Consider the gypsy moth.
This humble creature flits about, doing moth things, living its moth life, and dreaming its moth dreams.
And even though it never wanted to be another flash point in this nation’s endless culture wars, the gypsy moth is now a catalyst for political arguments, proving that there is nothing — and I mean nothing— that Americans will not fight about.
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As our illustrious leader has informed us, these are dangerous times for men… particularly white ones… particularly straight, rich, conservative ones…
Yeah, that’s right. It’s an absolute horror show for privileged males today.
Of course, common sense and a basic understanding of math reveals that the odds that an American women will be raped in her lifetime is about 1 in 6, while the odds that an American man will be accused of rape is way, way, way lower. And the odds that an American man will be falsely accused is lower still.
So why — besides Trump’s nauseating predilection for misogyny — is the president advocating for the plight of men?
Well, there is a long history of the most powerful among us presenting themselves as the real victims. It is an effective method for retaining control, even if the hypocrisy and blatant mendacity of the tactic make it apparent to anyone who is the slightest bit non-partisan and/or has the cognitive ability of a ten-year-old.
In any case, this approach goes beyond simple sexism. It is at the core of the whole battle against the nefarious forces of political correctness, which an overwhelming 80 percent of Americans think is a problem in our country.
I’ve written before about how calling something PC is usually shorthand for dismissing the concerns of marginalized groups, and how there is nothing the slightest bit edgy about being non-PC, an ambiguous standard that often signifies a high level of fear and loathing about our changing society.
But is PC a legitimate concern, or is it just an overblown attempt by conservatives to claim victimhood and, in this way, their own political “safe spaces”?
Well, I don’t know of any scientific studies that have analyzed the toxic effects of political correctness. So we’re reduced to looking at anecdotal evidence.
For example, many white people have been caught on tape accosting black people who are minding their own business and posing no threat. Some of these paranoid individuals have been fired or publicly shamed for their actions. Now, let’s assume that it is mere political correctness to call out a white person for, say, calling the copson an African American who is watching his kid play soccer.
I would call it being a bigoted asshole, but let’s go with the right-wing definition, and say that it’s PC to fire someone for preventing a black man from entering his own apartment.
In that case, yes, I guess you could say that PC has harmed a handful of Americans. But for the most part, this is only when aggressive jerks display extremely prejudicial behavior that happens to be caught on video. Otherwise, they can just go around chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and cracking racist jokes with impunity.
Clearly, PC is a bit toothless if that is the extent of its cultural power.
Now let’s look at the other side.
Have there been examples of liberals — you know, the PC people — who have been bullied into submission?
Well, there is theblack Vermont lawmaker who “first suspended her re-election campaign before resigning altogether from her post following racist attacks against her and her family.” That’s correct — bigoted trolls attacked an elected representative, and PC did not come to her rescue. In fact, the alt-right abusers got their way.
And then there iswriter Chuck Wendig, who has been the object of many online attacks from conservatives. Wendig was fired from Marvel “after posting a number of explicit tweets attacking Republicans and the GOP over the confirmation of Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.”
Once again, the alt-right suffered no consequences for their fusillade on Wendig, who said that his firing “is really quite chilling,” leaving him “very sad, and worried for the country I live in, and the world.”
Why didn’t PC, with its monumental powers, prevent Wendig from losing his job? And why are his alt-right attackers, rather than being chastened, now overjoyed with yet another victory?
That’s because it is the alt-right that is punishing people for their language and opinions, not the so-called PC police. And it is the Republican Party that is cultivating this surrealistic environment, in that they cry about their oppression and issue a “call for civility as the PA GOP candidate threatens [his opponent] with a golf cleat stomping.”
No, a black lawmaker can lose her job due to alt-right attacks. But a white man who may have committed a felony can get belligerent and still nab a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Clearly, it doesn’t sound like privileged white men are suffering too much under the hideous yoke of political correctness.
In fact, I’m tempted to say that much of the whining about America being too PC is just another pathetic, knee-jerk reaction from unimaginative, self-righteous hypocrites.
But I don’t want to offend anyone.
One thing I don’t understand:
Why would anyone jump on Twitter and post a racial slur or homophobic tirade?
What is the upside? You rile up a dozen of your followers for 30 seconds?
Because the downside is that you look like a total fucking asshole to millions of people years from now, when your idiotic tweets are uncovered, and your career is threatened and your reputation is ruined.
That is a really bad return on investment.
Recently, major league baseball has had to deal with the fallout of several of its players who have had their old bigoted tweets unearthed.
Among them is reliever Josh Hader, an All-Star who pitches for my hometown Milwaukee Brewers.
Hader, like his fellow misguided tweeters, has apologized profusely for his words and insisted that his hateful outbursts are not indicative of who he is today.
OK, sure. Let’s go ahead and give the guy the benefit of the doubt. He was a dick when he was a teenager, but now he’s older and wiser, and not a racist jerk.
But this issue goes beyond a couple of pitchers who may or may not have issues with ethnic minorities.
You see, when Hader took the mound in Milwaukee for the first time after his apology, Brewers fans gave him a standing ovation.
I can’t be the only one who found that distasteful. I’d like to think that most of my fellow fans were just trying to be supportive of Hader’s quest for redemption.
But I also know my hometown. Milwaukee has long had problematic racial issues, even by the problematic standards of the USA.
