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"Hip" and Tasteless "Conservatives"
Rich is wrong about most things, but he's painfully on target in noting the incongruous pandering now taking place by some in the cool-kids clique on the Right. Conservatives criticize Hollywood relentlessly, but as Rich notes, "the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too."Which brings me to Mrs. Bush. She demonstrated at the celebrity-studded White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend that you can entertain without being profane. Most of her humor was just right: Edgy but not over the edge. But her off-color stripper and horse jokes crossed the line. Can you blame Howard Stern for feeling peeved and perplexed? And let's face it: If Teresa ("I'm cheeky!") Heinz Kerry had delivered Mrs. Bush's First Lady Gone Mildly Wild routine, social conservative pundits would be up in arms over her bad taste and lack of dignity.
The First Lady resorting to horse masturbation jokes is not much better than Whoopi Goldberg trafficking in dumb puns on the Bush family name. It was wholly unnecessary.
Self-censorship is a conservative value. In a brilliant commencement speech at Hillsdale College last year, Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner called on his audience to resist the coarsened rhetoric of our time: "If we are to prevail as a free, self-governing people, we must first govern our tongues and our pens. Restoring civility to public discourse is not an option. It is a necessity." ~Michelle Malkin
The furore over Mrs. Bush's vulgarity, which is to say her debasement to the level of rhetoric appropriate for the vulgus, the common people or, more accurately, the rabble, only recently came to my attention by a chance hearing of Michael Savage's radio show. Savage sometimes loses a proper sense of moral balance in his furious indignation, but here he and Ms. Malkin have been entirely right and the oh-so sophisticated replies from the Volokh Conspiracy, among others, have been quite wrong. (Besides the fact that there is nothing more tiresome than a libertarian telling conservatives what conservatism is, Volokh is simply mistaken, because for moral conservatives there is properly no public venue in which crass, vulgar or obscene jokes are acceptable or entertaining.) The real question ought to be this: who now takes Mrs. Bush seriously as representative of the "moral values" of the evangelical and other Christians who have supported her husband? If these moral values involve watching decadent programs such as Desperate Housewives, their dissolution and disappearance from this country will not be lamented.
Daniel Larison | May 06, 2005
Comments
I fully agree with you, but I was thinking just now that there's another element to this story that nobody's really commented about (probably due to the knee-jerk anti-"sexist" bias of our time): that horse joke would have been far more palatable had it been a male who said it. One thinks of the sainted Abraham Lincoln, for instance, and his penchant for bawdy humor, which people have always seemed inclined to forgive even if they didn't wholeheartedly endorse it. But there's just something innately repulsive and untoward about a woman making crass, anatomical jokes.
I imagine it has something to do with the exalted position of women in Christian thought. Men are generally viewed by Christians (or possibly by everyone) as the more bestial and rude of the sexes, requiring the civilizing influence of a woman to help subdue their baser instincts, such that when a woman displays those same bestial qualities, it is that much more scandalous and horrifying. In a very visceral way, I think such actions represent a serious threat to civilization itself in many peoples' minds.
Jim Newland | 05/07/05 05:52
I hadn't been thinking of this incident in those terms, but you are right to identify the source of the greater scandal in these remarks in Mrs. Bush's being a woman. The same is true when women utter profanities--it is deeply coarsening and brutalising. That is why greater decorum and dignity from women is needed, and therefore expected in sane societies, and why the "repression" of women in terms of imposing weighty social duties and responsibilities on them (and on men as well, of course) is not only justified but imperative for the continuation of a healthy society. It is all the more imperative for women in prominent social positions, as they are the exemplars of womanhood in public life. We have come down so far that this would hardly enter the minds of most Westerners.
Daniel Larison | 05/09/05 10:46
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