Posted on 09/20/2005 4:25:54 AM PDT by hildy123
I nearly fell out of my Barcalounger Sunday morning, watching The McLaughlin Group. The old Jesuit had Pat Buchanan, Eleanor Clift, Tony Blankley, and Clarence Page (who is black) sitting around. They were talking about Hurricane Katrina, of course. Suddenly, McLaughlin turned to Page and said: “Why the correlation between black and poor?”
Good grief, I thought, you can’t ask that. People get taken off the air for less. Poor Clarence Page didn’t know whether to spit or wind his watch. He mumbled something that wasn’t even close to being an answer. McLaughlin, realizing his gaffe, quickly and deftly steered the talk to other topics. Everybody in the studio, and all of us out there in viewerland, started breathing again. You can’t ask THAT. Nobody wants to hear about THAT.
At my neighbourhood block party that afternoon, a white, liberal neighbour expressed the sense of national shame that we’d all felt at some point in Katrina Week. “It was like some Third World country!” he said. “Like Somalia, or Haiti…” The guy stopped dead in his tracks, suddenly aware of what he had implied, then desperately back-pedaled, trying to erase his thoughtcrime. “I mean, you know, Third World. Like, um, Cambodia…” Those of us listening nodded in sympathy, silently thinking: Nice save there, guy.
All of us, and John McLaughlin, and very likely Clarence Page, too, all of us were still haunted by what we’d been watching on our TV screens through Katrina Week: the spectacle of several thousand black Americans openly, nakedly displaying their helpless, hopeless, clueless, angry dependency. It was there, it was real, though we’re stuffing it down the memory hole now as fast as we can work our fingers. Come on, you saw it too. What did you think? What did you feel?
Speaking for myself, I felt pity, anger, and shame, in proportions roughly 3-2-1.
Pity. It could hardly be plainer that nobody gives a damn about these poor black people, and nobody has any clue how to lift them up, least of all the people who bellyache endlessly about “racism” (see next point). The meritocracy vacuums up every clever, talented black kid it can find and puts him through college, after which he is welcomed joyfully into the Cognitive Elite. (Hey, look at us! No racism here!) The rest are packed off into welfare slums, or jails — anywhere really, so long as we don’t have to think about them. Yale or jail.
Anger. The whole thing woke my anger at liberals, big time. What lying, thieving hypocrites they are! All their vaunted “programs,” all that money, all those decades of preaching to us. What’s it accomplished? Black people don’t actually occupy any space in a white liberal’s mind at all. All their pretended concern is just intra-tribal moral posturing, asserting their moral superiority over other whites. Horrible, horrible, people. Hey, Teddy, Hillary, Barbra: You have a few houses each — how about giving one or two of them over to a poor black family flooded out from New Orleans? Whaddya say? Hillary? Ted? Hello?
Shame. Just like my neighbor. More so, if I may thus flatter myself, since I am a naturalized citizen. I chose this country. And because we can’t stir ourselves to care about this, above the level of posturing and lip service and cooking up convoluted lies to tell ourselves, a bunch of crummy foreigners are laughing at us. The hell with them, except… we kind of deserve it, don’t we?
The lying is the worst. Boy, how we lie to ourselves. What was that thing Orwell said in the Blitz, about how he didn’t mind people flying over and dropping bombs on him half as much as he minded the lies they used to justify themselves? Here’s Theodore Dalrymple, in a recent interview:
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
Tell it, Preacher! That’s us, that’s the United States of America in this year of Our Lord 2005: a society of emasculated liars.
A few weeks ago my wife, but not I, attended a school district function here in Suffolk County, Long Island. It was some sort of awards ceremony for kids from all around our district. Now, my wife, so far as she has any interest in politics at all, which is not very far, I’d have to classify as a Clinton Democrat. She is quite keen to be on board with the PC stuff. As a member of a racial minority herself, she has a vague idea it’s “for” her. Having been raised in China, though, she has never properly internalized PC in a sophisticated way, never really acquired the necessary reflex habit of not noticing those things we are not supposed to notice, never really mastered double-think. With the best will in the world, poor Rosie is just hopelessly off-message with PC — a thing that causes me much secret delight.
Well, she started telling me about this function, and she couldn’t keep herself from laughing. First (she said) they did the academic awards. The kids were called up one by one, and three quarters of them were Chinese or Korean or had Russian names. (Which last means, in this context, they were Ashkenazi-Jewish.) Then they worked through lesser awards — drama club, stuff like that. Finally they got to all these caucus-race dummy awards for things like “putting forth effort” and “attendance.” For those, the black and Hispanic kids came up. Rosie: “I felt so uncomfortable. Just squirming in my seat. It was so obvious.”
[I recall attending some similar function myself a year or so ago. After a whole string of four or five Asian kids one after the other, getting awards for academic excellence of various kinds, the emcee announced an award for a name something like Sean Macdonald. Thank goodness, I thought to myself, a white Gentile at last. Then little Sean emerged from the seating area: a one hundred percent grade-A pure-blood Chinese! Plainly he was one of the many children adopted from East Asia by American families.]
