Archive for June, 2005

“Doing the Accent”

They say that we are all great singers in the shower. When you are singing in the shower you can hear the music playing in your mind. But when most people actually sing to a tape recorder they are appalled at what comes out.

The same is true of people who are “doing an accent.”

I have a relative who will sometimes do a Southern accent, and he is just awful. He sounds like every New York comedian who hates the South and mimics Southerners in a way I have never heard anyone, trash included, actually speak.

All of my kinspeople not only love the South, they are Southern Nationalists. But when he does that Southern accent, this guy does not hear himself and how much he sounds like that South-hating New York Jew.

I have heard the person he is trying to sound like, and nobody could identify any similarity.

He doesn’t mean any harm, just as a perosn who thinks he can sing and has no talent means no harm.

Most people can’t sing. Most people can’t “do the accent.”

Most people can’t sing or do accents. Yeshiva University finds that out every time it puts on Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.”

Just as a lot of people think they can sing, a huge number of Jews think they can do a stereotypical Jewish accent. They think they are hilarious. So at Yeshiva, year after year, the people looking for a good Shylock have to suffer while they listen to a hundred people who think they are doing The Offended Jew perfectly.

You have watched the same thing happen when people are looking for singing talent. It is not only painful for them, it is embarrassing. You listen to one person after another who honestly thinks he or she has rhythm and a great voice, and they are just AWFUL.

But, just as in the case of great voice, when you hear someone who really can “do the accent,” it is magical.

One Jew I know always goes into The Accent when the subject of some big sale deal camesup. He will suddenly assume a character that would make Shylock look like a Presbyterian. He moves his hands and says, “Such a DEAL! Such a deal as you never had in your life!”

If you could see him do it, you would laugh until the tears come, the way I do.

Political Correctness outlaws that sort of thing. It says “doing the accent” reinforces a stereotype.

No way.

“Doing the accent” has nothing to do with reality.

“Doing the accent” is the stereotype squared or cubed. That’s why it’s so funny.

You are not laughing because it is grim, sober reality. That simple observation is beyond the Politically Correct imagination. It requires a sense of humor, and a sense of humor requires a sense of proportion which sour-faced Political Correctness simply does not have.

If you have any experience of the real world you would no more believe a real Jews talked that way than you would believe that Laurel and Hardy were being presented as typical white gentiles.

The problem is, of course, that Politically Correct people have no experience with the real world. “Doing the accent,” like all real comedy, goes beyond reality and every adult knows it.

Politically Correct people have no sense of humor, so they see it all as a plot against Jews. At the same time they never even imagine that Laurel and Hardy or Abbot and Costello or Al Bundy on Married With Children represent some kind of plot against white gentile males.

When I lived outside of Pontiac, South Carolina, we had the only TV set around the brick plant. So the little black kids I played with would come and lie on the floor — with me in case you think they were being humiliated. They were ALWAYS there when “Amos ‘n Andy” came on.

The program was entirely black. They saw black judges who spoke perfect English. They saw black doctors. They LOVED it.

But all the NAACP noticed was that this comedy program had some comedy blacks on it. Amos was the complete idiot, just like Laurel in Laurel and Hardy. The Kingfish was the Hardy, the guy who could always fool and cheat poor old Amos and who thought he was smart because he could.

Andy, the narrator, was a black taxi cab driver who had touching scenes with his children and was a very sensible man. But the NAACP did not notice the black judges, the black doctors, Andy’s good sense, the black teachers, or anything else.

All the NAACP saw was that the two main character in a comedy show looked like fools.

Oh, and there was the lawyer Calhoun. He was the one educated black on Amos ‘n Andy who was portrayed as a fool. The NAACP ignored the black judges and said it was all a plot to make all black lawyers and all other educated blacks look like fools.

If you get a tape of the old Amos ‘n Andy show, you will find that the black lawyer who was a featured character on Seinfeld acted EXACTLY like Calhoun on Amos ‘n Andy.

Why? Because it’s FUNNY.

So the NAACP scored a major triumph by getting Amos ‘n Andy taken off the air, despite the fact it was a hit show and the ONLY black show on television. Not one of the black actors on that show ever got another major role. There were no roles for blacks, and I’ll bet every one of them was tainted forever by the NAACP for being in on this evil, racist White Gentile Conspiracy.

I once saw the actor who played Amos do a bit part on TV as a butler. I felt the unfairness of it all. He was as great an actor being Amos as Laurel was as being the complete white gentile idiot. But the NAACP put him on the human junk pile.

