An important statement

The Bupkes' Secretary-General of Words has some words.

It has come to our attention that some wannabe “journalist” guy reportedly named William Noah Gluhcroft has been passing himself off as the person behind The Bupkes. To be clear, this is false. To be clearer, the rightful founder of The Bupkes is its Secretary-General of Words — no one other than Noach Głuchowicz. To be clearest, any resemblance between the two is pure coincidence, and an unfortunate one at that.

Noach had never heard of William Noah Gluhcroft, but we are sure he would have been pleased to meet him. Maybe.

So, who is William Noah Gluhcroft? Hard to say, as he appears not to exist, but the idea that he — or anyone, for that matter — could possess the bold thinking and strategic nerve required to tirelessly churn out the incisive and insightful work of The Bupkes is an insult to The Bupkes. And also to the bowl of lukewarm oatmeal we had to put down to write this statement.

While we can’t comment about this so-called Gluhcroft specifically, we can say that anyone with a check-less following of fewer than 2,000 semi-sentient and sentient-adjacent netizens is no one worth exerting energy for. You must X this much per minute to go on the internet rabbit hole ride, and frankly, we just don’t care enough to inquire. We have better things to do — like sock puppetry and flicking at that new mole we just found on the top of our right ear.

What little time this fleeting existence of mortal suffering affords is better spent getting that mole checked out by a real doctor than pursuing a fake influencer who can’t even bother to selfie his slacktivism multiple times a day. Starving your Insta feed is a war crime, you know.

If you’re looking for absolute zero, it’s not out there in the infinite cosmos but in the endless loserdom of someone like William Noah Gluhcroft. The kind of social media impact ascribed to William Noah Gluhcroft we would describe as zero, but we have more respect for the number zero. We also fear the defamation suit that zero would slap on The Bupkes if we did.

(Speaking of lawsuits, The Bupkes is consulting with legal counsel to determine if action against William Noah Gluhcroft is necessary. Though we would need to find him first.)

What even is a “Gluhcroft” anyway? That’s less a human-person’s name than an onomatopoeia for a farting goose. No one could ever take someone with such a name seriously — and even less so satirically.

We were so bored trying to come up with what “Gluhcroft” elicits that we asked ChatGPT for its ideas. Here are some of them, only lightly tweaked:

• a crumbling manor half-swallowed by ivy

• bookshelves, heavy with dust and dead languages

• a groundskeeper who talks to the trees

• children in paintings who age when no one looks

• a cat that's always watching from the corner

• a single candle burning in the dark for no one

Thanks, ChatGPT, for helping us figure it out. We know what William Noah Gluhcroft is: a bunch of

bupkes.

Now that we’ve settled that, there is another small matter to attend to. In less interesting corners of the internet, a pesky rumor has gone around that The Bupkes is racist — or, to the extent the difference matters, uses racist language. This is a specious claim. It’s outrageous, egregious, preposterous.

For his part, Noach Głuchowicz is colorblind. Literally. He couldn’t find black on the color wheel if he tried.

That said, exactly because The Bupkes is an open and inclusive platform in the tireless pursuit of cathartically itching your weltschmerz scratch, it is committed to empathy and understanding. So we have empathy for those whose intellectual grounding in historical, political, and cultural discourses is so weak they use words without knowing their meanings. We have understanding for those who find it easier to take to X than six seconds to google.

If they did, they might better understand the dialectical swamp of liberal politicking. If they had, they might have thought twice before adding a crumb atop the mountain of cookie crumbles under which decades of Yiddish-”Negro” relations are buried.

Go down, Moses. Let my People go.

Reading this, you may think that we at The Bupkes are angry for a mischaracterization that amounts to little more than an effort to parody a satire. If there is anything to be angry over, however, it is that we are not angry, but instead filled with an unsettling modicum of relief and an unwelcome sense of hope. Gross.

The baseless allegations leveled against us suggest the Americanization of Europe still has work to do. The long arm of liberal empire and its cultural domination is perhaps not as long as we thought, which is surprising given Europe’s growing groupthink around securitization and marketization at the political level and its growing dependency on America for social justice cues at the civil society level. One could be deceived into thinking that Europe, to the extent such an entity exists anymore than a “Gluhcroft,” doesn’t have plenty of shit to work out on its own.

In the history of transatlantic trade, slavery was only the most explicit of many bad ideas to crisscross the ocean. Unfortunately, there is no tariff high enough to stop them. Discussions of race and racism in Europe may be less acutely conscious of the concept of the “Magical Negro” as parallel discourse is in the United States, but they sure do internalize it well. As it turns out, you can import the capital B and still export döner meat at the same time.

Indeed, there is no better expression of the Dream than to be judged not by the color of your skin but by the content of your shlocky romcom. We will not rest until all people can walk equally down the over-traveled path of derivative Hollywood plotlines.

We are, therefore, where we are. The Bupkes has little interest in passing moral judgment and even less in engaging in the politics of feelings, but instead observing and learning from developments as they take shape. Hannah Arendt understood that distinction better than most when she went to Jerusalem, where she would go on to write “that such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.”

The banality, and the thoughtlessness on which so much of it is built, never went away; it simply (d)evolved into something else.