The Role of David Hemmings will be Played by Marlin Perkins
When I was attending St. Mary’s Hall in the 1970s, and the first editions of the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue arrived in the school library each year right after the NFL season had concluded, our matronly British-born head librarian would alternately either hide that week’s edition of the magazine, or cut out the photo spread.
Today, religious puritanism takes a different tack, as blogger Jammie Wearing Fool notes: “Latest Outrageously Outrageous Outrage: SI Swimsuit Issue Uses African Tribesman With White Model.” Click over to read JWF’s post, and then drop by Newsbusters, which spots centrist-objective no-bias-here ABC — just ask George Stephanopoulos — trolling the liberal Blogosphere for stories, and running with this one. Here’s my initial take:
It’s left-on-left kabuki. (Especially from ABC. If the network gave CBS and Dan Rather a pass for RatherGate, why would they mount a meaningful attack on another fellow old media stronghold, Time-Warner-CNN-HBO?)
This is the equivalent of the movie critic who seeks to gin up easy PR for himself by seeing racism in every Hollywood movie. If you really believed your own rhetoric, you’d be running daily apartheid-era style front page stories for an boycott of the studios*, rather than accepting DVD screeners, weekly interviews with actors and directors, and you’d talk your paper out of running ads from local theaters promoting the latest Hollywood wares.
See also: The Washington Post ranting in 2005 about “The Magic Negro Syndrome.” Presumably, the Post would rather blacks play street thugs and pimps, as they did throughout 1970s-era television crime dramas. Similarly, the SI flap illustrates the double-blind argument of modern-day “multiculturalism:” pose your models in National Geographic-style settings next to African and Chinese natives dressed in traditional garb, and the photo shoot is dubbed racist. Pose your models around whiter-than-white tourists in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts vacationing in Waikiki, and the photo shoot is dubbed racist.
Sports Illustrated, a division of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO, is a reactionary liberal publication, staffed by reactionary leftist journalists. If you’re a leftist seeing racism in it, you’re seeing racism in the left itself.
Of course – if you are, then welcome to the party: conservatives have been complaining about the rampant racialism at another division of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO since at least 2008. If you’d like to take the fight to them from the left, have fun storming the castle as well.
* Or a 9/11-era daily call for a boycott of a golf course.
Since I’m first, Dear Fellow, “an boycott”?
“Let he who is without sin…”
Hardly.
You might even be right, I suppose.
By the way, the “Magic Negro Syndrome” is a real thing. I have known many. They are Black Men who are not led by the nose, but by the cranium, and by the Spirit. I could write many chapters on strong, gentle, powerful black men I have known and respected; indeed, loved.
The “Gentle Giant” is an awesome character in history. His traits always include steadfastness, decency, love for all creation, respect for all life, and a deeper understanding of human beings (actually, Nature)than your run-of-the-mill fellow.
Perhaps the knowledge that, in his own hand, he held the power to destroy utterly, led him to a greater appreciation of life. In the 1960s, I worked with many such men. They were all Black Men. They were the anchors of all about them; their touchstone for what was right and correct in life. Where, alas, have they gone?
Obumbus is no magic negro. He is not fit to wash their feet. Their reaction to him would be to “Straighten up, boy. That stuff don’t go here!” How did such a race, right on the cusp of success, let themselves be abased so?
I wish I knew.
Is all leftist history complete bull$#;+? Here is another bit of the leftist catechism reduced to smoking rubble:
https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/338656/what-happened-haymarket
“My aim is not to prove that the police and the courts were right and the anarchists and their supporters were wrong,” writes Messer-Kruse in the introduction to Trial. Yet the sum of his work appears to do just that. He shows that Chicago’s anarchists belonged to an international network of left-wing militants who believed that only bloodshed could bring social change. They plotted to incite violence at Haymarket. The person who threw the bomb was almost certainly Rudolph Schnaubelt, a close confederate of the defendants. He was never brought to justice because he fled Chicago and vanished from history, though Messer-Kruse suggests that he lived out his days as a farm-equipment salesman in Buenos Aires. The eight men who were arrested received a fair trial by the standards of the day. Finally, most of the blame for their being found guilty lies with a defense team that seemed more committed to political theater than to providing competent legal counsel.