Canada/England/Sweden and though you were a foreigner you received excellent and free health care. They will be very impressed and likely tell you about how the powerful drug and health-care lobbies are destroying everything.
Though their passion for national health care runs deep, it is important to remember that white people are most in favor of it when they are healthy. They love the idea of everyone having equal access to the resources that will keep them alive. At least until they have to wait in line for an MRI. This is very similar to the way that white people express their support for public schools when they don’t have children.
113 Che Guevara
Though he would likely hate them all, white people cannot get enough of Che Guevara. They love his radical politics, his fight for the peasants, and his role in establishing the Communist government of Cuba, which has found varying degrees of success since its inception. But far and away his greatest contribution to white culture has been his ability to look good on a T-shirt.
Wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt tells the world that you are cool (it’s a T-shirt), you are left wing (he was a Communist!) and you look good in red (the shirt is always red). For bonus points, some white people like to pair the Che T-shirt with a sport coat and a pair of jeans. It’s the ultimate mix of business and peasant.
Though highly successful in T-shirt form, this has not been without problems. Many younger people are fairly confident that Che Guevara was created by the same guy who created Obey Giant.
Still, his dashing good looks and young death have made him a hero to upper-middle-class white people everywhere who hope to one day be able to pull off a beret in public.
When you encounter a white person with a Che T-shirt, it’s very important to approach them with the following understanding. White people would fondly embrace a Communist revolution if they were given jobs as writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, politicians, or architects. So long as they don’t have to do manual labor, they share Che’s utopian vision!
Follow that simple rule and you will likely find a T-shirt of your own waiting for you at your desk on International Workers’ Day.
114 The New Yorker
The magazine industry relies heavily on white people, not only for staffing but also for subscriptions. White people love many magazines, including The Economist, Wired, Saveur, The Atlantic, and The Utne Reader. But without fail, the magazine that will get you the most respect from white people is The New Yorker.
The magazine is made up of many sections: letters, cultural listings, snippets, and extremely long articles. Toward the end of the magazine you will notice ads for many things that white people like, including summer study programs, language software, and berets.
When you first pick up The New Yorker, you will notice that there are not a lot of pictures. This is very important to white people, as it makes them feel smarter about reading it. However, do not assume that white people read every word of The New Yorker. Due to an abundance of words and the fact that the magazine is published weekly, white people have been subscribing to and not reading The New Yorker for more than seventy years.
Every white person is ashamed about letting their copies of the magazine pile up, and this is your ticket to common ground.
Once you have successfully moved the conversation to a place where you can reference the magazine, it’s a fantastic move to say, “I need to take a week off just so I can get caught up on the issues piling up next to my bed.” Once the white person has realized that they are