I have to disagree with the “as always” part of your statement: from the end of Roy’s (wonderful) 2014 Village Voice piece:
“On the bright side, it’s at least even money that most of our fellow Americans haven’t turned into paranoid lunatics yet. We’ll see.”
Honestly, (re)reading that VV piece and being reminded that Michelle Bachman & Louie Gohmert were once the nastiest pieces of shit the GOP could fling at us made me long for those simpler, less loony times, lo these 8 long years ago.
I absolutely agree cancel culture is political correctness 2.0, and I think it’s very fair to say a pivot point happened circa 2010-2015, when conservatives moved from a “Jeez, can’t you take a joke” response into “we have a constitutional right to tell this joke at a private venue, a constitutional right to be paid cash to tell this joke, and you are required by law to listen to us tell this joke. We haven’t figured out how to force you to laugh at it yet, but we’re working on that” territory.
I assume they've had a VERY close look at the eye-clamps from Clockwork Orange, and are now in talks with manufacturers in China who can produce them at reasonable cost.
The naive kids of Wyoming -- WYOMING! -- have confused the Big Government that wants corporations to pay taxes (BAD) with the Big Government that wants to police our bodies (GOOD).
Maybe it was an effect of all the Westerns on television the years just before I was born, but I could swear that growing-up in the East the pronunciation I always heard was 'wye-OH-mee'.
…as sure as True West Scotsmen go roamee in the gloamee.
Wow. I thought I was the only one. I grew up in Michigan and I’m old, and my father insisted that the ing was silent and the correct pronunciation was WyOHMee. I never heard that from anyone else until this very moment. Are we cousins?
LOL, as the kids say. One would think grads should have at least no small amount of say as to who speaks at their graduation and who they pay to speak. And one would be wrong. But, as I'm wont to say, as life becomes ever shittier because of our awesome leadership, we still have, it would seem, a right to kill at least select fellow Americans (cf Covid, of course) and an absolute entitlement to a platform for expressing the proper expressions. Amazing. Or, as the red commies maybe used to say, decadent AF.
"...but at the risk of sounding conceited I think Clio’s still keeping some of mine under her pillow."
Tough, sad to be a Cassandra, harder these days when news media are focused on pandering to their audiences instead of reporting important facts and truths (as I'm wont to say). Indeed, Cassandra maybe is the OG cancel culture victim, but it's worse now.
Your PGA mention reminds me of a photographer I once worked with who had just come off a project with Jack Nicklaus. Surprise -- he was one of those "One-Does-Not-Speak-or-Even-Look-Directly-at-the-Great-Man, One-Must-Go-Through-His-Assistant" celebrities. There was some kind of brouhaha over a wardrobe person touching a sweater he was supposed to wear in the shoot, I don't recall the details, but he threatened to walk. Tense. It made for a long shitty day for everyone involved. So imagine my shock that he turned out to be MAGA.
Him bragging that he turned down the Saudis--twice--when they asked him to develop them a golf tournament. . . .as if anyone asked him to tell us this.
It annoys the hell out of me every time some jackass pontificates about the "science" of two distinct sexes, which is the latest update of "homosexuality is unnatural." I know it's absolutely pointless to hope to educate these people, many of whom think that a killer argument against evolution is asking, "If we descended from monkeys, why are there still apes?"
May 18, 2022·edited May 18, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
If real scientists were still filling skulls with mustard seed to measure brain volume, that would be the ONE other instance of "science" they would support. Otherwise, no.
If only we could actually cancel them .Like a spin-off of Welcome Back Kotter.
Blubber( in the non whale sense) is just the best word! My Mom raised 4 boys- "Stop your blubbering" was a frequently heard phrase.
The Smothers Brothers were so subversive. Their show looked like every other variety show( the whitest of all entertainment forms (until The Flip Wilson show) )( can I get in trouble putting parentesis inside the parentheses?) But oh my God that content. They were pretty upfront about this being a racist assed country deeply involved in a racist assed war in Southeast Asia. Plus Glen Campbell. I was 10 or 11 when they were on and I didn't get all of it but I bet I got some of it . I mean look where I am today . And Sonny and Cher was pretty cool there at the beginning .
Really great column today. Harkins well back to the VV days. We were all so much younger then. I remember going to the reading room in my local library as I was just starting my teen years reading through the Village Voice classified ads not quite knowing what was going on there but being pretty sure that it was something that I wanted to understand. Plus Greil Marcus and Andrew Sarris. I think I was the first first place I read any Nick Tosches. Then later in life that Ed Roso fellow.
