I had a short breather yesterday before being pulled back under the whirlpool of work, and as I looked out at the world for the first time in days, it was a struggle not to laugh bitterly at the stupidity abounding about us and dive back into the whirlpool. But eventually you reach a point where stupidity passes beyond the point where you can smile rudely, or sadly, and still manage some sympathy for a fool's victimization of themselves; there's a point where it descends into something that is purely obscene - and ladies and gentlemen, we've reached that point.
Appropriately enough, this latest episode began with a rodeo clown. It seems that what happened was that a rodeo clown did what rodeo clowns have been doing for decades, going at least back to Nixon (Richard, that is), and the clown put on a presidential mask, mixed it in with some clownish buffoonery, and amused the crowds while distracting the bulls from the riders.
That's their job.
Usually the only shit they have to deal with in such situations, is what comes out of the bulls.
This time however, the actual shit that came out of the bull's ass was positively fragrant and hygienic in comparison to what has come out of the mouths of our fellow citizens and elected officials.
Dana Loesch has
skewered & linked to a stunning amount of human BS related to this episode, but there are a few stand-outs that I've got to point out.
One, is what MO
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) had to say:
"“If what’s being reported is true, then it’s shameful and it’s unacceptable. The State Fair is funded by taxpayer dollars, and is supposed to be a place where we can all bring our families and celebrate the state that we love. But the young Missourians who witnessed this stunt learned exactly the wrong lesson about political discourse-that somehow it’s ever acceptable to, in a public event, disrespect, taunt, and joke about harming the President of our great nation. Missouri is better than this, and I expect someone to be held accountable.”
Bite me Claire.
Oh, and BTW that's a bi-partisan 'Bite Me', which I'd also like to extend to the second stand-out, MO's Lt. Governor Peter Kinder (R), who tweeted:
I love the @MoStateFair and will attend this week. I implore @GovJayNixon to hold the people resonsible for the other night accountable.
, and,
The @MoStateFair celebrates Missouri and our people. I condemn the actions disrespectful to POTUS the other night. We are better than this.
The Lt. Gov. is condemning the actions of a rodeo clown, and demands that someone be held accountable... for his behaving like... a rodeo clown.
Are you friggin'
kidding me!?!?!?!?
We have now sunk to such a level that the standard which We The People are to aspire to, is one where a rodeo clown
A RODEO CLOWN (!!!) for Gawds sakes, cannot be tolerated to behave disrespectfully to those in authority?
Is it just me, or does such an uptight, repressed, priggish & humorlessness bunch of people seem more reminiscent of Cold War era East Germany, than of the American "Show Me!" state of Missouri?
I am so damn offended by these OfendoCrats, Left, Right and Center... and I have been for some time...
see here ... and
here, but this one, this really takes the cake.
It's tempting to simply reply to these examples of stupidity, absent memory and blatant hypocrisy, with examples from all sides reminding them of what has been done, and accepted good naturedly, in the recent, and very recent, past. I mean... while Claire's claiming to be offended over taxpayer dollars being spent in ways that might be inappropriate for family viewing, has she really never heard of the National Endowment for the Arts? Has she never heard of the
NEA's funding of Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibitions? Serrano's 'Piss Christ'? Seriously? Or maybe those are simply examples of what Claire finds to be acceptable for family viewing?
And while she's claiming to be offended at taxpayer dollars being inappropriately spent, maybe she oughta browse some vintage
Breitbart posts... from all of three years ago, such as:
"EXPLOSIVE NEW AUDIO Reveals White House Using NEA to Push Partisan Agenda
Should the National Endowment for the Arts encourage artists to create art on issues being vehemently debated nationally?
That is the question that I set out to discuss a little over three weeks ago when I wrote an article on Big Hollywood entitled The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?”
The question still requires debate but the facts do not.
The NEA and the White House did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address politically controversial issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable. "
But such reminders are really missing the real point here. But ... sadly, before we can get to the real point... I have to point out that what I've noted so far, is not nearly the lowest of lows that this situation has sunken to.
Brace yourself.
One: The Rodeo Clown
has been fired... for being a Rodeo Clown.
