If laughter really is the best medicine, it’s no wonder race
relations are in a state of ill health.
Many years ago I spent quite a bit of time with a Zambian
friend. He remarked one day that he found America’s hang-up with racial humor a
bit strange, as racial jokes were not at all off limits in his country. And
call it my one concession to multiculturalism, but neither were they off limits
in our relationship. We would occasionally engage in innocent racial humor just
as we would any other kind of jesting — and no hate-speech charges were contemplated.
When your article inspires a big-city mayor to refer your
case to a "human-relations commission," you know you've hit a nerve.
And when that article is the recent "Being White in Philly" piece by liberal
Robert Huber, you know it doesn't take much truth to hit that nerve.
That's the scary part. Huber's article contains mostly tepid
examples of whites' negative experiences with blacks and primarily black
neighborhoods, such as a Philadelphia resident whose grill was stolen from her
backyard but "blames herself" for not fencing it in. Its tone is
basically apologetic, absolving a drug dealer of responsibility because he was
just "trying to get by" and describing the US' racial history as
"horrible and daunting." Yet this wasn't good enough for Philadelphia
mayor Michael Nutter and his comrades. They still want Huber silenced.
With the election of Pope Francis, there are the usual
complaints about how the Catholic Church has got to get with the times. The Huffington
Post ran the headline,
“Pope Francis Against [sic] Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption,” which is much like
thinking it newsworthy to write, “New Pope Believes in the Divinity of Jesus.” Mother Jones laments the “missed
opportunity to bring the papacy closer to where the people are.” And Forbes’
John Baldoni dishes the baloney, writing
of “a Catholic Church that is resistant
to change but one that must certainly adapt (and rather radically) if it is
going to continue to attract well-intentioned men and women who adhere to its
faith but also are willing to devote themselves to its perpetuation” (hat tip: Drew
Belsky). Yet this misses the point that it is creatures who must adapt to
their ecosystem, and the Church is
the moral ecosystem. Our modernistic culture is simply a pretender to that
throne.
Being a conservative just ain’t
what it used to be. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) was recently accused of
tweeting a “racist” joke — by another Republican.
The issue arose when McCain, responding to Iranian leader
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remark that he’d like to be sent into space (not, I
assume, by an Israeli nuke), referenced Iran’s recent successful launch of a
monkey into space and tweeted, “So Ahmadinejad wants to be the 1st Iranian in
space — Wasn’t he just there last week?”
As many of you know, singer Harry Belafonte recently suggested that Barack Obama handle dissenters the way a Third World dictator would. So in recognition of Belafonte's contributions and because, since we're getting musical here, "I'm Just Not Wild about Harry," I've created "The Banana Republic Song." It goes like this:
It’s often hard to accept the truth, especially when that
truth is scary, when reality seems to offer you no solutions, only poison from
which to pick.
It’s as with a man I once knew who insisted it couldn’t be
proven that smoking was bad for you. He knew better in his heart, but his
available choices — giving up cigarettes or accepting the danger of their use —were
both emotionally unpalatable to him. Enter the rationalization.
We’re seeing the same thing with Republicans in the wake of
Barack Obama’s re-election. Radio host Sean Hannity, citing changing American
demographics, stated a while back that his position on immigration has
“evolved”: we now must offer illegals some kind of pathway to citizenship
(a.k.a. amnesty). Other conservatives are warning that we must dispense with
social issues or the Republican Party will be dispensed with.
Students at Capital High School (CHS) in Charleston, West
Virginia have been regularly forced to stand during the playing of a song known
as “The Black National Anthem.”
The song,
“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was played in the morning right after the American
national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, and students were forced to stand
for all three. While the law currently states that no child can be compelled to
stand for any kind of pledge, controversy only arose at CHS after two students
and a parent complained about having to stand for the “Black National Anthem”
(BNA).
While modern society prides itself on being unbiased, it’s
no exception to the rule that every age has its fashionable prejudices — and
unfashionable people. Among the latter today are white men, and the closer they
are to “dead white male” status, to use a favored leftist descriptive, the greater
the disdain in which they’re held.
There are endless “anecdotes” from the last election “that
prove nothing about vote fraud,” as the critics put it. And one that would be
comical, were this not a tragic topic, involves reports of dozens of black
voters showing up to cast ballots in small Maine towns. The Portland Press Heraldwrites:
With the loss of the 2012 election, there is much talk of
how the Republican Party must do some soul searching. How will the GOP wage
successful campaigns when demographic and cultural changes favor the
opposition? Increasingly, the answer is that the party’s party is over, that it
must move into the future or be relegated to the past. “Dispense with the
social issues!” we’re counseled. “Don’t trouble over abortion or faux marriage
and instead just focus on fiscal matters.”
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