Rancid remarks remind us that we used to be better than this
Is it still OK to be repulsed in America?
Is it still OK to call a degenerate a degenerate?
Is it still OK to say, “No, that’s wrong”?
Those questions surface here almost daily.
If life were a limbo bar and America was asked how low it could go, our answer would have to be, “We don’t know because we haven’t hit bottom yet.”
But Samantha Bee, masquerading as a comedian on her TBS cable show, just brought us a bit closer by using “the C-word” to denigrate President Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
You know what “the Cword” is, don’t you? It’s like “the N-word,” which is to say shorthand for the vilest and most egregious of epithets, unless of course the speaker seeks a pass in the name of artistic freedom.
Jackie Mason has made a fortune making fun of Jewish stereotypes, but he gets away with it, and should, because everyone knows there’s not a scintilla of malice in his routines.
He’s just a very funny man who reaffirms that if we’ll learn to laugh at ourselves we’ll never cease to be amused.
But where was the humor in Bee’s brutal deprecation?
Where was the humor when Michelle Wolf, addressing the nationally televised White House Correspondents Dinner, suggested Ivanka “is about as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons”?
Shouldn’t that have enraged the #MeToo crowd, the ones who’d have us believe all women are demeaned whenever vulgarities are tolerated, or is that true only when the offender is a man?
Years ago the late Bruins PA announcer Joel Perlmutter would begin games by saying: “Fans, the Bruins would appreciate it if you would guard your language, remembering there are women in the audience,” prompting someone to tell him, “Joel, a lot of those F-bombs are coming from the women!”
It’s not just our culture that’s becoming rancid. Australian feminist — really? — Germaine Greer tried to get laughs by suggesting “rape is just bad sex.” Remember?
When did that become OK?
And now we’re supposed to applaud ABC for washing its hands of Roseanne Barr after her shockingly racist remarks? Please. They knew who and what she was before they brought her aboard, or did they forget the night she grabbed her crotch while shrieking the national anthem before a Padres game?
OK, humor is subjective. But does that mean anything goes?
“We have reached midnight in the moral order,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted more than half a century ago, “a time when nothing is absolutely right and nothing is absolutely wrong because the majority opinion seems to be, ‘Everyone’s doing it so it must be OK.’ ”
No, everything is not OK. We used to be better than this, remember?
If only for the sake of kids coming along, America needs a housecleaning.