For those of you who are new here, this is part of a series where I pretend Jonah Goldberg's The Tyranny of Cliches is a book.
OHGODOHGODOHGOD. Chapter 7 is about diversity. It reads with all the excitement of Jack Kemp's diary. (For the record, there was no mention of Nazis in this chapter. What the hell? Did we lose a war or something?)
I shit you not, Goldberg starts off this chapter by complaining about how Barbra Streisand once complained that he was a no-talent hack who only got hired at her local paper on account of how he was a pompous asshat who got off on pleasing the Tribune Company's stockholders. Also, Jonah thought Streisand's grammar was atrocious. Perhaps he's right. On the other hand, neither Streisand or I get paid to write for the LA Times.
The "meat" of this chapter is the typical privileged bullshit about bootstraps and people who aren't Goldberg sucking at things. I could dissect the writing, but you've heard all of this shit before. Besides, Goldberg has a PhD in Metaphorolojizzim from Bulwer-Lytton University. Observe:
Ever notice how in the movies the "good" street or prison gang or band of mercenaries is the one that's diverse? Those rapists and murderers can't be all bad. Look, there are two black guys and an Asian!No. Actually, I've never observed that. Ever. What I have observed is that there's no dearth of roles for black actors, provided they're willing to portray a criminal. Also, the prison industrial complex is so a thing.
There's no shortage of horror stories about diversity run amok-- from the first responders in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, who were forced to undergo sensitivity training before they could fish drowning people from flooded neighborhoods, to the fire departments that seem to spend more energy fighting for quotas than fighting fires.Okay, he's got me there. If there's one complaint I have about governments' responses to Katrina, it's that they were too racially sensitive. Also, there are too many firefightwomen.
An omelet with red peppers and sausage is better than one with only red peppers. But an omelet with red peppers and kitty litter is not.To those of you who are planning to sell "Gays are the kitty litter in our national omelet" bumper stickers at next year's Value Voters Summit, permit me to say: dibs! And what's up with starting a sentence with a conjunction, Mister Grammar? And wait, you can't imagine the existence of people who don't want tubed meat in their eggs? Yours truly is a rich and colorful world.
Adding carbon to molten steel creates the stuff of samuarai swords. Adding tapioca to molten steel is less advisable.I guess, but neither is adding Slavic-Americans to steel, yet judging by various books I've read, US STEEL IS MADE OF PEEE-POLE. (Or at least it was. Back in the day. Out East.)
[T]he National Basketball Association would be made vastly more diverse if a rigid quota of midgets and one-legged point guards was imposed upon it. But the game would not be improved, and any team that voluntarily adopted such a regime would have very long odds of making the play-offs.People of color are to practicing law as
It would not strengthen the DVD sales of a porn flick if the content was sufficiently diversified that it included a long tutorial on gardening tips.
"What are you watching?"
"Uh, uh, the Food Network"
"Well, why are your pants off?" /Gaffigan
The NAACP would not be a more effective organization if they [um, don'cha mean "it"?] adopted a hard quota of Klansmen at every meeting, and the cadres of America's school crossing guards would not be made stronger with a forced recruitment of more blind crossing guards.Okay, I'm not going to touch that one. Well, maybe I'll point out that Hard Quota would be an excellent name for a porno. Yeah, I'll definitely do that.
Most of the greatest scientific and literary minds of the last two thousand years were products of educational environments that would hardly count as diverse according to the standards applied by today's diversity industry. Newton, Galileo, and Einstein had very little exposure to Asians and African Americans.Do you folks remember what it was like when you were six years old at sitting in your therapist's waiting room? Remember Highlights magazine? It used to have cool brain teasers, like "Here's a picture of a giraffe puking in a trombone. See if you can find the ten most fucked up things about it!" Those two sentences are a lot like that. For starters, I'm pretty sure that "African Americans" weren't really a phenomenon back in Galileo's day. I mean, technically there were slaves that white colonists had brought over to the Western Hemisphere from Africa way back then, but I don't really know that anyone would refer to them as "African American." And yeah, take that Pearl S. Buck! Or for that matter, actual people of color, who have, in my estimation, written most of the literature of the last two thousand years. Also, brown people invented algebra. I mean, not to get snotty, but Goldberg knows that Europe was the Washington Generals of continents for at least one of those two thousand years, right?
The thing is, this chapter is probably one of the clearest illustrations I've ever seen of cultural conservatives' thoughts about oppressed people. What Goldberg says is that diversity isn't a big deal. What he also does is compare the lot of us to kitty litter, tapioca, and
To recap, gibber-jabber about diversity is crap, because:
1. Straight, white, able-bodied dudes are good at stuff
2. BARBRA STREISAND HAS NO RIGHT TO IMPLY I'M NOT GOOD AT STUFF
3. She's just a no talent schmuck that gets all clumpy when cats pee on her.
Yep. That pretty much sums it up. Everybody should read this chapter. It's very illustrative.
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