| Dear Reader (Including those of you who rioted over the lack of a "Dear Reader" gag last week), By the time this "news'' letter reaches your e-mail box, pretty much every joke imaginable about "Pajama Boy" will have been made. But I reject such a dour Malthusian view of Pajama Boy humor! When the brouhaha started, I was tempted to make the following joke on Twitter: Q: What's the hardest part of being picked as the poster boy for the pajama-boy ad campaign? A: Telling your parents you're gay. Now, quick, before you call A&E and have my reality show canceled, the first problem with this joke is that you're not supposed to make any derogatory jokes about being gay anymore. And that's okay by me so long as people avoid being complete tools about enforcing that rule. But there's a deeper problem with the joke. It's insulting to gays. And I don't mean that merely in the sense that it's wrong to make gays the butts of jokes anymore (You know what I mean!). I mean that there are plenty of gay dudes -- and women! -- who are vastly more masculine than Pajama Boy. Pajama Boy doesn't exude homosexuality; he gives off the anodyne scent of emasculation. Seriously, the construction worker from the Village People would kick his ass. Besides, this is the gay enrollment ad for Obamacare (there's also this). All of these dudes are manlier than Pajama Boy. If you try to play out the life of Pajama Boy in your mind, he probably has a girlfriend. It's just that she's wearing the pants in the relationship, as they used to say. I picture her like Sarah Silverman in School of Rock or the girlfriend at the beginning of Office Space who everyone knows is cheating on Peter. Pajama Boy is a Low-T liberal who wears a "this is what a feminist looks like" T-shirt and flinches whenever his girlfriend makes a sudden movement. He's the sort of guy who thinks the "Consensual Sex Contract" given to him by his liberal-arts college R.A. is a good place to start, but ultimately doesn't go far enough. Charlie Cooke compares him to Leonard from Big Bang Theory, but I think he's more like Raj, who "manscapes" (and moisturizes!) and is ecstatic when he's invited to girls' night. I imagine he was terribly conflicted when his girlfriend finally made him watch The Silence of the Lambs (he wanted to rent Pitch Perfect again), because while he was horrified by all of the violence and he was dutifully empowered by the Clarice Starling character, he was secretly thrilled by the idea of having his own human-flesh girl suit. What Were They Thinking? First, it's worth stating this isn't about Ethan Krupp, the Obamacare activist who plays Pajama Boy. For all I know he bow-hunts alligators and rides a Harley. Though, come on, it's doubtful. The point is that the Obama social-media folks, for whom Krupp works, are going for an image, so what Krupp is like in real life is irrelevant and people should probably leave the guy alone. There's a debate over why on earth the promoters of Obamacare would pick this image to hawk their wares. One side says that it was a brilliantly cynical move because it got people talking just like those "Brosurance" ads with the keg-stands got people talking. (The motto of the campaign is, after all, "Get Talking.") If you can make young people chatter about Obamacare, goes the theory, more will eventually sign up. The other side of the argument is that this offers a real peak into the collective mind of liberalism (and the collective incompetence of the Obamacare team). Pajama Boy represents an actual constituency. There are males (if not necessarily "men") who fit this profile. Like most people who've thought it through, I'm more inclined to the latter. The Pajama Boy image is an extension of the original Thanksgiving enrollment video, which featured parents saying, "We love you no matter what, but it's time to get covered." Which isn't quite as weird as saying "We are admirals of the pantless armada, give us your ball-bearing vestibules," but still strange. The "we love you no matter what" line -- like the "get talking" line -- is an attempt to make getting insurance both edgy and mature at the same time. Edgy because there's a vague hint that talking about this stuff violates a taboo or is difficult. Mature because it's something grown-ups do. But there are problems. For starters, Obamacare actually delays adulthood. You get to stay on your parents' plan until you're 26! Which means the young people we're talking about are 27-year-olds! Twenty-seven used to be the age of seriously grown men. John Wayne was 27 in the Lucky Texan. You can go to college, enlist in the army, do a couple tours, and come home again before the age of 27. The average age of marriage for men is 28. (Though the women I've talked to think dudes who have difficult talks in their jammie onesies while drinking hot cocoa might have to wait a good deal longer. Seriously if women had Terminator-like vision that saw the world by sexual attraction instead of infrared, Pajama Boy would be an almost invisible boy-shaped vapor.) Moreover, isn't it interesting to see the contempt Gen-X and Baby Boomer liberals have for Millennials, or at least Millennial men? (By the way, where are the ads targeting young women?) Twenty-something males are either testosterone-addled idiots doing keg-stands or they're suffering from estrogen poisoning. Last, I love the rearguard effort from liberals trying to turn the mockery of Pajama Boy into proof of right-wing sexual insecurity. It seems to me this is a pretty desperate attempt by the MSNBC fanboy set to compensate for the fact that so many people find Pajama Boy pathetic. That cuts too close to home. So it must be more proof of racism or gender confusion. But if you just take a step back, you can see the problem. If you find yourself in the position of arguing that real men get snuggly in their jammies and drink cocoa, you need to push the keyboard away and walk around the block a bit.
