by notesfromachair

The Chair’s Immodest Proposals

Almost 300 years ago Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical essay called A Modest Proposal suggesting that the poor in Ireland sell their children as food to the rich so as not to burden the upper class with the sight of so many raggedy moppets as they walked through the streets.

Our blue vs. red state divide has not quite gotten there – yet – though we are well on our way. As the summer doldrums begin to wind down and the bottom of the pop culture and political barrel is scraped (Note: You know it’s bad when you’re re-watching reruns of shows you’ve already seen – last week – broadcast on yet a different cable channel broadcasting reruns) what’s a legal U.S. citizen to do? Certainly, not read.

Getting lost in one’s thoughts seemed the only choice. This despite the advice once overheard at a 12-step meeting;

Your mind is like a dangerous neighborhood. Don’t go in there alone.

Not being an addict and never one to listen to too much advice, A LOT of original thinking occurred this week that unearthed more than a few immodest proposals. They might not quite rank as Swiftian but they are certainly more entertaining than this year’s unavoidable summer replacement series – The Republican Apprentice. Of course, so is the dentistry of almost 300 years ago.

No… I don’t mean that kind of Swiftian. #differentBadBlood

In that spirit, here are some not immodest but very necessary proposals. Yes, they are bold but we need to make America great again. Or as Howard Dean once said: YEEEEEHAHHHHH!!!!! (people remember him, right?)

All global warming deniers are to be shipped off to Antarctica to work on restoring the polar ice caps. If there is indeed no global warming, they will discover once they get there that the ice caps are not melting and no work is necessary. If not, they stay for 10 years to see for themselves that the frost has declined yet another 12% during the decade, which in turn caused our temperatures to increase half a degree per year. When they return in 2025 it will be 115 degrees in August and they will be REQUIRED to continue wearing their Antarctica outerwear in the hottest town in either the south or Midwest. Actually, make that Death Valley, where it will be 146 degrees in August, 2025.

Thanks a-holes

Mega churches must be cede 50% of their fortunes to the unborn fetuses of all the children they will force women to bear against their will in states where their contributions to pro-life or anti-Planned Parenthood initiatives are successful. They will also be stripped of their tax-exempt status and that money will be used exclusively for gay wedding cakes.

Still cracks me up. #MissYouJon #COMEBACK

Scandalized, shamed or even disliked celebrities will be required to clean the latrines of every soundstage they have ever worked on or dressing room they’ve ever trashed – with a toothbrush (Note: non-electrical). In the meantime, all of their money will be donated to charities whose causes have been enabled or made necessary by their bad behavior. If they don’t contribute an applicable charity will be named for them. Here is a partial list of this year’s names: Bill Cosby, Katherine Heigl, Cara Delevigne, Justin Bieber, Chris Brown, Robin Thicke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Donald Sterling. Tom Cruise is on probation but will be watched closely during 2016.

Oh god I don’t even know what to do with you.

Politicians must become journalists and journalists must run for office. This will happen impromptu though will be supervised by a citizen’s volunteer army headquartered out of the old Fox News and MSNBC/NBC buildings. Both will be available because the politicians will have caused their ratings to plummet by making no new policy decisions. #gridlockgonewild #bloodfromwherever

Any citizen can make an arrest for someone driving 5-15 mph down the street in their car while on their cell phones. The offender will then have their vehicle impounded, their phone confiscated and a microchip installed underneath their wrist that shocks them each time they use a mobile device at any time during the next year. Furthermore, drivers who take up two parking spaces, touch the yellow line of the space next to them with their vehicle or park their SUV in a spot that is clearly labeled COMPACT will be murdered. That’s right, murdered. They will hand over the keys to their car, be strapped to a pole and the driver of the car parked next to them will floor the gas and either split them in half or decapitate them. As the rest of us cheer. Those who don’t cheer will meet a similar fate for not cheering.

This is starting to get serious.

Florida and Ohio will no longer be allowed to vote since they seem to not only tip the balance of elections unfairly but both are too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter. Except minority voters. They will continue to be allowed at the ballot boxes to make up for all those years where their votes weren’t counted. This policy will last through the next election cycle when new voting regulations will require every wealthy resident of those two states to line up at their local polling place with their birth certificate and most recent tax return. The latter must then meet the approval of a special IRS agent employed at each location to detect fraud.

Anyone refusing to provide goods and services to transgendered individuals anywhere on the gender continuum will be forced to live as their opposite sex indefinitely or until they vow never to discriminate again. If they agree to non-discrimination and break the agreement, then it’s a one-strike rule and they will forever be condemned to the same fate as the individuals they refuse to allow to be their true selves. Also, there will be no wardrobe consults from the LGBT community. #uglysthenewblack #gayagenda

The word dude can only be used in reference to people on a ranch. Otherwise it’s $250 a pop, which will accrue in a fund distributed each year to aspiring fiction writers. Individuals choosing to end a spoken declarative sentence with a question mark will pay $100 per violation, since they tend to be younger. Those fees will accrue in a government account in order to supplement social security and unemployment benefits for future generations.

that’s $250, Marky!!

