"There's No Other Way"

We should take the time to analyze, at the root, what's keeping us pissed off and apart; instead we're content to keep zinging the other side from the safety of our bubbles

Just heard that Rev. Warnock defeated Herschel Walker in Georgia. Whew.

That said, lemme run this by you and see what you think. It’s an article from Jezebel, the lefty online magazine (Tagline: “Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”). And it really pissed me off.

The piece chronicles the efforts of John Kennedy to stump for Herschel last weekend. You might know Kennedy, the crotchety ol’ Southern-boy senator from Lou-ziana, from one of his trademark zingers, like:

• “When the Portland mayor's IQ gets to 75, he oughta sell.”

• “They’re asking us to get in the van but they aren’t showing us the candy!”

• “‘Be yourself' is the worst advice you can give to some people.”

• “What planet did you parachute in from?”

• “This is why aliens won't talk to us.”

• “The majority of American people right now trust the Biden Administration like they trust a K-Mart bathroom.”

• “Problem is, the oil is in Louisiana … but the dipsticks are in Washington, D.C.”

• On The Squad: “They’re the reason for instructions on shampoo bottles.”

• And my favorite: “The price of gas is so high … it’d be cheaper to buy cocaine and just run everywhere.”

Kennedy’s funny, but he’s also a fake of the first order. He’s actually an accomplished lawyer and Rhodes Scholar who secured one of his two post-graduate degrees from Oxford (not Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, either—the one in England).

Those are the worst, the ones who pretend to be men or women of the people when they’re just saying what they think they need to say to get the base to vote for them. Texas’s Sen. Ted Cruz (who went to Princeton and Harvard) and of course Donald Trump fit the mold, too.

But Kennedy’s worse in my judgment, because he used to be a fairly progressive Democrat.

Now, I was a Rush-Limbaugh-loving Republican myself up until I was 18 and went to college. But we’re talking about a guy who was still a Democrat at 53 when he first campaigned for Senate, and not a particularly moderate Democrat as far as I can tell. He became a Republican for his next campaign, when he was 57.

Adults can change parties, I guess. I certainly understand why many have abandoned today’s extremist Republican Party. And people get more conservative as they age, and want to hold onto their hard-earned money, so I get why older folks lean toward conservatism when they used to be liberal-minded.

But in a short-ish amount of time, Kennedy went from fairly progressive Democrat to the biggest Trump supporter, the biggest pusher of tax cuts for the wealthy, the greatest proponent of the Big Lie, the greatest opponent of early-Covid unemployment benefits, etc. etc

.

So Kennedy is ripe for disparagement. And the Jezebel article does it well in a couple instances.

The writer singles out Kennedy’s suggestion at the Walker campaign event that Walker is both a “gentleman and a gentle man,” which a bunch of his exes and offspring beg to differ with.

She also accurately spurns his recent “cartoonishy offensive campaign ad telling people who ‘hate cops’ to ‘call a crackhead’ next time they need help.” (‘Crackhead’ is the racist and derogatory phrase popularized during the federal government’s war on drugs to vilify Black people arrested and charged with using crack cocaine.)”

[SIDE NOTE: I have to admit, it never occurred to me that the term “crackhead” is racist. When I first saw the ad in question, it angered me because Kennedy was suggesting all of us in favor of wiser funding of law enforcement, that which would prioritize mental health treatment over tanks and bazookas, “hate cops.” Did the federal government really popularize the word “crackhead” expressly to vilify Black people? Can a white crack addict not be a “crackhead?”

…Oh man, I’m going off on a tangent within my original tangent. But it appears my perspective here is kind of adjacent to the perspectives of poor working-class white people when it comes to poor working-class Black people. “We’re just as poor as you Black folks, why do you get more sympathy?” Well, it’s because in addition to poverty they’ve had to deal with bigotry.

“White people can be ‘crackheads,’ too!” Well, OK, but usage of the term to vilify crack users disproportionately affected the Black community since crack was cheaper than powdered coke and therefore a bigger problem in poorer Black neighborhoods.

But that’s all still just coming from my super-swammy point of view.]

But any-damn-way. Geez.

