Sometimes in the midst of all the assaults on our historic Western civilization, the best approach, the most effective counter-arguments utilize humor, mordant wit that can make significant points and sometimes attract more interest and readers than a serious documented report.
Unfortunately, in our day and time, far too many of our fellow citizens either don’t have time to spend reading such epistles; often they confront such detailed information with a yawn, counting the minutes to the latest episode of “America’s Got Talent” or “The Bachelorette,” or anticipating more social posturing on Facebook or Twitter (which increasingly dominate our lives to the exclusion of all else).
While many of our parents (and we) grew up, even in the most rural schools, reading a smattering of Shakespeare (I had to read “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar” in high school), memorizing a famous poem or two (I can recall learning by heart Milton’s “On His Blindness” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabelle Lee,” again in high school), being able to write a correct sentence, and learning at least the outlines of American history…while they and we were at least exposed to such education, today it seems that much of that has gone by the wayside.
On National Public Radio on September 4, on one of its “woke” quiz shows (I think it was “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell me!”), a youthful, supposedly educated celebrity contestant was asked to name the famous plantation where George Washington lived on the Potomac River (Mount Vernon). You could hear the contestant’s consternation and perplexity…it was if somehow she had stepped into a black hole in a galaxy light years away. Obviously, her history courses, such as they were, didn’t mention that. Answers to all the questions about trendy rock groups, a sure thing. But a real knowledge of American history? Nyet.
Indeed, the accusation is that such knowledge is a sure sign of “racism,” that is, “historic white supremacy,” whose hegemony marks and stains irremediably every aspect, every facet of our history, our culture, our language, and our very existence.
To follow the template of the new breed of “academic scholars”—an Ibram X, Kendi, a Nicole Hannah-Jones (of the “1619 Project”), and a Robin D’Angelo—“whiteness” is akin to a terminal disease, an inherited fatal and ineradicable malady which must be literally torn out of society, extinguished, totally expelled. And far, far too many of our educators either believe such rubbish, or, at the very least go along with it or simply refuse to oppose it for fear of being labelled “racist” and banned on Twitter or Facebook, or perhaps severely punished at work or “cancelled” in the public square. The outrageous examples abound.
There has been, of course, pushback. But in our present society, the major vehicles of communication and learning are possessed by those who wish our extinction, and they employ those media with an unrelenting zeal, an almost hysterical commitment, which borders on sheer madness or lunacy. They are, as I wrote back on December 2, 2020 in one of my columns, the modern equivalents of “pod people,” human beings possessed demonically of an inextinguishable, all-encompassing ideology, a fanaticism which resembles a psychopathic illness.
Over the years I have noticed that one of the most effective weapons in our small quiver is humor, especially the kind that is simple, at times ironic, and that literally slaps you in the face. That’s one of the reasons why Tucker Carlson has been so successful: he is able to combine a withering critique of the latest politically-correct abomination, oftentimes something very serious, with the ability to simplify and demonstrate the utter ridiculousness, the laughable (if they weren’t so serious) inconsistencies of so much that passes for politics, education, and media in our benighted nation.
You don’t have to read a long and involved policy report, although perhaps after commentary by Carlson, finishing with an amusing zinger, you might be persuaded to. Knowledge and understanding are, in a real sense, intuited by the listener/viewer, the image projected, often sardonic or ironically sarcastic, laced with ridicule…but all the same, hitting the mark.
Recently, The Guardian, that major purveyor of Leftist thought and information in Britain, complained “Is rightwing comedy on the rise?” And one of the “rightwing comedians” on the rise that The Guardian obliquely attacks is a Russian-born Brit named Konstantin Kisin.
I admit that I had never heard of him…until just the other day, when I ran across his fascinating and searingly accurate portrait of the dominant media, both American and British. Titled, “Why Won’t They Believe Us?,” it showed up in The Tablet on August 10 of this year. And although its main goal is to explain with irony and thinly-veiled humor why so many people are reluctant and hesitant to get vaccinated for COVID, indeed doubt about and mistrust of the entire agenda that government is now foisting off on its citizens, what Kisin writes has far greater application in Western society concerning the role of what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has termed the “presstitutes,” our servile media.
Kisin’s essay is like a rapier thrust into the puffed-up belly of our establishment media and government, slowly building and then twisting into its target, and at the same time causing us to reflect on the ideological insanity of our media and the Deep State the media whores for. And in the present combat in which no prisoners can or should be taken, it may well be more effective than the latest statistical study issued by the Heritage Foundation or some other pseudo-conservative outfit more concerned with appearances than the real, grungy combat we must engage in.
I offer that essay here.
Why Don’t They Believe Us?
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