As for the black kids who had been there every week to watch Amos ‘n Andy, they were completely stunned. They cried. The world of educated blacks, of caring black parents and hilarious black comics was suddenly gone.

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My Christian Commenters are Actual Christians

My Christian blog commenters are actual Christians.

Please note I do not put “Christian” in quotes as I so often do with others.

My commenters are very unusual Christians. In the first place, they know the facts. I always learn a tremendous amount from them. My flat statements are also questions. They give me answers.

The purpose of Bob’s Blog is to make ME think, too.

Secondly my Christian bloggers do not fit the stereotype, which so many “Christians” do, that a Bible literalist or a hard-core Catholic is somebody who goes to pieces when they are contradicted. I have found that stereotype all too often fits.

Thirdly, unlike “Christians,” inside the quotes, my bloggers are very forgiving. Look at HS’s latest reply to me. She makes it very clear that she thinks I am being a numbskull, and she warns me that the gloves have been off for quite a while inside this blog and they will stay off. She even makes it clear that what I say often hurts her.

But she also states flatly that this is the way it should be.

As I have said repeatedly, the Catholics, Bible literalists, Calvinists and other hard-core religious people I have worked with all my political career believed firmly that the others were going to hell. Except for the hard-rock atheists, who thought everyone else was silly.

And they SAID so.

To each other.

Then we all went back to fight the fight side by side.

I am very proud of my little band here.

As for those who can’t get in here and duke it out with me, they can’t stand the heat so they should stay out of this kitchen.

Not only is it very hot here, we’ve got big old iron frying pans to hit each other with.

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More From the Armchair General Bob

What I say about war comes from what The Greatest Generation would call “an armchair general.” The tiny little incidents I was in were not part of a Real War. I have never been in Real Combat.

Until this was explained to me, I honestly thought I had been. That was because of a brain trauma, I suppose. One time I did something stupid and was on my feet when a high explosive went off in front of me. It knocked me backwards on my neck and I lay there for what seemed like an hour, but was probably a few minutes, thinking I was crippled from the neck down.

Then the feeling came back. It was the best pain I ever felt. I was not a permanent paraplegic; I had just had the hell knocked out of me. A blow like that shakes the brain. I naturally would end up with delusions like the one that I was in a real fight.

So, speaking as Armchair General Bob, I would caution you about some problems with military statistics.

Let me begin with a very practical poitical matter. One of the big issues in the 2004 presidential campaign was the question of whether John Kerry was a real hero and whether George Bush the Younger was a draft dodger hiding in what the media agree was the cowardly National Guard.

When George Bush became a combat pilot in the National Guard, what the media refer to as a “draft dodge,” a person who trained as a pilot stood a better chance of dying during training than the average man who went to Vietnam in uniform.

But I STILL cannot compare Bush and Kerry in any meaningful way.

I wish I could refine this statistic. “A man who went to Vietnam in uniform” could be somebody like Al Gore, who was always kept in a relatively safe position when he went to Vietnam as a volunteer.

I do not condemn Al Gore for being in a “relatively safe position” in Vietnam. First of all, there were no really “safe” places for any American in uniform in Vietnam. Al Gore was a volunteer from the Volunteer State when he could have avoided the draft very easily.

Gore was NOT given any special privileges because his father was a United States senator. It was military policy to keep actual volunteers in relatively safe positions. I would like to make him the villain.

The problem is that he simply wasn’t.

Facts really screw up a good story.

I would like to compare Bush and Kerry, but the statistics aren’t there.

At the height of the Vietnam War there were about half a million uniformed American troops in Nam. But only about eighty thousand of those men were on “man with gun” assignments.

So I cannot compare the risks John Kerry took with the risks George Bush took. Anyone who has had practical, professional experience in dealing with military statistics will understand the difficulties involved here.

Many of the guys “in the paddies” were not in the “man with gun” classification. On the other hand a lot of the “man with gun” category did not serve “in the paddies” (which is a curious expression if you have ever seen a paddy). Many in the “man with gun” category were guards in relatively safe places.

If history were a “just so” story, I could join all the people who think Gore or Bush or Kerry was just being sneaky and evil. I could find a statistical category that Kerry was in and use it prove he was in very little real danger. I could find another statistic to prove he was in the most endangered category.

I could denounce Bush as a cowardly draft dodger as so many people do.

I would love to prove that Bush and Kerry and Gore were all getting credit for nothing. I don’t like any of them.

