Before we start, check out the latest of the Allamakee County Chronicles over at Glibertarians!
That said: National treasure Dr. Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughts on the “woke” madness that’s infesting our institutions. Excerpt:
Whether in the corporate boardroom or in Hollywood casting meetings or in the campus president’s office, race-based obsessions mostly reflect intramural wars between elites for the lucrative spoils of the one-percent’s news anchorships, roles in TV shows and commercials, diversity deanships, and admissions quotas to the Ivy League.
As a result, class considerations have vanished. They are replaced by absurd racial reductionism. For example, CNN mediocrity Don Lemon, by virtue of his race-mongering, can pose as a multimillionaire victim. The anonymous white deplorables at Walmart, caricatured as smelly in the Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove, are his proverbial anonymous oppressors.
Apparently, we can only prevent the tragedy of thousands of young black males killing each other and hundreds of innocent bystanders each year in our major cities—if Oprah, at her $90 million estate, conducts a series of TV interviews with Meghan Markle (denizen of a $15 million mansion) about the psychodramatic slights she feels she received from the Royal Family, or if Black Lives Matter founder and Marxist Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac gets her $35,000 new fence around her new Topanga Canyon home, in an era when “walls don’t work.”
The elite Woke are now obsessed about race because of leftist failures in the past to galvanize a permanent class of victims of the grasping rich—given the upward mobility and expanding economy of the United States.
Race, in contrast, is deemed immutable. The Left sees it as permanent proof, a stamp of victimization and thus deserving of reparatory government action. LeBron James may be worth $1 billion, but he will always be a needy voice of the helpless given his race. Or so the woke would have us believe.
Another national treasure, Dr. Thomas Sowell, once pointed out that “white privilege” is the idea that a white coal miner in Appalachia somehow enjoys societal benefits and privileges that are denied to an Ive League-educated black attorney in Manhattan. Dr. Sowell is not only more eloquent than I but more polite, as I simply would describe the theory as “bullshit.”
Seriously, watching a billionaire like Oprah Winfrey whine about how she feels oppressed is just giggle-inducing. This woman in particular is a good object lesson; she literally made her billions absorbing sob stories from middle-aged women, and now she positions herself as the victim of some nebulously defined “racism.” Ditto for the fabulously-wealthy yet not very bright LeBron James. I could name many more, but you get the idea.
“Victimhood” has become a fashion accessory for wealthy liberals. That’s plain enough. Their whining is, as Shakespeare pointed out, “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
