The headlines are hilarious in their own way. AOL writes, “MSG posts questionable image of New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin”. And this from CBS local: “Is Knicks Sensation Jeremy Lin The New Tim Tebow?”
And of course there’s ESPN’s tagline, the “Chink in the Armor”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESEGRwnQW4k
“Chink in the Armor” is a great line, but ESPN outdid themselves in followup interview asking whether Lin now intends to date Kim Kardashian. The question was no doubt sincerely intended to flatter, but …
It may all seem exceedingly infantile and stupid, but there’s a deadly serious point to all of it. Maybe all new ‘celebrities’ have got to be oriented into the right attitudes; shown into the narrative mold. Otherwise they will be out of place. The nudge will come in a hundred different insidious ways. But it won’t stop until the new entrant into the limelight emerges in the approved fashion.
The rules apparently say that in order to become normal one has to become the standard kind of freak; some caricature of piety, an ethnic ready to take offense at remarks he might not care less about; readily living a lifestyle that is nothing short of crazy. Until this is accomplished, the public figure will literally not compute to the media mind. He will be unrepresentable, impossible to portray as a signal that does not pass their signal gates.
Why won’t the media won’t stop until they have a person buttonholed into a category they can finally understand? Why won’t they quit until they have an oriental Jesse Jackson, who whenever he isn’t blowing all his money on dope, is busy being dating the starlet du jour?
The reason of course is because that is how their mind operates. There are some indications that the poor Lin doesn’t want play the media’s game. But the pressure to conform is surely on.
“I don’t think it was on purpose or whatever, but (at) the same time they have apologized. And so from my end I don’t care anymore,” Lin said after leading the Knicks to a 104-97 win over Dallas on Sunday. “Have to learn to forgive, and I don’t even think that was intentional. Or hopefully not.”
As an expression of the collective consciousness of the cultural elite, the media’s memes are nothing less than a kind of insanity; a window into an dreamscape in which everything is inverted; where ordinary people are seen as freaks and freaks are seen as paragons of sanity. This is sometimes called alienation; the average person is alien to them and they are alien to the average person.
Someone observed that the system of political correctness was really a process of encryption. It created code words for everything so the public discourse could be sanitized while allowing every hatred to fester unseen in the settings that were, by common consent, to be left unmonitored. After all, the only way you can keep a plantation system going is to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Within unmonitored settings people could speak their minds provided they knew how to shut their mouths when entering the public space. If you weren’t already on a plantation then you had to join one quick. Otherwise the system might leak truth.
Thus public obsession with “racism” or the recent inordinate sensitivity to “religion” does not actually reflect some deep desire to show respect or a rooted sense of shared piety. Instead, it represented an outrage that the hypocrisy is not maintained; that the supports holding up the facade are showing.
When former press secretary Robert Gibbs said that GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum was “well over the line” for questioning President Obama’s Christian faith, was it because ‘faith’ was so important in the White House? Or was it just one more little prop to beat the other guy over the head with?
“It’s wrong, it’s destructive and it makes it virtually impossible to solve the problems we face together as Americans,” Gibbs told me in an exclusive interview Sunday on “This Week.” “It’s just time to get rid of this mindset in our politics that if we disagree we have to question character and faith.”
Nobody can talk about national, religion, patriotism or a personal life unless you happen to truly take it unseriously, otherwise you’re a bigot or worse, a hypocrite. But we’ll all pretend as if we cared.
In today’s world the most oppressive regimes in the world chair UN committees on human rights, theocracies claim to be “persecuted”; racial supremacists can cry ‘discrimination’ at every turn; and billionaires proclaim themselves champions of the poor. But nobody thinks these absurdities are in the least bit strange; the focus is on what they say. For as long as they deviate not a jot or tittle from the prescribed narrative, then all is well. But once they depart the language of political correctness it is time to break out the tar and feathers. The real offense in the world today is not to tell the lie, but to refuse to talk in code.
“I don’t even think that was intentional,” Lin said. Probably not. By now it is all second nature.
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