You know what struck me about the whole Roseanne Barr thing?
Not that they were so surprised that a comedienne known for shock value said something shocking, not that they canceled her contract so fast it left contrails in ABC offices; not that the usual suspects lost their minds, no.
What struck me is that the left is still playing psychoanalysis games and people on the right are not just letting them get away with it, but being so impressed with the “profound” thinking that they get in the conga line to dance to the tune of “she is racist, yes indeed.”
Is Roseanne racist? Boiled if I know. I had to look up her last name before writing about her on my blog on yesterday. I don’t think I have ever watched anything with her on it. I not only don’t follow celebrities, I’m the anti-celebrity watcher in that I can never remember what actors look like. I remember the role they play, but not the actor. To me, they really are vague shadows who come to life for the role. As for Hollywood going ons since I’m not interested in the people, I’m not interested in what they do in private life. You’re much more likely to get my full attention if you mention writers or even politicians.
I knew that someone – and I thought her name was Roseanne — had come out in support of Trump. And since this blew up friends of mine informed me that she has a history of running at the mouth about race or whatever. So, maybe she is a racist.
But you know what isn’t racist? Her tweet. In fact, one of my fans who was watching the twittersplosion assures me at first Roseanne had no idea what the furor was about. She was defending herself as not being anti-Muslim because she thought that’s why they were all going ape-sh*t.
She did not say that the scabrous Valerie Jarret was a crossing between the Muslim Brotherhood and apes. That might still not really be racist, but I’m willing to concede it could be interpreted that way. She said she was a crossing between the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes, which could mean tons of things not related to race.
Me? I think she meant Jarret’s eyes, which are curiously devoid of affect and don’t seem to belong in her face. The eyes of the actors in Planet of the apes – no, I didn’t watch it, but I saw portions of it while my husband was watching it and I was writing in the comfy chair near his tv-computer – give me that same “lack of proper affect” impression, possibly because the makeup removes some of the cues just around the eyes that we learn to expect. This is the sort of thing that would be so obvious to an actress, that the comparison would present itself “logically.”
But I’m not married to the explanation. She could have meant a ton of other things up to and including that Jarret wanted to plunge us into a post-apocalyptic state of disorder. (Yeah, I think that’s a bit beyond Roseanne, too, but never mind.)
Or she could simply have meant that Jarret is ugly (she is.) The thing is Roseanne didn’t say “All blacks look like apes” (they don’t.) She didn’t say “Hey, I think blacks are inferior evolutionarily” (they aren’t.) She didn’t say “I don’t like Jarret because she’s half black.” No, she was insulting an individual. Not a race, not a culture. An individual. Whom she might not even have known was half black. I, who follow politics obsessively, didn’t.
So what we have here, once again, is the left playing psychoanalyst to find sins in anyone who dared step out of line.
Which they’ve been doing for some years now.
I didn’t know how crazy this had gotten until someone used one of my books, whose main characters are gay and portrayed in a positive light, to prove I was homophobic. You see, I was stealing victimhood, which meant—
And dear Lord, I’m not alone. “Apes” and “Monkeys” is a favorite word for the left to use to divine racism. This is rather bizarre considering they have compared Republican – white – presidents to apes all the time. Bush was “Chimpy McBushhitler” and Bill Maher assures us that Trump is half-orangutan. I no longer remember if it was the book about Trump – you know, the fabulist before Comey – who claimed Trump was convinced there was a “gorilla channel” and it was his favorite show, or if it was a parody of that book, but I remember the left swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
More than that every American uses ape and monkey not only for every race but indiscriminately. Note the ape-sh*t above. My younger son’s nickname is Monkey (yes, he is the darkest in the family. I’m waiting for someone to claim that’s racism. Actually, monkeys were his favorite animals at the zoo, so we called them his brothers, the same way his brother is an elephant – which, yes, professors have tried to use to divine his political orientation.) One of my best friends, the writer Dave Freer, got stuck with the nickname Dr. Monkey through a complex set of jokes. He embraced it and flings coconuts at his fans. I swear when I started flinging fish at mine, I wasn’t aping him.
Yeah, sure, some pseudo darwinists in the early twentieth century decided that people with darker skin were closest to apes. That was the early twentieth century, and it was stupid. If you look hard enough in history you can find all sorts of “hidden meanings” to words.
Which of course is what the left does, and it’s a deliberate tactic.
What pisses me off about this is not the firing of Roseanne, or the left’s storm of faux-outrage, it’s that all of the right immediately piles on with “She should have known” and “she was stupid to give them an opening” and, in a bizarre paranoid turn in one of my groups on facebook “I bet she never really supported Trump or was a conservative” [this part is almost guaranteed, btw, since she’s an actress, not a political philosopher. Roseanne just said that to piss someone off or because the libs were driving her insane or something. But the next part is teh crazy.] “She just pretended to be so she could make us look bad.”