I'm meandering now. I turn 64 this weekend. I've been told to expect that.
"Anyway, a few months later Trump was president. Draw your own conclusions."
Nope. Need my own blog to do that (and I'm not that motivated.)
"Ha ha ha, I kill me."
Easy there, chief. We're gonna just take a walk over here to the nice Mrs. Pierce who has a few questions to chat about with you...might take a few hours (maybe even overnight, but there's pizza) and then tomorrow you can go ahead and pick up that AR-15 you been muttering about...
Wow, those halcyon days of "political correctness," which was garbage back then, promulgated with a straight face by every major media outlet, and still invoked to this day by folks who ought to know better.* Basically when someone says this before a sentence like so, "this may not be totally PC..." I hear "this is probably an asshole thing to say" or "you all might think I'm a racist."
Oh, there's this use too that's equally fuckfaced: white person has opinion about how some other group ought to help themselves or solve some problems. So then you hear this: "This might not be _entirely_ to say, but did they.... [insert mayonnaise bullshit here]."
* There was, however, a campus romp movie called "PCU" (1994) released amid the tumult, which is notable only for a surprise cameo & performance by George Clinton & the P-Funk All-Stars. God, that movie was shitty....
I'm willing to listen to someone who says "this may not be politically correct" because attention is not an endorsement and you may sometimes hear some truly insane shit that expands your understanding of man's depravity.
Hey, watch your pronunciation, everyone knows the proper way to say it is p'liticly c'reck.
It's like these TV ads I see for something called "Gruber Law Offices", Mr. Gruber, who naturally wants to be the face and voice for the ads himself and save the cost of a voiceover, pronounces it "Gruber loffices", like he's French and he's saying, "Gruber, the offices."
It's just natural that when you repeat the same phrase obsessively over a period of decades, you're going to drop a syllable or two.
My ever shaky recollection is that libs started PC and all it was about was not being an asshole when discussing non-white folk. As is their wont, the right latched onto it, lied about, and their bullshit has been supported by the mainstream media ever since.
Yeah, in the way back olden days (like late 60s) it was (as Roy describes) a way for us lefty types to make fun of ourselves if we got too rigid or doctrinaire.
My awareness of PC maybe goes back to just before conservatives started perverting the term. Can’t recall when that was but I think in the 90s or oughts.
Good heavens, it's almost like taking a day that people have worked incredibly hard for and instead of applauding them and offering them hope much less advice, you tell some of them they're bad people for something they can't control and doesn't hurt anyone who isn't trying to be hurt by it. And then those hard-working kids, on their day of celebration, are rude enough to say they'd rather not be PAYING for all of their classmates to take this kind of hate speech into their own lives.
Hard to imagine some people aren't okay with it.
Also, Roy, you know there are books of columns out there right? I'd buy yours.
Yeah, why did the government allow mass gatherings of people in liquor stores to sing the praises of malt liquor and single malt while spewing coronavirus into the air?
Wyoming might not be one of them, but there are states where, if I was forced to live in them, you're damn right a liquor store would be essential. And then there are the states (lookin' at you, Mississippi) where I'd be on a doctor's prescription for an IV drip of grain alcohol.
I always learn something here at Roy's 'stack, especially following the links. Today I learned that Jack Nicklaus is currently being sued by Nicklaus Companies, LLC for using his own name to endorse things. Seems that back in 2007, Nicklaus sold all the rights to his name, nickname, etc. to this company for $145 million (!) back in 2007 when that was a lot of money. Yet he still is lending his name to tournaments around the world for ridiculous sums of cash. The suit recently forced him to turn down $100 million to let the Saudis use his name for their own golf tour. It seems that the paltry millions you make winning at golf when young and fit ain't nothin' compared to the earning power of licensing when old and decrepit.
PS I always picture Basil Fawlty at a funeral saying something like "Well isn't this a Sunny Bunch" whenever I see the name.
For a moment there, I had Nicklaus mixed up with that other golfer who figured out how to make a buck off the brilliant idea of mixing lemonade and ice tea., but Google straightened me out.
Excuse me, but the cancelculture judges have ruled that the acronym for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education shall not be “FIRE,” but rather “FFIRIE.” I will be taking no questions.
Carrie Nation is for guys who want a REALLY kinky dominatrix, some axe-play involved. The Phillis Schlafly is so dirty I can't even type it on the internet.
