I think that we Americans have a real problem: a problem that goes right to the heart of Who We Are. Do you know what it is? No, no. Not the deficit. Or the debt. Or Trump's tweeting. The problem is much more basic than that.
We Americans, or, if you prefer, we 'Muricans, are not allowed to satirize the sacred cows of the ruling class.
Hey! What's the matter with our ruling class? Are they so insecure that they can't abide jokerology? I mean, even Shakespeare said there was no harm in an allowed fool.
In the good old days, the ruling class seemed to be OK with satire. My favorite example is the laughs that Charles Dickens has at the expense of the Circumlocution Office in the Britological government in London, staffed by the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings.
Yes. Things haven't changed. The world is overrun with government employees hanging onto their jobs like grim death, er, barnacles, so that they can do their 30 years and get that gubmint pension. And as for the Stiltstockings! What are all the stuck up journalists and politicians and activists and aides and Deputy Assistant Program Directors but modern Stiltstockings? Find me another name that better describes them, if you can.
Even as recently as the 1980s the Brits put the interesting interface between the Civil Service and the politicians on TV in Yes, Minister. The joke was that the clueless Minister of Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker, was totally bossed around by his suave and educated Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby. And we have seen that happen in real life as Prime Minister Theresa May was clearly bossed around by her Civil Service underlings in respect of Brexit. Note that the present Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a take no prisoners aide, Dominic Cummings to keep the civil servants down to a dull roar. Maybe Cumming is in charge of the removal of "handles" as they call orders and knighthoods ver in Britland.
Back in the stuffy old Victorian Age, Gilbert and Sullivan famously staged a whole string of comic operettas that satirized the upper class and the aristocracy. In H.M.S. Pinafore, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, had no experience in ships. He started out as a clerk in the bureaucracy. In The Mikado we have the Lord High Executioner who is a nobody, and the Lord High Everything Else, who runs the show. And so on. Maybe the stuffy Victorians weren't as stuffy as we are.
But in our day in the US we have had West Wing. But it wasn't a satire. It glorifies the president and his noble liberal effort to bend the arc of history towards justice. Yes, really. Can our liberal friends not see how such a putrid effort diminishes them and the noble art of bending arcs of history.
See, I think we should have comedies and tragedies on the stage and screen that slay all the sacred liberal cows. For instance, we could start with satirizing the unspoken requirement to have diverse casts, with blacks as wise advisers -- or computer whizzes -- and women as superheroes. Then we could make fun of, gasp, high-born feminist women and fake-victim LGBTs.
Hey, I know. Whatabout making fun of Medicare? Of the various follies in education? We could have a sitcom about education bureaucrats busy trying to make life hard for homeschoolers, assisted by monster Harvard professors.
Whatabout climate change? We could have a sitcom featuring a really weird Swedish girl on the spectrum acting out the women's Culture of Complaint and a rather nice and thoughtful German girl who is the soul of level-headedness advocating for the eevil science deniers.
Whatabout discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard? And the millions of useless Karens in the bureaucracy and HR?
Yeah, and all the stereotypes that our liberal masters impose upon us, from race to sex to immigration. And #MeToo. And the amazing way that our news media are all over sex scandals when Republicans are involved but just give the guy a break when a Democrat is involved. We have seen that now at the presidential level with Bill Clinton, when a feminist offering to put on her knee pads to service him, and now with Joe Biden, where feminists are willing to be outraged by his hair sniffing, but still vote for him.
Remember when Candidate Trump's admission that women were more than willing for him to touch them intimately utterly outraged all proper suburban housewives?
What? You say that making fun of intersectional politics is not fun, and you don't see how anyone could seriously laugh at it? Oh really?
How about a skit about female software analysts at Google? The idea would be that the girls spend all their time being outraged by toxic masculinity and planning woke activism, except when the boss comes by and then they pretend to be deeply absorbed in their Big Data project.
Or how about the girls at Google reading an anodyne article about the profound differences between the sexes, footnoted and all, and conspiring together to get the author fired?
How about a skit about the censors at Facebook getting utterly outraged by some anodyne conservative post, but cheering on some lefty AntiFa post proposing to "peacefully protest" some right-wing gathering, and discussing what kind of Molotov cocktails and brass knuckles they will need?
How about a side-by-side skit on a group of Black Power Matters activists planning a noble black protest, intercut with some Proud Boys planning an eevil white supremacist protest?
This is not that hard. But somehow nobody dares to do it. Odd, don't you think? Could it be a conspir-i-cy?
Point is, if the ruling class and their bribed apologists in the media and the activism community don't have the cojones to be able to deal with actual criticism and people laughing and sneering at them in the time honored way of satire and cocking a snook at the pompous rulers, well then, really, they aren't ready for Prime Time, and they ought to go back to the nursery and play with their dollies until they get a clue.
The point is that politics is about power. If you use your power to stop other people from speaking, then what is wrong with your ideology and your politics and your culture that you can't take criticism? I mean, surely your ideas are so good that 97.2 percent of people agree with you, right?
And even more to the point, what is wrong with you, pal?
Or, if you are a woman, "I can't believe you can't take criticism."
But I wonder. Maybe the rule is that only the Gentry is allowed to do satire. Maybe God has forbidden satire by Commoners? Or maybe history demands that deplorable Commoners keep their traps shut.
