Tell a Joke. Save a Civilization.
Telling jokes about people may not be very nice, but it may teach the children that there is a difference between right and wrong.
A recent piece in The Daily Caller prompted the comment that the piece was in poor taste. That is good news, of a sort: it implies that there is still good taste. But the poor grade offered was for the article only, not for the behavior the article described. That raises the question: Is there any behavior that is in poor taste? If there is, can we talk about it —without being accused of poor taste?
The behavior described in the article was Bradley Manning’s sex-change hormone treatment. Manning is the soldier who leaked more national-security secrets than anyone else in U.S. history. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but because he was given credit for the time served before trial and because of the way the system works, he will be eligible for parole in a few years, which means that, in reality, he is facing only about seven years in prison—and hormone treatment preliminary to a sex-change operation. Manning will not be facing free facials, free manicures, or, you may be relieved to hear, free pedicures.
One question raised by the comment on The Daily Caller piece is: How robustly can we discuss Manning and his treatment? How technical do we have to be? Can we make snide jokes at his expense? Can we call him “Transie Mansie”? If we can’t make snide jokes at the expense of a traitor, at whose expense can we make snide jokes?
The politically correct answer is: No, we can’t do any of those things, because the most important thing in life is being nice. Being snide is not being nice.
That, of course, is one of the central problems of our time: not being not nice. We have been cowed by the PC police into not opposing, even in language that is in good taste, the assault on Western Civilization’s culture.
Major aspects of that culture have vanished as if swept away by a tsunami.
But they were not swept away by a tsunami. They were swept away by liberal progressives who sought to make a new society, free of the guiding constraints of a culture that had taken centuries to develop.
The result has been a disaster, and that disaster is progressive liberalism’s greatest triumph—and one of the seven scandals of the modern world. But above all it is the scourge of the “lower classes,” those people who live in Charles Murray’s Fishtowns, who lead the lives that liberals love to promote (but wouldn’t dream of living themselves) and whose resulting plight produces floods of liberal crocodile tears. And legislation that makes their plight worse.
The most obvious public-policy failure for those who believe in the Western code involves sex and marriage. According to one source—you can find plenty of others—fifteen times the number of couples today live together outside of marriage than did in 1960. For other statistics, read reports on the fiftieth anniversary of the Moynihan Report, which described the then-nascent and now-endemic collapse of the black family in the inner city.
But the traditionalists, the guardians of Western morality, may be more to blame. The liberals may not have realized the consequences of the revolution they midwifed (though they probably did). But the traditionalists, perhaps equally ignorant of the consequences, nevertheless knew the behavior the liberal revolution sought to regularize was wrong.
What they failed to do was speak out forcefully enough against the liberals’ new morality. They were cowed by the PC police. They abandoned their posts as guardians of the culture.
Not that opposing the culture vandals is easy. We have seen harassment of people who have made the attempt. An Oregon bakery that refused to bake a wedding cake for a couple of lesbians was fined $150,000 by the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries.
The question facing those who still think the culture is worth fighting for is, What to do? One answer is to stop being nice to the vandals.
If vandals came to your town and busted up the war memorial, cut down the flagpole, defaced the doors of the church, and then started destroying the furniture in your house and smashing the crockery—and unplugging the TV—how un-nice would you be inclined to be?
So much more un-nice should you be—should we all be—when what the vandals are destroying is the culture that has sustained our civilization for centuries.
One method of opposing the culture vandals is to make fun of them. We need to tell jokes about them, including, most especially, those who would debase—who have debased―our sexual culture and the related family culture. Once upon a time, many years ago, we coexisted with homosexuals. They let us alone, and we let them alone, for the most part. But then some of them became vandals, and sought to wreck our culture of marriage and family.
We should have been, and should now be, ferociously opposed to them and their allies, and should tell jokes about them—sometimes ribald, bawdy, nasty jokes. Did you hear the one about the two queers who…? Three lesbians walked into a bar, and…. Sing along with me: “Transie Mansie, pudding and pie….” Scholarly disquisitions on cultural degradation may do for toney intellectual journals and high-IQ, super-zipcode Ivy League graduates. But a more robust vernacular will be needed to galvanize the masses into taking up their pitchforks and sticking it to the vandals.
Telling anti-gay/lesbian/transie jokes is as anti-PC as you can get today. But anti-PC jokes are the weed killer we put in the garden of our culture. Weed killer should be handled with care, of course, but without it the precious plants and flowers, tended lovingly by generations of our forebears, will die.
Telling jokes about people may not be very nice, but it may teach the children that there is a difference between right and wrong. And that the liberal creed on sex—if it feels good, do it—and the homosexual-inspired agenda should be rejected.
Did you hear the one about the three agendas, homo, lesbian, and transie, adrift in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific without food or water? It has a delicious ending—especially if you’re a shark.