But No Short People
link Randy Newman writes new satirical, political song – Yahoo! News.
It’s difficult to refute an argument about a topic if the rebuttals have no reference to basic logic. Liberals love to demonstrate how enlightened they are by taking the sides of issues that have little logical foundation. If one reads the argument of the artiste Randy Newman, one will get that he is trying to prove how enlightened and non racist he is. Yet the thrust of his argument is that the President should be embraced BECAUSE he is black, not for any particular aspect of ability. What if that same logic were applied to his music business? Why don’t we all buy music that’s performed by black artists regardless of their quality? Hey wait a minute….
In our modern American Idol culture, popularity is the same thing as being legitimate. If there weren’t sane people in the world, (a shrinking contingent to be sure ), George Clooney or Brad Pitt would be elected to lead the country. It makes very little difference to most that neither one of those talented individuals have any genuine grounding in economics or geopolitics. Oh sure, they may look good on TV and probably even smell nice. However , it should not shock most people that the opinions of folks like those are considerably less illuminating than your average first year economics student. In an increasingly dumbed down society in which David Letterman is considered a source of real information, people farm out their critical thinking and merely adopt what they hear in the pop media and from pop artists as fact. As if people who live in fantasy can give advice on reality. An artiste like Newman may think it’s logical to support someone solely because of their ‘minority’ status, but it’s the very racism he’s trying to parody.
If we are going to appoint people solely because of their membership in a favored constituency, why don’t we elect more female leaders? They do represent more than half of the population and it would only be appropriate in an enlightened, modern society. I recommend Kim Kardashian. She appears to be popular. Some may perhaps argue that a Hilary Clinton would be eligible; they had that chance. But as we recall, the DNC thought that it was more important to install someone with no real life experience but who happened to be a person of color, than it was to embrace someone with a lifetime of political experience. Any racism or sexism there is incidental. Now if Hilary looked less like Hilary and more like Kim, who knows?
Like most people, when I get my car fixed, I want the guy who knows what he’s doing, not the grad student who has University credits for studying engine theory or because he belonged to a favored minority. I’d bet that even the socially sensitive Randy Newman doesn’t specifically ask for the black mechanic, nor would he write satirical songs about it. We keep hearing that racism is the great issue of our society. For people like Newman at least, it must be, they find it everywhere. Sort of like lawyers and lawsuits. Americans have the largest numbers of lawyers per capita in the world. Coincidently, they are the most litigious nation as well….lawbreakers are everywhere. As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.