The ASA, Israel, and Anti-Americanism
So the American Studies Association has announced a boycott of Israel. This has generated a lot of semi-predictable charges of anti-Semitism. I think Larry Summers has it right. The boycott isn't anti-Semitic in intent, but there is something vaguely anti-Semitic about the result. That's because the double standard against Israel is so glaring, it causes some people to think it's an awfully odd coincidence that the one country in the world run by Jews is singled out this way. After all, whatever Israel's sins, it hardly sinks to the level of many of its neighbors, never mind the human-rights abuses of such regimes as Burma, North Korea, China, or Zimbabwe, just to name a few. It's like the U.N. Human Rights Council over the years has basically developed two functions: To protect horrible regimes from criticism and to criticize Israel as a moral horror. But it seems to me the real culprit isn't anti-Semitism, it's antiselfism. Since antiselfism isn't a word so much as a cheap effort to cultivate some alliterative parallelism, let me clarify. What I mean about antiselfism is self-hatred or, more specifically, hatred of Western civilization. The American-studies racket long ago became one of the great bastions of left-wing hornswoggle and codswallop. Obviously, there are exceptions, but American Studies in general has become the catch-all discipline for people who want to come up with reasons why America sucks and why Western civilization is a problem. What Would Gandhi Do? When asked what he thought about Western civilization, Gandhi famously replied, "I think it would be a very good idea." It's a beloved quote among many leftists who pin it to their refrigerators or faculty-office doors. It's important to remember that Gandhi was in some ways the founding father of the post-colonial anti-imperial movements. But it's also important to remember that his arguments were entirely geared to Western thinking. He wasn't a Marxist, but he reminds me of Marxists like Rigoberta Menchu who denounce the "Western mind" even though Marxism is a Western idea. Marx wasn't a critic from outside the West, he was a cancerous lesion within it.
Peter Beinart, who has been reincarnated as a fierce critic of Israel, gets closer to the truth about what the ASA is up to. "For institutions like the ASA," Beinart writes, "Israel's real crime is not being a country where Jews rule non-Jews. It's being a country where, in their view at least, whites rule non-whites." I'd put it differently. Israel's "crime" stems from the fact that Zionism is seen as little more than Western imperialism, a foreign European transplant on authentically Arab or Muslim soil. At least on the Left, anti-Zionism is of a piece with anti-Americanism, anti-colonialism, and dislike for anything that smacks of treating Western civilization as superior or exceptional. Tellingly, the ASA's resolution isn't aimed at forcing a two-state solution or making Israel pull back to its 1967 borders. Rather, it is aimed at the legitimacy of Israel's existence. It opposes "the Israeli occupation of Palestine." All of Palestine. In other words, Israel should not exist. Israel's crime is being an outpost of the West, of thinking it has an authentic right to be a nation, a Jewish nation. Never mind that Jews were in Palestine thousands of years before Mohammed or Jesus was born. They are colonizers of the mind even when they aren't necessarily colonizers of the land. This is one reason why the campus Left doesn't much care about the pogroms against Coptic Christians in the Middle East. Christianity is Western, too, now. What I find fascinating -- and repugnant -- about this double standard is not so much that it holds the West or the Jews to a higher standard, but that it holds Arabs, Muslims, Africans, Asians, et al., to a lower standard and then celebrates that bigoted standard as enlightened. Over the last decade, 6,500 Palestinians have died in military conflicts with Israel (mostly sparked by terrorist attacks), while the overall Palestinian population in the territories and in Israel has boomed. And yet, Israel haters declare this genocide. That's a hard claim to square against not just the facts, but the Israeli military's reputation for ruthless efficiency. Surely if the Jews were bent on wiping out the Palestinians, there'd at least be fewer of them now? And while that counts as genocide, the routine slaughter of innocents by other regimes elicits a "meh." I mean who are we to judge? Which brings us back to Gandhi. As I wrote in Tyranny of Clichés, what people always forget about Gandhi is that there was a tactical aspect to his philosophy of non-violence. He believed it would work on the British because the British conscience was open to moral suasion and guilt. George Orwell observed that Gandhi's tactics wouldn't work in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, because in those places a Gandhi would be carted off in the middle of the night and shot, probably alongside his whole family. In effect, Gandhi used the higher standards of the British against the British. And it worked to the extent that the Brits left India.
