Beach Blanket Bingo 2020
It Only Matters If . . .
It only matters if it is happening to Them.
That statement summarizes my experience with people in the Media, and with people who claim to champion causes, especially freedom of speech. I do not often use generalizations or stereotypes because there are always exceptions to every rule, always a surprise beneath each blanket statement. In this case, though, I’ve not found any, and, over the course of a lifetime, I have looked! Beach Blanket Bingo has been broadcast for decades!
The suffocation of Free Speech in America really began in the workplaces, in the little town squares, and in small public meetings of the 1980s. I had the misfortune to work with, though not work for, a supervisor who was getting money, a lot of lucrative brownie points from the Federal Government, for hiring women and people of color. There was absolutely nothing principled or compassionate or caring in his decisions. He was a coward of the worst stripe. Hiring a person who covered both categories was his profitable two-fer. It was, and is, in my opinion, racism of the worst kind.
The office atmosphere became a stifling cauldron of silencing whatever offended the new Hire-ee of hissy-fit temperament. There were certain words, such as “garbage man”, that could not be spoken because of this Very Young Clerical who deemed herself the dictionary of how people could speak. She determined the office social clique, and the order in which she did any work, entirely by skin tone, although social class and wage bracket were also somehow mixed into this elaborate scoring system of Justices and Injustices.
Only people of color were allowed into her sphere of friends-for-social-justice. And this was over 30 years ago!
I once quipped, with honesty, but unknowingly with abundant audacity, upon observing a former co-worker of hers come to visit her in the office:
“Do you know, that is the first white person I have seen you befriend.”
Within a year, the entire section of employees was rent with problems that might not have erupted, except for the hostility over WORDS and PIGMENTATION. To the cowed supervisor, I became persona non grata for speaking out on the rude, abrasive and very uncivil treatment of myself and my fellow employees, some of whom were treated even worse than myself by this prima donna of skin-tone and by a nebbish-boss.
One colleague of mine hailed from South of the Border. Upon being told that he was not invited to her Friday lunch event, he asked: “Aren’t I dark enough for you?”
This dear friend received his reward from our craven boss: the paperwork for his very delinquent promotion became lost, memory-holed, long before such a vile act became public and retail policy.
This type of pushy, putrid person, waking the dead with hate-filled shrillness, while desecrating the noble dead through an appallingly obscene ignorance of history — is now on public display, everywhere, around the globe. He and She demand the same type of unearned and treacherous concessions, nowadays from Big-City-Mayors and Corporate CEOs, that were demanded decades ago from the linguine-spined-overseers in the quiet workplaces of America, Back then, this person was merely a nasty piece of work, not doing much work, except sowing dissension among a dozen or so individuals who had, before her arrival on this “unjust” scene so ripe with offensive words, just been working for a living, and talking with candor and humor to one another, in an attempt to communicate! More recently, the Thug for Justice kills in the name of . . . killing.
This breed of vulgar, violent spoiled brat has been nurtured, for decades, by people who gamed the system for money and power and perks. Those jellyfish are not strangers to many of us who decisively walked away from their “decisions” drenched with unfairness in so many places of the past. A jellyfish on the beach stings your foot, terribly, when you step on him (actually the worst stings are from the pieces-of-jellyfish that you don’t see in time). Such a gelatinous creature, however, is completely incapable of standing up for himself, or for anyone else. It cannot run away from the sea of comeuppance a-coming at him.
Within a year, that government office was emptied out of a lot of good and talented employees. The gutless bigoted supervisor, who was sooooo sensitive to the needs of the oppressed, while he pocketed payola for allowing malignant tension in the workplace — he was still there. He had to deal, though, with the zoo he’d created. And, believe me, he wasn’t much of a zookeeper.
