by Chris James
In case you missed them, I'm going to
cherry-pick for your delectation a few examples of what's going on in the
bountiful world of professional hypocrisy. First, the definition of
hypocrisy, per the Oxford dictionary: Claiming to have moral standards or
beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform. This rather
lukewarm definition does not really give the sense of what goes on in the real
world. But a dictionary-approved list of the major synonyms does:
Pretense, dissimulation, cant, affectation, insincerity, deceit, dishonesty,
duplicity, fraud, etc.
Most people, surely, must recognize that
hypocrisy is the mega-multi-vitamin pill that powers the average politician.
As the matchless Sir Winston Churchill slyly pointed out: "A
politician has the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next
week, next month and next year. And to have an equal ability to explain
why it didn't happen." But, not all politicians are created equal. Henry
Kissinger: "Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad
reputation." So, let's start with a real-world politician.
None other than your fave and mine, the Governor of the Great State of
California, Jerry Brown. He's an interesting study, having succumbed to
early stage senility as Governor Moonbeam in the 70's, at around 40 years of
age. From there, his career went downhill, but he slowly clawed his way
back, ultimately retaking the Governorship in 2011.
From his normal, numerous, garden variety mountain
of political hypocrisies, I'm going to select a recent one that got up my nose.
Not too long ago, the newspaper carried the story of Brown's reaction to
the infrastructure problem. Like many of his predecessors, he has done
little - if anything - to fix the problem. But the customary rumble
of disaffected "voices off" has become a tumult this year because of
attacks mercilessly raining down on the infrastructure by - well - rain.
As reported, Brown's delayed, disingenuous reaction sounded as though he,
alone, had discovered the problem. One could almost hear him saying, deadly
serious: "I was shocked, I tell you, shocked...." Been there,
done nothing and then late to the table! Not bad. Especially when
this entirely fake reaction is welded to the context of his obsessive
contribution to solving the state's infrastructure problems. Yep, that
ultimate brimborion*, the High Speed Rail project.
Another recent announcement that caught my eye
was that Colin Kaepernick plans to test the waters of the free agency system.
Unless you've been off the planet for an extended period of time, you'll
recall that Kap - as we affectionately call him - was the San Francisco 49ers star
quarterback who mysteriously descended into the quagmire of really mediocre
mediocrity, and was unable to free himself from it. To take his mind -
and ours - off his bench-warming plight, he came up with the idea of
kneeling when the National Anthem was played at the game. He received
quite a bit of support for his heroic protest gesture; there was even a number
of imitators. However, there also seemed to be a lot of people who
thought that he was an ungrateful lout. You might say that the whole
issue was controversial!
I am not a great fan of football; soccer is my
game. What got up my nose (it's a generously accommodating nose) was the
staggering amount of coverage this episode generated. I was thoroughly
sick of being bombarded by Kap, and all the derivative antics, in the
newspaper's main section and sports section. For the latter, the column
inches necessary to keep the inferno raging meant that other sports news had to
be sacrificed. First to go was the, already meager, soccer coverage.
Of course.
Back to the present. Buried in Kap's
announcement of free agency was his promise that, post the free agent draft, he
wouldn't be kneeling any more. So much for principles. When it
comes to getting a job and a pay-check, whatever all the kneeling palaver stood
for in the first place went right out the window.
Talking of soccer, when the U.S. women's
soccer team won the world cup in 2015, it was a national triumph. But a
local newspaper reporter, after damning the achievement by faint praise,
excoriated the team because they had not represented the U.S. well. His "logic"?
He discovered that there was only one "ethnic" on the 23 person
team. (Way up my nose!). First, what an egregious word
"ethnic" is; an adjective, bastardized into a noun, that is
condescendingly used in the manner of terms like "alien." The
ethnic in question was insultingly identified by her color; the rest of the
team wasn't the same color, but they came from a multitude of ethnicities (the
correct word), nonetheless.
Fast forward to a recent international women's
soccer tournament in the U.S. The home team, ranked number one in the
world, is drawn against England, ranked number five. The U.S. loses the
game 1-0. This is the first time that the U.S. has lost a game on home
soil since 2004! Thirteen years! What would our reporter have made
of that? Well, since the U.S. team now has on its roster four
"ethnic" players (using his criterion), then are we witnessing the
"triumph of origin over performance"?** Absolute rubbish; of
course not. How do I know this with such certainty? Because the
winning English team had five identifiable "ethnic" players on their
squad. So much for the ultra-hypocritical, life-blood draining
"diversity for diversity's sake" ethos. Performance counts, you
sniveling hypocrites - regardless of any baseless ethnic quotas that you pull
out of the hat. Just because you throw the word "ethnic," or
even "ethnicities," around does not make your pathetic attempt to
manage by identity any the less racist. Bloody hypocrites!
* Brimborion (n) = A totally useless, utterly nonsensical thing.
** For a different publication, I wrote a satire on this very
subject back in October 2015. It was reprinted on the Common Sense site
in March 2016. It's in the archives.