But there are limits to such tactics. When Gandhi was asked how the German Jews should respond to the rise of Nazism, he responded that they should commit mass suicide as an act of civil disobedience. (Even after the war, he stood by his advice: "The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.") When asked how the British should respond to the Nazis, he gave pretty much the same advice. "I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity," he said. "Let [the Nazis] take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds." This was, of course, fantastically stupid advice. But it was also the sort of advice you get when you follow the logic of Western self-loathing to its illogical conclusion. It uses Western ideals to denounce the West, while suspending the application of those ideals when judging all other societies. The end result is a kind of death-wish where the social compact becomes a suicide pact. You see this death wish in the push for more immigration (which I'm okay with) but a hatred for any effort toward assimilation (which I think is vital). In fact you see it all over, but that's a subject for another "news"letter. For the ASA crowd, Israel can prove it is worthy of acceptance if it will simply agree to cease to exist. They don't want Israelis to literally commit mass suicide, but they do want Israel to stop being Israel, which is pretty damn close. Various & Sundry So yesterday was a pretty busy day. Had to drive kid to school, write syndicated column, do a hit on Fox News, record an hour-long conversation about Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke with Yuval Levin for C-SPAN, go to my daughter's basketball game and then the Special Report Christmas party. I hit a snag; I just couldn't get my syndicated column to work. So I had to write a whole new one in an hour. This was the result. By the way, the C-SPAN thing with Yuval will air on C-SPAN2 on the first weekend in January. Saturday at 10 p.m., Sunday at 9 p.m., and Monday at 12 and 3 a.m. So get your jammies and cocoa ready! It was pretty nerdtastic. Oh, today is my annual Holidaze lunch where I get together with some old buddies and eat and drink too much. Every year we debate who the "D-Bag of the Year" was (sorry for the vulgarity). Note, this isn't a conversation about the worst person of the year or the biggest shmuck. It's about the person who thinks he's better, cooler, smarter than everyone and gets exposed for it. For instance, in 2007 Chung of "Chung is King" fame was the consensus winner (Note: much profanity). Anyway, if you've got nominations send 'em my way. ("You've got mine already, right?" -- The Couch.) Oh, for the record I didn't fail to write a "Dear Reader" gag last week. According to the folks at NRHQ the G-File bumped against the top of the pneumatic tube, and since the Dear Reader gag is at the top, like the radar dish thing on the Millennium Falcon, it got smashed off. For what it's worth, it was "Dear Reader (Or, as my South African sign-language translator likes to say, 'steal second base.')." Speaking of pneumatic tubes. Pneumatic tubes! The ten most frequently asked Google questions (Note: It's mostly interestingly uninteresting.) This is great. 38 test answers that were wrong but awesome nonetheless. Menswear dog pictures! Twenty-eight responses to wrong-number text messages. This is a Cracked video about the four most insulting Christmas commercials. It tries a bit too hard, but has some funny, albeit sophomoric, stuff. But I bring it up mostly so I can criticize it for not mentioning my Yuletide obsession: the Kay Jewelers ads that says "Every Kiss Begins with Kay." As longtime readers of mine know, I've been ranting about this for years. If every kiss begins with a bauble from the jewelry store, than your girlfriend isn't a girlfriend, she's a hooker (who for some reason doesn't take cash). Twelve non-tree Christmas trees. How did I miss "Big Ass Spider"? Top ten moments of 2013 -- in Play-Doh. I don't know if this is all that interesting, but for some reason I think "The fiery history of Scandinavia's Yule goat" is one of the most euphonious sentences I've ever heard. Spot the leviathan! Parrot in a hoodie. Skull sponsorships! Behold: "Alcohockey." Penguins in Santa suits. It's the shame that keeps them warm. Just in time! Fifty weirdest Christmas gifts under $15. | 
Comments
Post a Comment