More than thirty years ago, I left that office to start the rest of my life. During these past weeks, going into months, of observing violence toward, and the bullying of, honest, upright citizens, and the wanton sacrilege toward the honored dead, I have thought back to when this obscenity toward America, and toward Western Civilization, really began — perhaps during those extremely dysfunctional mid-1960s and early 1970s, when the crybabies of those wretched days gave birth to the crybabies of today. I was still a child back then, but I daresay that I was more mature than many of those snot-nosed adults ranting and raving for peace and justice and equality and the right to destroy whatever they found objectionable in the history of humanity.
The stories must be in the millions, of the individuals whose civil rights were trampled on, in the quest to make a just world of America. We’ve been at this thing for how many decades now? The millions of individuals in the supposed silent majority have not ever been able to have their say about the violations of their basic human rights — especially to the Media, because the Newsrooms of America were among the first to buy into the hypocrisies and hyped hysteria of the Left.
Who talks with the microphone to the vastly ignored American? Ever?
At times like these, when the crybabies are, once again, Front and Center Stage, I recall the reason why I did not receive my long-overdue promotion, simply because I stood up for myself and my country in the face of a Chinese co-worker, loyal to Beijing, who spoke vilely of this country, and of Americans. My final statement to him was:
“But you’ll take their tax dollars for your paycheck? You’re despicable.”
And now the News is just filled with these barbaric instances of injustice in the public square. Unfairness all over the place because of people who cannot speak freely and cannot peaceably assemble. Constitutional rights being crumbled by tin-pot-dictator mayors and governors!
Well, pardon me for asking Mr. and Miss Media, but: Where have you all been?
I, former journalist, have more than a few questions, but no follow-ups, for the bold bastion of the Press in America:
Where were you during the past 20 years when any technical writer, worth that title — in any scientific realm — would no longer work in his own profession because of the neutering and degradation of the English language into the politically correct psychobabble now plastered all over News Screens today, and posing as Science!?
Where were you when talented writers got shoved into pigeon-hole slots as globalists bought out the News Organs of America during the past 2 decades?
Where were you during the past 40 years when newspapers and magazines became fodder for lawsuits that had nothing to do with the First Amendment?
Where were you when prizes and awards were handed out to the most Politically Correct Students in the Class, who then went on to become to the most pliable and pompous Pulitzer-Prize Scribblers on the News Staff?
Where were you when the people hired to “write” articles on the currents events of American life were the pet employees of the corporate blob, and not the most qualified and creative minds? Talented and technical thinkers don’t spin reality like hired airheads do.
Where were you when the statues that are now being torn down were neglected and pissed on for years and years?
Where were you when the boys and girls of America had to find other places to live, and play, and learn, and relax because so much of home life in America was a trivial matter to pay any attention to? They were not The Big Story, getting The Big Ratings? Flyover Country got mocked by people on both the Left and the Right.
Finally, where were you when the majority —this vast Silent Majority — turned off the tube, unplugged the wire, and cut the cord?
Too busy chasing the latest 30 minutes of ratings time? Too rolled up in your puffed-up sense of self-importance over what to tell those dolts out-there to think?
In the World of the Media, the Left is filled with cowardly creeps who do not love anyone or anything. The Right is filled with almost as many of the same abhorrent anti-social personalities, minus the overtly 2-faced vitriol. The sense of condescension is the same among both groups of “news-aggregators”, because we hardly have any Real Reporters anymore!
I’ve worked in liberal news bureaus and also dealt with less-liberal journalists, slogging away in wire services and photo departments of magazines. There is not much space in between those two “extremes”. The nature of the news business of telling people what So-and-So is doing, or of hiding from people what So-and-So is doing — it’s not uplifting stuff!
I do not blame the Media for chasing ratings. Every shark must eat to live. But do not do it in the name of justice!
When I first went to work at that federal agency, my boss-lady told me the bottom line on Personnel: They deal with pay raises and promotions, and they always put theirs in first.
The same ground-rule applies to the Media, in America, and anywhere.
It only matters if it happens to Them. That’s the News for Today.
