Some hate speech is O.K., depending on the speaker

Like the Roseanne show, this blog has been rebooted
… but not canceled (so far)

The party-line telephone here at the Stately Manor was ringing off the hook Tuesday with concern that this popular feature (Free! And worth it!) had been canceled by our Russian disinformation handlers — and that its Founder, Producer, and Chief Talent had been murdered most foul-ly. 

Rest easy, my Deplorables. Truth is, we were shut down for a day of in-Manor house sensitivity training. Not to instill more sensitivity (Shirley, you jest!), but to drum out the subtle hints of occasional compassion, as detected by overly sensitive instrumentation.

While the denizens of the Manor were being subjected to endless PowerPoints of guilt-mongering, yet another popular figure became a non-person Tuesday 05-29-18. The TV personality formerly known as Roseanne Barr, having made a spectacular comeback, crashed and burned like an Space X rocket over an almost predictable act of hubris. Or, as we used to say back in Sun Prairie, sheer dumfuckery.

Tweeting that former Obama fixer Valerie Jarrett was the love-child of “Muslim brotherhood & Planet of the Apes” is stupid, as well as racist. Is it Roseanne’s First Amendment right to say so? Of course, and the government has not fined or incarcerated the TV star.

It is also ABC/Disney’s right to cancel her show for whatever reason or lack thereof. 

Just as it is the right of the National Football League to require its employees to stand respectfully for the National Anthem when on the job. (They can kneel or sit at the baseball game, on their own time, if they wish. Or go for a Johnsonville brat.) 

Now the Squire will commit his own act of hubris, if not downright D******-ery. Some hate speech is more acceptable than other hate speech.

[ WE BLAME THE AMBIEN. As Abraham Lincoln counseled, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. The mighty, diesel search engines at the Policy Werkes have determined that the photograph of Whoopi Goldberg originally reproduced here was PhotoShopped, that Ms. Whoopi never wore that T-shirt depicting Donald Trump blowing his brains out with a handgun. At this point, our Eisenhower-era mainframe computer cannot confirm even the existence of such a person as a “Whoopi Goldberg.”

[Therefore, the photograph and accompanying unhinged diatribe has been scrapped from this blog much as ABC/Disney scrapped the Roseanne show from its line-up. Until its writers can rewrite the character, anyways, perhaps substituting the so-called Whoopi person for Roseanne. Talk about a plot twist! We would write it like this: Roseanne awakens one day to find herself in Whoopi Goldberg’s body. She confesses to Dan and the kids that she had only been identifying as a white racist until she had an out-of-body experience due to an overdose of Ambien. 

[But our point, whatever it was, remains. Should have gone with Kathy Griffin and the severed head.]

Golfing while black, and too slowly!

Roxanne Gay in the New York Times sees racism everywhere:

• Five black women were golfing in Pennsylvania when the police were called because the women were, purportedly, golfing too slowly. [A golfing Fivesome? FIVE?! I’d call the police on that, too.]

• Some black people were having a barbecue in an Oakland, Calif., public space and a white woman called the police on them for using a charcoal grill. [It’s California, an environmental thing. Smog, y’know.]

• In Philadelphia last month, two black men waiting for a business meeting with a third person in a Starbucks were arrested for sitting in a Starbucks while black. [Hold your business meetings at Starbucks! No purchase necessary!]

Ms. Gay continues:

In each of these encounters, white people took it upon themselves to police black bodies in public spaces. They felt entitled to do so because of racism … They felt this entitlement because that’s what racism does — it allows one group of people to feel superior to and imagine dominion over another.

We could also make the case that PC-ism does the same: allows one group of people to feel superior to and exert dominion over another. We who live in the Emerald City know a thing or two about virtue signaling. Because we’ve seen a thing or two …

We might accept Ms. Gay’s examples at face value. We could posit that police are called on white people for equally specious reasons but those result in no headlines, lawsuits, or BLM marches. We could walk on the wild side to argue that even No Shoes, No Shirts, No Service may fall victim someday to the malleable curse of “disparate impact.” Do we exaggerate? One academic maintains:

As white segregationists in the South were placing “whites only” signs in the windows of restaurants, in the North, more enlightened (or, rather, more savvy) white proprietors and public officials realized that rules restricting public spaces to local residents and the strict but selective enforcement of laws against things like disorderly conduct and loitering could be used to impose racial segregation.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Do you really think Madison Ald. Shiva Bidar-Sielaff would have sicced the police on Monica Adams of Freedom Inc. if she had been haranguing alders? The other BLM shouters? The grievin’ grandma of Tony T. Robinson Jr., martyred by police? Of course not. 

But she did on an aging white man. No cursing, no shouting, no threats. No matter.