Tall Tales
Lifted from the comments, a spot of anthropology. In which, a progressive woman seeks irritation, some cause for concern – and, with effort, finds it:
What’s amusing about these displays of woke piety is, I think, the eerie uniformity, the contrivance, the same weird psychology.
Ms Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, is not only ostentatiously vexed by an unremarkable expression of politeness and goodwill – such that she feels a need to alert her 134,000 likeminded followers to the imminent Christian Nationalist uprising – but we’re also expected to believe that her account of events is entirely true. That her peculiar disapproval was shared, audibly, by many other passengers, which, frankly, seems unlikely.
Oh, and she’s also revealed in the subsequent thread to be something of a hypocrite, and a repeated user of the same, supposedly offensive term. The latest instance being a mere three days earlier. I’m sure you’re all shocked. Do take a moment to steady yourselves.
As Clam adds in the comments,
It does suggest being accustomed to getting away with it. An expectation of mutual dishonesty, in which no-one pulls at the obvious threads, lest the favour be repaid and their own pronouncements receive an unwelcome scrutiny.
I suppose we could see the dubious story above – in which an innocuous expression of politeness is proof of “creeping Christian nationalism” – as a new spin on the woke eight-year-old phenomenon from 2016, in which countless progressives, including MSNBC “analysts” and editors of leftist magazines – and including Ms Jeffery herself – started tweeting, competitively, about their small children, all aged eight, supposedly saying Oddly Precocious And Terribly Progressive Things:
As I said at the time,
The phenomenon was seemingly contagious and quite bizarre, a collective fit of transparent fabrication, and soon became a mocking meme. But I think we’re seeing much the same psychology. The same telling of tall tales in order to assert status and to fuel some progressive psychodrama.
For grown adults, our supposed moral betters, this is… odd behaviour.
Update, via the comments:
Rafi quips,
The urge to inflate grievances, and indeed to fabricate them, to balance umbrage and chest-puffing on the merest mote, is a progressive credential. Theirs is a hamster-wheel world of competitive indignation. But when you’re very publicly complaining about a flight attendant using the word blessed, as if this one word signalled some impending theocracy – and when you’re using your eight-year-old child as a political ventriloquist’s doll – then we’re in the land of make-believe. And possibly, anti-psychotic medication.
Ms Jeffery seems oblivious to how petty, presumptuous and mean-spirited she sounds. As if complaining about a commonplace word of kindness, a courtesy, and construing it as offensive and vaguely sinister, were what righteous, well-adjusted people do. As if it were something one should boast about, publicly, while waiting for applause.
Ms Jeffery goes on to complain about disrespect – as if she had been violated by someone wishing her well – and she depicts herself as being oppressed by some “dominant culture.” In which flight attendants say nice things to passengers.
Readers are invited to imagine what it must be like to publicly mouth some bizarrely implausible claim, for no discernibly pressing reason, knowing that the bullshit-like properties of your claim, and your own hypocrisy, can easily be discovered, in a matter of seconds, and to mouth it anyway. And then, when challenged, to double down on the implausible and bizarre. Again, it strikes me as an odd compulsion.
Ms Jeffery is now calling those mocking her “so, so, so dumb.”
Heh. I thought that headline/title looked familiar. I was drawn to just the part I quoted because I saw that part buried in an excerpt I read on an Instapundit post and it was that the CareBear thing triggered my memory of the baby food thing. Sometimes I stumble into things that remind me of some long, otherwise forgotten memory. Especially when it’s one that pissed me off at the time. Serenity now, serenity now…
@WTP,
You’d be surprised how much sheer homicidal rage these sorts of things can engender…
Back during the Clinton administration when I was mid-career in the Army, they suddenly came to the conclusion that the latest BS, which they charmingly entitled “Consideration of Others Training”, or COO… Well, they decided that that “training”, in addition to all the already existent Equal Opportunity BS, took priority over everything else. You could be behind on marksmanship, crew drills, driver’s training, and all the rest, but woe unto thee if you hadn’t ticked those boxes on the onerous touchy-feely crap they mandated.
And, to be quite blunt, I don’t think that any of that “training” was of any utility whatsoever, other than highlighting and encouraging enmity between the various “groups”.
I think my issues with blood pressure started back then… You’d be looking at your training status, and realize that you were unable to field properly trained and qualified machine gun teams because “no ammo in the budget”, but even so, you had to spend time and effort doing the COO and EO crap that they mandated from on high.
I loathe that entire realm, and if you put it to me, I’d do away with all of it. I never sae any of it do the least bit of good; it never changed any minds, and continuous emphasis on it all just kept dragging it back into being. You don’t “fix” issues like that through the measures they put in place; all you do is exacerbate them, and make them exponentially worse. I entered the Army sometime in the early 1980s with an open mind and about zero racism. By the time I left some 25 years later, I fear I had become what could be termed a “pragmatic racist”, because of the crap I had to put up with. The Army does not promote on merit; all you have to do to succeed as one of the “right minorities” is exist; you don’t have to perform, you don’t have to even avoid outright criminal conduct, because in order to massage the numbers, they’re going to ignore your transgressions and promote you anyway. If you’re not one of the favored groups, well… Too bad. An exemplary career and hard work will get you precisely nowhere.
It’s no way to run a railroad. Or, much of anything else.