De “Debil” made me do it
Flip Wilson as Geraldine Jones in a sketch from
The Flip Wilson Show in 1971
Some years ago a black comedian, Flip Wilson, made a relatively successful television career by creating a slippery, evasive hustler type who claimed that all his miscreant behaviour, all his lies, all his sleazy tricks were really not his fault. That bad old “debil” made him do it. It wasn’t his fault!! You couldn’t blame him. Really, he deserved sympathy. He was really the victim of the bad guys. It was someone else’s fault. On television he got away with it “in spades” as his fans roared adoringly in laughter. But in reality, “fate” is not that tolerant.
Recently, some second rate comedienne tried to jazz up her questionable act by presenting a ”mock up” of the severed head of the President of the United States. Dripping in blood, the head was held by this person in the manner of the blackhooded ISIS barbarians as they proceeded in their quest of eliminiating Christians. With a grim, unsmiling stare, she used this grotesque, nauseating maneuver to elicit laughs. Apart from the few cretans who did laugh and chortle with her, the mass of Americans erupted in decent disgust and horror.
She was immediately fired. Her behaviour was far beyond the boundaries of good taste and honest, free disagreement. It was obscene and revolting. The First Amendment does has some penumbras and emanations. Decent Americans - Democrat, Republican, Independent, and others - agree that such misuse of our freedoms is over the line. Goodness, honour, decency and truth stand above party.
People are beginning to suspect that selective tolerance does have serious weaknesses, harmful to the Common Good. Some things are just plain wrong. Her firing was right and reflective of the deep underlying, intuitive goodness of the nation, whose goodness though threatened still endures.
But, interestingly enough, in the mode of Flip Wilson, she with a great show of tears and obvious meltdown, accused others of being at fault. Rather than admit her gross acting out as inappropriate, she blamed others for her downfall. She pleaded that she was the victim. It was not her fault. Some bad guys, lurking in the background, were to blame. She should be exonerated.
How to explain such infantile reaction? How can an adult (?) person say such rubbish? How can an adult toss responsibility to “some one else”? Something evil has happened to our collective social attitude. Political correctness? Loss of will? Growth of narcissism?
Even our political figures often reflect this decay. In the presidential election last year there was a surprising result with the underdog winning the Big Prize. According to several sources, the loser has undergone severe emotional reactions since. She has firmly believed that the Presidental role was hers by destiny and, hence, has been (and still is) shaken by what she and others thought was impossible.
Despite the objective evidence that the winner got the votes and she didn’t, she cannot emotionally accept the fact of her loss. All types of drives were instituted challenging the validlity of the outcome. All failed. The President is firmly set in the leadership role. Yet this woman after two failed attempts at winning the WH, continues to appear on media outlets, in explaining her loss as due to “others.”
It was the Russians. It was the Director of the FBI. It was the “deplorables”, the unwashed, the ignorant, the selfish. It was her dumb staff. It was the leaks. Anything to avoid facing the harsh truth. Which is: It was she herself who is the reason for her loss. She was a weak candidate. She couldn’t connect. Her steely eyes betrayed the fixed smile. Her cold, calculating nature came through all the fancy talk and the makeup artistry (the absence of which shows her as a baggy-eyed aging woman).
Her presentation is that she should be upheld and believed and perhaps supported a third time for the WH. It was not her fault she lost. She should have won by 50 points! It can’t be true that she lost. But if she did, it was the bad guys who did it. Not she. She has been misused. We should feel her pain and sympathize with her.
How different is the Character of this person from the “comedienne” described above? Different in degree? Probably.. …Different in kind? Perhaps the same in that each tries to shift off the blame on to other factors. Both refuse to accept responsibility for the discomfort in their own lives…
Cassius speaking to Brutus in Julius Caesar, a 1953 American film adaptation of the Shakespearean play
Such attempts at evasion have been part of human nature since Adam. Shakespeare highlights it when he writes: “The fault, my dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” Even Walt Kelly’s Pogo sees it: “We have found the enemy and it is us.”
We all try to escape taking the fall, the blame. But it does appear to have become intensified in recent times. If the modern moral system accepts almost everything except throwing a cigarerette into the lake, what would be wrong with getting the best deal one can get regardless of truth and conscience? Why bother about strictures of commandments and the “nonsense” of religious teaching?
I feel like the moronic “guard” in the bank robbery ad who says: “I am here just to report there is a robbery.” So he turns to the bank patrons and says: “There is a robbery.” So, he stands there watching the thieves cart away the loot. I watch the deterioration of society and do little more than Kvetch (yiddish for complain)!!!! We are all saying that someone should do something about this mess…. But who is the somebody? Maybe like Pogo’s insight: The somebody is us!
I am part of “us” and as such I should, I think, take my share of the responsibility for the mess we find in modern society. Though some ‘thinkers ”claim that present society is wonderful and going surely in the right direction with transgender bathrooms and pot and unmarried moms, I think we are going down the drain to extinction. And to the extent that I pretend about truth, I am responsible!! Mea culpa is not necessarily the slogan of the scrup!!!
It may be the sign of a big boy!!!