You think?
We Americans, or, if you prefer, we 'Muricans, are not allowed to satirize the sacred cows of the ruling class.
Hey! What's the matter with our ruling class? Are they so insecure that they can't abide jokerology? I mean, even Shakespeare said there was no harm in an allowed fool.
In the good old days, the ruling class seemed to be OK with satire. My favorite example is the laughs that Charles Dickens has at the expense of the Circumlocution Office in the Britological government in London, staffed by the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings.
Yes. Things haven't changed. The world is overrun with government employees hanging onto their jobs like grim death, er, barnacles, so that they can do their 30 years and get that gubmint pension. And as for the Stiltstockings! What are all the stuck up journalists and politicians and activists and aides and Deputy Assistant Program Directors but modern Stiltstockings? Find me another name that better describes them, if you can.
Even as recently as the 1980s the Brits put the interesting interface between the Civil Service and the politicians on TV in Yes, Minister. The joke was that the clueless Minister of Administrative Affairs, Jim Hacker, was totally bossed around by his suave and educated Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby. And we have seen that happen in real life as Prime Minister Theresa May was clearly bossed around by her Civil Service underlings in respect of Brexit. Note that the present Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a take no prisoners aide, Dominic Cummings to keep the civil servants down to a dull roar. Maybe Cumming is in charge of the removal of "handles" as they call orders and knighthoods ver in Britland.
Back in the stuffy old Victorian Age, Gilbert and Sullivan famously staged a whole string of comic operettas that satirized the upper class and the aristocracy. In H.M.S. Pinafore, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, had no experience in ships. He started out as a clerk in the bureaucracy. In The Mikado we have the Lord High Executioner who is a nobody, and the Lord High Everything Else, who runs the show. And so on. Maybe the stuffy Victorians weren't as stuffy as we are.
But in our day in the US we have had West Wing. But it wasn't a satire. It glorifies the president and his noble liberal effort to bend the arc of history towards justice. Yes, really. Can our liberal friends not see how such a putrid effort diminishes them and the noble art of bending arcs of history.
See, I think we should have comedies and tragedies on the stage and screen that slay all the sacred liberal cows. For instance, we could start with satirizing the unspoken requirement to have diverse casts, with blacks as wise advisers -- or computer whizzes -- and women as superheroes. Then we could make fun of, gasp, high-born feminist women and fake-victim LGBTs.
Hey, I know. Whatabout making fun of Medicare? Of the various follies in education? We could have a sitcom about education bureaucrats busy trying to make life hard for homeschoolers, assisted by monster Harvard professors.
Whatabout climate change? We could have a sitcom featuring a really weird Swedish girl on the spectrum acting out the women's Culture of Complaint and a rather nice and thoughtful German girl who is the soul of level-headedness advocating for the eevil science deniers.
Whatabout discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard? And the millions of useless Karens in the bureaucracy and HR?
Yeah, and all the stereotypes that our liberal masters impose upon us, from race to sex to immigration. And #MeToo. And the amazing way that our news media are all over sex scandals when Republicans are involved but just give the guy a break when a Democrat is involved. We have seen that now at the presidential level with Bill Clinton, when a feminist offering to put on her knee pads to service him, and now with Joe Biden, where feminists are willing to be outraged by his hair sniffing, but still vote for him.
Remember when Candidate Trump's admission that women were more than willing for him to touch them intimately utterly outraged all proper suburban housewives?
What? You say that making fun of intersectional politics is not fun, and you don't see how anyone could seriously laugh at it? Oh really?
How about a skit about female software analysts at Google? The idea would be that the girls spend all their time being outraged by toxic masculinity and planning woke activism, except when the boss comes by and then they pretend to be deeply absorbed in their Big Data project.
Or how about the girls at Google reading an anodyne article about the profound differences between the sexes, footnoted and all, and conspiring together to get the author fired?
How about a skit about the censors at Facebook getting utterly outraged by some anodyne conservative post, but cheering on some lefty AntiFa post proposing to "peacefully protest" some right-wing gathering, and discussing what kind of Molotov cocktails and brass knuckles they will need?
How about a side-by-side skit on a group of Black Power Matters activists planning a noble black protest, intercut with some Proud Boys planning an eevil white supremacist protest?
This is not that hard. But somehow nobody dares to do it. Odd, don't you think? Could it be a conspir-i-cy?
Point is, if the ruling class and their bribed apologists in the media and the activism community don't have the cojones to be able to deal with actual criticism and people laughing and sneering at them in the time honored way of satire and cocking a snook at the pompous rulers, well then, really, they aren't ready for Prime Time, and they ought to go back to the nursery and play with their dollies until they get a clue.
The point is that politics is about power. If you use your power to stop other people from speaking, then what is wrong with your ideology and your politics and your culture that you can't take criticism? I mean, surely your ideas are so good that 97.2 percent of people agree with you, right?
And even more to the point, what is wrong with you, pal?
Or, if you are a woman, "I can't believe you can't take criticism."
But I wonder. Maybe the rule is that only the Gentry is allowed to do satire. Maybe God has forbidden satire by Commoners? Or maybe history demands that deplorable Commoners keep their traps shut.
You think?
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