I would like to nominate Jordan Peterson as Little King Baby Man for his habit of quitting and then claiming he was canceled, most recently in a wounded tweet after the backlash to his insult to the model on the cover of SI, which did double duty as a complaint against "authoritarian tolerance," my apologies if I'm late on this one and y'all already put it to rest: “The endless flood of vicious insult [sic] is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else....If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go.” I look forward to his future treatise on what makes a woman beautiful.
"All I said is the fat chick is ugly!" -- I mean what an absolute garbage human being. The single redeeming feature of that frog-warbling dipshit is that he reminds us that Canadians can also be gutter scum.
Spot on, as always.
I have to disagree with the “as always” part of your statement: from the end of Roy’s (wonderful) 2014 Village Voice piece:
“On the bright side, it’s at least even money that most of our fellow Americans haven’t turned into paranoid lunatics yet. We’ll see.”
Honestly, (re)reading that VV piece and being reminded that Michelle Bachman & Louie Gohmert were once the nastiest pieces of shit the GOP could fling at us made me long for those simpler, less loony times, lo these 8 long years ago.
Good point.
Yeah, "the halcyon days of kooky Michele Bachmann" was not a thought I ever believed I'd have.
Hey, as long as the percentage of lunatics hovers around 49% Roy is still technically correct, and as we all know, that's the best kind of correct.
I absolutely agree cancel culture is political correctness 2.0, and I think it’s very fair to say a pivot point happened circa 2010-2015, when conservatives moved from a “Jeez, can’t you take a joke” response into “we have a constitutional right to tell this joke at a private venue, a constitutional right to be paid cash to tell this joke, and you are required by law to listen to us tell this joke. We haven’t figured out how to force you to laugh at it yet, but we’re working on that” territory.
Creeping fascism, indeed.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, just thirty years late.
I assume they've had a VERY close look at the eye-clamps from Clockwork Orange, and are now in talks with manufacturers in China who can produce them at reasonable cost.
The naive kids of Wyoming -- WYOMING! -- have confused the Big Government that wants corporations to pay taxes (BAD) with the Big Government that wants to police our bodies (GOOD).
2 marks for "WYOMING!" 'cause I'm in a generous mood this morning.
WYYYYY-OMING where the wind comes sweepin' down the plains... no, wait, that's not right.
Actually, it kinda is (see world's largest wind farm project in development)...maybe not exactly plains, but not fancies either...
Yeah, if you are in the Wheatland area a 20 mph wind is a fairly calm day
As per Voltaire: begin with an absurdity—most pre-birth personhood—and atrocities are inevitable, logical (though not reasonable) consequences..
The look of the goats in the gloaming
When for mates of their kind they go roaming
It's all for their passion
And in family fashion
They make naive kids in Wyoming
Maybe it was an effect of all the Westerns on television the years just before I was born, but I could swear that growing-up in the East the pronunciation I always heard was 'wye-OH-mee'.
…as sure as True West Scotsmen go roamee in the gloamee.
Wow. I thought I was the only one. I grew up in Michigan and I’m old, and my father insisted that the ing was silent and the correct pronunciation was WyOHMee. I never heard that from anyone else until this very moment. Are we cousins?
Quick question: Milk or melk?
Melk.
IPA.
Nice shout-out to the halcyon days of Jonah Goldberg making a vague and sweeping and obviously made up accusation. I miss that guy.
"policing of thought crimes is all the rage" is pure dumb-brilliant bs, and smack down the middle of the plate for Goldberg. Miss him I do not.
It's simply too depressing to read even the Dispatch columns he opens to the general public. His worthlessness has exceeded even his gormlessness.
Never before has such a gaseous mass been such a nonentity. I’d compare him to Uranus, but it actually has substance and gravity.
"His worthlessness has exceeded even his gormlessness."
I'm too impatient to wait to see this carved on his tombstone, can't we just have it tattooed on his forehead right now?
Jonah Goldberg's Distemper column
LOL, as the kids say. One would think grads should have at least no small amount of say as to who speaks at their graduation and who they pay to speak. And one would be wrong. But, as I'm wont to say, as life becomes ever shittier because of our awesome leadership, we still have, it would seem, a right to kill at least select fellow Americans (cf Covid, of course) and an absolute entitlement to a platform for expressing the proper expressions. Amazing. Or, as the red commies maybe used to say, decadent AF.
"...but at the risk of sounding conceited I think Clio’s still keeping some of mine under her pillow."
Tough, sad to be a Cassandra, harder these days when news media are focused on pandering to their audiences instead of reporting important facts and truths (as I'm wont to say). Indeed, Cassandra maybe is the OG cancel culture victim, but it's worse now.
