This is sort of an update of something I wrote back in 2018, but have been thinking about again. I guess the horrific thought of Karlie Kloss, Alessandra Ambrosio and Candice Swanepoel being replaced by Megan Rapinoe and a cadre of unattractive "body positive" models reminded me of how the progressive spirit of the age sucks the life and fun out of every damn thing.
Women are beautiful, that is only one aspect of them as human beings, but for me, looking at a beautiful woman is the equivalent of viewing great art. It makes me happy and not in a sexual way. I just appreciate beauty in all its forms.
Over the past several weeks, few random thoughts and observations have resurfaced and have been ricocheting around in my quite spacious empty skull like a marble in an empty paint can.
If America is not to be allowed to judge the cultures of others, then other cultures are not to be allowed to judge America.
If you think policies pursued by former presidents are now bad because they are pursued by the current president, the problem isn’t the current president, it’s you.
America seems to be losing its sense of humor, and while it is appropriate to be serious about truly serious things, what many in America consider serious are ridiculous. It seems a minority of our country believes they have a solution and spend all their waking hours looking for problems that solution can solve…and in the process, making most Americans 100% miserable.
To me, the first two are sort of basic logic and reason. It’s the last one that really bothers me – and at the risk of a double entendre – it’s not funny. At. All.
Losing our sense of humor is something that seems unusual in American history – one of the interesting aspects of the most difficult and dangerous times in American history (during wars - and particularly WWII) gave rise to great comedians, actors and musicians – Bob Hope, George Burns, Red Buttons, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, the Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Richard Burton, Kirk Douglas, Clark Cable, Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart – and Ronald Reagan to name a few…
Often the darkest times can only be transited through a little gallows humor. Humor is also a pressure relief valve on society.
But our humorless, moralizing, scolds in the entertainment industry have bought into the idea that they need to push the postmodernist agenda through every entertainment vehicle and at all costs…and therein lies the problem.
If everything is serious enough to be an issue, then nothing is funny. Many established comedians have stopped playing college venues due to this very fact – and as a result, the comedy institutions are producing young comedians who just aren’t funny, at least not to the majority of America.
Where are people like the original SNL cast, “The Not Ready For Prime-Time Players” – Laraine Newman, John Belushi, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, and Chevy Chase (even though Chevy Chase has turned into a bitter old man) or the original SCTV cast – John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Harold Ramis, and Dave Thomas? Where are comedians like Cheech and Chong, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy?
Where is the new Mel Brooks? For Christ’s sake, this man made arguably the funniest movie of all time, Blazing Saddles, a movie based on lampooning racial stereotypes. He even made a movie called “The Producers”, the central plot of which revolved around putting on a Broadway musical titled “Springtime for Hitler”.
Can you even imagine a film like “Blazing Saddles” getting green lit by Hollywood today?
Never happen. Hell, no - you couldn't get funding. If you did, everybody associated with it would be condemned to eternity in a digital gulag, most never to work again. It seems ironic that the very people against capital punishment are more than willing to sentence an offender to a digital death for a 15 year old tweet.
As I told one of my kids, when you succumb to the postmodernist idea that there are no objective standards, that truth is relative and that opinions are equal in weight to facts, it should come as no surprise that people will be offended by anything and everything can be construed to fit any narrative.
It just so happens that most of the narratives today are negative and designed to demean and to punish.
This is not to say America doesn’t have serious problems – because it does now that the Harris/O'Biden people are in power – but the attention given to issues created by the social justice/woke/Critical Theory postmodernists is taking time away from working on the real issues and without humor, the relief needed to deal with the true seriousness of our times is missing.
America needs to be able to laugh again without worrying about who hears us. We need to be able to hold up a gigantic middle finger to the wokescolds and the crap dealing morons in charge.