Wherever he resides in the afterlife, George Carlin is having a bleeping good time.
One of the comedian’s “seven words you can’t say on TV” is being said on TV over and over again – starts with “sh” and features “it” — and getting bleeped, or someone is attempting a weak euphemism.
The thing is, the censors aren’t bleeping some off-color comic, gangsta rapper or street person debating a fire hydrant. They are having to censor what has come from the lips of the president of the United States.
Use that “it” word, and add “hole” to describe certain countries inhabited by people not like Donald Trump.
The Huffington Post ran a cavalcade of “stupidly tinged” print euphemisms for what Trump said of those places.
Associated Press reported on how media in other tongues were treating Trump’s coinage. In Spanish, what he said is translated as “paises de mierda.” In Chinese, it’s “fenking.”
Japan’s Kyodo News wire service tried out “kusottare.” It literally means “dripping with excrement.”
Donald Trump, the most divisive person on the planet, has drawn us all together at our collective thesaurus, and in many languages.
Leave it to Fox News to explain to its people that what Trump said was just what normal people do.
“If it’s true,” said Jesse Watters, host of “The Five” show, “This is how forgotten men and women in America talk at the bar.”
Continued Mr. Fox talking head, “This is how Trump relates to people. If you’re at a bar, and you’re from Wisconsin, and you’re thinking, ‘They’re bringing in a bunch of Haiti people, or El Salvadorans, or people from Niger.’ This is how some people talk.”
So very true. Whether in Wisconsin, or in Michigan, or wherever, that’s exactly how racists talk.
That’s how a racist connects with fellow racists.
Trump, he assures us, is not one of those. Disregard what he might say about Mexicans, or Muslims, Haitians, or misunderstood white supremacists.
You know, it’s awfully hard to misunderstand white supremacists. Their every effort is to make themselves crystal clear. So, too, with Donald Trump. Crystal clear.
This matter isn’t about vulgarity, that “locker room” stuff of the “Access Hollywood” tape and giggles with Billy Bush. It’s about a racist leader, abetted by racist leaders, who, like the Dixiecrats of old, strum a tune that appeals to modern-day segregationists and xenophobes.
In the Oval Office today, the New York Times describes “color-coded maps” highlighting the counties Trump won in 2016. Of course, we are to assume that “his” counties are red. Then again, red means mostly white.
Republican leaders, after getting beat twice by Barack Obama, said their party needed to become more inclusive. Trump showed them all how wrong that was. Though he lost the popular vote by 3 million, he guilefully mapped out a successful mining of pale-skinned affection.
White grievance was Trump’s ace in the hole in 2016. Consider Trump’s precious wall. Why so precious. Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman calls it “a representation of everything he could offer his supporters: a way to keep out … immigrants diluting the country’s whiteness.”
I’m reminded at this point of a 2016 survey of people most inclined to denounce immigrants. It found that those people are least likely to have ever encountered immigrants or people of other races.
These are people who fear the world of difference, who – mapped out with care on White House walls — live in Neverlands of racial homogeneity, and who see people of different nationalities as threats against everything they hold dear.
Except maybe those from Norway.
John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.
From The Progressive Populist, Febuary 15, 2018
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