We were once politically incorrect

7 thoughts on “We were once politically incorrect”

1. Far too many people actually don’t understand that those racist portrayals are wacky and harmless exaggerations. Yes, many sophisticated people get that, but they are not in the majority.

   Dave Chappelle talks about how shocked he was when he was doing his comic exaggerations of life in black America and finally realized that many white people actually pictured those lives as he exaggerated them, that they were laughing at the dumb n_____s, and that he was fueling racism.

   Similarly, I stopped doing Polish jokes when I realized there were so many people who actually believed that Poles were inherently stupid and dirty, and that the jokes were not just contrivances, but real put-downs.

   For all the progress we have made since our remotest ancestors first crawled from the sea, the fact remains that many, many people are unintelligent. I always have to remind myself that half of all people have IQs below 100. As Mencken once wrote, “No one in this world … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

2. Well, maybe no one showed they were offended, but I don’t think anyone actually laughed. I didn’t laugh at the Armour hot dog ad. Just calling someone a name doesn’t count as a joke unless you’re Tom Green or maybe Pauly Shore.
   What any of this has to do with being “strong” isn’t real clear either. Still, progress: someone invented the Mute button. We can talk to each other instead of listening to ads.

3. That’s a nostalgic inaccurate statement. Maybe what you really meant to say is, people were offended, but scared they may get the shit beat out of them for defending themselves.

   This commercial was airing during the Vietnam War era, when guardsmen were putting bullets into unarmed student at Kent State. Not exactly a ‘live and let live’ society. Go watch the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam, it covers this era very well.

   I see it as the ‘good ole days’ of strong-armed authoritarianism entitlement, where you could send off the poor minorities to fight wars and drop a slur on them if they made it back, smack a girl on the ass and tell her to make dinner, and proudly wave the flag and attack anyone who questioned authority as anti-American.

   The words you’re probably looking for is people back then tolerated garbage and played it off, intimidated by the real world consequences of fighting back.

4. When you could call a Coon a Coon, eh, Courier?

   1. That’s what I thought. You proved your colors.

      Racist

5. It is amazing to go farther and farther back and see more and more offensive presentations. Look at the portrayal of the Japanese in the wartime Warner Brothers cartoons. Go back farther and see the offensive stereotypes of people of African descent. We may be in a bad place in history, but we forget that we have at least made some progress in some important ways

6. Why, it’s almost like you are being offended by someone else’s offense!

   Lol! As the great philosopher B. Bunny observed,

   “What a maroon!”

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