November 2, 2007

Untethered on the Great Noose Mania of 2007

Quantitatively consistent blogging -- relentlessly feeding the beast -- tends to be the enemy of quality. There are a handful who can be prolific, steady, and still surprising over many years -- Michael Blowhard perhaps comes first to mind -- but many of the best bloggers are among the most erratic.

All of a sudden, Dennis Dale is back at Untethered with lots of good stuff, especially about the Noose Scourge sweeping our nation ever since the Jena Six story got all that media play:

CNN's Rick Sanchez, whose Hispanic surname seems to have made him the network's go-to guy on racial issues despite the fact that he is nearly as WASP-like in appearance and manner as Ted Knight's Judge Smails in Caddyshack, (or, for that matter, Knight's affable and clueless anchorman Ted Baxter of The Mary Tyler Moore Show), is valiantly traipsing into the dark heart of America, with his expedition of camera and make-up crew in tow, hunting the now legendary Great Noose Scourge of 2007.

My point here is not to pick on Rick, who evinces the same bemusing persona that Fred Willard periodically reprises in Christopher Guest's faux-documentaries: confident, cocksure and half-cocked--as enthusiastic as he is oblivious. He sees opportunity; he seizes it; he is no exception. But under his guidance the absurdity has moved beyond comic into surreal, and there will be no competing with real life now, my fellow amateur satirists. Soon we may find it difficult to delineate the boundaries between. Game over. It's time to simply shut-up and marvel.

Last night, on Halloween, Sanchez utilized a split-screen format to simultaneously deliver two reports, one from a private residence and one from a bar, each the subject of controversy because their elaborate Halloween displays featured corpses hanging from nooses. As the cameras tightened in on the offending figures to reassure us they weren't black (the report wasn't quite so thorough as to call in forensics to analyze one body, just bare decomposing flesh over a skeleton, which the homeowner assured Sanchez was "Caucasian"), also revealed was a fairly realistic upper torso (safely, reassuringly white), severed at the waist and hanging upside down from a meat-hook, unremarked upon.

I guess you had to be there, but the absurdity of it was riveting, delicious irony: this ghoulish, fetishistic fascination with gore, once a ritualistic, occasional transgression for days such as these, now as widespread and mundane as the dull safety of daily life it mocks, juxtaposed with the bizarre conceit of the segment and its cravenness (acting as a tie-in for CNN's upcoming, opportunistic report, "The Noose, An American Nightmare"), the real-life horrors of the war out of sight and mind; well, all I can say is genius. Pure, unadulterated, unintentional genius.

Bravo, Mr. Sanchez. Bravo, CNN.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whatever happened to the NYPD investigation into the Columbia Teachers’ College noose incident? After overblown national coverage, it seems to have disappeared into the collective memory hole.

Perhaps the media elites are becoming better at manipulating hoaxes to propagandize and berate the masses with their race, sex and class meta-narratives. Who needs the truth when you have the media on your side?

The half-lives of hoaxes seem to be rapidly shrinking from the Duke LAX non-rape, the Jena 6 gang stomping to the Columbia Teachers’ College. Now the media get all the juice from the initial shock of a wildly contrived hoaxes without the slow, long and embarrassing unwinding that usually follows – genius!

Like the Duke LAX and Jena 6, the Columbia Teachers’ College story looked and smelled like a stinker from the start:

- White supremacist in Manhattan, at an Ivy League school, in a black-dominated uber-PC dept like education?
- Claims from a single-minded “black activist” professor whose last three publications focus on “Racial Microagression against African Americans”, “Perceptions of Racial Microagression among Black Supervisors”, and “Addressing Racism”
- The suspicious fact that the purported victim, Prof. Madonna Constantine, called a press conference immediately after the incident but only spoke through her lawyer who didn’t let her speak directly to anyone
- The Teachers’ College refusing to release security tapes to the NYPD investigators until the NYPD were forced to begin legal proceedings to obtain the tapes
- The total media blackout since

The money is on the explanation that this is either a “harmless” consciousness-raising hoax by the victim and/or associates or some twisted personal grudge someone has against Prof. Constantine. There is virtually zero probability this is the vanguard of a real and sizable anti-Black racist movement backed by physical violence which is why hate crimes should be singled out for special treatment if at all. The whole concept is ridiculous and almost exclusively used in the service of common abuses like these for personal agendas, private conflicts, personal profit and to enforce Orwellian truthspeak at the expense of society as a whole.

On a follow-up, one of Prof. Constatine’s Jewish colleagues who also into psyche and education at Columbia’s Teachers’ College found a swastika painted on her door on Halloween night.

KlaosOldanburg said...

so now that nooses are off-limits, what's next? whips? chains? maybe growing cotton will be outlawed.

left-handedness is somewhat hereditary, although it seems to be triggered in some way during embryonic development, a lot like homosexuality.

lefties certainly do contradict the fundamental principles of multiculturalism. we were persecuted almost universally up until very recently, yet show no symptoms of suffering under the oppresive social construct of 'handedness.'

Anonymous said...

Fear powers a noose, not hate.

Eugene said...

In Japan, teru teru bouzu dolls are good luck charms made from white cloth or paper and hung from lintels or overhanging rafters. Check out this picture and ask yourself if they would pass politically-correct muster here.

Anonymous said...

Nice find eugene. Being a shintoist myself, I'll have to hang few of these up for good luck and to keep in touch with my religious side. If anyone says anything, I will claim they are attacking my religion and that they will be looking at a lawsuit if they don't piss off.

Anonymous said...

More racism, plus insensitivity to the families of the hanged (no word on the decapitateds' loved ones)

Anonymous said...

Ted Knight was Polish (Tadeusz Wladyslaw Konopka) and not a classic Anglo WASP. Just for the record.

Anonymous said...

I can say that I don't know a single person, liberals included, who believe any of the noose and hate crime nonsense. The liberals won't really admit it outright, because they are uncomfortable for obvious reasons, but like I said most people aren't buying this garbage from the press and the black community. To me this focus on nonexistent racism and hate crimes looks more like desperation to me on the part of the media and liberals/leftists.

Anonymous said...

I recall the media induced mania of church burnings in the mid 90's. ATF put together a special task force only to find the burnings were not being done by robed Klansmen but by robed clergymen. After breathless front page reporting the story just kind of drifted away.

Last week, the Atlanta papers reported a noose and other vandalism was found on a statue of Tuupac Shukar, a murdered rapper/actor. The police did not designate it as a hate crime but the center housing the statue immediately labeled it as such and gathered the press together for a conference. The police arrested a black suspect in this case.