What stymies me is the fact that I have been cursed with a conscience. Many, many times I have wished that medical science would find a way for me to have the damned thing surgically removed.

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What is “Combat?”

I was raised around what I call “professional World War II veterans.” These were men who fought in WW2 and have had no life since. According to them, if you weren’t in WW2, you didn’t know what real life was all about.

I was talking to one of the more pathetic of those guys and mentioned a friend of mine who was the only soldier in his unit to come back on his feet from a battle in the Korean War. The professional WW2 vet replied, “He wasn’t in a real war, he was in a police action. I was in The WAR.”

True, not all WW2 vets are that callous and stupid. But I have never heard ONE SINGLE member of the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation have the moral courage to contradict this kind of statement by a “professional WW2 veteran.”

And plenty of them were sitting right there when the professional WW2 vets told me nobody else had been “in combat” but them.

You might as well spit on Korean War vets’ graves.

This is another reason why I have a low opinion of the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation.

My brother-in-law served in WW2 in the Merchant Marine. He insists he was “never in combat.”

He didn’t have to tell me that. Very few men who were in the Merchant Marine were “in combat” and lived to tell about it. “Combat” meant they were attacked by a submarine. Very few of the men who were on a Merchant Marine ship that got attacked by a submarine are around to talk about it.

No, my brother-in-law was not “in combat.” He just risked a horrible death at sea, never knowing when, day or night, his ship might go down under him.

For excellent reasons, I can only reveal that I have almost certainly have never been in a fire-fight that involved as many as two hundred combatants on both sides. My WW2 friends told me I had never really been “in combat.”

You sure could have fooled me.

I also knew some of the people who were trying to kill my brother-in-law. One of them was serving on a German submarine at the age of thirteen. He showed an understandable reluctance to talk about how much experience he had had “in combat.” He would have had to tell me about his success in killing people like us.

The death rate in the AMERICAN submarine corps in WW2 was one in seven. The death rate among Germans was more like 50%. And it was horrible way to die down there.

Professional American WW2 vets would probably say that all this German submariner ever did was help run the submarine while it shot torpedoes at Allied ships. He wasn’t really “in combat” unless he had been fired back at.

But he was in the same position as my brother-in-law. Very few German submarine crews who had depth charges dropped at them lived to tell about it.

So even he, a man who was in The Real War, was never really “in combat.”

Let me tell you something: I would FAR rather be in a fire-fight out in the field than sitting on a ship for months waiting day and night for a torpedo to send me to a cold drowning death. And I would take either option long before I would be willing be go down in a sub and spend months waiting for a suffocating death down there.

But what would I know? I’ve never been a Real War.

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News Flash: Boys and Girls are DIFFERENT!

I know what you are thinking:

“Oh, Lord, Ole Bob has started drinking again.”

But, honestly, the idea that boys and girls were the same was Sacred Writ in the 1970s. It was the first line in the Feminist Bible. In order to be professor, you had to swear to the idea that the only difference between little boys and little girls was that little boys were given toy guns to play with and little girls were given dolls.

The reason for this was to force little boys into the role of ruler and aggressor and little girls into the slavish role of child-bearers for the men. The whole thing was a male plot to dominate women.

I am not joking. That was Gospel on campus. Society had conspired to keep women “barefoot and pregnant.”

More than once a woman would find I was a right-wing Southerner and she would say, “If you had your way, your wife would always be barefoot and pregnant.”

Liberals don’t believe in stereotypes, you see.

My reply was, “I appreciate the compliment, but all I could really guarantee would be the barefoot part.”

Most feminist leaders followed their own advice and never got pregnant. But a few years after the movement was at its height, a stream of articles began to appear that was written by feminists who had actually had a child or two. They all reported, with amazement, that a little boy and a little girl were different before they could walk.

No toy guns. No dolls. They seemed to be BORN different!

Gosh, what a surprise!

Back in the 1950s every ad for a horror movie always showed a beautiful woman being attacked by a male beast or a male murderer, or being carried off by same. In the 1970s this was held up as an example of Society forcing women into the role of victims.

They ignored the fact that half of the people seeing those movies were female.

Men as aggressors is not a mind-set that is exclusive to men. Every serial killer who goes to prison finds a stack of amorous letters from women.

I tried to be fair, and wondered if aggressive females get the same kind of fan mail.

Well, somehow I doubt that Elena Bobbitt gets a whole lot of marriage proposals, but I could be wrong.

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