I am on vacation, but something is bugging me, and the way I deal with what’s in my head is to write about it, so I thought I’d write about it here instead of cluttering up my travel journal with it.
The topic of male privilege comes up here quite often, but we see around us unfolding a rather super example of it. Kevin Williamson, conservative writer/troll #8,321,992 who has come in to cash in the frustrated entitlement of US conservatives,
Sane people reacted to this tweet with WTF, and then in true troll style he tried to claim it was a heat-of-the-moment thing, only then people found evidence of him saying the same damn thing on a podcast, only more emphatically.
Oh, and the method of execution? Hanging.
IOW, in Williamson’s mind, it should be highly public and painful.
Of course, he then whined about losing his job and because he is a dude and a conservative, other major publishing outlets immediately rushed to give him airtime, interviews, and lotsa lotsa attention, including this long, self-important pity party in the Wall Street Journal.
long, self-important pity party in the Wall Street Journal.
All this will undoubtedly lead Williamson to bigger and better gigs, depending on whether the FoxNews continues to kiss POTUS’s backside or not (Williamson has been critical of DT because of the latter’s bad family conduct.) He’s got himself a conservative brand now, way more famous than when he was writing for the National Review.
Contrast this with the conservative furor engendered by Professor Randa Jarr of Fresno State University being quoted as calling late First Lady Barbara Bush “a crazy racist” and “taunting” (according to the WashPo) her critics that she can “never be fired.” As it turns out, Fresno State says they aren’t going to discipline her (as they shouldn’t).
The frothing on social media from conservatives was entirely too predictable, about how Jarr is “brainwashing our kids” and should be fired and the whole university system is corrupt (thanks a pant load for throwing tenure under the bus, lady, like it’s not going extinction fast enough without your loudmouth.)
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t support Jarr’s saying awful things. But Barbara Bush is dead. Jarr is not wishing the woman a sado-machocistic death, as Williamson does. All Jarr basically said was “miss me with grieving for this one particular woman.” We could have a nice, long argument about how much blood the Bush family has on its hands. Nonetheless, Barbara Bush wasn’t an elected official, her family hardly needs to hear her badmouthed, and whatever her sins and failures were as a living person, she’s not getting any more second chances. (I had one idiot tell me after my father died that she hated him because he was a Democrat. Stay classy!) But—and this is big one—Barbara Bush lived an enormously privileged, long life. She had quite a bit of what this good old world had to offer, and while it isn’t nice to speak ill of the dead, Bush and Co will be fine.
Williamson essentially wishes for mass executions of living women whereby I suspect Handmaid’s Tale is his utopian future. Jarr is a villain of free speech and Williamson a hero of free speech in today’s conservative mind.
After what just happened in Canada, shouldn’t we be a little more worried about death fantasies about live women en masse than disrespectful comments towards one, now dead after very, very, very long life woman?