I don’t know Selwyn Duke personally, so I’m in no position to question either his motives, or his qualifications to opine on the hot button issues of the day. All I know about him I have gleaned from his writings, but this data, skimpy though it may be, has lead me to the following conclusions:
1. He thinks you’re a bigot.
2. He thinks he’s smarter than you (so smart, in fact, that he can convince you — through sheer force of logic! — that he’s not a bigot).
3. Based on his name alone, he would have made a fine third tier silent film actor.
4. As long as there’s a black man in the White House, Selwyn will be churning out inches of faux erudition proving that school segregation was Thurgood Marshall’s fault.
With relativistic people, there is no such thing as a true axiom
Well, that’s too bad, because a “true axiom” sounds great. I’m not sure exactly how you’d make a self-evident truth even truer, but there must be a way; it probably involves reversing the polarity, or adding flavor crystals…
yet you’d never know it listening to our modern mantras.
I have to admit, I do miss the old fashioned mantras, the kind the Greatest Generation used to chant. Makes me nostalgic for the way my grandma’s kitchen always smelled of Old Dutch Cleanser and incense.
We hear things such as “Our strength lies in our diversity,” “Religion has caused all the wars in history,” and “Everything is a matter of perspective” proclaimed with theological assurance. Of course, the last supposition is contradictory, and embracing it renders moral supposition itself meaningless.
Yes, pull on your Wellington boots, it’s going to be a bit of a slog.
Regardless, it’s natural for man to make sense of the world by “profiling” elements of reality.
For instance, in last week’s column, All the president’s bigoted men, Selwyn made sense of his world by profiling a bunch of black people:
For all intents and purposes, politically liberal blacks are by definition bigoted.
This is true virtually to a man.
This seems somewhat prejudicial — and it is — but as we’ll see, it’s not a negative prejudice.
Many will say that I’m prejudiced for painting all the members of such a large group with the same brush. But let’s note that “prejudice” in the negative sense denotes an unfavorable opinion about a person, group or thing that has no basis in reality.
To paraphrase Trent Lott, if only beleaguered white people had taken a break from applying police dogs and fire hoses to the problem of civil rights to explain that blanket statements about racial minorities aren’t bigotry if they’re true, then we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years. Anyway, back to this week’s cerebral extrusions…
Understand that bigotry is simply a manifestation of one of the Seven Deadly Sins: wrath. It is not the end-all and be-all, the source of all our woes. It is not, relatively speaking, even a major problem (although, it waxes when we let the Sharptons, Jacksons and Obamas of the world stir the pot).
In fact, we’d hardly have any measurable race prejudice at all in this country if it wasn’t for African-Americans, because even though they make up only 13.5% of the population, their high number of liberal bigots is totally screwing up the curve.
So the question is not whether bigotry exists and is a problem, as this is true of every sin. It concerns whether it is a characteristic problem.In other words, if we were to constantly lament our lacking math ability, it would imply one of two things. It either stands out in reality, making us pay it some mind, or it stands out only in our minds, in which case we are detached from reality.
I’m guessing you picked Door Number Two.
If the former, it would have to pale in comparison to the mathematical achievement of other nations or to our ability in other areas, such as English and history. So the question is, does our obsession with bigotry meet one of the last criterion’s two elements?
Well, judging by last that paragraph, I don’t think math is our biggest problem.
Let’s now contrast this manifestation of wrath with the rest of our national sins.
Let me guess…Boobies?
It’s obvious where we should start. Given that we have sexual imagery and innuendo everywhere, classes in pornography and “sexology” in colleges, and stories of children re-enacting Caligula’s court in schools…
Another No Child Left Behind success story!
…can we really make the case that bigotry is a greater problem than lust?
African-Americans would be entirely content with their place in society if it wasn’t for the rabble rousing effects of Black Tail magazine!
What about greed? Well, given the Bernie Madoffs of the world, the recent Wall Street woes, rapacious government officials and the long-accepted maxim about the lust for money being the root of all evil, it just may rank a bit higher as well.
Tell you what, Sel, I’ll be more than willing to admit that greed is just as corrosive as bigotry on the day that the black community’s biggest problem isn’t unemployment, or underfunded schools, or unequal treatment before the law, but how the heck they’re going to explain away their billion dollar bonuses.
Sloth? Our welfare state and handout-and-entitlement mentality.
Welfare Queens and uninsured paupers who’d rather go to an emergency room and drive up premiums for everyone who already has insurance, rather than die and reduce the surplus population? Selwyn’s looking at you.
