By Mark Steyn
Friday, December 20, 2013
Last week, following the public apology of an English
comedian and the arrest of a fellow British subject both for making somewhat
feeble Mandela gags, I noted that supposedly free societies were increasingly
perilous places for those who make an infelicitous remark. So let’s pick up
where we left off:
Here are two jokes one can no longer tell on American
television. But you can still find them in the archives, out on the edge of
town, in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the ever-expanding Smithsonian Mausoleum of
the Unsayable. First, Bob Hope, touring the world in the year or so after the passage
of the 1975 Consenting Adult Sex Bill:
“I’ve just flown in from California, where they’ve made
homosexuality legal. I thought I’d get out before they make it compulsory.”
For Hope, this was an oddly profound gag, discerning even
at the dawn of the Age of Tolerance that there was something inherently
coercive about the enterprise. Soon it would be insufficient merely to be
“tolerant” — warily accepting, blithely indifferent, mildly amused, tepidly
supportive, according to taste. The forces of “tolerance” would become
intolerant of anything less than full-blown celebratory approval.
Second joke from the archives: Dean Martin and Frank
Sinatra kept this one in the act for a quarter-century. On stage, Dino used to
have a bit of business where he’d refill his tumbler and ask Frank, “How do you
make a fruit cordial?” And Sinatra would respond, “I dunno. How do you make a
fruit cordial?” And Dean would say, “Be nice to him.”
But no matter how nice you are, it’s never enough. Duck
Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a
rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while
carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all
sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of
drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals. Nevertheless, GLAAD — “the gatekeepers
of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered
— saw their opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star,
they would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that
espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with
American celebrity.
Some of my comrades, who really should know better,
wonder why, instead of insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t
rather “start a conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most
Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the
right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups like GLAAD increasingly oppose
the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more
effective to silence them.
As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for
gay nuptials and many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted “freedom
of religion” is dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed
doors in the privacy of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of
such tastes for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public
square you have to leave your faith back home hanging in the closet. Yet even
this reductive consolation is not permitted to Robertson: GLAAD spokesgay
Wilson Cruz declared that “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but
Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians
believe.” Robertson was quoting the New Testament, but hey, what do those guys
know? In today’s America, land of the Obamacare Pajama Boy, Jesus is basically
Nightshirt Boy, a fey non-judgmental dweeb who’s cool with whatever. What GLAAD
is attempting would be called, were it applied to any other identity group,
“cultural appropriation.”
In the broader sense, it’s totalitarian. While American
gays were stuffing and mounting the duck hunter in their trophy room, the
Prince of Wales was celebrating Advent with Christian refugees from the Middle
East, and noting that the land in which Christ and Christianity were born is
now the region boasting “the lowest concentration of Christians in the world —
just four percent of the population.” It will be three, and two, and one
percent soon enough, for there is a totalitarian impulse in resurgent Islam —
and not just in Araby. A few miles from Buckingham Palace, Muslims in London’s
East End are now sufficiently confident to go around warning local shopkeepers
to cease selling alcohol. In theory, you might still enjoy the right to sell
beer in Tower Hamlets or be a practicing Christian in Iraq, but in reality not
so much. The asphyxiating embrace of ideological conformity was famously
captured by Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar for Justice, in a speech
to the Soviet Congress of Chess Players in 1932, at which he attacked the very
concept of “the neutrality of chess.” It was necessary for chess to be
Sovietized like everything else. “We must organize shock brigades of chess
players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess,” he
declared.
Six years later, the political winds having shifted,
Krylenko was executed as an enemy of the people. But his spirit lives on among
the Commissars of Gay Compliance at GLAAD. It is not enough to have gay
marriage for gays. Everything must be gayed. There must be Five-Year Gay Plans
for American bakeries, and the Christian church, and reality TV. There must be
shock brigades of gay duck-hunters honking out the party line deep in the
backwoods of the proletariat. Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily
gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate
so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor
heterosexuality is in contemporary America.
Look, I’m an effete foreigner who likes show tunes. My
Broadway book was on a list of “Twelve Books Every Gay Man Should Read.” Andrew
Sullivan said my beard was hot. Leonard Bernstein stuck his tongue in my mouth
(long story). But I’m not interested in living in a world where we have to
tiptoe around on ever thinner eggshells. If it’s a choice between having celebrity
chefs who admit to having used the N-word in 1977 (or 1965, or 1948, or
whenever the hell it was) and reality-show duck-hunters who quote Corinthians
and Alec Baldwin bawling out some worthless paparazzo who’s doorstepping his
family with a “homophobic” slur, or having all of them banished from public
life and thousands upon millions more too cowed and craven to speak lest the
same fate befall them, I’ll take the former any day.
Because the latter culture would be too boring for any
self-respecting individual to want to live in, even more bloody boring than the
current TV landscape where, aside from occasional eruptions of unerotic
twerking by sexless skanks, every other show seems to involve snippy little
Pajama Boys sitting around snarking at each other in the antiseptic eunuch pose
that now passes for “ironic.” It’s “irony” as the last circle of Dante’s
cultural drain; it’s why every show advertised as “edgy” and “transgressive”
offers the same pitiful combination of attitude and impotence as a spayed cat
humping.
Such a pansified culture is going nowhere. I hasten to
add I don’t mean “pansified” in the sense of penetrative sex with other men,
but in the Sarah Silverman sense of “I mean ‘gay’ like ‘retarded.’” Miss
Silverman can get away with that kind of talk because she’s a Pajama
Boy–friendly ironist posing as a homophobic disablist. Unless, of course, she’s
a homophobic disablist posing as a Pajama Boy–friendly ironist. Maybe we should
ban her just to be on the safe side.
How do you make a fruit cordial?
Be nice to him. Or else.
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