Georgia and Texas enacted voting reforms in the wake of the mess that was the 2020 election. Quick as you can say “woke,” the states’ legislators and governors were denounced by the Democratic leadership and by those of a “woke” persuasion, with concomitant misrepresentations and outright falsehoods regarding the content of those reform bills.
This being 2021, where social justice has thoroughly infiltrated Big Business, Corporate America rushed to join the condemnation chorus. Delta and American Airlines issued their denunciations (the latter’s CEO apparently didn’t even read the legislation before condemning it), and Major League Baseball whiplash-promptly declared that this year’s All Star Game would be relocated from Atlanta.
Corporate America has gone all-in on woke. After the Atlanta spa shootings, Fortune 500 companies tripped all over themselves to condemn “violence against AAPI,” before the investigators even had a chance to assess the shooter’s motives. AAPI, for those of you not up on your woke-cronyms, stands for “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” a broad-brush designation whose first half deliberately conflates China, Japan, Korea, eleven Southeast Asian nations, and depending on who you ask, the six “South Asia” nations (India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka), and whose second half folds in people from as far south as New Zealand and as far east (west?) as Hawaii. That’s roughly half the world’s population, wildly diverse in countless ways, but lumped together for the purpose of scolding those not on the social justice train. I’d bet that the number of AAPI who actually call themselves AAPI is vanishingly small, by the way, and rest assured that the various nationalities therein aren’t very keen on being mistaken for or lumped in with each other.. This mirrors the conflation of everyone from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego as “latino,” or more recently, “latinx.” No matter that mistaking a Cuban for a Dominican, or vice versa, can get you into a whole lot of hot water. These designations are nothing but elitist arrogance coupled with a desire to declare “oppressed” groups of sufficient size to carry political weight (and of course to claim those groups for the Left, individuals’ politics aside).
AAPI, by the way, have only recently become a group worthy of the SJWs’ white-knighting. For quite some time, Asian students have faced discrimination in secondary and tertiary education, because they are, statistically speaking as a populace in America, more successful than other identity groups. Elite universities set higher admissions thresholds, and there has been a significant effort in New York City to reduce their representation in the “elite eight” competitive public high schools. Pay attention, and you’ll likely see this discrimination continue, even as they profess their shock and dismay at anti-AAPI violence.
Ponder what it means when Corporate America adopts a cultural trend. I recall an utterly cringe-worthy commercial, many years back, where a teenage girl called something “phat” in front of her parents. She promptly spelled it out “you know, P-H-A-T.” That was the moment I knew the word (which I had never used) was done, and that anyone who clung to it would forever after be the subject of mockery. This happens all the time – once a new/leading-edge idea goes mainstream, it flips from cool and attractive to laughingstock.
Big companies typically behave in cravenly defensive ways, even when those behaviors appear to be forward-thinking. Rest assured, most of the woke-porate actions, statements, responses, etc., you see are not born of actual social-justice thinking, but rather out of bottom-line considerations. Their C-suites are desperately afraid of the Twitter mob, mistakenly believing that this gaggle of loons and goons is representative of broad cultural attitudes. So, they rush to condemn, figuring that doing so will prompt the slavering hordes to vent their pique at other targets.
In other words, I don’t for a minute believe that their outrage and indignation is genuine. Their adoption of the new words and acronyms serves one purpose: to point the angry mob elsewhere. The movements and intentions that spawned those words get diluted or lost entirely, and the expression of the words, rather than real changes, are the end unto itself. Witness Black Lives Matter in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Everyone said it, but how many reforms actually happened? BLM (the movement) jumped the shark in a matter of weeks, dragged up that ramp by BLM (the organization) that has far more interest in milking the words than in fixing the problems.
Unfortunately, jumping the shark does not rid us of these meddlesome priests. Happy Days ran a full seven years after Fonzie’s farcical stunt (which took place a mere 3.5 years into the show’s run). Being woke makes people feel special, and it’s the rare person who gives up “special.” Instead, they elevate their game, reaching for ever more outrage, and ever more demonstrations of “enlightened” thinking.
To the point of tragedy and farce, sadly. Consider this entry from the woke-xicon: MAP. Showing an obsession for acronyms even greater than the DoD’s, the SJ crowd came up with a new euphemism that infuriated me even more than their usual BS.
MAP stands for “Minor-Attracted Person.” That is, they replaced “pedophile” with an acronym.
I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language. — George Carlin
What possible reason could there be to substitute an esoteric acronym for the word “pedophile??” Other, that is, than taking a position other than the cultural norm (i.e. that pedophilia is utterly abhorrent). Are they attempting to normalize this behavior??? Are they that detached from reality???
Given that some believe it’s proper to pump five year olds full of chemicals to alter their hormonal development, should the kids somehow “identify” as trans, the answer seems to be yes, at least in some cases.
“Jumping the shark” is found in the transition from edginess to banality, but banality is far too forgiving a term to describe the excesses we witness today. I hope that these excesses will turn more and more people away from the small minority that dictate acceptable social norms today, and encourage more and more to stand up to the woke crowd, to tell Wokeporate America that they’re not buying any of it, and to let their politicians know that it’s time to return to normalcy.
Loading ...
Active Comment Threads
Most Commented Posts
Universal Background Checks – A Back Door to Universal Registration
COVID Mask Follies
When Everything Is Illegal…
An Anti-Vax Inflection Point?
“Not In My Name”
The Great Social Media Crackup
War Comes Through The Overton Window
The First Rule of Italian Driving
Most Active Commenters