Your PGA mention reminds me of a photographer I once worked with who had just come off a project with Jack Nicklaus. Surprise -- he was one of those "One-Does-Not-Speak-or-Even-Look-Directly-at-the-Great-Man, One-Must-Go-Through-His-Assistant" celebrities. There was some kind of brouhaha over a wardrobe person touching a sweater he was supposed to wear in the shoot, I don't recall the details, but he threatened to walk. Tense. It made for a long shitty day for everyone involved. So imagine my shock that he turned out to be MAGA.
Him bragging that he turned down the Saudis--twice--when they asked him to develop them a golf tournament. . . .as if anyone asked him to tell us this.
It annoys the hell out of me every time some jackass pontificates about the "science" of two distinct sexes, which is the latest update of "homosexuality is unnatural." I know it's absolutely pointless to hope to educate these people, many of whom think that a killer argument against evolution is asking, "If we descended from monkeys, why are there still apes?"
If real scientists were still filling skulls with mustard seed to measure brain volume, that would be the ONE other instance of "science" they would support. Otherwise, no.
What a dumb use for mustard seed...
I imagine the first craniologist looking at a jar of mustard seed and asking, "Is there a way this could be used for RACISM?"
Them dumb musTARDS!
If only we could actually cancel them .Like a spin-off of Welcome Back Kotter.
Blubber( in the non whale sense) is just the best word! My Mom raised 4 boys- "Stop your blubbering" was a frequently heard phrase.
The Smothers Brothers were so subversive. Their show looked like every other variety show( the whitest of all entertainment forms (until The Flip Wilson show) )( can I get in trouble putting parentesis inside the parentheses?) But oh my God that content. They were pretty upfront about this being a racist assed country deeply involved in a racist assed war in Southeast Asia. Plus Glen Campbell. I was 10 or 11 when they were on and I didn't get all of it but I bet I got some of it . I mean look where I am today . And Sonny and Cher was pretty cool there at the beginning .
Really great column today. Harkins well back to the VV days. We were all so much younger then. I remember going to the reading room in my local library as I was just starting my teen years reading through the Village Voice classified ads not quite knowing what was going on there but being pretty sure that it was something that I wanted to understand. Plus Greil Marcus and Andrew Sarris. I think I was the first first place I read any Nick Tosches. Then later in life that Ed Roso fellow.
I'm meandering now. I turn 64 this weekend. I've been told to expect that.
I wonder if there's tapioca for lunch?
Happy birfday, WM! Try to leave your worries at the door for a spell
Happy birthday, if I forget. (I will forget.)
Happy birthday. I'm with you on the parentheses -- it reflects a discursive mind. Not sure whether it's good or bad but you're never bored, I trust.
Parentheses I dunno, but typos require penance of some sort.
"typos require penance"
I hope not else my life would be one long "Hail Mary full of grace"
I still owe a bunch of " Our Fathers" for some self abuse I may or may not have committed when I was 12...Sure I confessed, but it was under duress.
FASCISTS!!!
Well if that is all you're worried about, I commend to you the following – my boss's go-to response to worrying in general: Fret Not!
It is better to masturbate than to burn.
"Anyway, a few months later Trump was president. Draw your own conclusions."
Nope. Need my own blog to do that (and I'm not that motivated.)
"Ha ha ha, I kill me."
Easy there, chief. We're gonna just take a walk over here to the nice Mrs. Pierce who has a few questions to chat about with you...might take a few hours (maybe even overnight, but there's pizza) and then tomorrow you can go ahead and pick up that AR-15 you been muttering about...
ANOTHER psych hold? Well, long as there's food.
If you play your cards right you can get 3 squares PLUS a cot!
3 hots and a cot!
Wow, those halcyon days of "political correctness," which was garbage back then, promulgated with a straight face by every major media outlet, and still invoked to this day by folks who ought to know better.* Basically when someone says this before a sentence like so, "this may not be totally PC..." I hear "this is probably an asshole thing to say" or "you all might think I'm a racist."
Oh, there's this use too that's equally fuckfaced: white person has opinion about how some other group ought to help themselves or solve some problems. So then you hear this: "This might not be _entirely_ to say, but did they.... [insert mayonnaise bullshit here]."
* There was, however, a campus romp movie called "PCU" (1994) released amid the tumult, which is notable only for a surprise cameo & performance by George Clinton & the P-Funk All-Stars. God, that movie was shitty....
