President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

And there will be no consequence for something that would have horrified people at any other time, because this is what we have allowed to happen.

So it will stay out there, until we find out about the next abuse of power or corrupt act or whatever else next demonstrates someone who is unfit for office.

For what it's worth, that unfitness for office was precisely what impeachment was supposed to address. The kind of person whose demeanor and actions demonstrate that they are morally bankrupt or who you find out would use the office for financial gain or who would sell out the country to advance their personal ambitions or hurt a perceived political enemy.

If this charlatan isn't impeachable -- actually hasn't been impeachable for at least several dozen different actions since he's been elected -- then nobody is.

 

I am not speaking for Justin Trudeau or what he was thinking or what was going on when those photos and videos were taken, because I have no clue.

But I think there is a subtlety here that time has changed.

Context matters.

Remember the movie Soul Man from the 1980s, with C. Thomas Howell doing blackface, with the plot being about him pretending to be black to get a scholarship to Harvard Law School?

In the mid 1980s, maybe there were people out there who found it offensive, but that kind of thing definitely flew, which is why the movie got made, had some success and was a throwaway HBO staple for years.

I don't think that kind of move would ever fly today. There would be automatic boycotts. There are way too many people who automatically go to outrage whenever race gets played with that way now, and there is no joking about it, no matter of context making one thing OK and another obviously offensive.

I am not pointing that out to argue that things shouldn't be that way, I am simply saying that is the way it is now.

I think things have changed when it comes to things like this, even since 2001.

Yes, I agree that in 2001 a minstrel show would have been offensive to most people, but there were still contexts where I could see someone still trying to joke around with race (rightly or wrongly), in a way that most people would be afraid to touch today.

I am not saying that Trudeau was within that sort of context where he should have thought it made it OK then, in fact the fact that he was in blackface so many different times makes me wonder wtf is up with it. But I do think there was still a subtlety that existed around this until relatively recently, where for many people context would have mattered more than it does now.

I am not going to come up with the perfect example, but say in 2001 you had a kid dressing as Kobe Bryant for Halloween and he tried to make himself look black. I think then there would have been some people who found it offensive, sure, but as many or more people probably wouldn't have seen it as racist or someone trying to be offensive.

But maybe my sensibilities (and memories of 2001) are off.

In any case, today, no way that flies. Again, I am not saying that is wrong. Maybe our history with things like minstrel shows did so much damage and caused enough hurt that it all should be off limits. But if that is the case, I do think we definitely got to that realization and point relatively recently.

 

See, I thought Danson failed not because an ironic commentary on American bigotry suddenly became verboten in 1993, but because he failed to pull off an ironic commentary on American bigotry.

He was a white man, wearing cartoonish minstrel show make up, with big white lips, running around using the word nigger over and over again, eating watermelon, and offering nothing actually funny or ironic. Which just left the offensive.

In 1993, an actual minstrel show was just plain offensive. He thought that it was a foregone conclusion for everyone that he was a right-thinking, progressive guy, so somehow the minstrel show was going to be funny just by virtue of him doing it.