As always, life imitates Liberal Fascism.
Did I say life? Sorry, I meant lunch, as the Portland Tribune notes — apparently with a straight* face — that the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, heck, the sandwich itself — is raaaaaaaaacist:
Verenice Gutierrez picks up on the subtle language of racism every day.
Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year.
“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.
“Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”
As Jonah Goldberg noted in Liberal Fascism:
This is not to say that there are no racist conservatives. But at the philosophical level, liberalism is battling a straw man. This is why liberals must constantly assert that conservatives use code words—because there’s nothing obviously racist about conservatism per se. Indeed, the constant manipulation of the language to keep conservatives—and other non-liberals—on the defensive is a necessary tactic for liberal politics. The Washington, D.C., bureaucrat who was fired for using the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence is a case in point. The ground must be constantly shifted to maintain a climate of grievance. Fascists famously ruled by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear. No serious person can deny that the grievance politics of the American left keeps decent people in a constant state of fright—they are afraid to say the wrong word, utter the wrong thought, offend the wrong constituency.
Serve the wrong lunch.
Twitchy is having lots of fun with the above article, but when does the sheer weight of this idiocy collapse like a black hole? Or as Ace writes today:
I remember reading, say, 20-25 years ago, a pundit fretting about the loss of liberal persuasiveness — why was the public growing tired of liberal appeals and electing awful insane conservatives?
The proposed answer was “Compassion Fatigue.” That liberals had created such a vast and sprawling list of things we all needed to be compassionate about, and think lots of bien pensant thoughts about, that many were getting weary of it all and just wanted to get back to something called “living our own lives.”
Do we ever get to just make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich for a kid, or do we have to don the hairshirt whenever we do anything?
And if you really want to see hair shirt leftism in action, do not miss the video at the end of Ace’s post.
* Apologies for that heteronormative word. While I’m in Reeducation Camp, try to hold the fort down. (Damn — did it again!)
Update: At CNS News today: “U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading,” a headline that dovetails perfectly into the Portland Tribune article, and the observation that Victor Davis Hanson made in a recent article: the more the results of “liberalism” (or what passes for it today) are shown to be a failure, the more that liberals (ditto) will retreat into fantasyland — it’s sort of a Red Queen’s Race into deeper and deeper spirals of dementia.
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