Taste and Taboo, the Id and the Ick

"I saw my father’s penis once. But it was okay, because I was so young . . . and so drunk.” Thus one of the important cultural voices in modern American liberalism explores what our credulous Freudian friends would call her Electra complex. If, somewhere in this or another galaxy, an advanced alien race is monitoring the broadcasts of Sarah Silverman, we can be sure that they will not be much tempted to visit.

Silverman is a model American of the age, whose craft consists of taking a very old tradition, Jewish ethnic humor, and making it embarrassing. Barack Obama is a fan — it is not mere cultural accident that their careers are contemporaneous — while semi-serious intellectual salons host her, to their occasional regret."

The unmentioned irony is that such real taboos as remain to us go largely unspoken of (that is the nature of taboos), while the ritual violation of ersatz taboos is carried out according to carefully cultivated social convention.

Violate the taboos in the manner prescribed and you will be the subject of fawning New York Times profiles; Miss Silverman’s was headlined “Female comedians are confidently breaking taste taboos.” Violate a social taboo in a way that disturbs the liberal consensus and the results will be somewhat different...

Insightful... thanks for posting.

Liberal women are being taught to be more and more revolting. It’s not an accident - it’s “Hillary’s Army.”

I was talking to a woman who runs a Farmer’s Market who started referring to “pig people.” She said it a few times, and finally I asked who, exactly, these people were. She replied quite openly and righteously that they were “the people who shop at Costco” or the people who couldn’t afford her “upscale” Farmer’s Market prices.

Pig people. This is the mouth of a liberal female. They are taught to spread filth against groups so that those groups will be easy to attack and destroy. It’s the same tactic used by Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, and every other collectivist “revolution” that “needed” to “shut down” (that’s the Hillary’s Army term) people who are “in their way.”

It’s soul rot on a scale I believe America has never seen before, carried by feral females looking for fights, and uncaring about who or what they destroy.

Like Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, Sarah Silverman is not conventional — she is convention itself.

Somehow I don't think Henry James had anything like Sarah Silverman in mind when he wrote his novel. Going that far to show that you know your 19th century novels really strikes a wrong note in an article about a stupid comedienne.

In the United States, the thing we call “multiculturalism” does not involve understanding foreign cultures but rather the careful erasure of the sharp contrasts between them, as though the main difference between Anglo-American culture and Yemeni culture were saltah.

Ditto there. I don't need to know what saltah is or that Kevin Williamson knows what saltah is. Putting that in or dropping a name like Blaise Agüera y Arcas really makes me think Williamson is less -- rather than more -- qualified to write about the passing scene of trash culture.

Sarah Kate Silverman seems to be more Kate than Silverman ...

So Kates are one thing and Silvermans are another? Um. Okay. I guess I get where he's going here, but is it really worth it when he gets there?

I can't see wasting pixels on Sarah Silverman, especially since her career's been going downhill lately. Like some of the things Williamson works into his article the whole attack on Miss Promising Comic Newcomer of 2005 is a major non-sequitur.

If Williamson had to write about her (and Freud and Gilbert Osmond and saltah and someone named Blaise Agüera y Arcas), he could have looked at the slippery slope argument. I laughed at Joan Rivers, as my parents did. Silverman starts where Rivers left off and pushes further in the same direction. Too far to be sure, but it's not like she's some kind of outlier worthy of much notice.

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