PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “Gascoigne checks O’Reilly into the boards…”
COLOR GUY: “Oh, wow. Cheap hit, there…”
PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “Aaaaand off come the gloves. We’ve got a donnybrook going here”
COLOR GUY: “Hockey used to be such an artistic game. How far hockey has fallen, since it’s first ever fight, last January 7”.
PLAY BY PLAY ANNOUNCER: “RIght you are, Guy”.
MOM: “Why isn’t your homework done, Junior?”
JUNIOR: “January 6”
MOM: “Fair enough”.
GUY A: “Who was that woman who got arrested here in Highland a few years back for being a terrorist?”
GAL B: “Sarah Jane Olson. She was arrested for being involved in January 6″.
GUY A: “I thought it was from in the Symbionese Liberation Army, back in the seventies?”
GAL B: “Couldn’t be. There was no political violence before January 6”
GUY A: “Doh. My bad”.
TOUR GUIDE: “Welcome to Volgograd – formerly Stalingrad”.
TOURIST:”Excuse me – will we see any monuments to the Battle of Stalingrad?”
TOUR GUIDE: “What?”
TOURIST: “The epic battle between the Nazis and Soviets, in 1942-43?”
TOUR GUIDE: “I don’t understand. There was no war or violence of any kind before January 6”.
KOMMISSAR (yelling from off-camera left (where else?)): “Or since!”
GOVERNOR WALX: “Any questions?”
REPORTER: “Tell us why you moved people with Covid into nursing homes?”
WALZ: “It was January 6. It was responsible for everything“.
REPORTER: “Thanks!”
BOSS: “Er, let’s talk. You’ve turned in no work yet this year.”
PROGRESSIVE EMPLOYEE: “After January 6, how could I?”
BOSS: “Fair point”.
TEACHER: OK, Chad, what do the Gulf War, World War 2, World War 1, the Civil War, the War of the Roses, and the French Revolution have in common?
CHAD: Um…
TEACHER: Besides being called wars.
CHAD: Um…I don’t know?
TEACHER: None of them existed. Because there was no violence of any kind before January 6.
COP (PULLING WOMAN OVER): “Do you know how fast you were going, ma’am?”
WOMAN: “After January 6, does it even matter?”
COP: “Good point. You’re free to go”.
PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “Now, Barack, eat your lima beans…
CHILD OF PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “After what happend January 6?”
PROGRESSIVE PARENTS: “Damn. He’s right”.
Re my interview with Angus Fox – here’s the introductory essay to the series, Part 2, and Part 3.
The series, as noted in the interview, is open-ended.
And, back by popular demand, today’s music setlist!
A friend of the blog emails:
Recently I was in a meeting with State of Minnesota bureaucrats. They said it is now the practice for state of MN meetings to start each one with this recital.
Why is this necessary? Why not an acknowledgement for the ingenious federal republic devised to govern such a vast and varied people? Why not an acknowledgement for the free enterprise market that has done more to raise more people out of poverty than any other economic system ever invented.
I was just so floored by the Land Acknowledgement. Really.
That floors me, too.
And I have sat through Saint Paul school board meetings.
If Vegas bookmakers ever start putting odds on hate crimes ending up as hoaxes, I, and everyone who takes Berg’s 20th Law seriously, will become fabulously wealthy.
You recall last week’s story, about anonymous, abusive, “White Supremacist” emails at White Bear Lake High School?
The district’s Superintendant:
Over the last week, we have worked with the FBI and local law enforcement, who investigated the racist, hateful, and threatening messages that were sent to several of our students of color from an anonymous Instagram account. The messages have caused great pain to our students and caused a material and substantial disruption in our school.
This afternoon, a young person took responsibility for posting hateful messages on social media. While we are working to learn more about the motives behind this action, we understand that race is at the center of this incident and any use of hateful language against another student is unacceptable and won’t be tolerated. Our anger around racist acts and bullying remain critical to our work as parents, educators and community.
Since the student’s race wasn’t mentioned, that can really only mean one thing.
To: High School and College Kids in the audiene (or parents of same)
From: Mitch Berg, Ornery Peasant
Re: A Tip From Future You
Dear Kids,
Study up, get into a Tier 1 law school, and get into medical malpractice law:
Your future self, sitting on the deck of your yacht, will thank your present self. And, by extension, me.
