Fake Outrage: When Everything Is Shocking and Offensive
I've written several blogs dealing with fake outrage and too much emphasis on being politically correct. First, in "Blackface/Whiteface: Why We All Need Thicker Skins" (3/30/14), I criticized the media for making a fuss about comedian/host/Mariah's babies' daddy Nick Cannon wearing whiteface and dancer/actress Julianne Hough wearing blackface. I argued that the fake outrage allows us to ignore the real horrors of our society caused by systemic racism. In "Morals Versus Manners: Why I Support the Anti-PC Movement" (4/10/16), I distinguished between people like me (and the character Simon Rosedale in THE HOUSE OF MIRTH) and those like the corrupt members of my community's Home Association. I might call the President of the HOA racist and maybe even a bitch, which offended another racist white bitch serving illegally on the board, but I wouldn't participate in a corrupt coup to prevent the people selected by the community to represent them from serving on the board. In "Black and Blue: What We Can Do" (7/16/16), I said that one way we can stop the men and women in blue (police officers) from murdering unarmed blacks is to ignore the molehills (like tasteless jokes or racial slurs) and focus on the mountains.
Apparently, no one is paying attention to me and my blogs because once again last week there was an outbreak of fake outrage. I have chastised people on Facebook and Google+ for joking about killing Trump or for discussing how much they hate him. I even refused to join a special Facebook group called "I Hate Trump," although I belong to one called "Republicans Suck." Hating makes us haters, and we shouldn't celebrate the murder or death (sorry, Supreme Court Judge Scalia, but you can rest in peace because karma, also known as McConnell, appropriately from Kentucky, punished me) of anyone. Still, when insult comedian/provocateur Kathy Griffin was demonized for holding up a decapitated bloody head that resembled the electoral college President, I was outraged. Like many other folks on social media, I pointed out all of the ways that Trump had insulted Obama, not caring about his children. (I didn't mention Ted Nugent, who had threatened Obama yet recently spent a day in the White House with Trump and Sarah Palin, but many others did.) And since I like to mean-tweet as much as he does, I let the electoral college President know how I felt. I also tweeted CNN and asked why they allowed Trump to continue to come on their shows after he accused our (half-)black President of being foreign and called Mexicans rapists. I even went after Kathy's so-called friend Anderson Cooper, telling him to grow some balls and defend his friend because Trump grabs pussies. When the former producer of Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" wrote an op-ed in USA TODAY, claiming that Kathy's tasteless joke had united Americans in defense of Trump, I set him straight. I let him know that some of us were old enough to remember when Jay Leno moved ahead of David Letterman in the late night ratings because Dave didn't think the trial of a black football hero accused of savagely murdering two young white adults was comedy material while Jay had fun with the Dancing Itos and Marcia Clark and Kato Kaelin lookalikes.
My spirits lifted on Friday evening when my favorite politically incorrect comedian Bill Maher gratuitously dropped the so-called n-word into an interview with Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. I had tweeted Bill a few hours earlier, saying I hoped he and the other anti-pc comedians would defend Kathy. But I didn't assume he had read my tweet; I like him mainly because he's the only white man I know who thinks like me. I assumed Bill was defending Kathy by provoking the pc cops to attack him so that he could blast them for faking outrage over a word or a picture instead of over having an insane bigot in the White House. Imagine my surprise when I learned yesterday that Bill (like Kathy who turned into a whiny bitch and hired all-women-are-victims lawyer Lisa Bloom) apologized. Now one difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals will apologize. But I thought Bill, who lost his ABC job for being politically incorrect (the name of the show) after 9/11, who still spouts anti-Muslim rhetoric despite being chastised by just about every liberal who communicates with him, including Ben Affleck and me, and who continued to ridicule Trump after being sued for saying Trump's daddy was an orangutan, would stand his ground. WTF!? Has Trump driven everyone crazy?
The problem with fake outrage is it allows us to ignore the real horrors and outrages, the ones that are more damaging to our society and that are harder to fix. If we go nuts because Bill Maher or Paula Deen used the n-word, we don't have to think about cops killing unarmed black people, Republican governors and legislators working to prevent blacks and browns from voting, the electoral college discriminating against urban nonwhites, or a point that Bill made to Sasse, the fact that the very diverse California, with 40 million people, has the same number of senators not only as Nebraska but as mostly white states like Montana and Wyoming, which are so sparsely populated that they have more senators than they do U.S. Representatives. We don't have to worry about our so-called democracy turning into apartheid. If we go nuts about a self-proclaimed D-list comedian posting an offensive picture that evokes violence, we don't have to worry about mentally ill people killing white children in schools or elderly black women in churches, about racists stabbing people on trains, or religious/political terrorists blowing up nightclubs. We can make the offending celebrities apologize, we can fire them from their jobs, we can even take down symbols like Confederate flags and monuments to Civil War "heroes," and feel good.
