Post Election Follies

 

“I Haven’t Seen Democrats This Mad

Since Republicans Freed Their Slaves”

-post election internet meme

 A person does not have to be a fan of Donald Trump to be amused by the stuff coming from some Democrats since the election (not the ordinary Democrat voters who are disappointed and concerned but keeping their heads). We have shaved heads, sex strikes, people checking with Google to see how to get to Canada, tearful TV late night show hosts, Harris people blaming Biden, Biden people blaming Harris, somebody blaming almost everybody except Obama, various friends of democracy blaming the voters for being too stupid to appreciate them, all sorts of people blaming men, and colleges and law schools offering students cookies and coloring books to ease their suffering. It’s a show.

There is also the phoniness that has been revealed in the last few days. As Kat Tempf and others have noticed, all the people on leftist TV outfits who claimed they would be imprisoned if Trump won showed up for work after the election as if nothing had happened. One would think that if they believed what they had said, at least one of them would have gone into hiding or run for the border. Since none has or likely will, one may assume they were lying all along. The same thing goes all the more so for those who claimed Trump was another Hitler who would become a dictator and end the republic. If they really believed that, surely at least one of them would be getting out while the getting is good.

I think a special prize for phoniness should go to those such as some of the gang at the Bulwark who have spent the last few years proclaiming preserving democracy as the crucial issue of the age and their role in defending it as a high calling. That was before the election went the wrong way for them. Now they are declaring that the demoi are fools not to be trusted, that their stupid choice should not be respected, and that its implementation should be resisted and sabotaged starting immediately. A person half expects them to follow the Babylon Bee’s lead and come out for abolishing both the electoral college and the popular vote to save our democracy. It may become hard for them the get people to take their “we have no tribal loyalties; we’re just warriors in the sacred cause of democracy” pitch seriously.

I voted Republican against the left rather than for Trump, and I will oppose some of the stuff Trump plans to do. But you have to give the guy credit for both triggering some fine entertainment and highlighting some serious phoniness in the last week.

Amos 'n Andy

I received a collection of DVDs of the old Amos ‘n Andy TV show as a Christmas present this year. I remember watching the show in reruns when I was an adolescent, but I had not seen any of the programs since then. I have watched a few episodes and am now puzzled by the controversy over and suppression of the show over the years.

In what I have seen, there is nothing about the program demeaning to black people. The lead characters are of course comedic to the point of being goofy. It is a comedy show. However other black people who appear in the shows are depicted as normal, average, competent  Americans  - lawyers, actresses, department store executives, bank officers, FBI agents, secretaries, store clerks, and so on – with a complete lack of stereotyping or condescension. The main characters are a typical set of stock comedic types. There are the conniving schemer (Kingfish), the henpecked husband (Kingfish again), the straight man (Amos), the schemer’s frequent dupe (Andy), the cowardly, blustering loudmouth (Algonquin J. Calhoun, attorney at law), the shrewish wife (Sapphire), the harridan mother in law (Sapphire’s mother), the troublesome idiot brother-in-law (Leroy), the preening, ridiculous lady’s man (Andy again), and the witless sidekick or servant (Lightning).  One finds versions of all of them in comedies going back a long way indeed and having nothing to do with black people.

The episodes I’ve seen vary in quality. Some are funny. Some fall flat. One was touching. None depicts black people in as bad a light as do many more politically correct movies and TV shows (particularly the awful stuff from the 1970’s), and none provides any good reason for throwing the Amos ‘n Andy show into a memory hole. One could  half wonder if the real reason for suppressing the show is less the humor than the background of presenting black people  other than the main characters as ordinary Americans, something which goes against too many cherished political notions. I doubt it, but the entire situation is odd. As Kingfish might say, something funny going on here.