HOW CAN SO MUCH WINNING FEELS LIKE LOSING?
May. 1st, 2018 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogIt’s so hard to be a conservative in Trump’s America. Apparently.
Exhibit A: This NPR piece on how despite having complete control of the US govt, which they've always wanted, conservatives feel so unloved because they can’t watch a TV show or go to the movies without seeing someone criticizing them or mocking them, and they can’t say anything on Twitter without being mobbed with haters screaming at them.
Exhibit B: This NYT piece about how terrible it is that we are punishing celebrities like poor old Kanye West, Shania Twain, Rosanne Barr etc for having The Wrong Opinion.
Exhibit C: Michelle Wolf’s dinner comedy.
And, you know, I have thoughts.
1. I’m a celebrity get me outta here
I don’t feel bad for Kanye or these other celebs being “deleted”, whatever that means. In terms of their careers, I think they’ll be fine. John Scalzi makes that case in 140 characters or less.
2. It's just a joke, man
I haven’t seen/heard Wolf’s routine apart from a couple of clips, but it sounds to me the conservative outrage over it is the usual schadenfreude, for a couple of reasons.
First, a lot of the same people seem to find the current POTUS quite amusing when he insults women for their looks or does impressions of disabled people or makes "jokes" about police brutality and treason. So when you rally behind a POTUS whose entire schtick is insulting people he openly hates, and who distinguishes himself by phoning up Fox & Friends to rant for 30 minutes about his enemies, you don’t really have the high ground to lecture the rest of us on cruel humor and decorum.
Second, whether yr conservative or liberal, you know what yr getting with a WHCA dinner. Or I assume you do – apparently the WHCA didn’t. Which is odd since they’re the ones who booked Wolf. So I don’t know what kinds of jokes they were expecting. when you hire edgy political comedians, you tend to get edgy political humor, so let's not pretend to be shocked that Wolf went over the line. That’s what she was there to do. The entire point of good political comedy is to “punch up” (as they say) and speak truth to power –or at least mock it. And the truth about the current power isn't all that pretty for a lot of people, which tends to give political comedy more of an edge. Besides, is it Wolf’s fault a minority of voters elected a POTUS who said “grab them by the pussy” on tape?
Bottom line: if you don’t want comedians making fun of you, hire David Blaine or someone.
Also, Margaret Talev can talk all she wants about civility – and that’s something the press should always aspire to, but not to the point of being deferential to the Powers That Be. The thing is, comedy is even less constrained by civility, especially when it comes to politics. It has to be. People who say Wolf blurred the lines between roasting and bullying don’t really understand the concept of either. As someone pointed out somewhere, the difference between Wolf and Trump when it comes to making fun of people is this: (1) Wolf is mostly just kidding – Trump is not, and (2) Wolf has no real power over the people she makes jokes about – Trump does.
3. What did I do to deserve this?
As for conservatives feeling persecuted … well, look, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that Internet lynch mobs are a major social problem, and that it’s stressful getting piled on by trolls, Russian bots and other people who don’t like yr politics to the point of reducing you to an Evil Cartoon Villain. We need to address and fix that, and soon.
On the other hand – and I know I’m not the first person to point this out – but to continue the riff in the above section, I’m reasonably sure the problem has to do with the fact that the modern conservative movement – and specifically the ones that have wholeheartedly supported Trump – has built its political platform on anger, xenophobia and hate directed at basically anyone who isn’t an angry conservative straight white gun-owning evangelical Christian native-born American. They support white-identity marches and tell us that blacks are the real racists, they defend men accused of sexual assault (as long as they're Republicans), they turn away war refugees, they pick on teenage mass shooting survivors – the list goes on.
To be clear, there are conservatives who don’t do these things, but many of them seem willing to turn a blind eye to it all as long as rich people get a tax cut and Obamacare is repealed because ideology.
And now they’re like, “We’re such nice people, why does everyone pick on us?”
Welp.
You shall know them by their fruits,
This is dF
Exhibit A: This NPR piece on how despite having complete control of the US govt, which they've always wanted, conservatives feel so unloved because they can’t watch a TV show or go to the movies without seeing someone criticizing them or mocking them, and they can’t say anything on Twitter without being mobbed with haters screaming at them.
Exhibit B: This NYT piece about how terrible it is that we are punishing celebrities like poor old Kanye West, Shania Twain, Rosanne Barr etc for having The Wrong Opinion.
Exhibit C: Michelle Wolf’s dinner comedy.
And, you know, I have thoughts.
1. I’m a celebrity get me outta here
I don’t feel bad for Kanye or these other celebs being “deleted”, whatever that means. In terms of their careers, I think they’ll be fine. John Scalzi makes that case in 140 characters or less.
2. It's just a joke, man
I haven’t seen/heard Wolf’s routine apart from a couple of clips, but it sounds to me the conservative outrage over it is the usual schadenfreude, for a couple of reasons.
First, a lot of the same people seem to find the current POTUS quite amusing when he insults women for their looks or does impressions of disabled people or makes "jokes" about police brutality and treason. So when you rally behind a POTUS whose entire schtick is insulting people he openly hates, and who distinguishes himself by phoning up Fox & Friends to rant for 30 minutes about his enemies, you don’t really have the high ground to lecture the rest of us on cruel humor and decorum.
Second, whether yr conservative or liberal, you know what yr getting with a WHCA dinner. Or I assume you do – apparently the WHCA didn’t. Which is odd since they’re the ones who booked Wolf. So I don’t know what kinds of jokes they were expecting. when you hire edgy political comedians, you tend to get edgy political humor, so let's not pretend to be shocked that Wolf went over the line. That’s what she was there to do. The entire point of good political comedy is to “punch up” (as they say) and speak truth to power –or at least mock it. And the truth about the current power isn't all that pretty for a lot of people, which tends to give political comedy more of an edge. Besides, is it Wolf’s fault a minority of voters elected a POTUS who said “grab them by the pussy” on tape?
Bottom line: if you don’t want comedians making fun of you, hire David Blaine or someone.
Also, Margaret Talev can talk all she wants about civility – and that’s something the press should always aspire to, but not to the point of being deferential to the Powers That Be. The thing is, comedy is even less constrained by civility, especially when it comes to politics. It has to be. People who say Wolf blurred the lines between roasting and bullying don’t really understand the concept of either. As someone pointed out somewhere, the difference between Wolf and Trump when it comes to making fun of people is this: (1) Wolf is mostly just kidding – Trump is not, and (2) Wolf has no real power over the people she makes jokes about – Trump does.
3. What did I do to deserve this?
As for conservatives feeling persecuted … well, look, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that Internet lynch mobs are a major social problem, and that it’s stressful getting piled on by trolls, Russian bots and other people who don’t like yr politics to the point of reducing you to an Evil Cartoon Villain. We need to address and fix that, and soon.
On the other hand – and I know I’m not the first person to point this out – but to continue the riff in the above section, I’m reasonably sure the problem has to do with the fact that the modern conservative movement – and specifically the ones that have wholeheartedly supported Trump – has built its political platform on anger, xenophobia and hate directed at basically anyone who isn’t an angry conservative straight white gun-owning evangelical Christian native-born American. They support white-identity marches and tell us that blacks are the real racists, they defend men accused of sexual assault (as long as they're Republicans), they turn away war refugees, they pick on teenage mass shooting survivors – the list goes on.
To be clear, there are conservatives who don’t do these things, but many of them seem willing to turn a blind eye to it all as long as rich people get a tax cut and Obamacare is repealed because ideology.
And now they’re like, “We’re such nice people, why does everyone pick on us?”
Welp.
You shall know them by their fruits,
This is dF
