To play the old guy for a moment — because it’s typecasting, that’s who Mister Jones is anyway — in response to the Lee Camp “Stop Telling Me” list and video that Laska posted and reflected on, I say this:
I’m not “telling you” shit, and nobody cares what you celebrate or don’t celebrate. Being old, cranky, and full of necrotic guile, I see your copping this defiant attitude as a member of a supposedly oppressed class — oppression universalized here as nothing worse than being being bossed around by your elders — as a classic ploy of adolescents.
There’s only one thing I really do have over you: I was young , you’ve never been old, and you will be. It’s infuriating. I remember. Nothing makes it more infuriating than hearing some old guy say “I remember.” I remember that too.
Because that’s just the way fifteen-year-olds are: it’s all about you, desperately flailing to self-define, in endless reaction to the elders you pretend to disdain but can’t stop gazing at. Since you’re not fifteen, grow the fuck up and stop pissing, obsessively, on my parade. She’s obviously won the nomination as much as anyone else ever has who’s been in the position she’s in, which is the only point specifically regarding history, dimwit, celebrate it or no.
Or . . . is it the only point? Might she … get indicted before the convention!?
But no, because system. And because rigged.
There’s an interesting way in which she’s NOT the first, and I appreciate the way you use capital letters to get your point across there, because uppercase always makes things more persuasive. You have the sense of history to invoke ’08 and ’12, but let me rely on a classic privilege of age: telling you a rambling story with no real point. When I was a lad in the late 19th century, Victoria Woodhull — a member of the American Communist Party, a gender-rights and sex pioneer, a feminist so radical that you’ve never heard of her — ran for president. You wouldn’t like her: she was also the first woman with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. So a “corporate-funded big-bank employee.”
Anyway, face it. Really, HRC is — no, I mean “IS” — the first real female candidate, and with any luck she’s about to be the first female president. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, again, I don’t care, but then why would you invoke McKinney and Stein? See, this shouldn’t be a bullet list. I know the list thing is supposed to make your plaint seem unarguably hardnosed in its logic; intellectually, though, it’s a circle. There are things you could do to fix that, but they’d require effort, and some regard for clarity not only of expression but also of thought. Stuff old people like.
— “Corrupt kleptocracy.” Now here’s something I can get with. Cleanse the kleptocracy of corruption! Make it a clean kleptocracy!
— “Stop being sheep.” Oh. OK, I will. Is this good? Just tell me what to do. So I can stop being a sheep.
Get off my lawn.
[UPDATE: I’ll save this for a more serious post, but: Anyone yakking on TV about a corrupt kleptocracy with that “Russia Today” logo in the corner of the screen has got to be fucking kidding.]
In at The End of The World 
I love you, man.
Everything I meant to say in my meek comment post. But was afraid to “wave the cane”. Plus, my doctor says that I shouldn’t elevate my heart rate.
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OK, cranky guys, I tried. Not sure that bad constructions and short history is really the right standards for internet communications, but let me try this…
“I’m not “telling you” shit, and nobody cares what you celebrate or don’t celebrate.” That’s certainly not been my experience as a person who hasn’t loved HRC from the beginning or as a witness to scoldings.
But I think we’re missing the dynamic of the day to day Sanders-Clinton argument. A lot of the back and forth – social, MSM, interpersonal threads, IRL convoes – involves second guessing people’s motives for their votes, which leads to characterizations of the person, which leads to condemnation for failure to celebrate. Remember Madeline Albright telling young women there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women? Check out All Caps Lady storming the web against a backlash that wasn’t happening, a conflation that Obama and Clinton and Sanders are the same and the only reason for not liking HRC was sexism.
http://www.pajiba.com/politics/an-allcaps-explosion-of-feelings-regarding-the-liberal-backlash-against-hillary-clinton.php
I’m trying to provoke a conversation about the generation coming up . . . what’s a conversation that lets us do more than critique the technique of a comedian? Post something else?
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No, no no. That’s not what my rant was supposed to be/do — but too slammed now, have to respond later. Anyway, you *did* provoke a conversation… more to come.
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Jerry: . . . I have a suspicion that he’s converted to Judaism just for the jokes.
Priest: And this offends you as a Jewish person?
Jerry: No, it offends me as a comedian!
So one of the things I like about this blog, and my loosely maintained persona on it, is the freedom it gives me to let fly, as if with a full-on pov, with an exaggerated portion of my gut reactions (admittedly genuine) to some of the things I see and hear regarding this insane election cycle. Hence the alias, etc., which is anything but a full-fledged character. Sometimes it’s more me, sometimes it’s more Mister Jones.
In this case, I was *trying* to critique a comedian, or, I admit, actually compete with him. Or with a “comedian,” in that I think he’s wrapping his activism in what he thinks is an appeal to the funnybone, as Laska discussed. That needs unpacking — I’m kind of obsessed with that issue — but maybe not here.
Put it this way: I’m critiquing his comedy partly because I think I’m funnier than he is — I mean that in this ranting mode, I narcissistically find Mister Jones funnier — and that makes a part of my point, even if my rant really can’t be said to *be* funnier than his, which would be in the ear of the beholder anyway.
I mean: I think I have a sense of humor. He doesn’t. I’m not secretly being serious. He is.
I don’t *really* think that what I’m saying here represents all there is to the younger generation’s insurgency and all that it entails; I’m just permitting a slice of my old-school, old-fartism to fly, for the sheer, pointless thrill of it, to see what’s in there. He, however, appears to sincerely believe that anyone who — not tells *him* to celebrate, but actually celebrates (he’s tipped his hand on that) HRC’s presumptive nomination — is a sheep, a priori, or far worse, and that he’s been assigned to wake them up.
He’s trying to persuade people. I’m not. So as totally not a comedian as I am, compared to him I’m a total comedian.
In real life, I’m actually very interested in the generational battles involved in this nominating process, as y’all know, and as Laska’s post mentioned. I don’t want to get into a real generational war. No percentage, the younger generation always wins anyway! (Until they lose.) But getting some thinking going here on that issue is a good idea. Because it got raised at first via some political comedy, I may have pushed it out of shape a bit, but if the idea was to spark conversation, it worked! We can definitely springboard off Lee’s stuff to more substantive matters. . . .
But I do think it’s just as fair to goof on “bad constructions and short history” — that’s it, and succinct! — in this guy’s posts and videos as it is, for example, in Gopnick’s essays.
Show business is my life.
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Wow, I feel the energy and emotions rising now. That is, NOW. Right on, Mr. Jones. You did mean necrotic and not just neurotic, right? I loved the Victoria Woodhull comments which may inspire my write-in Presidential vote. I’ve never been worried about the odds that HRC will and should be elected as the next President. Odds are significantly better than Exaggerator winning Saturday’s Belmont.
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I meant “necrotic,” a word I first learned from our old boss (so I’m probably using it wrong). If you write in Woodhull, and Trump takes the state you live in, you’ll feel really bad. Just saying.
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