“Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief lost a lock of hair, and the Colonel’s bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh. The Colonel’s left shoulder was clipped a little. They fired again. Both missed their men this time, but I got my share, a shot in the arm. At the third fire both gentlemen were wounded slightly, and I had a knuckle chipped . . . They then talked about the elections and the crops a while, and I fell to tying up my wounds.
Maybe we should go ask Tucker Carlson and Lawrence O’Donnell how the crops—and the elections—are doing. You first.
Woke to the Sound of Laughter
Puritanism is back—and you’re welcome to it. I applaud the New Piety and want to tell twenty-first-century thought leaders that your current fashion for sanctimoniousness, earnest solemnity, and taking everything very seriously indeed is just what’s needed.
Humor depends upon irking the dour, the censorious, and the po-faced. Now there’s a fresh abundance of calamity howlers, bluenoses, and vinegar pusses to provoke.
This is a great relief. For most of the previous century lemon-sucking prudes were scarce and sadly out of style. Life was mirth-deprived.
World War I was followed by a licentious riot of amoral libertinism with the collapse of ethical norms, societal conventions, plain good manners, and religious convictions.
Nothing was sacrosanct. This turned laughter into hard work, like going to see Waiting for Godot and waiting for the punch lines. Or skating over the thin ice on a river of despair in the novels of Evelyn Waugh. Or fearfully suspecting, with Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five, that levity might be a symptom of mental illness.
Lacking icons, the iconoclastic joker is just a crazed person trying to break things in a safe space—his padded cell. Without taboos Tabu is a perfume, available in better stores since 1932. Shortly after Tabu was introduced Cole Porter sang
In olden days, a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking.
But now, God knows,
Anything goes.
And everything went. The years from 1918 to 2016 weren’t funny. First came manic-depressive economies, then the rise of totalitarian ideologies, another world war, Mutually Assured Destruction, the antinomian violence of the 1960s, dissolution of the nuclear family, evisceration of the middle class, and people over forty wearing bicycle shorts.
Goodbye to all that (except, alas, the bicycle shorts). You stiff-necked pettifoggers have reemerged from the loosey-goosey fog bank of pre-postmodernism. Thank you. The long drought in prudery is over. Japes at Tartuffian cant can begin anew.
Jesters witnessed, with happy surprise, the rebirth of priggish shock and prissy moral indignation when a licentious riot of amoral libertinism was elected president of the United States in 2016.
(Actually, Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. But the New Piety had yet to be proclaimed. Imagine how much more fun the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio would have been with #MeToo. Unfortunately for the sanctimoniously pious and earnestly solemn, the Clintons arrived too soon—Gadarene swine with nobody to chase them into the sea.)
But nowadays you, the woke, have perfected your pietism. You know just which conscious thoughts to decry and just what unconscious thoughts to condemn, and you even know the precise words that mustn’t be used to describe any of those thoughts. For example, you disapprove of the noun “mankind.” You grapple with English as if the language were a professional wrestling villain attempting to pin “womynkind” to the mat.
(Rematch to be announced. “Womyn” is considered transexclusionary by gender activists.)
To be woke is to maintain a state of mind where you are constantly and acutely alert to social injustice and permanently on the lookout for more social injustice to be alert to. Or what I would call a good reason to take a nap.
Which one would think would be perfectly acceptable since being woke doesn’t seem to entail actually doing anything. But thankfully for the merry-andrew, if you’re woke you must stay “conscious” in order to continually “communicate” how “vigilant” you are about “toxic masculinity,” how “mindful” you’re becoming about “cultural appropriation,” and how “committed” you are to “no platform” people who disagree with you by, for instance, putting your vocabulary in quotation marks.
Thus each of you becomes a “social justice warrior” armed, like Samson, with the jaw of an ass.
Being woke is a parody of being born again—instead of you accepting Jesus, people like Jesus (Cisgender normative, famously well-connected father) have to accept you.
And, as to religion, it’s about time we had a new one. Religion has been the mainstay of lampoon at least since Voltaire. But the old established creeds are no fit targets for jocularity—doddering congregations, frayed theologies, and sorry impoverishment from being sued for less than comical behavior. A fresh theology to poke fun at is required.
I don’t understand your creed, but I enjoy it. Diversity is a wonderful new shibboleth—you must both pronounce it correctly and not pronounce it at all. Differences between religions, races, ethnicities, cultures, and various genders (after a million years with just two, dozens more have been discovered) can never be acknowledged. Then they must be celebrated.
And tolerance is a wonderful new sin. It’s a modern moral lapse to practice toleration when glorification is what contemporary mores demand. Witness the shamed Colorado confectioner who, on the occasion of a gay wedding, failed the “If I knew you were coming I would have baked a cake” test.
Of course the New Piety requires up-to-date saints. Gladly there’s no shortage. Martyrdom has become inclusive. Hurt feelings count. So does Joe Biden smelling your hair. Saintly relics are close at hand. You have a mental