What I took issue with in the Jezebel article covering Kennedy’s stumping for Herschel was this: the writer underestimated the spirit (and it’s not a good spirit) behind Kennedy’s calling out “The Woke.” Below is the chunk of the article that’s relevant (and here’s the full article again):

Kennedy, while wearing a sticker reading “RUN HERSCHEL RUN,” railed against “these high-IQ stupid people” running around Congress at a campaign stop in Loganville, Georgia, on Sunday afternoon. “These high-IQ stupid people have an answer for everything. You know why? Because they think they’re smarter and more virtuous than the American people,” he said.

Did that make no sense to you? Never fear, Kennedy gave rallygoers a list of how to identify this population: “These woke high-IQ stupid people are easy to recognize. They hate George Washington. They hate Thomas Jefferson,” he said. “They hate Dr. Suess [sic], and they hate Mr. Potato Head.”

To that end, the spud haters also, apparently, are going about their days carrying plastic bags full of hearty greens. “These high-IQ stupid people walk around with ziplock bags of kale that they can eat to give them energy,” said Kennedy, who is notably an Oxford-educated lawyer pretending to be a regular man of the people. “If you want to eat kale, that’s up to you. I don’t eat kale. You know why? Kale tastes to me like I’d rather be fat.”

Now, first, I put that “[sic]” at the end of the second paragraph there just to make sure it’s clear Jezebel misspelled Dr. Seuss, not me. I mean, who doesn’t read the name “Dr. Suess” and immediately know, from the thousands of impressions the book covers made upon our little eyeballs, that it’s spelled wrong there? Doesn’t it just look weird the instant you see it?? Harumph!

More importantly, though. When the author asks, “Did [Kennedy’s rhetoric] make no sense to you?” I said—out loud, in fact—“NO, it made total sense to me!” I don’t much like it. I don’t much agree with it. I don’t buy that he’s being sincere in the least. But Kennedy’s speech lays out exactly why blue-collar conservative folks resent white-collar liberal folks, and especially white-collar liberal politicians. It’s unhelpful to ignore this stuff.

“The liberals think they’re better than us,” says the collective right, in my head. “They think having more money and more education, and being able to take on virtuous causes easier than we can, means they’re actually harder-working, smarter, and more virtuous. As long as they keep looking down their noses at us, we’re gonna keep punching them in said noses.”

That’s how a lot of the über-wokeness espoused by the left comes off to the right. As offensive. Disrespectful.

Yes, Washington’s and Jefferson’s owning slaves is awful. But we have to realize that canceling those historical figures in full isn’t practical. Not that we should let their tarnished legacies off the hook. We can’t make excuses for the slave ownership by reasoning, “Well, it was just a different time.” But we should still simultaneously hold up the extraordinary things those leaders did that led to a painfully flawed but still-phenomenal country.

We have to recognize this stuff is complicated.

Yes, Dr. Seuss has had his posthumous problems, too. Racial stereotypes made it into some of his titles, because…well, it was a different time! Not an excuse, just a reason. His estate ultimately decided to stop publishing the books most adversely affected. Which I think might have been a mistake. Wouldn’t it be worth just censoring the offending images, and placing a note at the bottom of the page explaining the blurry images? Don’t we lose a teaching moment, here?

Of course, we also have to do better than saying, “Hey, look at all the goodwill his other books spread, who cares about a handful of missteps? Those were just borne of a bygone era.” To me, advocating for canceling the books and advocating for leaving them alone are both lazy approaches. Both philosophies decline to explore the root of the problem, when some discussion might have helped us pull a little closer as a society.

It’s just ironic (I think?) that, in making fun of Kennedy’s making fun of liberal stereotypes, Jezebel further perpetuates the stereotype that liberals are stuck-up jerks. Corrupt characters like Sen. Kennedy are infuriating, but it’d be more helpful to analyze why their infuriating rhetoric is so relatable to so many. And then cut the shit so the other side might cut the shit. Or at least they won’t have that ammunition to work with.

It’s 4am and at this point I have no idea if any of this is making sense. But I’m gonna send it on through anyway.

Yours,
~Dean

P.S. I’m just calling this newsletter CeeGees.org now. Or feel free to just call it CeeGees or whatever, I dunno. It was CeeGees: Ideas to play off the BeeGees and their album Idea, the album cover of which I swiped, manipulated, and commissioned for the image at the top of this posting. But nobody got the reference. Which is fine. Although I’m not sure anyone’s gotten the BeeGees reference either, even…