Envy? Class warfare.
Why look, young Selwyn has a Frank Luntz-tested buzzword for everything. He has learned his catechism, the beamish boy! And of course, the great thing about turning social ills into personal vices is that some of them cancel each other out. If the Have-Nots would just not demand to have what the Haves have, that would put an end to class warfare, which in turn would decriminalize Greed.
Pride? Given how people are loath to admit error –
True. Bush never admitted he was wrong to ignore the Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” He never admitted the Iraq War was a mistake; Cheney never admitted that permitting — even demanding — that the U.S. military and intelligence agencies use torture on captured terrorism suspects had a deleterious effect on national security…
think Obama and his refusal to apologize to the Cambridge police — and the super-size egos that abound, this trumps bigotry also.
Oh, right. I guess my deadly sin is that I tend to get hung up on the little things and miss the Big Picture.
This lack of perspective is no small matter
Yeah, I’ve noticed.
Just think about race-based quotas, affirmative action and set asides. Consider the assumption that relative racial homogeneity within a business or organization equates to racial animosity in its leaders’ hearts
The only way to prove that the reason a company hasn’t hired any blacks is because they don’t want to hire any blacks is to perform open heart surgery on each member of the Board of Directors, and everybody in Personnel. And that’s expensive. Which means that it’s primarily due to frivolous lawsuits by black people alleging employment discrimination that the cost of health care is so high.
…or how largely white neighborhoods are targeted with “low income” housing
You know, Selwyn’s beginning to talk about minorities the same way that obnoxious dork at the beginning of Night of the Living Dead talked about zombies: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara…!”
All the while we have schools teaching perversion, profligate government spending, illegal aliens “undocumented” into legitimacy, criminals who go unpunished, slackers who are rewarded, heroes who are derided and traitors who are exalted. We have caricatured virtue and vice, exaggerating some parts to grotesque proportions while ignoring others.
Hell, after this paragraph alone we can scratch “Caricature virtue and vice” off our To Do list.
The result is that we misdirect our scalpel during “corrective” surgery, slicing off healthy tissue while allowing cancerous tumors in our midst to grow unfettered.
Hm. “[C]ancerous tumors in our midst,” I wonder if that’s supposed to be some kind of metaphor for certain people…?
Nazi ideologists frequently employed [medical and disease metaphors] in their public attacks on the Jews. In these metaphors, the Jews were compared to various types of bacilli or disease: cancers, plague, or tuberculosis.
Nah. Probably not…Anyway, I shouldn’t compare Selwyn’s column to Nazi rhetoric; after all, he hasn’t broken Godwin’s law…
The modern leftist is as blind as a Nazi who thinks he is good because he is hygienic and punctual.
Oops. Looks like Mother Superior jumped the gun there…
Yet this leftist conception of virtue is as shallow as it is narrow; its definition of goodness doesn’t seem to involve love for what one defends as much as equal-opportunity hatred. As to this, I have long observed something: liberals treat blacks like people; the problem is that they don’t treat people like people. That is to say, they treat blacks like everyone else, but they treat everyone pretty shabbily.
What does that mean, exactly? It’s not like liberals go around torturing people…
With Torquemada-like zeal they advance the dogma that we must treat all people equally…
Those where the days, back when the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission could impose the Auto-da-fe, instead of these wimpy fines.
Equally at what moral level? You can treat people equally by killing them all with the same expedition and ferocity.
And that’s how we get from the liberal push to provide health care for all Americans, to forcing patients to stand in their hospital gowns before a leftist Star Chamber and defend their right take a beta blocker.
So here is the implied standard: you may curse people out generically for five minutes with seething hatred, just don’t utter one racial epithet. You may let everyone starve, just don’t give one race a morsel of food another cannot digest.
Lactose-intolerance is the new Black.
You may corrupt all races with vile hip-hop anti-culture, just don’t imply that it is more corruptive than anything else. This is our national hang-up, our racial Puritanism.
I agree, Mr. Duke, that your column is rich in “racial Puritanism,” I just don’t think it means what you want us to think it means. So I guess after all this, I’ve learned one more thing about Selwyn: He seems to be dying to shout out certain words and ideas that even American Thinker wouldn’t publish or condone, but he believes he’s smart enough to encode his message in such a way that only the Right Kind of People will be able to decrypt it. So actually, he’s pretty stupid.
Okay, so two things.