Guys, I don’t care for the individual foci of the attack – unless it’s me or one of my friends, which has happened, as you guys know – but I do passionately care that your reaction to these attacks from the left is not to treat them as though they were insane – which they are, by the way – but to pile on, and say the person attacked “should have known.”
You know why they shouldn’t have known? Because there’s no rhyme or reason for it. The left attacks when they feel like it, and declare some word or phrase racist sexist or homophobic, and then declare the person beyond the pale.
And it’s all based on a sort of deranged pseudo-Freudian analysis, where you say something but you mean your mother, type of insanity.
I know people who got in trouble for using “snigger” and “niggling doubt” and in academic circles if you use “history” and not “herstory” you’re of course sexist. Two colleagues of mine, not even remotely right wing but yeah white males and competent in their field (which the left hates) got attacked for using the world “ladies” to qualify female editors and writers. Apparently, ladies is demeaning and sexist. Who knew? I guess everyone who has ever used “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury” is a raging sexist.
The truth is the left runs around, usually targeting people who are more competent/successful than they are and who don’t sing in the choir, and discover signs of these “liberal sins” in whatever strikes their fancy at the moment. Let’s not forget the Super Genius who thought my use of Chicom was “A racist slur” instead of its being, you know, the state department designation of “Chinese Communist” to distinguish them from non-Chinese communist.
They don’t actually need to find wrong or offensive words, either. They can distort the plain meaning of your words to mean the opposite. Like when my friend Larry Correia came out in favor of teaching women self-defense to prevent rape, he got accused of being a rape apologist.
Or recently, when in my blog comments a group of people (one of them Finnish) started talking about how the Roma’s refusal to integrate in Europe and the way they work the welfare system might target them when Europe goes from zero to genocide in sixty seconds (as they’ve done in the past) another Super Genius intuited that we were planning genocide. Because that makes perfect sense, since my blog commenters are the de-facto government of Europe, right?
Thing is, whether Roseanne is racist or not, what made her a target was that she had one of the most successful shows ever while claiming to support Trump. Like Muslims who destroy every sign of a previous civilization, the left destroys all non-leftist competition, so they can maintain their cultural dominance and their myth of being the creative ones.
To do this, they will sift through everything you say and everything you do and come up with however far-fetched an interpretation to make it seem like you are a despicable racist/sexist/homophobic. And the right will immediately join in with “you should not have said that.” Which is the wrong thing.
Do you want to lose a culture war? That’s how you lose a culture war.
Even the real Freud depended on his own interpretations of things to “psychoanalyze” people, which is why he was so often wrong and why much of his interpretations have been discarded.
And the left, raging racists, see everything through that prism. The answer to “you used ape, you’re racist” is not to pile on the person, but to ask the left “Why do you think black people resemble apes? And if they don’t, why do you immediately bring race into it? Also, is George Bush black?”
The alternative is to be unable to speak and communicate and certainly to be unable to be pithy and funny because you’re evaluating every single word you say and everything you do in light of the obsessions of the left. Which includes researching the genetic background of a potential plagiarist before you say they are aping you.
And that means again that the left wins the culture war and get to claim they are the “good people” and the creative ones. Because no one runs them out of public life for using “chimp” or “Ape” or even “cockholster.”
There are no hidden meanings. There are no dogwhistles. If Roseanne wanted to insult the unspeakable Valerie Jarret’s ancestry, she could have said it outright.
Most racists are either out and proud about it, or aren’t particularly good at hiding it. They will outright tell you that blacks are inferior, because “lower IQ” (Which only reveals these people know nothing of IQ and IQ measurement); they will tell you that Jews are the enemies of Western civilization; they will tell you that women are little more than glorified baby factories; they will hang all their crazy out to dry, because, you see, they think they are right and this stuff is obvious. You’ve seen them in our comments here!
It takes the crazy of the left to assume anyone saying things the left doesn’t like secretly knows the left is right, and so says these things in “coded ways” to… I don’t know. Here is where it all breaks down, unless the left admits that they isolate and destroy anyone who says things they don’t like.
And most people on the right, let alone most people who are better at their jobs/more successful than leftists, be they writers, actors or rocket scientists, aren’t racist/sexist/homophobic. The left hunts for “signs” of these sins because it is part of their doctrine that we are, not because it makes any sense.
Stop letting them psychoanalyze them. The proper response to their poo-flinging monkey-fits is to ask “And why do you think that?”
Freud is dead. And he was never as crazy as these idiots.
Stop letting them scare you. Stop the circular firing squad.
They are the crazy ones. Stop letting them smear it all over you.
Sometimes an actress is just an actress. And Marxists are just crazy.
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