When I started blogging almost 12 years ago, one of my targets was focusing on elements of American life that since the 1960s have become politicized by the left – the First Amendment via political correctness, the Second Amendment via gun control, and other targets of the left such as religion, holidays, food, history, the calendar, and even language itself. Since what we call “the left” is ultimately a holistic philosophy designed to supersede all others, the list is a bottomless one. Robert Ley, the head of National Socialist Germany’s Labor Front once said that the only private individual in Nazi Germany is a person who is asleep. Today’s left similarly sees all aspects of your life as open to politicization.
Forget Melissa Harris-Perry claiming that your children belong to the state (in an ad to promote(!) MSNBC); in his defense of the Sunday MSNBC panel hosted by Harris-Perry which mocked Mitt Romney’s adopted black grandson, one CNN commentator insists your family snapshots are also a political statement:
Marc Lamont Hill: “Some would say maybe that it’s an exploitative picture that they’re exploiting the kid by hauling out this black person …”
[crosstalk]
“They were pointing out the fact that the picture itself was sort of a spectacle and they were sort of making fun of the Republican party. I don’t think they were making fun of the baby. If they were I’d be right on your side. This was a light moment making fun of Mitt Romney”
At The Right Scoop, Caleb Howe responds:
Please note the New Rule in Hill’s comments. Taking a family photo with a member of your family is exploiting that family member. Using that photo to make fun of republicans as racists is not exploitative at all, it’s just clean harmless horsing around. Why any second now Hill is going to snap a towel at Mitt in the locker room and oh, how we’ll laugh. Good times.
Not for nothing here, but in order for it to be exploitative, wouldn’t it need to have some degree of visibility? This photo wasn’t exactly plastered on posters in Times Square. It was, in fact, sort of difficult to find online.
Hill goes on later in the segment to say, in response to host Lemon’s comments that the panel was using a baby to score points, that “you could argue that [the Romneys] were using a baby to bring attention to their political progressivism.” So again, it’s really Mitt Romney who is at fault for his son adopting the kid. Because he only did it to get off the hook for being so super white and republican!
Now what do people on the left call a black person who ends up in a photo or on a stage or on TV among white conservatives? I can’t recall. What’s that word? Oh now I remember. Token.
Writing at Da Tech Guy blog, Longtime friend of PJM Baldilocks describes Hill’s reasoning as “Rapist Logic” run amok:
Embedded in this seemingly ridiculous notion is a frightening idea: that Kieran Romney’s race was bound to be mocked and that his grandparents, knowing that he is different, set him up for ridicule by publicly acknowledging him as their grandchild.
The notion of “some,” that the Romneys are exploiting the child by including him in a family photo and by sharing it, is merely a foundation–a fabricated pretext to shift the blame from the MSNBC panel to the Romneys for the actions of the former.
The Romneys should have never post the photo; or they should have never included the child in such a photo. But because they did, the Romneys deserved what they got from the MSNBC panel…according to Dr. Hill’s logic.
“You deserve to be assaulted because you tempted us by wearing that short skirt/being out too late at night/leaving your meat uncovered. Wear a burka.”
In recent years, I normally expect CNN’s annual ratcheting downward of the cultural bar to occur on New Year’s Eve, when anchor Anderson Cooper and co-host, the “comedienne” Kathy Griffin collide in their Weimaresque annual train wreck. But between Cooper recently discussing his famous 89 year old mother’s enjoyment of cunnilingus, Griffin asking another CNN host “Have you ever spooned with Candy Crowley?”, and now one of the network’s commentators politicizing family snapshots, the bar was lowered by the Time-Warner-HBO-owned network even before 2014 has been ushered in.
Goodnight America; it was fun while it lasted.
Oh, and speaking of family snapshots and mixed-race families, perhaps the ultimate rebuttal to Harris-Perry and her defenders:
You know who else was raised in a white family, @MHarrisPerry? Your president. Was he just a “token” too? #Sick pic.twitter.com/Bu8SHDmHTp
— Chelsea (@chelseagrunwald) December 30, 2013
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