When a rodeo clown is summarily denied Pronto Pups and deep-fried Twinkies and other attractions of a state fair, and such supposedly independent sorts as rodeo cowboys feel obliged to oust their elected leader in the name of proper political etiquette, and the NAACP is threatening to literally make a federal case of such a harmless act of lése majesté, the chilling effect on other critics is unmistakable.
As we now know, the clown has been permanently banned from the Missouri state fair, the announcer has been forced to resign as president of the Missouri Cowboy Rodeo Association, and the Missouri NAACP demands that the culprits be sent to the Gulag.
Rodeo clowning is not high art, in fact it's dangerous work. But the furor over this is instructive in a way that's vaguely like the Oprah controversy about being dissed in a Swiss boutique. It's how ruling classes get to be ruling classes.
Mocking our elected leaders is healthy in a republic lest they get too full of themselves. The presidency of this country has not and should not be accorded the kind of subservient deference that was commonly accorded kings and princes. I may have been momentarily irritated if I had heard of George Bush being used as a prop in another rodeo ring ... if I had heard about it. But I didn't because Bush did not receive the kind of slavish deference that Obama is receiving from the media and the rest of his coterie of bootlickers.
Mocking our elected leaders is healthy in a republic lest they get too full of themselves. The presidency of this country has not and should not be accorded the kind of subservient deference that was commonly accorded kings and princes. I may have been momentarily irritated if I had heard of George Bush being used as a prop in another rodeo ring ... if I had heard about it. But I didn't because Bush did not receive the kind of slavish deference that Obama is receiving from the media and the rest of his coterie of bootlickers.
What is disturbing about this episode is that it's part of a pattern of government suppression that has come to full flower under the Obama Regime.
It’s not as if the Internal Revenue Service were using its awesome powers to stifle dissent, or impertinent journalists were being treated as criminal conspirators by the Department of Justice, or a contributor to the opposition party were being harassed by a variety of federal agencies, but at a time when all those things are also happening it creates an unhappy feeling of enforced conformity. When rodeo clowns are being subjected to “sensitivity training,” which is a modern euphemism for re-education, there’s something almost Soviet about it.
Almost comrade?
And The Oprah? How dare a lowly shop girl do anything but bow and scrape to The Oprah? "Do you know who I am?"
And The Oprah? How dare a lowly shop girl do anything but bow and scrape to The Oprah? "Do you know who I am?"
No comments:
Post a Comment