Here's the performance:
https://youtu.be/-kytz-dB1HY
I'm willing to listen to someone who says "this may not be politically correct" because attention is not an endorsement and you may sometimes hear some truly insane shit that expands your understanding of man's depravity.
Hey, watch your pronunciation, everyone knows the proper way to say it is p'liticly c'reck.
It's like these TV ads I see for something called "Gruber Law Offices", Mr. Gruber, who naturally wants to be the face and voice for the ads himself and save the cost of a voiceover, pronounces it "Gruber loffices", like he's French and he's saying, "Gruber, the offices."
It's just natural that when you repeat the same phrase obsessively over a period of decades, you're going to drop a syllable or two.
My ever shaky recollection is that libs started PC and all it was about was not being an asshole when discussing non-white folk. As is their wont, the right latched onto it, lied about, and their bullshit has been supported by the mainstream media ever since.
Yeah, in the way back olden days (like late 60s) it was (as Roy describes) a way for us lefty types to make fun of ourselves if we got too rigid or doctrinaire.
My awareness of PC maybe goes back to just before conservatives started perverting the term. Can’t recall when that was but I think in the 90s or oughts.
Good heavens, it's almost like taking a day that people have worked incredibly hard for and instead of applauding them and offering them hope much less advice, you tell some of them they're bad people for something they can't control and doesn't hurt anyone who isn't trying to be hurt by it. And then those hard-working kids, on their day of celebration, are rude enough to say they'd rather not be PAYING for all of their classmates to take this kind of hate speech into their own lives.
Hard to imagine some people aren't okay with it.
Also, Roy, you know there are books of columns out there right? I'd buy yours.
Yeah, why did the government allow mass gatherings of people in liquor stores to sing the praises of malt liquor and single malt while spewing coronavirus into the air?
Wyoming might not be one of them, but there are states where, if I was forced to live in them, you're damn right a liquor store would be essential. And then there are the states (lookin' at you, Mississippi) where I'd be on a doctor's prescription for an IV drip of grain alcohol.
Been there and have say no, definitely a nearby well-stocked liquor store would be essential.
I always learn something here at Roy's 'stack, especially following the links. Today I learned that Jack Nicklaus is currently being sued by Nicklaus Companies, LLC for using his own name to endorse things. Seems that back in 2007, Nicklaus sold all the rights to his name, nickname, etc. to this company for $145 million (!) back in 2007 when that was a lot of money. Yet he still is lending his name to tournaments around the world for ridiculous sums of cash. The suit recently forced him to turn down $100 million to let the Saudis use his name for their own golf tour. It seems that the paltry millions you make winning at golf when young and fit ain't nothin' compared to the earning power of licensing when old and decrepit.
PS I always picture Basil Fawlty at a funeral saying something like "Well isn't this a Sunny Bunch" whenever I see the name.
For a moment there, I had Nicklaus mixed up with that other golfer who figured out how to make a buck off the brilliant idea of mixing lemonade and ice tea., but Google straightened me out.
Excuse me, but the cancelculture judges have ruled that the acronym for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education shall not be “FIRE,” but rather “FFIRIE.” I will be taking no questions.
If you're done with those questions, can I have them? Skipped lunch...
Hilarious that she tried to "right the ship" with a crowd of college students by switching to "They made liquor stores essential!"
OK, they didn't like my Phyllis Schlafly, but wait til they see my Carrie Nation!
I'm guessing "Phyllis Schlafly" and "Carrie Nation" are euphemisms, but I do not want to know what for...
Carrie Nation is for guys who want a REALLY kinky dominatrix, some axe-play involved. The Phillis Schlafly is so dirty I can't even type it on the internet.
I would like to nominate Jordan Peterson as Little King Baby Man for his habit of quitting and then claiming he was canceled, most recently in a wounded tweet after the backlash to his insult to the model on the cover of SI, which did double duty as a complaint against "authoritarian tolerance," my apologies if I'm late on this one and y'all already put it to rest: “The endless flood of vicious insult [sic] is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else....If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go.” I look forward to his future treatise on what makes a woman beautiful.
Yeah, let it go, Jordan.
Turn away and slam the door
I don't care what they're going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway
Note to Jordan: When your drama-queening reaches the level of "Disney Princess" , it may be time to hand in your man-card.
At least then he won't talk about Bruno (no no no)
"All I said is the fat chick is ugly!" -- I mean what an absolute garbage human being. The single redeeming feature of that frog-warbling dipshit is that he reminds us that Canadians can also be gutter scum.