One of these Things is Not Like the Other

Can you guess? I for one am having a hard time figuring it out. Maybe you can help me. I mean, they’re both named Robert Lee.

I shouldn’t be so hard on myself because it doesn’t seem like the clowns who have run ESPN into the ground can figure it out either. This brings back a memory from 30 years ago. Back then, I used to watch religiously a show called Hill Street Blues. In one episode, one of the cops was trying his hand at being an agent and he found a really good stand-up comic and he wanted to promote him. Trouble was the guy’s name was Nick Hitler. Nick didn’t understand why everybody was uncomfortable with his name and why the agent-to-be wanted him to change it.

It was good for some laughs (the comic was Jewish to boot) but this was a fiction show. Unfortunately, we are not living in a fictitious television show. Neither is the aforementioned Robert Lee, an Asian-American fellow who by all accounts does great play-by-play.

Snark aside, it’s clear that we’ve descended into the abyss. But we shouldn’t be surprised because this is the penultimate result of identity politics as brought to us by the Democratic Party. (The ultimate result will be the commencement of actual hostilities a la Beirut during their civil war and the Balkans in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia.)

Right now, the left should be apologizing profusely to the ghost of Martin Luther King. He didn’t envision an America in which a “person of color” would have to be pushed aside simply because –why exactly again? There’s no way to sugar coat this, the Robert Lee we’re talking about has had his career derailed because of the idiocy of identity politics. It will always be a part of his curriculum vitae overshadowing him for the rest of his professional life.

Fortunately, the backlash against ESPN has been pretty severe. Hopefully, some Asian-American grievance group will put the pedal to the metal and make ESPN regret their stupidity. They should anyway.

I can’t for the life of me understand how a major American entertainment conglomerate would do something so stupid. Are they really that beholden to political correctness that they can’t see the ridicule they’ve heaped upon themselves?

I guess the answer is “yes, they are that stupid”. This begs the question however, which is: “why?”

I think I know the answer. In George Orwell’s 1984 we re told that there is an Inner Party that really holds the power and an Outer Party that does the dirty work. The Outer Party is made up of dupes who actually believe the nonsense spewed out by their masters. It is the Outer Party who are always pushing the envelope with aggrieved SJWs who are forever making fools of themselves in so many and multifarious ways.

None of this is productive to be sure. Why then does the Inner Party allow such turbulence? Because the Inner Party profits from it more or less. They have always used useful idiots to further their ambitions, which is to hold on to power at all costs. In other words, they are not True Believers. Therefore it is up to the useful idiots in the Outer Party to push the envelope. If they do something ludicrous and there’s push back then that’s a small price to pay.

Examples in our own nation would be things like the great Ebonics kerfuffle back in the 90s. Or when Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General said that schoolchildren should be taught masturbation in the public schools. The uproar and ensuing laughter was instantaneous and non-stop. The Inner Party calibrated the uproar and beat a hasty retreat. The Outer Party was left to hang out to dry. The Inner Party was smart, the Outer Party, not so much.

This should tell us something. Namely this: that the Inner Party doesn’t care one whit about this, that or the other thing. All they care about is what will further their goals. Make no mistake, if it becomes advantageous for them to start putting up statues of Confederate generals, then they’ll turn on a dime and do so. After all, the overwhelming number of these statues were erected fifty years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. When Democrats were in control of the Presidency and the Congress and they needed the votes of Southerners to hold on to power.

Think about it.

In the meantime, I hope that Mr Robert Lee gets his gigs back or at the very least is judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin.

I have a dream and all that. Or maybe I’m just naive. In the meantime, grab a bag of popcorn and a nice stiff drink and enjoy the spectacle. The entertainment value is worth the price of admission alone: you couldn’t make this stuff up.