HIP, WHAT CRIMES ARE COMMITTED IN THY NAME
Certain attitudes are strictly a one-way street. There's a class of hipsters and intellectuals who feel perfectly entitled to be ill-mannered, rude, and crass when it comes to everybody else. They often disarm criticism preemptively by presenting their crassness as humor or satire, and of course no one now dares be accused of lacking humor or hipness (I get the joke, we all say, and then we nod and wink).
But this privilege is reserved to the hipster intellectual. If anyone else tells even a mild joke at the expense of such people or their beliefs, you'll see very quickly just how intolerant and self-important they can be.
As the basic standards of proper intellectual, political, and even social discussion have collapsed in recent decades, so we have become perversely and hysterically prickly to the smallest of imagined slights. The only jokes that we can take anymore are those that flatter us and enable us to flatter the audience.
And as this continues and gets worse, it encourages extremism of all kinds. We lose the ability to make small but important distinctions. Many intelligent people simply give up the effort to talk about anything meaningful, and they become external conformists and inner skeptics. Others throw the baby out with the bathwater. "Hell, everybody's calling me a Nazi or a Commie, so I might as well go and BE one." I know some very bright people who have gone right round the bend and become stark staring political loonies out of overreaction to the oversensitivity of the times.
Americans used to be fearless. What the hell has happened to us?
"One horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms."--H.L. Mencken
But this privilege is reserved to the hipster intellectual. If anyone else tells even a mild joke at the expense of such people or their beliefs, you'll see very quickly just how intolerant and self-important they can be.
As the basic standards of proper intellectual, political, and even social discussion have collapsed in recent decades, so we have become perversely and hysterically prickly to the smallest of imagined slights. The only jokes that we can take anymore are those that flatter us and enable us to flatter the audience.
And as this continues and gets worse, it encourages extremism of all kinds. We lose the ability to make small but important distinctions. Many intelligent people simply give up the effort to talk about anything meaningful, and they become external conformists and inner skeptics. Others throw the baby out with the bathwater. "Hell, everybody's calling me a Nazi or a Commie, so I might as well go and BE one." I know some very bright people who have gone right round the bend and become stark staring political loonies out of overreaction to the oversensitivity of the times.
Americans used to be fearless. What the hell has happened to us?
"One horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms."--H.L. Mencken