First Fonzie did it, wearing his leather jacket. In a single instant, all those years of cool were rendered moot when Happy Days made the coolest guy in the world look more stupid than all three stooges put together.
Spring of 2015 should go down in history as the year American popular culture jumped the shark.
Bruce Jenner dons a bustier and says his name is Caitlyn and the world swoons as folks fall all over themselves to call him beautiful. It’s only a matter of time before folks start to refer to him as ‘the least crazy Republican in America’.
I’m sorry but if he’s unwilling to complete the charade and lose the package in his panties, I’m unwilling to play my part and call him ‘her’.
Folks get nose jobs and breast reductions every day, Bruce. There are parts of the feminine experience that involve pain; some of which no amount of surgery will ever equip you for; time to man up and show your commitment.
At least looking like Caitlyn is a surgical possibility.
Take the strange case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who has been successfully masquerading as a black woman for years. She’s built her entire career around her blackness, which has turned out to come in a can.
Sorry, Rachel; no surgery will correct your dysmorphic disorder.
This is kind of ironic, since race is far more a social construct than gender. Just ask the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda.
Male/female is determined by the existence or lack of a Y chromosome. (For all you PC university students, this is what is known as a ‘biological fact’ from a field of study that used to be known as ‘science’.) Caitlyn Jenner can have all the surgery in the world and wind up looking like Dolly Parton but (s)he’ll never be able to get rid of that pesky chromosome.
But race?
Pathologists can tell gender from a skeleton hundreds or even thousands of years old, in the sterile environment of a lab. Can they tell race under such circumstances, or is it mostly context that depicts race?
The chapter of the NAACP which Rachel heads has come out in support of her; they don’t mind that she wasn’t born ‘black’. What is ‘black’ but skin pigmentation and perhaps closer genetic ties to a particular continent? We can change the color of our hair with dye, the color of our eyes with contacts, why not the color of our skin? It’s all superficial. The real differences are cultural and don’t we create the culture we choose?
She’s kind of the embodiment of Martin Luther King Jr’s dream, isn’t she? Isn’t she proof that it’s not the color of her skin but the content of her character that matters?
(Um… she is a serial liar who used racial preferences to get where she is, so the whole ‘character’ thing is pretty iffy.)
Whatever.
Rachel is proof positive that black/white is a superficial, societal construct that only holds because too many folks have based their careers and identities on perpetuating the myth that they’re different.
Long Live the Colorblind Society!
Anyone can be ‘down with the struggle’, since victimology is not the problem but the cure.
Which brings us to Mattress Girl. No, she’s not the star of an X-rated comic book but a Columbia University student who’s been hauling a mattress with her everywhere she goes. She’s highlighting or protesting or bringing awareness or something…that rape sucks.
Wow. Good to know. Thanks, Mattress Girl!
The only problem is that the ‘rape’ she’s protesting apparently never happened. Dating someone for a while and then getting dumped may constitute ‘rape’ in the minds of coeds but fortunately it doesn’t meet the legal designation. Yet.
Ladies (I’m old fashioned and still use this sexist term), when a guy you’ve been sleeping with dumps you, it may feel like emotional rape but that’s really on you; not him. Blame Sex and the City for leading you to believe you could experience sex like men do.
She’s now being sued by the fellow she accused of rape.
As if these instances weren’t enough to convince you that as a culture, we’ve jumped the shark, I leave you with this last and in my mind, by far the most outrageous event;
The college student who lectured Jerry Seinfeld on what is and is not funny.
Dennis Prager is right: you have to go to university to become that stupid.