That is all.
The hue and cry grows:
But if that black woman isn’t transgender, then this movement is no better than Hitler.
By the way – remember when the advice was “never read the comments?” It’s even more true w/r/t comment sections of lefty pressure groups tweets.
…don’t you dare claim that major media have become stenographers for Big Left.
Perish the thought.
The women weren’t really trying, that’s the only reason they lost. Otherwise, they’d totes have dominated the field. For sure.
Because if the professional women athletes really were trying but still got beaten this badly by a bunch of high school boys, we’d have to admit there truly is a physical difference between the sexes and that’s simply Unacceptable.
Joe Doakes
2+2=Women Can Literally Do Anything As Well As Men, Winston.
Ads don’t appear by accident.
Least of all television ads, with their high production costs and long lead-times. If you see something in a television ad, especially an “agency” spot (produced by an ad agency, as opposed to something shot at a store or TV station for a local merchant, you may be assured someone thought about the message it was portraying.
A lot.
As we’ve discussed recently, the high numbers of African-Americans in TV commercials challenge the idea that Americans are innately racist. If an add offends someone on some visceral level, it’s just not going to work.
With that in mind, I direct your attention to the latest round of commercials for “Hy Vee”, the national grocery chain, and what HyVee thinks it says about their customers. Both spots are done to the tune of the ’80s song Our House, by the British ska group “Madness”.
Here’s the first one, which came out over the winter:
Note the imagery (amid all the HyVee products):
Now, there’s nothing wrong with dads taking care of kids. I spent 20 years doing it, 11 of ’em mostly by myself, several more covering the day shift and working nights to save daycare. Fathers pulling their weight is nothing new.
But it’s not an unreasonable assumption that, in the typical family – whether two-parent or not – a woman is still making a lot of the shopping decisions. And HyVee, one of the major retailers, believes that not only is the image of the woman being the high-speed executive bread-winner one that appeals to those consumers, but showing hubby as a hapless buffoon who’d be lost without her appeals as well.
It’s hardly a novel observation.
HyVee has a new “Our House” spot out – it’s not out on Youtube just yet, so I can’t post it here just yet. And when I first saw it – with its improbably pretty mom cleaning the house to a fine sheen with her array of HyVee products, and a pronounced “Father Knows Best” vibe, I briefly thought “Ooofda – how did this get greenlit? The feministasi are going to have a cow.”.
Then I mentally caught myself. “There’s going to be a whammy”.
And sure enough – Dad finally came home. And he reminded me of Rip Taylor, if Rip Taylor were playing a Gestapo agent (sans long black trench coat – this agent was dressed like, well, Rip Taylor in a HyVee commercial) – simultaneously petulant and way below Mom’s league.
So apparently HyVee’s marketing department believes that an ad Dad who is a mass of caricatures, coming across as a spoiled, petulant martinet to his improbably gorgeous, clearly put-upon spouse, is not only not going to turn their audience off, but will in fact bring them out to the stores?
What does this say about…
…well, not “society”, per se, but the advertising industry’s view of society?
They’re not even bothering to couch it in academic abstractions anymore:
If the people have any kind of memory or moral sense at all, 2022 is going to be a bloodbath.
But I’m worried about the whole memory and moral sense thing.
At what point will the common-usage definition of “conversation” merge with “monologue” in popular parlance?
Because I can see that happening sooner than later.
Dissenters are the first target. Especially the ones whose dissents actually work:
If I were him I’d run background checks on every customer coming through the door.
…and writing Bonfire of the Vanities, the classic satire on late-eighties class and race relations, I’m fairly sure he’d move on and pick another topic. Our class war (the race war is really a class war) is beyond satire.
Case in point: even though we know the Atlanta shootings last week were not motivated by anti-asian hate, the media is still playing it as an anti-Asian grievance, at best – and at worst, the media’s grievance pimps seem to be actively wishing yet another racial fault line into being.
Mass transit.
Old and busted: “it’s about moving people”
New and Fresh: “It’s about smashing racism”.
The Met Council released its new plans for yet another extension to the “Blue Line”, which would push the rail line – whose usage has plummeted since Covid – all the way up to Oak Grove.