There will be a moratorium on films based on superheroes or comic books for the next 25 years in favor of stories about actual human beings. If there is no measurable decrease in box office revenue during that time the law will be extended another 25 years. If revenue increases, any references to superheroes or comics will be outlawed for future generations. If revenue decreases, there will still be no comic book or superhero movies made until science discovers a viable alternative.

What… no Iron Man 4??

In the next 30 days, the manufacturers of all TV and audio equipment will be required by law to come up with a single, user-friendly remote that can regulate power, channels and audio. Those will be their only three uses. And the device will be equipped with a lifetime battery. Companies who DO NOT participate will have to start new manufacturing operations based ENTIRELY IN THE U.S. and pay unskilled labor DOUBLE THE MINIMUM WAGE. #technomania #bringjobshome .

Saturday Night Live, Sesame Street and the entire Law and Order oeuvre will be given to all illegal immigrants to study for a 30-day period. If any individual in question can pass a test on any one of the series at the end of that time they will automatically be declared American citizens with the irrevocable status that goes with it.

Stabler/Benson 2016

Members of the NRA will be required to play Russian roulette with their weapons each time a school, movie theatre and army base mass shooting happens. If they die their assets will be distributed to survivors of the fallen. If they live they will not be able to use Obamacare for medical treatments, even after they go bankrupt from health costs. An assault weapons ban in Congress would automatically rescind this law.

For every sports analogy made by a newscaster (“This is the Senator’s Hail Mary Pass” or “It’s bases loaded and two outs in the ninth in the life of this bill”) a reference must be made to a Broadway show. This will be done until phrases like “A Chorus Line” are used to refer to the new freshman class in Congress or “Oklahoma” means something more than a Republican stronghold.

Dogs will be regarded with the special status reserved for religious institutions. This means that society will worship them in their homes and shelters and spread the words of their good deeds. Not to mention, all contributions to their upkeep will be tax deductible. Forever. (Note: Make that all animals).

08.16.15

by notesfromachair

PC University

There’s been quite a lot of swill in the air lately about political correctness. Mostly on how our society has devolved to the point where you can’t say anything anymore and how the nation’s college campuses have greatly contributed to this trend with affirmative action-based helicopter parenting under a doctrinaire, left wing manifesto of bland, overly sensitive inoffensiveness.

Bull crap. Or horseshit if one prefers the non-p.c. version of bull crap. And this is particularly the case when it has to do with college campuses and, more broadly, the millennial generation.

Interestingly enough, a lot of this criticism has been coming from any number of aging baby boomers that are no doubt pissed off at a slightly more benevolent world (well, in some sectors) that they no longer understand and thus feel excluded from. Or perhaps now that many have college-age children, or need them in their audience to stay relevant, they simply mourn the days when they (or others) could utter a racial epithet, gay joke or sexist remark without having their reputations twittered to death all over the world. Though they could simply resent the fact that their kids don’t have to endure the hard knocks that they believe made them into the strong, successful adults they are today. It could be just that.

Is this how boomers see millennials?

I feel like I can say this because I am a baby boomer. I am also a college professor who gets along quite well with my students – even when we vehemently disagree – which we often do in everything from movies to politics to Beyoncé (Note: Don’t hate me, she’s talented but I just don’t get what the big deal is).

Still, I find a great kinship with them because in some small ways – even if only generally – they seem to be living their lives by the sort of mythical moral code that was set forth in the 1960s in Broadway shows like Hair and albums like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. That would be a world where it was not cool to disrespect people of other races, sexual preferences and religions “just because” you want to make a point and are too lazy or annoyed to do otherwise. For these views, some of my students have granted me honorary millennial status. Though I’m sure in the minds of many of my fellow boomers I am simply the cause of their limited thinking – exhibit A for why our educational system is a disaster and, in turn, our American Empire will continue to decline. How can you lead when you’re so willing to go the extra mile for peace of any kind? And how can you wind up being #1 when you make a conscience choice to use equal amounts of intellectualism, heart and reality to make the most important decisions in life?

How? The same way Barack Obama was elected president of the U.S. twice. And why he would probably win a third time. The. World. Has. Changed. Have a seat or deal with the alternative. The latter is the option almost everyone I know 55 or over is desperately trying to keep at bay these days – irrelevancy, death or, perish the thought, The Republican Apprentice. (Note: Yeah, you know who I mean. Don’t make me say it).

