Outrage! Everyone’s mad about something
BREAKING FAKE NEWS! Kathy Griffin joins the Dixie Chicks! Gentlemen, start your outrage engines … .
Indeed, there’s no outrage like selective outrage. And the redheaded comedian stepped squarely into it last week when she posed for a photo holding what appeared to a decapitated head of one Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States of America. Outrage! It was as predictable as a crazy 4 a.m. tweet from the commander in chief. All sorts of people who spoke not a word about a white supremacist in Portland fatally stabbing two people who stood up to defend two teenage girls the racist was haranguing on a train — or the killing of an African-American Bowie State University student, allegedly by an “altright” enthusiast — were accusing Griffin of treason and all sorts of crimes.
No, I’m not saying conservatives support crazy racists murdering people. I’m just observing that these incidents didn’t move them en masse to condemn these incidents like the Kathy Griffin situation did.
You can’t say Griffin didn’t pay a price for this ill-received attempt at humor. She lost her annual New Year’s Eve gig on CNN with Anderson Cooper — which means now I’ll never see it. She even had a gig at Route 66 Casino canceled.
But worst of all, she lost her role as a spokes-comic for Squatty Potty.
This is true. Just weeks after the company, which manufactures special stools for a better toilet experience, released an ad featuring Griffin joyfully telling people they’re “full of [expletive deleted],” they dumped her like … Oh, never mind. Squatty Potty CEO Bobby Edwards said in a statement, “We were shocked and disappointed to learn about the image Ms. Griffin shared today. It was deeply inappropriate and runs contrary to the core values our company stands for.”
Yes, the CEO of a company whose slogan is “Poop better” was on his high horse about core values.
The furor over Griffin was even more furious than the fury over Ted Nugent that time on stage when he claimed he told President Barack Obama to suck on his machine gun (followed by an obscene comment about Hillary Clinton and his machine gun.) Or the time in 2012 when the Nuge said at a National Rifle Association confab, “We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November,” referring to the Obama administration. Ted added, “If Barack Obama becomes the next president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”
In those cases, it was the liberals who were outraged. Show me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe Nugent ever apologized, although he did apologize for calling Obama a “subhuman mongrel” in 2014.
Unlike Griffin, Nugent never suffered financially for his outlandish and violent remarks about a sitting president. He’s not a spokesman for any company, not even Squatty Potty, so there was no question of him losing any endorsement deals. His violent remarks about politicians didn’t stop Trump from inviting him to dinner at the White House earlier this year. And if Mike Huckabee still had his Fox News show, I’m sure he wouldn’t hesitate to ask Ted to play “Cat Scratch Fever” there again.
So which outrage outraged me the most? Neither.
To begin with, to paraphrase an old college professor of mine, I think we all need to go through some de-sensitivity training. Dumb jokes are dumb jokes, (and Lord knows I’ve made my share.) I’ll defend to the death (is that too violent?) anyone’s right to make a stupid joke.
Both Griffin and Nugent are entertainers, not leaders. Neither were making actual threats against a president or anyone else. Still, couldn’t Nugent’s knucklehead remarks about machine guns inspire some unstable person to commit violence? Maybe. But almost anything could set off a maniac to commit unspeakable acts. You never know.
As for Griffin, tasteless or not, she was engaging in what you call your basic political humor. “Satire” they used to call it over at the English Department. I believe that’s protected in that wacky rule book we call the Constitution — as is your right to bellyache about it.
And that’s no joke.