PC “Right think” is a low-quality cover for no think. Joe Bob Briggs writes, today, for Taki’s Mag (a “wrong think,” thus, not politically correct, thus, actually correct publication) on the failure to grasp humor by the outraged, unintellectual masses.
He takes offense with the offended youth of today:
Satire is a machine gun on a swivel. You aim at a target, fire, move one foot to the right, fire, move again, aim and fire—you hit all the targets, without exception, and about one in ten targets will scream. When that happens, you hit that target twenty more times.
That’s how you identify the sacred cow, then exterminate the sacred cow.
The difference, in 2018, is that it’s not one in ten targets, it’s one in two. Everybody screams, like, all the time. Nobody ever says, “Oh, wow, you caught me, yeah, that’s pretty stupid.” And everybody assumes you have some kind of second agenda, usually political.
…
I stopped reading the Comments sections entirely, not because I couldn’t take the heat but because I often couldn’t even understand the context of the argument.
Unreasoned assumptions are bad enough; making an “ass out of u and me.” It’s much, much worse in an era and an area of rapidly declining intelligence. For instance, assuming (wow) that most could even read the above-selected Briggs’s quote, some might assume (again) that he’s promoting gun violence and nothing else.
He’s not communicating at the highest level but at one a good deal higher than the passing average. By strange coincidence, today’s Pearls Before Swine strip tackles the same subject from a slightly different, easier to comprehend angle:
Stephan Pastis, Pearls, 5/17/18.
Again, even here, a basic literacy is required, else the viewer merely sees three generic people and a rat holding a beer. But Pastis is saying the same thing as Briggs: mind your own business, brighten up, and lighten up!
The other day we lost the mighty Tom Wolfe. He made a mark offending the pretension, as Monica Showalter observes.
What a treasure he was. He wrote about the world as it is, telling our American story because he loved our American story. How sad that we don’t have him to write about the ongoing story of America. He wrote about the world as an outsider, and he examined the establishment as it needed to be examined, and naturally, that added up to making the left look stupid. There was no other way for a writer this honest, and we are the richer for it.
It’s true that I would love to step into Wolfe’s role, merely lacking the talent and those white suits…
I do hope all this offended someone.
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