I hate it when the news reports on something offensive that some famous guy said…and then doesn’t mention the offensive something. Don’t get me wrong, I love it as much as the next guy when, in an unscripted moment of rare celebrity honesty, Justin Bieber is caught on tape professing his hatred for Asian midgets, but if he really did say something like that, we wouldn’t know it from the news. All we’d know is that Justin Bieber said something the news thinks is awful and that a bunch of very short Asian people are really mad about it. This happens all the time.
The next time you hear a news snippet about outrage stemming from some off-hand remark, listen closely, lean in to hear if in his spiel the announcer actually mentions WHAT WAS SAID to touch off this supposed “controversy” in the first place. They may hint. They may imply. But they rarely say. The next time you read about the anti-Semitic comment made by some angry Utah separatist made at some black tie dinner to raise awareness for Regretful Circumcision Syndrome, scan the article to see if the reporter actually reports the story. Nine times out of ten, you won’t find the actual comment, you won’t be able to glean what the whole story is about in the first place, and that’s the meat of the story. The rest is just condiments.
It’s the fallout from the thing that gets reported. It’s the talking head back-and-forth between the uptight free speech advocate and the even-more-uptight anti-slander subgroup activist that gets reported. The moderator will let the two sides debate the topic for an hour without even mentioning the thing that everyone tuned in to hear about. And this isn’t the just newsmen doing their standard “tease the story” shtick where they tell us that they’re going to deliver this scandalous, gossipy tidbit of “news” four times before reporting the story, their teases conveniently coming right before the commercial breaks. This is a different phenomenon. I’m used to announcers’ teasing. It’s annoying, but it’s merely a producers’ trick to keep you watching. The non-reporting reporting phenomenon is a totally different idea, and one that I really don’t understand. Why not tell us what the deal is? What’s the logic behind just reporting the fall-out and not the story? What are they afraid of? Are they honestly trying not to offend while emphatically telling us that someone said or did something offensive? Since they’re trying to make us feel offended, why wouldn’t they mention the offense? Am I wrong and it really IS the same teasing phenomenon without the payoff? Is it all just corporate news cowardice?
This nonsense is like buying a pack of baseball cards, tearing off the wrapper and finding not only that the gum hasn’t been fresh since The Great Depression, but then also discovering that there are no baseball cards, just a bunch of card-shaped pictures of local mailmen. You bought the pack to get baseball cards, not mailmen. You went to the website to find out what the founder of Google said off-hand about transvestite Mormons. You tuned into the cable news show to learn what Kiefer Sutherland said about Trinidadian-and-Tobagonian waitresses. And yet…nothing. I WANT to hear the offensive comment. We all do. Even the members of the angry, offended group WANT to hear the offensive comment. For God’s sake, that’s what got them angry in the first place. (Well, really it’s just what pushed them over the edge–Those guys are pretty much always on the verge of anger and are just biding their time, but the comment was their touchstone.)
I don’t think that this is simply a natural by-product of our current Woke worldview, but it’s clearly tied into that somehow. Wokeness/Political Correctness is a good idea and a terrible reality. Simply put, free speech is much more important than trying to keep everyone’s feelings from getting hurt. This, too, shall pass. Eventually we’ll look back on Political Correctness like we now do the telegraph—a quaint, probably necessary, but wildly limited, means to a better end. It will be an historical footnote, an asterisk in sociology textbooks, and the butt of jokes that aren’t nearly as funny twenty years later—instead of a decent joke, we get a half-hearted, cliché audience applause burst in favor of the awareness of the latest group’s “acceptance.” We all need to lighten the hell up and learn to laugh at ourselves before it’s too late.
Political Correctness may be a great trend for comedy writers, but it’s not so good for office water cooler jokes. We’re all too busy looking over our shoulders to see if Jenkins is rolling down the hall near us to make fun of the fact that Jenkins was the only paraplegic in recorded human history to be paralyzed by a herd of zebra escaping a Nebraska zoo. Who knows if Jenkins has a sense of humor or not? He should. Zebra stomping is funny, at the very least it’s funnier than most crippling injuries. Sadly, we’ll never discover whether or not Jenkins can laugh at himself because we live in an era where we don’t treat Jenkins like a real human being. We treat him more like Lex Luthor after years of therapy, when his evil days are long behind him, but we’re still terrified that if someone mentions the phrase “World Domination” within his earshot, it’s going to set off a chain of events that ends with the destruction of Los Angeles (and not in a good way).
Personally, I want to know if Jenkins can laugh about it. I want to know what stupid nonsense that Hollywood actor said when he thought that gossip columnist was a high-end hooker. I want to hear the actual story…but alas, like you, I live in this particular era.
The non-story story phenomenon is hooked into the same weirdo psychology as the PC stuff. Ironically, when you dig into it a little, most Wokeness/Political Correctness is actually based on the very thing it purports not to be, prejudice. Assuming that another group of people can’t laugh at THEIR stupid shit (We all have stupid shit.) is pretty condescending if you think about it. Plenty of black people are idiots. All gay people aren’t just walking around waiting for some jock out of a 50’s advertisement for hair gel to call them some derogatory name. If they were, they wouldn’t have time to be gay. Woke-anger is a full-time job.
The very groups whom the news people are deathly afraid of offending are more than likely cool with being made fun of. Pay inequity is sexist. Blonde jokes are not. Getting pulled over because you’re black and you drive a nice car is racist. Telling gangsta wanna-be teenagers that the droopy pants tough-guy-penguin look is moronic is not, in fact, racist. It’s just true. Everybody knows it, people are just afraid to say it. All religions are kind of funny: Mormons think God told them and only them what kind of underwear will get you to heaven, Catholics still think Satan invented the condom, Jews and their love/hate relationship with bacon is funny, female Baptists are sticking with the hair spray (Obviously, God doesn’t want women’s hair to move. Everybody knows that.). I’m not even going to give political examples, but only because there isn’t enough space.
True equality is when we all realize that everyone, every single freaking one of us, is a moron. Yes, that includes you, too. You reading this right now, you’re an idiot, and you know what? That’s cool. I am too.
I can’t end the cycle of baseless judgment. I am incapable of putting a stop to prejudice-based fear of offending anyone with a marginally-different skin tone than you. I can merely hope that, in the future, our robot newscaster will be unafraid to report the actual news. They’re robots. And if the work of Arnold Schwarzenegger has taught us anything, it’s that robots will take over the world at some point and we’d better be buff enough to beat their metal asses. At the very least, by then they should be able to be honest and tell us exactly what XG517-0 said about rusty, pathetic vacuum robots and why your Rumba is so pissed off about it. They’re robots. And they’re in charge. Why would the robots need to lie to us?