There is another problem with fake outrage. As I tweeted in response to a woman on Katy Tur's MSNBC show shrilly proclaiming how shocking it was that a man had streamed a murder live, "When everything is shocking, nothing is shocking." I pointed out to Katy that some of us are old enough to remember (being old has its advantages) when the man who killed our President was shot "live" on television, and we remember wars that were televised. I didn't mention that we had also seen a teacher blown up on her way to space and two very tall buildings crumble and fall with thousands of people, including many firemen, trapped inside. One explanation for how Trump managed to win the electoral college is " shock and outrage fatigue." By the time the "Access Hollywood" tape was released, we were beyond being outraged.
As I've been saying for the last few days, we should be outraged, horrified, and terrified that an insane, incompetent bigot is in the White House. Everything else is just distracting noise.
Apparently, no one is paying attention to me and my blogs because once again last week there was an outbreak of fake outrage. I have chastised people on Facebook and Google+ for joking about killing Trump or for discussing how much they hate him. I even refused to join a special Facebook group called "I Hate Trump," although I belong to one called "Republicans Suck." Hating makes us haters, and we shouldn't celebrate the murder or death (sorry, Supreme Court Judge Scalia, but you can rest in peace because karma, also known as McConnell, appropriately from Kentucky, punished me) of anyone. Still, when insult comedian/provocateur Kathy Griffin was demonized for holding up a decapitated bloody head that resembled the electoral college President, I was outraged. Like many other folks on social media, I pointed out all of the ways that Trump had insulted Obama, not caring about his children. (I didn't mention Ted Nugent, who had threatened Obama yet recently spent a day in the White House with Trump and Sarah Palin, but many others did.) And since I like to mean-tweet as much as he does, I let the electoral college President know how I felt. I also tweeted CNN and asked why they allowed Trump to continue to come on their shows after he accused our (half-)black President of being foreign and called Mexicans rapists. I even went after Kathy's so-called friend Anderson Cooper, telling him to grow some balls and defend his friend because Trump grabs pussies. When the former producer of Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" wrote an op-ed in USA TODAY, claiming that Kathy's tasteless joke had united Americans in defense of Trump, I set him straight. I let him know that some of us were old enough to remember when Jay Leno moved ahead of David Letterman in the late night ratings because Dave didn't think the trial of a black football hero accused of savagely murdering two young white adults was comedy material while Jay had fun with the Dancing Itos and Marcia Clark and Kato Kaelin lookalikes.
My spirits lifted on Friday evening when my favorite politically incorrect comedian Bill Maher gratuitously dropped the so-called n-word into an interview with Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. I had tweeted Bill a few hours earlier, saying I hoped he and the other anti-pc comedians would defend Kathy. But I didn't assume he had read my tweet; I like him mainly because he's the only white man I know who thinks like me. I assumed Bill was defending Kathy by provoking the pc cops to attack him so that he could blast them for faking outrage over a word or a picture instead of over having an insane bigot in the White House. Imagine my surprise when I learned yesterday that Bill (like Kathy who turned into a whiny bitch and hired all-women-are-victims lawyer Lisa Bloom) apologized. Now one difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals will apologize. But I thought Bill, who lost his ABC job for being politically incorrect (the name of the show) after 9/11, who still spouts anti-Muslim rhetoric despite being chastised by just about every liberal who communicates with him, including Ben Affleck and me, and who continued to ridicule Trump after being sued for saying Trump's daddy was an orangutan, would stand his ground. WTF!? Has Trump driven everyone crazy?
The problem with fake outrage is it allows us to ignore the real horrors and outrages, the ones that are more damaging to our society and that are harder to fix. If we go nuts because Bill Maher or Paula Deen used the n-word, we don't have to think about cops killing unarmed black people, Republican governors and legislators working to prevent blacks and browns from voting, the electoral college discriminating against urban nonwhites, or a point that Bill made to Sasse, the fact that the very diverse California, with 40 million people, has the same number of senators not only as Nebraska but as mostly white states like Montana and Wyoming, which are so sparsely populated that they have more senators than they do U.S. Representatives. We don't have to worry about our so-called democracy turning into apartheid. If we go nuts about a self-proclaimed D-list comedian posting an offensive picture that evokes violence, we don't have to worry about mentally ill people killing white children in schools or elderly black women in churches, about racists stabbing people on trains, or religious/political terrorists blowing up nightclubs. We can make the offending celebrities apologize, we can fire them from their jobs, we can even take down symbols like Confederate flags and monuments to Civil War "heroes," and feel good.
There is another problem with fake outrage. As I tweeted in response to a woman on Katy Tur's MSNBC show shrilly proclaiming how shocking it was that a man had streamed a murder live, "When everything is shocking, nothing is shocking." I pointed out to Katy that some of us are old enough to remember (being old has its advantages) when the man who killed our President was shot "live" on television, and we remember wars that were televised. I didn't mention that we had also seen a teacher blown up on her way to space and two very tall buildings crumble and fall with thousands of people, including many firemen, trapped inside. One explanation for how Trump managed to win the electoral college is " shock and outrage fatigue." By the time the "Access Hollywood" tape was released, we were beyond being outraged.
As I've been saying for the last few days, we should be outraged, horrified, and terrified that an insane, incompetent bigot is in the White House. Everything else is just distracting noise.
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