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Whitaker's Current Articles July 19, 2003
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Fun Quote:
"That's what us educated people call an add
hominy remark."
Giggling
at a Funeral
Every time I listen to a Politically Correct
speaker giving a grave and deadly serious lecture, I am afraid I am
going to laugh at the wrong moment. I am like one of those guys who
tends to giggle uncontrollably in the middle of a funeral eulogy.
This happened while I was watching a biography
of Confucius on the Discovery Channel. The concluding lecture was
about how Confucius was Politically Correct. He was a champion of
the Working Class, just like Chairman Mao and our other recent
idols.
OK, that’s standard stuff. But then the
Politically Correct narrator made the flat statement that Confucius
was directly responsible for the high level of prosperity the
Chinese people have enjoyed since his day. To me, the idea of
Chinese peasants as prosperous was funny, but it wouldn't be to a
modern college graduate.
The flat statement that the average Chinese
peasant has lived high on the hog since the fifth century B.C.
caused me to give that laugh I am so afraid of. But a roomful
of today’s college graduates would be able to sit there with that
grimly determined look every professors likes to see while he's
repeating the liberal lines for the hundredth time.
Why the Well-Trained Mind Does Not Laugh in the Wrong
Places
Some of our readers may have a certain problem
with the idea that Asia has been a model of individual prosperity.
He may laugh at the idea
just as I did.
Four years in college will prevent a person
from making my mistake of laughing out loud at the idea that a
Chinese peasant has been the world’s model of good living for over
two millennia.
It starts with the fact that every student has
spent hundreds of hours learning that, “Things are not as they
appear.”
So when the Aztecs slaughtered thousands of
human sacrifices and kicked headless bodies down the stairs of their
temples, it wasn’t really a bad thing. Europe was just as bad. If
you don’t agree with that, you are Hitler.
Schools into which large numbers of ghetto
children were bussed produced a generation of white children who
consider foul language normal and schools where drug dealers and pimps
have become routine. But college students are told that
this is not bad. This is exposing white kids to
experiences they would not otherwise have. This is broadening their social
horizons. If you don’t agree, you‘re Hitler.
So the well-trained mind is expected to fill in
the gaps and not laugh. A young person has heard hundreds of
explanations as to why our provincial mind might think that peasants
who live in squalor and starvation are, to the untrained eye, not
prosperous. After all those lectures you just fill in the blank
without a tedious explanation.
So you don’t laugh.
I have an untrained mind. I laugh in all the
wrong places.
Another
Funeral I Laughed at
The first time
I heard the Preamble to the Soviet Constitution was when a professor
read it in class. I laughed out loud.
Nobody else
saw the joke.
That Preamble
said that the Soviet Union would be a union of “workers, peasants,
soldiers, AND INTELLECTUALS.”
No
ten-year-old would fall for that crap.
Let’s say that
several ten-year-olds were talking about setting up a country. One
of the kids says, “OK, Tommy, You’ll be the soldier. You’ll do the
fighting and get your leg blown off. Will, you’ll be the peasant.
You’ll spend your whole day out in the mud and grow all our food.
Frank, you’ll be the worker. You’ll spend all day in the factory.”
Naturally,
being intelligent ten-year-olds, Tom and Will and Frank will ask,
“So what will you be doing?”
To which the
guy setting things up will reply, “I’ll be the intellectual. I’ll
sit around and tell you what to do.”
No reasonably
intelligent ten-year-old would be taken in by that line.
But leftist
intellectuals would not question that line. A room full of
students in class with me saw nothing funny about it.
I laughed out
loud. I laughed out loud because I was more than ten
years old and I had a mind to prove it.
It had never
occurred to the rest of my class that there was anything funny about
this crap.
One
More Example of Many When I Laughed at a Politically Correct Funeral
Back while the Soviets were still occupying
Hungary, I was listening to a tour guide in Budapest.
At that time everybody still remembered that the Soviet Army had brought in troops from the
Orient to crush the 1956 Budapest uprising.
No one in Soviet-occupied Budapest dared
mention the 1956 slaughter. So I was wondering if
Hungarian hatred of the Soviet occupation might come up the
way things do come up in totalitarian societies, in an underground
joke.
It did. At one point the Hungarian guide
pointed across the river where there was an old fortress with a huge
hammer and sickle on it.
That place with the hammer and sickle, said our
Hungarian guide, had been the Turkish center of power when the Turks
occupied the other side of the river. The Turkish cruelty
centered in that tower was
legendary. It was a strong fort, but none of the many armies who
occupied Budapest since then had ever used that fort. The Turks had such a
horrible reputation that that hideous site had been left unoccupied.
Then, the guide went on, in the late 1950s the
people of Budapest had made that old Turkish fort into
a memorial to Soviet troops who died "liberating Budapest." The
Soviets were very proud of this touching tribute and Soviet troops
visited it regularly.
I caught myself, once again, laughing out
loud. As always, everybody else looked at me like I had a tulip
growing out of my forehead. The guide didn’t laugh either, though
I think her look was very friendly.
Everybody in Budapest understood the joke
except the Politically Correct ones. The ancient sign of
unimaginable tyranny had been reopened by the people of Budapest
with a huge hammer and sickle on it. The Politically Correct
Soviets saw nothing funny about that. The Politically Correct
European and American college graduates around me saw nothing funny
about that.
I have never met an intelligent Hungarian who
was not in on the joke. Except the Marxists, of course, and I did
say “intelligent”?
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