dd this to your list of forbidden things: last week, Takis Bags, Newport cigarettes,
Popeye's chicken cups, police tape, and Steel Reserve Beer have all been added to
the list of things that are racist.
The UK Daily Mail reported last week that Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey says he will fire the police officers who decorated their precinct Christmas tree with these seemingly ordinary, everyday items, calling it a “racist display.“
The evidence: a racist Christmas tree
Now, granted, the Daily Mail is not the world's most credible news source. My experience suggests that somewhere between five and ten percent of their news stories correspond to something that actually happened. But there's definitely outrage going on.
More outrage, you might ask, than that elicited by the story about the Harvard professor who said a portion of fries should only contain six instead of the usual 55? Worse than Catherine Oxenberg saying her dreams were ripped away after a wildfire incinerated her home days after moving in with sex cult escapee daughter? More heinous than Aaron Hernandez singing “I need your love” to his rumored gay lover during a prison visit while his fiancee waited in the lobby? Yes!!!
To find out what's going on, I looked up these items on the Internet. Firefox tells us that Steel Reserve Beer has not configured their website properly. If you get through, it demands that you tell them your birthday before accessing the site. Racist? You bet! Also ageist—it rejected my birthday of October 12, 1492.
Or is it that their beer is an “alloy” of different artificial flavors, such as Blk Berry, Spiked Punch, Blue Razz, Watermelon and Hard Pineapple? Or because it is 8% alcohol by volume? And therefore, it's what? Cultural appropriation? If the news media expect us to believe them, they need to spell out these things. Otherwise, they're just making it up.
I couldn't reach the Newport Cigarette website—you have to create a password to get in. But if you go to newportmenthol.com, you get a big price list. Each pack of cigarettes has a big warning label on the front, some in English, some in Russian.
The Russian one says something about smoking being judged to cause cancer. Or maybe that chicken hearts are alleged to cause earwax—my Russian sucks. That, surely, makes it racist.
Okay, so maybe the people in Minneapolis have some special sensitivity to such things that are a dog barking in the distance to the rest of the world, and I suspect the only effect will be to abolish Christmas trees from police stations.
But here's the clue: the Washington Post quoted a person named Ron Edwards, calling him a civil rights activist, as saying “These policemen are well familiar with what racism is. They knew exactly what they were doing when they decorated the tree.”
In other words, we should know why they're angry, as if they're housewives who won't say what they're upset about. It doesn't work that way. If the news media wanted to convince us, they'd provide statistics: x% of blacks, y% of whites, and z% of Asians eat Takis. They'd need to state explicitly why that makes them racist. Since they didn't, convincing us wasn't the goal.
My dog whistle tells me the goal is to terrorize us by convincing us that anybody, no matter how innocuous their intentions, can be accused and convicted of anything at will. By creating a false reality, the media hope to make us afraid to speak and act. We must shut up and do as we're told, or some inconsequential act will be fabricated and used as evidence against us.
Another goal might be, as with all those stories about white supremacists, to convince people that it really does exist outside the minds of journalists, political activists, and a handful of crackpots. If you create enough incidents and feed people enough specific details about something, eventually people will think it must be real.
As Franz Kafka wrote in the opening lines of The Trial: “someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” The story isn't the story. As some other blogger says, read the whole thing.
But here's what's really odd: even the Washington Post calls it a Christmas tree. “Holiday trees” are no more. The war on ‘Christmas‘ may be over.
dec 11 2018, 7:40 am