Two: The Rodeo Announcer,
has been removed, for announcing the doings of the rodeo clown in the rodeo he was there as an announcer for.
But it gets worse (though still not worst of all), with:
Three: Taking the absurd to the limits of absurdity, the Missouri State Fair Commission has insisted that
rodeo clowns be given sensitivity training classes before they can work AS A RODEO CLOWN at another state fair.
Clowns. To be taking
sensitivity classes. It is tempting to say that these people are obviously suffering from severely irony deficient diets, but it still gets far worse than that.
Just when you think the last clown has piled out of the clown car, along comes the biggest low of all, and the one that leads us to the real point that we should be focusing upon, and this low point comes to you courtesy of Tishaura O. Jones. Who, you ask, is Tishaura O. Jones? Her web page in the
St. Louis City web site states that:
"Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones brings a deep personal commitment, a wealth of experience, and a proven record of leadership to serving the City of St. Louis. "
And apparently part of the wealth of experience that she is deeply committed to, is race bating, ignorance, and promoting an anti-conceptual mentality, all of which she perfectly expressed in under 140 characters
in a tweet, during taxpayer funded city business hours:
"@eyokley @JeffSmithMO since November 2008, racism has been masked under the guise of "anti-Obama sentiment."
Psst! Claire! Is
that an acceptable use of taxpayer dollars? As Dana points out in the above link:
"So a taxpayer-funded city official is entitled to her opinion but a rodeo clown at a tax-payer supported fair is not. In Missouri an elected official can clown the people whom she represents but a rodeo clown can’t clown Obama."
The Rodeo Clown was fired for being a rodeo clown. The City Treasurer is not even chided by the mayor for calling those who disagree with Obama, racists. I would personally like to thank Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones for so perfectly summing up the proRegressive mindset - if you disagree, you are not only wrong, you are bad; bad because what they agree with is good... and so 'logically'...
you must be bad.
What she, and every other Offendocrat, of the left and the right, are demonstrating, is not just stupidity, but the chief virtues of the totalitarian state: Hostility to any ideas, actions or preferences that fail to hold up the positions of the state in a sufficiently exalted light.
This isn't funny folks, it should chill you to the bone.
Totalitarian Virtues Aren't Clowning Around
Not only is it now unacceptable to mock the President of the United States, but it is now a secular sin (
Racist!) to criticize any of the policies of the politically accepted victim class, a crime punishable at the very least, by being fired from your job... and condemning everyone in your line of work to political re-education classes.
These sensibilities which people such as the Senator and Lt. Gov. are expressing, are two phases of Totalitarian 'Virtues', both of which promote in a person a sense of anxious self-consciousness, spiced with a liberal dollop of fear, and the ability to extend it (dare I say project it?) onto others. When a person feels concern not only over what their neighbor might be doing, as the Senator expressed, but over what their neighbor
might be thinking that
you are doing, as the Lt. Gov. expressed, and that sensation impels you to speak out loudly in order to avoid being caught up in a politically correct backlash you know will directly, or indirectly, turn the power of the state against you - then you are displaying what, in the eyes of the totalitarian state, passes for virtue.
In short, if you are able to tolerate Un-PC points of view, you will be viewed as being intolerable to society.
And dealt with.
These are the priceless virtues of totalitarianism, and they can take decades to instill in a people, but to those in power they are worth their weight in your gold - because you simply cannot maintain a totalitarian state without a people conditioned to support it, and conditioned to turn on their fellow citizens, in just such a way as this. Such a state does not require a government itself be totalitarian - though that will surely follow - it only requires that its people cringe to the godz of political correctness.And IMHO, the '
Me Offended Too!'s', such as Lt. Gov. Kinder, are even guiltier than those who really believe it.
What this is, is the result of so many decades of fighting a political war, while ignoring the philosophical/cultural war - the intellectual equivalent of bringing a spit wad straw to a gun fight. It is the result of intellectually honest people being AWOL from academia and from the culture for a decade of decades, and
the ignorance which that absence has bred are fast becoming our society's norms, which is to say they are becoming Cultural Law... and once those laws are written into the hearts of the people, neither the Bill of Rights, nor the entire Constitution for that matter, will be worth the paper they will be burned on.
