The snarl hidden behind soft facade of US liberals
IN JULY, 2016, Michelle Obama gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention which entered public consciousness in a way that few of her husband’s words ever did. During that convention in Philadelphia, the out-going First Lady gave Hillary Clinton a ringing endorsement and, while not naming Donald Trump specifically, she spoke of raising her two daughters in a difficult world: “We insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. We explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is when they go low, we go high.”
Not surprisingly, the phrase “when they go low, we go high” was almost immediately adopted as a battle cry for Hillary and her supporters.
In fact, as the presidential race quickly turned into the most vicious, nasty and consistently stupid campaign in living memory, it became not so much a battle cry as the equivalent of the Serenity Prayer for a secular era.
As we saw at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend, the phrase may have been catchy, but it certainly wasn’t catching.
Michelle Wolf is a moderately well-known American stand-up comedian.
She will be vaguely familiar to regular viewers of ‘The Daily Show’ and has a new Netflix special coming up, so she obviously wanted to make a mark.
Well, she certainly did that, although the fact that even Democrats recoiled at some of her barbs is an indication that many feel she stepped over the line.
Her comments about White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have attracted the most opprobrium, and it’s not difficult to see why.
She insulted her choice of eye shadow, her decision to work for Trump in the first place, and then compared her to an “Uncle Tom, a white woman who disappoints other white women”, before dragging right-wing commentator Ann Coulter’s name into the mix.
She then made the usual jokes about Trump’s well-documented sexual travails, called him a pussy a few times because he skipped the show but then seemed to reserve most of her ire for Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, saying: “She was supposed to be an advocate for women, but it turns out she’s about as helpful as an empty box of tampons. She’s done nothing to satisfy women. So I guess, like father like daughter. She does clean up nice, though... She’s the diaper genie of the administration. On the outside she looks sleek, but the inside, it’s full of s**t.”
Going high, indeed. Inviting a controversial if little-known comedian to roast the president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an American tradition, but one which has now seemingly given birth to an annual paroxysm of outrage when the comedian goes too far.
It happened to Stephen Colbert, it happened to Joel McHale, and it will happen to more comedians as long as the event continues, which is now said to be in doubt.
Wolf’s problem wasn’t just that she was remarkably unfunny. Humour, after all, is subjective. Nor was the problem rooted in her being nasty about Trump.
The problem was actually twofold – she was seen even by those on her side to have crossed a basic line of decency with her comments about the women and perhaps more importantly, she showed the world the truth behind the liberal facade.
Over the last decade or so, those who consider themselves on the liberal side of the aisle have developed an overbearing sense of moral superiority. You can see that in any debate about hot-button issues where it is no longer enough for liberals to agree to disagree; now their opponents have to be
Those who consider themselves liberals have developed an overbearing sense of moral superiority
smeared and pathologised – racist, bigot, sexist, homophobe, transphobe and so forth.
That’s why Michelle Obama’s “when they go low...” speech resonated so deeply; because her supporters feel the need to loudly assert their greater decency and deeper compassion over the hateful and nasty Republicans.
BUT, of course, the truth is that both sides are just as capable of dishing it out. In much the same way that Trump avoided the dinner to hold a campaign rally for his base in Michigan, Wolf was speaking to her own constituency.
No comedian will go broke having a pop at Trump, but her act signified everything that is wrong with a lot of current political humour – the rage becomes more important than the gags.
That’s why the likes of ‘The Daily Show’ and even Bill Maher are now virtually unwatchable unless you’re the kind of person who can say that Trump is literally Hitler without blushing with embarrassment.
It also highlighted the hypocrisy of so many of the holier-than-thou commentators who repeatedly denounce any criticism of Clinton or any liberal woman as sexism and misogynist.
If you want to play by their own rules, Wolf’s act was drenched in thought crimes – body-shaming, misogyny, gay jokes, and racially dubious gags abounded (the Uncle Tom line was a particularly cheap shot).
That the Republican leadership responded badly to the jokes is not much of a surprise – they’re hardly known for their knockabout sense of humour.
But it is interesting to see so many people playing a game of intellectual Twister as they try to justify why it is OK for a liberal comedian to say the kind of things which would cause riots if uttered by a conservative, while also accusing Trump’s people of being that most overused word in the current lexicon – “snowflake”.
Ordinary people have repeatedly proved they’re smarter than the politicians and the media and they can handle some barbed shots.
But they hate hypocrisy, and the sight of those who would police words suddenly defending the kind of speech they normally condemn, simply because it came from “their side” is a slice of hypocrisy with a cherry on top.
Meanwhile, in the real world, it looks like Trump, this ideologue without an ideology, has helped usher the two Koreas into the most important peace talks in decades.
If Obama had achieved such a breakthrough, there’d be calls for a second Nobel Peace Prize.
But when Trump does it? Let’s just make a joke about his tiny hands instead.