Bear with me, guys. I have a theory that the whatever-the-aughts decade was the decade of the Tragic Final Act of the American White Male.

I know, I know, you’ve heard it before: Obama and more women go to college and blah blah blah. But I’m not really talking shifting demographics (no one ignores the reality in front of our faces quite like Americans!) or shiny national symbols (which we tend to tarnish more than treasure). I think, psychologically speaking, it has become impossible to be a white man in America. It requires such a vast degree of cognitive dissonance that is increasingly unsustainable at the upper levels of culture, politics, and government and for many individual middle-class, middle-aged men.

The result was (is?) a decade of paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and antisocial tendencies that began long before we voted in a black president and left a football-haired lady in charge of the Nuclear Football. I guess in many ways what I’m saying sounds like a repeat of 1970s handwringing, and maybe it is. After all, both decades were defined by government corruption, oil crises, and the threat of the “rise of women.” I suppose time will tell if we will push the psychological damage of the last ten years aside as easily as we did after the 70s (an equally pivotal but underappreciated decade! I have a thing for them). The only people—mostly men—who seem to have found an outlet for this widespread tension and carried it to its logical end are Tea Partiers, who have essentially embraced the spirit and rhetoric of minority politics to argue for a return to privilege (a strategy that either reduces dissonance or dives headfirst into it, who knows).

Here is a crazy-person list of unrelated and unexplained supporting points in rough chronological order. I periodically add cultural artifacts to the list in my head as they occur to me. One day I will make sense of it:

• September 11th
• The release of The Strokes’ Is This It
• The realization by men who voted for Bush in 2000 based mostly on a knee-jerk commitment to fiscal conservatism that in return they had sold out their most precious values (meritocracy, individual liberties, isolationism—the ability to be a self-made man) to small group of morally bankrupt, interventionist kleptocrats
• Loose Change
• David Brooks
• I <3 Huckabees
• Judd Apatow movies/the “men who refuse to grow up” genre of comedy
• economic collapse/the fall of finance
• Hanna Rosin’s flawed-but-definitely-on-to-something article “The End of Men”
• Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

Anyway, this is a thing I like to talk about when I’m drunk. Just warning you so you know what to talk about with me when you approach me at parties!