ast week, some guy named Jussie Smollett, who is said to be a TV actor, made big news
by claiming to have been beaten up by two Trump supporters. The incident turned out
to be a fraud. Supposedly, he thought it would keep him from being cut from the show.
The news media are being justly criticized for thinking it was real. But the question remains: how in the world would this guy think that getting attacked would help his career? What kind of a job is it where this is a qualification?
Here's how I imagine his employment cover letter might look like.
Dear Hollywood,
Last month, while I was innocently walking around Chicago, talking on my cell phone and casually eating a sandwich, as I often do when the wind chill goes below minus sixty, two guys who I totally never met before and weren't extras on my show at all walked up to me, claiming that Chicago was MAGA country. They threw a noose around my neck and slightly beat me up.
As you know, there are many Republicans in Chicago, and they always carry nooses around with them, and they all wear those little red hats and they beat up innocent black people who are actors on a TV show, which I am, all the time.
Luckily the beating wasn't bad enough for me to stop eating my sandwich or drop my cell phone. Unfortunately this wasn't caught on the surveillance camera that just happened to be there, and my phone records somehow all got erased, which was totally not my fault. I am totally not making any of this up.
I feel that this qualifies me for a role in your latest hit series. Let's do lunch.
Sincerely, /s/
Well . . . over the last two months I've been trying to help one of my colleagues look for a job. His cover letters needed work, but I seriously doubt that getting beaten up would have helped him (although, in all honesty, I haven't actually tested that yet).
That's not to say my friend wasn't making some mistakes. I told him, for instance, that eleven pages was too long for a résumé, and that his cover letter should not be an advertisement for the product he invented, but rather a description of how he could help his employer. And he should take out all the stuff that wasn't true, because the employer would find out sooner or later and he'd have to go through all this trouble all over again.
After some fruitless attempts to convince him of this, I gave up and sent him a sample cover letter.
I've imparted my extensive job-hunting skills, such as they are, to several other people, and I've noticed a general tendency of people to put things in their résumé that are, shall we say, not technically 100% true.
Why do people do this? There seem to be two factors. One is the idea that truth doesn't matter, only the end result. Another is that they can't get the result they want by conventional means. So I guess it's not surprising that some third-rate actor would do whatever it took—which is to say, pretend to be the victim of a hate crime—to get the stardom he craved.
This happens because Democrats have adopted a system that rewards victims by giving them special treatment. As a result, there's a colossal battle among various groups to secure their position at the top of the victim hierarchy. To gain adherents, the Party must create more victims, and each group ends up competing to create a more compelling narrative.
So we got an epidemic of nooses and fake racist graffiti. Feminists then saw their position in the hierarchy slipping, so they invented the #MeToo movement. This struggle to convince others that one is the biggest victim creates an unstable dynamic that must, sooner or later, rip the Democratic party apart.
Victimology only works when there is no objective measure of value, where success is established from purely subjective criteria. No doubt this is why activists are clamoring to remove objective measures of value, such as achievement tests, from other fields. The goal is to gain power and prestige, and if the only way to gain it is by lying, then people will lie. But to preserve their self-esteem they must first invent an ideology that justifies lying.
Postmodernism's not dead
That's where postmodernism comes in. Postmodernists taught that truth is solely a function of power. Therefore, to gain power one must invent a truth that puts the power-seeker on top. One can make something true simply by applying strong enough political pressure. Po-mo therefore justifies lying: if there is no such thing as truth, then there can be no such thing as a lie. Thus we get fake definitions of racism that are designed to allow the designated victims to say and do whatever they like without being guilty of it.
Po-mo, like mold, is still growing in the dark basement corners of academia, but its progeny—fake news, censorship, and fake hate crimes—are thriving in our news media and in Silicon Valley. Its target and ultimate prize is science and the destruction thereof. Climate science was only for practice. Their real targets are biology, chemistry, and physics.
What would postmodernist chemistry look like? Here's an example of what we might get:
Everyone accepts that water is merely a social construct. The social role of water in our society is so we can drink it, to “maximize” its “drinkability.” Therefore water is motivated to appear drinkable. This is how water obtains and uses its hegemonic power in our society.
Scoff if you will. Ten years ago, anybody who thought there are an infinite number of sexes would have been ridiculed. In ten years, postmodern science might be all our kids can get.
Postmodernism was created to justify what people wanted to do all along: make up lies about their political enemies. But truth is value. When lies are the norm, postmodernism becomes true, power replaces truth, and there are no values at all.
And for that, I give you Exhibit A: TV actors and the casting directors who hire them.
feb 20 2019, 5:24 am
Update: Police are now saying Smollett's goal was to get a raise, not to avoid being cut, making the episode even more bizarre.
