Category: Schadenfreude

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Free Speech and Cosplay Fascism

Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Wednesday, September 10. Shortly thereafter, J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller began to implement what looks like a preplanned program to find some pretext to destroy free speech. 

Jimmy Kimmel supplied the pretext on Monday night, September 15, when he (1) unwisely assumed that political assassination was a good topic for comedy and (2) stated—apparently incorrectly—that one of the “MAGA gang” was the actual assassin. Shortly thereafter, beginning on September 17, President Snowflake and his minion Brendon Carr, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, began calling for the revocation of ABC’s license and those of its local TV affiliates. 

Kimmel’s bosses at ABC hit the panic button and—on that same day, Wednesday, September 17—said they would “indefinitely suspend” Kimmel from the airwaves. 

Large chunks of shit began to hit the fan. As the hours and days went on, chunks of shit kept on hitting the proverbial ventilator.

Actors by the hundreds and others by the thousands began to protest and to initiate boycotts. The unspeakable Ted Cruz found that, after all, he could speak out against the planned death of the free speech.

The tide quickly began to turn. When we bought groceries on Saturday, Kroger still had its flag at half staff in loving memory of St. Charly Kirk, the martyr. But the next day, Brendon Carr was on TV trying to walk back his threat to start killing TV licenses. 

Over in England, the indispensable March Family began to write a very nice song about the American First Amendment. They wrote the song, recorded it, and put it on YouTube very quickly—but not quickly enough to get ahead of ABC’s cowardly decision to reverse their own cowardice, and to get our friend Jimmy Kimmel back on the air as of tonight. 

The “indefinite suspension” ultimately lasted less than one week. 

Walks Like Cosplay Fascism, Talks Like Cosplay Fascism

I have no quarrel with those who, beginning on September 17, have been wailing, gnashing their teeth, and rending their garments about the death of freedom in the United States. But my instincts told me that the public was not going to react well to Vance and Miller goosestepping all over Washington, and that insight seems to have been correct. 

Why? Well, I have to begin by admitting that recent events have tended to confirm H.L. Mencken’s claim that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. “Don’t know much about history/Don’t know much geography/Don’t know much about a science book/Don’t know much about the French I took.”

And yet … shockingly ill-informed as so many of us are, we do seem to have the sense to realize that government censorship is not a good thing. 

And so, as of this writing, midday, Tuesday, September 23, Trump and Vance and Miller don’t look like Nazis. Instead, they look like clownish, comic, cosplay Nazis as they strut about on the national stage. 

Right now, it looks as if the great plan to use the Kirk assassination as a pretext to destroy freedom has backfired. Bigly. 

But the Fat Lady Hasn’t Yet Delivered Her Aria

I think the cosplay Fascists have two alternatives. 

Here’s the first one: when your evil plot comes crashing down, what you should do is minimize your losses, change the subject, and then go on a retreat to see whether you can find a more intelligent way to work your evil plan and to establish authoritarianism in the United States. 

Here’s the other alternative: when your evil plot comes crashing down, respond by lashing out blindly in all directions, form a circular firing squad, and do everything you can to make yourselves look even more idiotic. 

Wanna bet on which choice they make?

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As Kimmel Plans to Return Tomorrow, Some Evening Thoughts from Walt Disney

“I believe that this spiritual and intellectual freedom which we Americans enjoy is our greatest cultural blessing. Therefore, it seems to me, that the first duty of culture is to defend freedom and resist all tyranny.”

And one more thought-provoking quotation from Disney:

“In America, we are guaranteed these freedoms. It is the constitutional privilege of every American to become cultured or to grow up like Donald Duck.”

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Explaining the Inexplicable: Some Further Observations

This follows up on the immediately preceding post.

So here’s some food for thought. Most major corporate CEOs have a corporate jet, and they have a pilot for that corporate jet. What qualities would a CEO look for in a pilot?

Would they want a person who cannot accurately acquire and process information about the weather?

Would they want to hire a pilot who does not understand the relation between his actions and the consequences of his actions?

Would they like a pilot who, when she makes a mistake, belligerently hallucinates falsehoods to explain away the facts—like some out-of-control chatbot, powered by runaway Artificial UnIntelligence?

Would the CEO want a person suffering from malignant narcissism—imagining himself to be the best pilot in the country, indeed, the best pilot who has ever lived, so capable that flying his jet through a hurricane is no cause for concern?

If the answer to these questions is no—and the answer surely is no—then why would the same corporate CEO be happy to hire a pilot for the nation who suffers from the same mental handicaps?

The Answer to My Rhetorical Question

The views of the Financial Times opinion writer are insightful, but let me add this. 

We are talking about Fortune 500 CEOs, whose average compensation runs to about $17 million a year. A lot of these folks are not addicted to heroin, but they are addicted to money. 

Just as a heroin-addicted paterfamilias will take the children’s milk money to spend it on a drug, so also a money-addicted person will optimize money making over considerations of common sense, not to mention considerations of empathy or morality. 

Compare Joe Sixpack. Joe Sixpack didn’t go to college, but, still, he should have known enough to conclude that it was unwise to reelect Trump. When Joe Sixpack gets hurt by the tariffs and by the inflation resulting from mass deportation, he will be getting no more and no less than he deserves. I hope Joe learns from the terrible lesson he’s about to receive. 

All that said, the greater responsibility falls on our country’s economic and intellectual elite. 

Well and truly has it been noted that a fish rots from the head down. 

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This is America, Where You Can Do Anything with Your Body Unless There is a Uterus in It

Alexandra Petri, writing in The Atlantic:

Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children: The state’s elimination of vaccine mandates is a courageous first step toward decluttering itself of any excess kids.

Sorry. We decided there were too many children.

You know how it goes.

Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks. They do this over and over again.

And the state of Florida, understandably, said: Enough. This needs to stop. We have decided that there are too many children, and we can let some of them go. Or, as the state’s surgeon general put it when he eliminated all vaccine mandates yesterday: “Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.”

(That relaxed attitude about bodily autonomy comes as something of a surprise, given the state’s six-week abortion ban, but this is America, where you can do anything with your body unless there’s a uterus in it.)

Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow. If we lose herd immunity, we will bring back diseases that had formerly been eliminated, and some children who would otherwise have been protected will perish. But no price is too high to pay in this pointless war against decades of lifesaving science. Confusingly, this effort is being taken up at the same time that people are Very Concerned about dropping birth rates, but it makes sense when you understand that they don’t like the children we currently have. They want us to make other ones instead.

This is certainly one possible response to the epidemic of mass shootings: unleash another epidemic on our elementary schools. If I had to guess what kind of shot we would make sure schoolchildren got, I would have guessed wrong. I am always guessing wrong. I am always guessing that we want children to live.