Tears Have No Color

Chris Rock...comedy as assault weapon

Chris Rock won’t be the first person I’ve long admired who’s gotten me up on my high horse to deliver a dose of moral rectitude. Knowing me and the times we live in, he won’t be the last. We’ve turned Andy Warhol’s “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” dictum on its tufty white head--every famous person will act like an ass for 15 minutes and will be called on it.
I was looking forward to Chris Rock’s new comedy special ever since he sampled it on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. He told Jerry he was developing a bit about how bullies are actually good for us…and society in general…in preparing us for the toughness of life. Having had my own experience with bullies I pretty much agree with that. I also agree with Rock’s observation that in going so far to protect ourselves from bullies, we actually made the US vulnerable to being taken over by a bully. But as happened, we turned on Tamborine, Rock’s new comedy performance for Netflix, on the day of the latest high school shooting which took 17 lives in Parkland, Florida. As I wrote in an earlier post, sensitivity to political incorrectness can sometimes be a matter of context and timing. Thus, I will allow that it’s possible that on a different day had I watched Rock try to make jokes out of the inequality in young black deaths to young white deaths and black mothers’ tears to white mothers’ tears there is an off chance I would not have reacted as strongly as I have. For the sake of my own humanity, though, I hope that’s not true. I hope my conscience didn’t need context to recoil at a comedian trying to get laughs with lines like: “I wanna live in a world where an equal amount of white kids are shot every month” or “I wanna see white mothers on TV crying…’we need justice for Chad.’” I hope I didn’t need a day watching a tragic parade of mostly white parents grieve beyond torture at the loss of their white children to a white gunman. Hopefully, regardless of my support for the #blacklivesmatter movement, I would never be so comfortable with a racialized view of murdered children that I would think it decent or acceptable to make jokes about such horror. 
In another Comedians in Cars episode, Bill Burr lamented to Jerry Seinfeld about the state of doing live stand-up comedy in these PC days. 

“Just because you took what I said seriously doesn’t mean I now meant it. Like you don’t get to decide that. ‘What?’ You’re in my head and you know my intent? …The amount of time they’ve shown clips…they’ll be like ‘Controversy at the Laugh Factory’ and they show the bit and the crowd laughed. One person got pissed and wrote a blog. It’s a lazy journal story. Right? And the next thing you know and you’re sitting there talking to a [bleeping] blogger.”

I realize that with this post, I’m putting myself at risk of being that bleeping blogger. But I guess my childhood experience with bullies is what gives me the gumption to go up against politically incorrect comedians as well as the PC police if it's warranted. In this case, it’s definitely warranted. That bleeping blogger Burr disdains could be like the boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes—even if an entire concert hall is oohing and ahhing at how dazzling the emperor is. Bill Burr is implying the absurd proposition that comedians are above criticism, which is just one of my issues with political correctness…it conflates aesthetic critique with political agenda. More over, because PC is so often employed as a weapon to advance ideology, it undermines and corrupts any reasonable calls for common decency...which is what I’m attempting here.
I know what Chris Rock’s intent was with this bit about racial inequality in the murder of children. He was trying to promote an understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement by pointing out the racial disparity in the number of black kids killed by cops vis-à-visthe number of white kids. Bill Burr might argue that I’m doing exactly what he expects from a bleeping blogger by taking Rock’s intent to comment on police shootings and fitting it into my agenda on mass shootings. I would argue that if you’re trying to draw a distinction between police killings of black youth and indiscriminate killings of a mass of diverse youth, you’re drawing a distinction without a damned bit of difference. A murdered child is a murdered child is a murdered child. Maintaining that one death means more than another because it was funded by taxpayer dollars to police rather than Congressional indifference to loners with assault rifles is to create a hierarchy of grief that is just bullshit and cruel. Turning grief into a competition in this way would be the darkest sign yet that we’ve sold our national soul to the ethos of capitalism, where being #1 matters most, even in matters of suffering.  
If ever there was a proper moment to declare All Lives Matter--without it being taken as a racist dismissal of black parents’ pain--this is that moment. Many of the faces most prominently on display in the current student protests against assault weapons are white. Still, those kids have been the subject of smears and attacks by the NRA, its bought Republican politicians, and the rocking chair right sitting in front of Fox News. This isUS against Them…and us doesn’t stand a chance if we continue to fragment ourselves into the same fucking little tribes over and over again.
Chris Rock’s mockery aside, we do need justice for “Chad” ...or let's call him Nicholas for Nicholas Dworet...and for Martin Duque Anguiano…as well as Tamir Rice…all our murdered kids regardless of how they were murdered deserve justice. Bill Burr says he hates it when comedians are made to apologize whenever somebody accuses them of stepping over the line. But it doesn’t have to be an apology. It just has to be an acknowledgement and self-correction of a grievous wrong. After all, that’s all we ask of the NRA and the Republicans. If Chris Rock is the bold and thoughtful guy I take him to be, asking him to rethink a bad comedy bit is not a case of PC police brutality; it’s a call for him to be as decent a human being as he can be.    

For Chris Rock...is this enough equality for you?

Update: Dana Loesch, NRA spokeswoman, at CPAC, 2/22/18, "Crying white women are ratings gold for the legacy media." Yep, you can work this shit from both sides of the political spectrum.)