Swearing at Them!
What is in a Jester's Heart?
The quickest way
to change
the
world is
to like it
the
way it
is
A. R. Ammons wrote that poem, and titled it “Old Geezer.” That is how I would like to write, and think, in my geezerhood. But Trump. Or Trumpty-Dumpty, as Stephen King calls him. He falls off wall after wall, and splatters us all, and bounces.
“You have a lot of hate in your heart,” the president informed ABC’s Jonathan Karl during a press conference the other day. The next day he announced, with a self-satisfied smile, “I hate my opponent.” (Opponent being, quite presumably, anyone who differs with him.) This he blithely stated at the funeral of a famously said-to-be reasonable young man increasingly regarded as a Christian martyr, whose widow had just declared that she forgave her husband’s killer.
I don’t hate the Fox News commentator Greg Gutfeld. His burden is to be a witty Republican in the age of Trump. That can’t come naturally. When the king is a loony — an inexplicably canny loony — then what’s a jester for?
Gutfeld frequently calls people-in-the-news “assholes” and “dicks”. He was proud the other night to share this reaction to an item in the news:
“‘Teachers welcome new rules against students sneaking phones into class!’ Yes, because they so enjoy searching students’ buttholes for phones! ‘Butthole’! There’s a word you won’t hear on [some other show].”
(That is somewhat paraphrased, but I’ve taken pains to get word-for-word the quotes that follow.)
A week or so after Charlie Kirk was killed, Gutfeld was one of the five discussants on the Fox show “Five.” Another was Jessica Tarlov, a Democrat, who observed — reasonably, in my view — that “the president and people who are supporting him” should not be saying that the murder was “a ‘they’ problem, that ‘the left’ came out and ‘they’ took out Charlie Kirk. We need more information before you smear — “
“We don’t need more information!” snapped Gutfeld.
“Really?”
“Yes! We don’t need it! The both-sides argument not only doesn’t fly. We don’t care! We don’t care about your both-sides argument. That shit is dead! What is interesting here is: Why is this only happening on the left and not on the right?”
Tarlov replied by bringing up the Democratic state representative in Minnesota who was killed along with her husband any their dog: “How about Melissa Hortman?”
Gutfeld erupted: “You want to talk about Melissa Hortman? Did you know her name before it happened? None of us did. None of us were spending every single day talking about Mrs. Hortman. I never heard of her until after she died.”
“Does that matter?”
“Don’t play that bullshit with me! For one thing, there is no cognitive dissonance on our side. On your side, your beliefs do not match reality, so you’re coming up with these rationalizations, like ‘What about this?’ and ‘What about that?’ We are not doing that, because we saw it happen. We saw a young bright man assassinated and we know who did it. We are not coming up with rationalizations. We are calm, we are honest, and we are resolute. We’re not defensive. And I understand the defensiveness… Because if you have to face the underlying fact of this, your life is going to fall apart. Because you’re going to realize you’re not the good guys. If you sat around and you defended the mutilation of children, you’re not the good guys… 600, 700 cases of harassment against Republicans. And you see this murder, after calling for the [assas- it sounded like, the rest of the word swallowed], you’re going to have to realize you’re not the good guys. That is a hell of a realization to deal with. Therefore, you have to grasp at rationalizations. I don’t believe you’re part of that group, Jessica. That is them. But why the hell you have to mimic and echo that crap to us . . . He was a patsy! He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct-to-consumer nihilism, the trans cult. And you know that. If you can decide that biology is false, you can agree that murder is okay and that humanity is expendable. How you can not see that, alone, and see that for what evil that is, without having to attach all this things, is beyond me.”
Tarlov: “I in no way intended at all to minimize what happened to Charlie. I was horrified by it. I just want to be sure that we have all the information before we say that ‘they’ did this. Because that is a broad brush — “
Gutfeld, talking over her and grimacing so angrily it amounted to teeth-baring: “But to continue that argument is like speaking Latin to a duck. Want to have a conversation? Charlie had a conversation, and he got shot . . . This is a story that is immune to news cycles. It’s immune to rationalization. This thing is with us for good. And we all have to deal with that. So that means we can’t live by the same arguments that you might be reading, about relativism, in the media. The media is dead to us on this story! They built this up! We’re going to deal with it. I don’t care. We’re going to act! We don’t care about this anymore. That shit is dead!”
Funny? Hysterical!
Gutfeld paused to take a breath, and said, “I’m sorry. For the swearing as well, I want to apologize to the American public.”
I’m hearing grief for a friend. I’m also hearing good-guy envy. And the defensive denial of being defensive. And the fetishizing of transexuals. And good-guy envy. And what we might call flimsy ergo-ism.
And how can you denounce “the media” when Fox is one of them? (Addressing “the American public,” indeed.)
And what’s with the “We’re going to act!”?