I open the laptop and I check my email first. There’s not much there, besides the endless, ever-greater spam. So, next, as is my habit, I peruse the daily news. Today’s scandal du jour, it seems, is that some Southern governor was pictured in a yearbook photo, thirty years ago, in blackface, as a Hottentot or Klansman in a homemade bed-sheet robe. No one’s quite sure which one Ralph Northam was, but by this time tomorrow we should know.
I think we can agree that such a puerile gaffe may cost poor Ralph quite dearly after the initial laugh. No doubt he wishes it had not come up, but is it really all that a big deal? The answer will be yes, or no. It depends on who you are and what your lifetime’s been about. The photo was, undoubtedly, intended as dumb fun. The “fun” consists, of course, of doing what should not be done.
The young have an unfailing knack for knowing what’s offensive and taboo. Then they run out to get their next – umm, challenging – tattoo. Thus, they inform the adult world – or seem to think they do – that they are not restricted by the so-called “normal decencies” which govern hopeless squares like me and you.
I grew up in the suburbs near New York and knew a bunch of adults who would never have considered buying any German car. The Germans were The Enemy to them after the war. In middle school my classmates came from those same bourgeois families with their “earnest moral views.” The kids saved their allowances, then spent them on the sly for buying surplus swastikas and Nazi bayonets (BECAUSE it was offensive and broke all the big taboos. Perhaps I ought to add: Those kids were Jews!)
Technology has blown the lid clear off Pandora’s box. The noise and the cacophony increase. So, here we stand today within the latter, waning stages of the melting Melting Pot – which now, thanks to The Internet, exposes everyone to everything. To what will you react or gravitate?
Humor has been one of mankind’s most useful tools for dealing with (defusing) all the stuff that makes us squirm, at least admitting that such things exist, and that, perhaps, at last, they’re all a joke. (Or “just a pack of playing cards”, as Alice Carroll said.) But what may seem like harmless fun to me – just some cheap lark – may pain you to your deepest, injured core, so my attempt to “lighten up” may start the next world war.
To censor tasteless humor just because it makes us wince is a mistake. Our species needs more pressure-valves, not less. If everything is serious there’s nothing left to save us from this tangled world and our unending mess. The so-called comedy we watch in clubs or on TV consists, almost entirely, of dwelling on the creepy things which we like to avoid or just deny. To tell the truth or wallow in the stuff that makes us writhe may be, when all is said and done, the very thing that helps keep us alive.
We know that prohibition doesn’t work. The problem, to be real and frank, is not that some lame moron pulls another tasteless prank, it’s that we humans have been so unkind since time began. Alas. Alack. Poor clumsy Man. Apology and angst, P.C., or courteous remorse must be the mops and sponges we apply in our attempt to mitigate the mess before we die.