Podcast: Less Than Five Minutes of Sarcasm
What the response to that infamous Sydney Sweeney commercial really means....
Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
I’m not seeing any podcast here.
Thanks for the heads-up, Ken. The system glitched when I was uploading and it jettisoned the five minute recording. The sound is not especially good, because I recorded on a whim, without notes, on my laptop. I hope to do more of these and ordered a microphone to fit the USB-C port.
I agree that it’s hard to work up a good outrage anymore, when someone on the left espouses another one of those inane attacks against tradition, Western Civilization, or the perfidious patriarchy. It’s just what they do. I get impatient with my friends who once again get in a lather, exclaiming “don’t they realize how ridiculous they sound?” Better to troll them, bait them, pour gasoline on the fire in the minds of the soy-boys. Give them a new micro-aggression to chew on today.
Those people hate beauty. They hate the idea that some people are better looking than others. They hate the genes that create the beauty that some have and others don’t have.
Just ridicule them for light entertainment. Watch and laugh. They are not serious people anyway.
A few weeks ago I was watching an old comedy on streaming TV and one of the all too frequent commercials came on. I usually hit mute to spare my ears the torture and close my eyes to rest them. This time I made the mistake of keeping them open. There were several overweight females of assorted races in tight fitting exercise outfits. One of them, the most obese one, of course, bent over as if to display her very large posterior, and the camera zeroed in on it. I turned away in disgust. What would make anyone think that anyone would want to see that? For those who watch a lot of TV and allow their senses to be assaulted like that all the time, the sight of Sydney Sweeney must be like a shot of morphine. Imagine breathing in the fresh air after surviving a gas attack. It just feels better. Anyone who would actually cringe at such a commercial is probably beyond hope.
Look, kids! Somebody said something nice about a white person on the television. Please join the army now.