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Are Liberals Humorless?
By Kyle | July 25, 2008
In a well-argued blog item, Commentary’s Jason Maoz says liberals have lost their sense of humor, citing as exhibit A the furious reaction to the New Yorker cover showing Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a gun-toting radical. Maoz quotes Jean Shepherd during the 1960 presidential campaign:
If you have any politically minded type friends, you know — the indignant Liberal or the shell-bound Reactionary — they both talk exactly the same, because underneath, underneath that simple, homespun exterior, there’ll always beat the heart of a true Neanderthal.
Topics: Barack Obama, Comedy, News, Politics |
July 30th, 2008 at 9:50 am
It’s getting harder and harder these days to even define what a term such as ‘liberal’ means. I am a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, for example. I believe - strongly - in universal access to health care. I consider it a strange thing that Americans have to choose whether or not they can afford to take care of their health, especially when a serious illness hits. People literally have to go broke before they can qualify for “assistance”. We simply must, as a matter of humanity, solve the problem of lack of access to health care. Period.
I do not believe in “tax the rich” as much as I believe in “keep costs down”, but I am certain I will live a full life, never having seen Washington take that message seriously. So who is the conservative? The one who tells my wife what she can and cannot do with her womb? The one who tells me why this is a “Christian nation”? The one who wants to strip every mountain for its last bit of coal? The one who wants so little industrial regulation that they want the law to protect them from being prosecuted for damaging the environment?
And what is a liberal these days? Somebody who wants to impeach Bush for war crimes (and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Rice…)? The one who wants to add billions to what is already a bloated bureaucracy?
We’ve all lost not only our sense of humor but our willingness (perhaps our capacity) to talk to each other. We live in sound bites, and we assign labels as fast as we can, so we know who and what we’re dealing with.
Life ain’t and never was that simple.
I got the New Yorker cover, because I get the New Yorker. It is “liberal” in the sense that it wants to talk about things rather than label them. The cover was all about labels, and how fatuous they are.
Several people complained. It was a story for maybe 16 hours, then it was gone. The liberals may have been indignant, until they discovered it was “one of us” who did it, and that there was a point being made.
The long article inside was also interesting. It detailed Obama’s rise to power in Chicago politics, and made me aware that he may not be the political neophyte he seemed to be in the primaries.
I am a left-leaning independent, but at this moment my candidate is McCain. I believe that Obama’s resume is thin and puffed up, and I am old enough to know that we need pragmatists, not idealists, in the White House.
Perhaps by November Obama can convince me otherwise. Til then, I am more closely aligned with McCain’s focus on the here and now, than I am with Obama’s “Yes we can” balloons that he keeps floating.