"You Americans, you are such a happy people!"
When you go back and listen to interviews from 19th & 20th century immigrants to America, what they nearly all reported as being the most striking feature of Americans, was their cheerfulness "You all seem so happy" they'd say... unlike the people form those totalitarian societies they were escaping from.
There was nothing in the climate or food of those societies that made their people, or ours, as happy or as tight lipped and grim as they were, it was in their ideas, and their societies endorsement of those ideas - its culture.
Understand, it's not as if people in America were walking around with giggly faces on, they simply spoke their minds, and laughed at what amused them, and they did so without a second thought, or more significantly, without any inkling that such a thing should even be given a thought.
THAT is a decidedly UN-Totalitarian mindset.
That is not a view that is compatible with
Political Correctness.
Tell me, that spontaneity, that habit of acting without first wondering whether you should be concerned that what you say might '
get you in trouble' (aka: fear)... do you have that today? You don't have to tell me - tell yourself. Honestly. Do you ever wonder whether or not the first response that comes to mind might, like the Rodeo Clown, get your life turned upside down?
Really, the fact that the question can even be posed, should raise more than a few alarm bells.
The ProRegressive State of Political Correctness, which we are well into today, could not possibly have come into being without first having ingrained into our minds the need to be concerned about whether or not something might be 'offensive' to one politically favored group or another.
The common term for this, though rarely thought of in this way, is seeking to 'raise consciousness' upon the 'correct' response to a 'politically sensitive' issue.
IOW, the healthy, happy American mindset, that of being open to reality and responding honestly and truthfully to it,
had to be replaced by one that shows concern for what certain influential groups of people think is more important than reality itself, in short:
a dis-ordered mind.
If you think that's a stretch, you don't need to confine yourself to rodeo clowns, or even Missouri, for examples of this. Just look to our schools.
Such as this one from the
California of the east:
"Parents across Massachusetts are upset over new rules that would not only allow transgender students to use their restrooms of their choice – but would also punish students who refuse to affirm or support their transgender classmates.
Last week the Massachusetts Department of Education issued directives for handling transgender students – including allowing them to use the bathrooms of their choice or to play on sports teams that correspond to the gender with which they identify."
The word 'Identify' is now no longer explicitly intended to accurately describe reality, but only to 'identify', meaning to take sides with, what some particular (politically acceptable and favored) person might wish reality actually were.
I'd call that dis-ordered 'thinking'.
To put that in broadly philosophical terms, whenever faced with an issue of Quality, the Leftist mind automatically transforms it into an issue of Quantity.
In regards to Health care, if you dare mention your concern for a persons right to live their own life and choose their own path, they will snarlingly demand to know why you want to condemn 30 million people to die in the streets without health insurance. They do not, and will not, respond to the conceptual quality of your idea, but only to the particular quantities of issues which they hope will deflect you away from your position - finding an actual error in your ideas is not their aim, but only to declare them to as being
'bad', making further explanation unnecessary
.
If you say you'd prefer that your daughter not have to shower with someone you consider to be, more likely than not, a pervert, they will have you
and your daughter punished for refusing to support what they have declared to be 'diversity' (a position notably lacking your opinion within the diverse positions it claims to uphold).
Unfortunately, the Right, caught unawares and outside of church, typically accepts these terms as offered and, raised in the same schools as the leftist, counters only with how it might be possible to tally up the quantities into socially acceptable, though hidden, benefits - surrendering the field of Right & Wrong altogether, and crawling off into the mud of justifiable quantities.
These are not unique situation, they are the norm. The left transforms Philosophy into Politics, and the Right responds with that relatively small fragment of politics they identify (in the modern sense) with... though bereft of the superior ideas they haven't had the courage to identify (in the classical sense) and defend ... and then they are baffled as more and more of the world slips away from their grasp.
To sum it up, if you lose the ideas that America
IS (and that'd be what the meaning of 'is'
is), and import Anti-American ideas into that place the American ones used to be (between our ears), then you will lose America, and no birth certificate will ever secure you passage back to it.
IOW, ya can't fight Philosophy with Politics.
You'll look like a clown if you try to.
Period.