RESPECTABLE MEANS DUMB | 2011-03-19
What the word "irony" really means is that something is absolutely ridiculous and usually cruel, but it is also absolutely true. Most Politically Correct doctrine falls into this category.
We all know that colleges simply will not hire more than 10% conservative faculty and we all know that any criticism of this is declared in the media to be a violation of "academic freedom." This is irony to those who allow themselves to think about it.
Most illegal jokes in other tyrannies are also ironic. The Soviet joke, "Saudi Arabia has just gone Communist and the government has announced that there is a shortage of sand," was profoundly true to those who lived in Eastern Europe on a level far, far below the poverty level right across the line in Western Europe.
Respectable conservatives had long articles about the philosophy of Marxism versus their pet authorities when every single Communist country was surrounded by a wall or a guard strip that would make a prison proud. There was no theory about it, people wanted OUT.
In over thirty years, National Review never mentioned that simple fact ONCE. In thirty years, that fact was never mentioned by a conservative "opposition" voice on the national media. Because it was irony, it was, and is truth: "Why argue about Communism when all Red countries are prisons?"
I went to a refugee conference in 1959 in West Berlin. East Germans fourteen years old or older were accepted alone in West Berlin. Half of the working-age population had already been "lost" to the West because of that outflow to the giant refugee camps we visited.
So they built the Berlin Wall to face down the new president, John Kennedy, in 1961. Anyone trying to escape was shot.
Respectable conservatives give you the impression that the Berlin Wall is special. I have been on the borders of many Communist countries, and every one of them had at least land-mined strips and guard towers with orders to shoot on sight.
Robert Morley, very pro-Communist himself, was vociferous about the time he was just walking along the Hungarian border on the inside and suddenly realized he had a machine gun pointed at him ready to shoot.
But I have never heard ANY respectable conservative mention this.
A person who understands irony ruins the debate. If a conservative said to a socialist, "So you want the whole economy run like the U.S. Post Office" the Serious Two-Sided Discussion would collapse in laughter. A respectable conservative can not make a living if he sees THROUGH things.
In other words, there is a very strict upper limit on the intelligence of respectable conservatives.
From time to time there are those who are allowed to make a living as respectable conservatives who are intelligent, Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan come to mind. But in every such case, there is a reason. The reason Buchanan was allowed to be a major voice so loud was because, as he started getting some national attention as when he ran for President they could depend on his ending up a religious nutcase.
His advertisements denounced funding for gay rallies but his sister decided that putting those gay marches on national television would be pornographic. So all you ever heard of those ads was that they were not real pictures, which was true, and the rallies themselves were made to look respectable.
Pat actually denounced suppressing fundamentalist Creation doctrine in the schools, which would have been legitimate on the basis of local opinion running schools, but instead he went into the same old nineteenth century crap about how he was no monkey.
People can respect a person who gets his science out of the Bible, but nobody's going to elect him to national office, much less the Senate.
To be a respectable conservative, you have to have some mental handicap that makes you harmless.