I can’t help but think that some of those fans were cheering for Hader because he wasn’t “politically correct” or because they wanted to stick it to the libs or some bizarre motivation like that. And some of them, unfortunately, were cheering for Hader’s original tweets and wanted to indicate that he nothing to apologize for.
If that sounds paranoid or accusatory, let’s try a thought experiment.
Imagine that Lorenzo Cain, also a Milwaukee Brewer and also an All-Star, had old tweets surface in which he denigrated people of a different race. The catch (and I’m sure you saw it coming) is that Cain is African American, and let’s pretend that he slurred white people.
In such a scenario, it’s difficult to“imagine thousands of white fans rising to their feet and giving him a standing ovation, even after he apologizes and blames youthful indiscretion.”
It’s not just about my hometown, of course. You see, “baseball has the oldest (average age of an MLB viewer in 2016: 57) and one of the whitest (83 percent in 2013) viewerships of any major American sport.”
It means that baseball — despite its prominence in Latino culture — has a fan base that is more likely to be both more socially conservative and more forgiving of white athletes who screw up.
And this means that young white fireballers who tweet vile things are more likely to get standing o’s, whether they are deserved or not.
By the way, I do indeed have a Twitter account. You can check it out here.
Go ahead and dig around. You won’t find any racist tweets.
Among the stranger aspects of this bizarre election season is the tendency of Donald Trump supporters to insist that their candidate is not racist. The hyper-defensiveness goes something like this:
When he referred to Mexicans as rapists, he didn’t specifically say, “all Mexicans,” so it’s ok. Right?
And building that wall isn’t xenophobic. It’s a practical way to keep out all those immigrants… I mean, illegal immigrants… wait, I mean, undocumented people… he’s got nothing against immigrants. And neither do I. Ha ha ha.
Banning Muslims would just be temporary. That’s key. And not bigoted at all. Nope.
OK, he wasn’t the quickest about disavowing the KKK, but we’ve all been there… I mean, he said they were bad guys… eventually… after being criticized for days… but yeah, he did it.
And all those unfortunate cracks about “the blacks”… well, he meant, um… Hey, you’re just being PC!
And so it goes. La la la la, not listening to you.
Oddly enough, liberals seem to have no problem identifying Trump’s many prejudiced remarks. And Latinos, Asians, and African Americans are pretty clear on the fact that the guy is a racist.
On the other end of the spectrum, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are lining up to endorse the GOP nominee. They also appear to have no illusions about where Trump stands on race relations.
Only two groups of people seem baffled about this issue. First, there are moderate conservatives who are struggling to maintain their fiction that racism is dead in America (and who are also striving to justify their votes for a blatant bigot). And there are stray ethnic minorities who explain away or ignore the obvious for reasons that I can’t quite comprehend (although I presume some self-loathing is involved).
Let’s be clear about this. The truth is that if you support Trump, you are aware on some level that the guy has tremendous hostility toward anyone who isn’t a white straight man. And as you stand in that voting booth, sweating through your rationalizations, you will be saying that you are fine with that.
Remember, if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a megalomaniacal billionaire pushing a racist agenda.
When I started this blog, this website, this little outpost of sanity in the vast crazy wilderness of the internet, I posted articles about the latest slurs and offenses aimed at Latinos. I still do that, of course, but for the most part it has to be something truly egregious, preferably by someone in a position of authority and/or cultural power (eg., a senator, a high-profile CEO, the winner of Celebrity Apprentice, etc).
So when our friends at Latino Rebels posted this story, I was initially intrigued. Apparently, a bored rich woman has tried her hand at satire by populating a website with images of something she calls, “Illegal Immigrant Barbie,” which I’m not even going to show here. Instead, just gaze upon a standard-issue Barbie, and use your imagination.
Now, it’s undeniably racist. Worse, it’s lazy and unfunny.
But we already know the woman’s excuses. We’ve heard them all before. Pick one of the following:
1. “I’m not prejudiced. I’m just telling the truth.”
2. “Well, excuse me for not being politically correct. Clearly, you can’t handle it.”
3. “Hey, I have Latino friends, and they thought it was hilarious. OK, my maid gave me a nervous laugh, but close enough.”
So I’m skipping the anger and substituting a sad shaking of the head and a lugubrious eye-roll. This woman’s pathetic affront deserves no more.
In fact, I only mention it at all because I intend to cut/paste my reaction to future instances of bored rich people mocking poor people, which never seems to go out of style with them.
On to the next outrage.
I was in the first generation of kids who grew up with Sesame Street. Even at a young age, I recognized how rare it was to see fellow Latinos on television, much less a happily married, well-adjusted couple like Maria and Luis.
I wasn’t even traumatized when Grover would get all quiet, lean in to whisper to a little Hispanic child, and then start shouting and waving his spindly arms around. Seriously, he did that a lot.
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Apparently, a bunch of sluts were running around my city recently.
I’m talking, of course, about the SlutWalk movement, which began earlier this year when a Toronto cop implied that women who dressed like “sluts” deserved to get raped. Outraged at the cop’s statement, women all over North America hit the streets both to protest the Neanderthal mindset that afflicts so many males, and to repurpose the word “slut.”
When I was in college, my editor at the student newspaper called me with an assignment: I was to cover a speech by a radical professor who, my editor breathlessly said, was brilliant “and so PC!”
I asked what that meant, and she said, with some amazement at my naivety, that it indicated “politically correct.”
I had never heard this term before. Of course, it wasn’t long before those juxtaposed letters entered the language and, in the process, went from leftist praise to conservative insult.