He who should not be named

Here are two articles that surfaced this week in The Atlantic that brought this on, were forwarded all over the web and much discussed on TV and the media platform of your choice.

The Coddling of the American Mind – In the name of emotional well being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like.

That’s Not Funny – Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke

As refutation to these I would offer up a third piece in Vanity Fair this month entitled,

Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse

It will reassure anyone who believes recent college grads have a too-politically correct view of the world or that sensitivity TRUMPS boorishness.

The four writers of these pieces – three of whom are boomers, the other of whom is merely 41 years old – were on various news and entertainment outlets promoting their work, including HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

The fifty-something Caitlin Flanagan (That’s Not Funny) essentially covered the National Association for Campus Activities annual convention in Minnesota where 350 colleges came to book numerous acts, including comedians, for appearances at their schools that year. Essentially, she seemed in shock that two white students from a college in Iowa didn’t want to hire one of the convention’s most popular performers – Kevin Yee, a gay comic with a Broadway background who closed with a song about a gay man and his “sassy black friend.” Yes, he got hired by other schools but – Imagine, they thought the kids at their small Midwestern school wouldn’t get what he did??? How PC of them!!!

Look at your life, look at your choices

The writer and Mr. Maher essentially backed up that and numerous other groundbreaking revelations with quotes from comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, both of whom recently noted they won’t play college campuses anymore because the environment is too-PC.

Question: What Jerry Seinfeld joke could possibly step over the line of political correctness?

Answer: Well, it was actually a line where he says people are scrolling through cell phones these days like they’re a gay French king. Right. Okay. Judge for yourself.

Full confession: I didn’t think it was funny because it was perpetuating a straight guy stereotype and had no context within the rest of the joke. Yet when an edgy comic like Lisa Lampanelli rides the gay guys in her audience by calling them “faggots” and insults the sexual appetites of her GBF (Note: Uh, gay best friend?) I’m on the floor because in that same moment she lets us know where heart really is.

More troubling is the idea in Coddling, which bemoans the fact that certain words and phrases that either are or can be perceived as sexist, racist, or homophobic are listed as microagressions and discouraged in college classrooms. That is unless they are put into context. The authors vehemently write this way of thinking contributes to students being in a constant stage of outrage, even towards well-meaning speakers trying to engage in genuine discussion. They further argue shielding students from this is bad for the workplace and…bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship.

Huh?

Here’s the thing. No one is saying you can’t use most words or phrases in a campus-based discussion – only that in an open learning environment what you say is positioned in a context. What makes colleges special is that they are a safe space where you can discuss tricky issues in a way that is too often NOT done in the real world. Does this mean college is NOT the real world, and sensitive matters demand guidelines upfront, especially for 18-22 year olds? If we’re at all to cover new ground and empower them as they get older to create new and perhaps even more innovative ways to move society forward in any sort of productive manner — Yes.

Gear up

Of course, there’s another reason for this – words change. When I was in elementary school African-Americans weren’t even called Black people, they were Negroes. Actually, THE Negroes. That’s also the term Martin Luther King used in his I Had A Dream Speech. Not to mention queer was an insult to gays – who at best were referred to clinically as The homosexual. Yet queer has been adopted by many under 30 in the LGBT movement as their current word of choice. Not by me, of course, because, well, I AM a BOOMER.

My autobiography

Oh – and lest any of us forget – the time period I’m referring to was also a time where crude sexist men could diminish a woman’s thoughts or questions by saying or even implying she was having her period. What’s that – you still can? Oh.

The final refutation to all of this should, of course, rightfully come from the millennials themselves. This is what you will get when you read about the group of Wall Street, marketing and other types of college grads as they wax poetic about scrolling through pages and pages of nubile, sexy or otherwise available young prospects on the dating app Tinder even as they are sitting in a bar with other real live prospective sexual conquests right there before them. One guy in the story bragged he slept with 5 women in 8 days – Tinderellas, he called them – noting with those numbers you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year! Another guy said he scored 30-40 per year via Hinge, another app, by selling himself as a boyfriend kind of guy even though he wasn’t and had no intention of changing. (Note: In fairness, Mr. 100 did chastise him by saying, ‘dude, not cool.’).

Don’t go looking for the Goslings

This is not so much the end of the world but a mere continuation of the one they inherited. When I was a younger gay man I couldn’t understand the idea that when you picked up someone at a bar you called them a trick – as if you were a prostitute turning over customers. To me, it devalued the sexual act and myself as an individual. Of course, that was my feeling and hardly anyone else’s. I remember being called a nun, part of the skirt and sweater set and by one boyfriend, hopelessly middle class.

Yes, I’ve written about him before and he called me that a lot. I suppose there are worse things. In fact, I know there are. But you can’t say them to someone on any number of college campuses. Thank God. God, that is, as you know Him. Or Her. Or even if you don’t.