HERE COME DA JUDGE - PART 1

Hey, Democrats! SNAP OUT OF IT!  Stop playing the martyr. You are not morally superior.  A man who was accused of sexually assaulting a young woman in high school was just appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States and you are calling for the resignation of the duly elected Governor of Virginia because he put shoe polish on his face to impersonate Michael Jackson in a dance contest 30 years ago? Have you totally lost touch with reality?

This is reality:

Human behavior is intrinsically neither good nor bad. People naturally do whatever gets them what they need and want. That’s how survival works. Which behavior is considered good, acceptable or legal, and which behavior is considered bad, unacceptable or illegal is a social construct. That means you can’t reasonably or fairly judge behavior outside of the social construct (which includes the time, place and circumstances) in which it occurred. 

Appearing in blackface was NOT socially unacceptable behavior until liberal political correctness became a fad. Al Jolson, one of the most prominent and beloved entertainers in the ‘20s and ’30s, was famous for appearing in blackface and singing Swanee River.  In the 1970’s the variety show Laugh In was the most popular show on television and a large part of its humor was based on making fun of racial and ethnic stereotypes.  Saturday Night Live did the same thing in its early years. And, comedian Don Rickels built his whole career around making fun of everybody – their race, ethnicity, religion, physical characteristics, age, gender, clothes, job..... nothing was sacred.  And the people he made fun of loved him for it. The idea was that if we could laugh at our differences they wouldn’t be as threatening or divisive.

Then along came political correctness and now, not only is the mere mention of our differences considered a sacrilege, we are judging people’s pre-PC behavior by current PC standards. Maybe, in retrospect, some of the pre-PC behavior was insensitive and hurtful to some people. But that doesn’t justify judging and punishing people now for doing something that was considered acceptable when they did it.  If we are going to continue down that path and judge past behavior by current standards then we need to be consistent and take down all the paintings and statues of Thomas Jefferson and rewrite our history books because, by today’s standards, he was a racist and a sexual predator. He owned slaves and impregnated some of them.

Speaking of sexual pedators, the rationale for judging behavior based on the social construct in which it occurred applies to sexual behavior as well as diversity. When I was a teenager, men were expected to initiate sexual activity. If you didn’t, people would think you were a “fairy”. And women were expected to resist sexual advances and say “no”, at least initially, even if they actually wanted the advances. If you didn’t, people would think you were a “slut”. Women’s Lib and the sexual revolution in the ‘60s changed those expectations and it became acceptable for women to desire, enjoy and even initiate sexual activity and, conversely, for men to not be the initiator.

OK. I know what you are saying. “Some things are always wrong.” No, they are not. Take murder for instance - killing another human being. It is the most serious crime a person can commit in almost every civil society.  But, not in the military. If you are in the military, you are supposed to kill the people that have been designated as your enemy, even if they never did anything to hurt you personally and live half way around the world from where you live.  In fact, the more enemy people you kill, the more medals you get. And if you kill some people who are not actually fighting against you and just happen to live where the fighting is taking place, that’s OK, too. We call it collateral damage and consider it unfortunate, but acceptable. Different Social Setting - Different Social Construct - Same Behavior.

l don’t happen to think political correctness is a step forward in terms of improving our social interactions or our quality of life. I think being able to laugh at our differences DOES make them less threatening and divisive, but that’s a different conversation. This is about judging behavior and there is no doubt in my mind that we have to stop judging behavior outside of the social construct in which it occurred. It’s driving us apart and diverting our energies from the many real, substantive issues we need to resolve; and we simply can’t afford to be spending time and effort on this kind of nonsense.

What do you think?

*In case you are not old enough to remember Laugh In, the title of this blog is from a recurring bit that Sammy Davis Jr. did on the show, where he pranced across the stage in a long judge’s robe that dragged on the floor, snapping his fingers and chanting, “Here come da Judge. Here come da Judge. Here come da Judge.” It was considered funny at the time, not racist.