“Didn’t other people notice this?” I asked. My wife said she thought some people had. People near her looked just as uncomfortable as she felt, and there was some smothered laughter.
We’d laughed ourselves at this vignette of life in modern America, husband and wife laughing together at one of our world’s little absurdities.
Last week, watching those scenes from New Orleans, an American city, I recalled that incident, and our laughter. Somehow it didn’t seem funny any more, though. Not funny at all.
I have always likened welfare to staking a tree. If a newly planted tree stays staked too long the trunk will not strenghten, it needs to be blown around to thicken itself. You can actually poison a tree with kindness.
With me it's hopelessness.
If six trillion$ only made the problem infinitely worse across the entire societal spectrum, I don't see an effective weapon emerging any time soon.
And, don't get married or have children, either as a father or mother, until you are past the teenage years and are willing to commit yourself to them and remained organized, so you can stay out of jail, keep a job, and stay sober, and you will never be poor.
ping
They pack themselves there by their choices.
You are a potty mouth! Ha:)
Why is it that you never hear the cities of Metairie and Kenner mentioned in the same sentence as New Orleans?
you've answered your own question thru the rest of your comment. pain and suffering sells news stories. stories of people who pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start all over - in the opinion of msm - is relegated to feel good emails.
if you want to sell news stories, you have to get peoples attention. storeis of people recovering just fine on their own won't grasp at people's attention like riots and looting. for example, if the msm reported that katrina wiped out new orleans, and the population just shrugged it off and started rebuilding, that would be 1 or 2 stories. but if you focus on the negative, you get a dozen stories, then rebuttals, then more stories and rebuttals. all these stories sell. we have become a society of "tragedy vampires" our society in general seems to thrive on the pain and suffering of others. and msm makes their money off of this addiction to all things grotesque.
sorry for the rant.. had this conversation with a bleeding heart liberal last night, who couldn't grasp anything the idea that everyone in new orleans was now destitute, i couldn't get him to understand that there were plenty of people that are going on with their lives and rebuilding, but the msm just wants to show all the "underpriveledged" to sell more news stories.
Old Testament law prohibits the boiling of of kid goat in its mother's milk.
I always read it to mean not to boil (make angry) a child in it's mother milk (of human kindness)
Mother's are good at nurturing, but sometimes they can smother with too much love and drive a kid away.
I cannot stand Imass any longer. Most of the time he has only liberals on his show and he is a mouthpiece for the Rat Party and proud he voted for Kerry.
Very interesting observations - and very spot-on. Teaching English here in Shanghai, the students are keen to spout certain PC lines they get from their government concerning America being racist - blah blah blah. However, they are very candid about their own highly negative views of certain races and nations, saying some jaw-droppingly un-PC things, since they don't receive the Service Pack updates to PC Bullsh*t® that are necessary to coordinate the latest lies and excuses.
Of course, they don't ever get surrounded and browbeaten (or worse) by people that are schooled in the subtleties of the lies we have to live in PC America every day, and the new positions "we have always believed in" as the PC BS constantly shifts to cover up another colossally obvious failure (shades of "1984"). The sick part is that most of the people doing the browbeating don't believe this PC BS either, but lack the courage to stand up for the blatant frikkin' truth. We wonder how the Cultural Revolution ever happened, well...we see it happening in a more insidious way in our own culture.
I try to explain PC to them, pointing out to them that it originally came from their Little Red Book, but judging from their blank looks, that part of history must have been wiped from their collective memories. They don't get it, and still won't get it until they live in an American ghetto for awhile to see the real truth of direct experience. And that also goes for a lot of pin-headed insulated dimtwits living in suburban "Progressiveland", the schmucks.
I read Bill Whittle's piece. Thank you for posting it. It is a very insightful essay that all should read. If you didn't read it, please take the time. You will not be sorry.
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/
It does contain strong language but it should be required reading for everyone.
Can't do that though. That's "acting white."
What do you think "get a high school education" should consist of?
Do you mean show up and don't get expelled?
Or do you mean 4 years of English, 3 years of History, Math through Trigonometry, Biology, Chemistry and Physics, and mastery of one foreign language?
Here's a fact: In 1941-42, the percentage of whites at age 18 who "got a high school education" was 25%.
The native ability to "get a high school education" is probably not much higher than that.
I have family down there, that were helping with the relief. Some have quit do to just what you described, and the rest are very careful about what they hand out.
I'm not saying that ALL are bad...but enough that a RADICAL change needs to happen before things get better.
It would also have the effect of the Public staging a revolution over taxes and welfare spending!
WHY THE **** SHOULD I HELP PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT TO HELP THEMESELVES!!!!
I hate to criticize this guy while he pitches in and I sit, but I don't like his attitude. He's not there to help the lazy hecklers: he's there to help the struggling women. It's convenient for him to collectivize the lazy ingrate and the struggling victim into one repudiable entity, but the fact remains that some individuals really do need the help.
(I acknowledge that he provided some of that help, while I did not.)
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