Chromosomes And Assholes
We need to stop believing we can lump people into groups and then treat them all accordingly
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More than a decade ago, back in the days when I still listened occasionally to the USA’s nearest thing to a radio channel for people with a measurable IQ, there was a radio show recorded in San Francisco and hosted by Michael Krasny called Forum. It’s your classic liberal West Coast program in which the host interviews each morning someone of interest — not infrequently, genuinely so. This particular morning he was interviewing some generic feminist and, being eager to demonstrate his Politically Correct credentials, was agreeing with everything she said. Which was a problem, because the guest (whose name I fortuitously forget) kept making statements such as, “you know, the best thing we could do with men would be to gather them up and put them in camps where they couldn’t do any harm.”
It struck me as odd that Krasny, a Jewish host with presumably some passing knowledge of the Holocaust, could blithely agree with sentiments like this. I pulled over to the side of the road and began to note down the guest’s utterances. “We have to accept that as a nation we have a man problem” and “for the good of society, I think we have to start looking seriously at a way to keep men separate from the rest of us.” “I think we need to remove men from positions of power.” After the show was over and I’d recorded over twenty examples of this kind of utterance, I went home and typed up a Word document in which I saved two versions of her opinions. In the first version I kept the words man and men; in the second I substituted Jew and Jews.
The second version was little different from much of the vile anti-Jewish propaganda promulgated by overt racists over the centuries.
I sent these two versions into KQED and some days later received a letter expressing outrage at my expression of “racist anti-semitism.” Turns out that while you can teach people to read, you often can’t teach them to perform the difficult task known as thinking.
It has become tediously fashionable over the last few decades to make blanket statements about “men” and to have these utterances accepted without qualm by the lefty-trendy mass media. Even those who feel uncomfortable by…