And it would appear that the motivating factor was…equity?
“As a Hennepin County Commissioner and North Minneapolis resident, I’m excited about the transformative benefits light rail projects can bring to communities,” said Irene Fernando, Hennepin County District 2 Commissioner and chair of the Regional Railroad Authority. “The new direction of the Blue Line Extension is positioned to serve among the most racially and economically diverse communities in Hennepin, while also connecting transit-reliant residents to the broader regional transit system. This will change the trajectory of what’s possible for so many of our neighbors — connecting students to education, patients to healthcare, and workers to jobs.
“To pursue this work equitably, we must also recognize that large-scale public investments can accelerate patterns of residential and economic displacement, and work together to ensure this investment benefits corridor residents, builds community wealth, and meaningfully addresses decades-long patterns of disinvestment,” Fernando said.
I’d urge commissioner Fernando to come to the Midway and breathe in all the “equity” that the Green Line has brought to my neighborhood. Come with a group.
I heard Met Council commissioner Charlie Zelle on MPR over the weekend tie the change in plans to…
…you guessed it…
…George Floyd.
Is “George Floyd” turning into a progressive branding gimmick?
(The MPR News site’s search feature being apparently nearly worthless, I can’t quite find the clip from yesterday. I’ll keep looking).
… And some of them write twaddle like this.
No less an authority than Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream informs me that public schools are hotbeds of systemic racism.
No less an authority than President Trump informed me that racism is evil.
Plainly, then, the conclusion must be obvious: public schools are evil.
Minnesota spends more than $13 Billion per year promoting evil.
We should stop doing that.
We should close all public schools at once.
Parents who care about education and who can afford to send their children to private school, will.
Parents who care about education but who can’t afford to send their children to private school, will home school.
Parents who care about education but who can’t afford to send their children to private school nor to home school them will be out of luck and their children will grow up ignorant and poor like their parents who probably were Trump voters anyway, so they deserve it.
Teachers, administrators, support staff laid off when the schools close, should learn to code.
Joe Doakes
The thing about calling racism “structural” is you gotta get rid of the “structure” to fix it.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is shoveling landscaping dirt into a wheelbarrow, distracted. Avery LIBRELLE pedals up the alleyway on, naturally, a recumbent fat-tire bike, catching BERG by surprise.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Aaaaah, fffffffor crying out loud, Avery, long time no see. What’s…
LIBRELLE: America is built around structural racism.
BERG: Our “structurally racist” country elected a black president, twice, and we have a sitting Veep who is Black and South Asian.
LIBRELLE: Yeah, but that’s just politics.
BERG: OK. This country is capitalist, right?
LIBRELLE: Ugh. Yes. Ick.
BERG: And under capitalism – well, the parody of it you people observe – all things evolve back to money, right?
LIBRELLE: Ugh, yes. Awful.
BERG: Right. And there are few places in our society where “money” and the people who spend it are as attuned to peoples attitudes as in advertising.
And perhaps you’ve noticed – in advertising these days, “people of color” are represented waaaay out of proportion with their share of American demographics. And remember fifty years ago, when Norman Lear got all “transgressive” and cast a biracial couple as bit players on All in the Family? Pretty scandalous stuff, back then – but interracial couples are kinda the “it” thing in advertising these days.
Now – given the ad industry’s focus on consumer attitudes, and capitalism’s imperative to make money work, would advertisers be pushing “racial diversity” in ads if the general public, including the white middle class which makes up a large portion of advertisers targets, were just frothing with racial hate?
LIBRELLE: You notice skin color in ads?
BERG: I notice trends in advertising, a key part of the industry I grew up in and which is still my avocation.
LIBRELLE: That’s racist.
BERG: No, it’s utterly clinical. But shall I just ignore everyone’s race? Because that’s pretty much my default setting…
LIBRELLE: No, that’s racist, too…
BERG: So the only thing that’s not “racist” is shutting up and letting you tell me what to think?
LIBRELLE: Pretty much.
BERG: Naturally. Hey, loook (points into the distance) – a garbage truck!
(LIBRELLE looks around – giving BERG an opening to slip away) .
(And SCENE)
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