America, land of the free to be stupid

[CHIMO]

There are some remarks that are so stupid that to be even vaguely aware of them is the intellectual equivalent of living nextdoor to Chernobyl. This is what it's been like to live in the United States for the last year or two: it's the moronic influenza, as the irate among us find increasingly convoluted ways to say decreasingly less (as I just did).

Hard to say precisely what it is that people – "folks", as President Obama likes to call them – are so darn exercised about, but they say things that show that their command of any words with more than two syllables is completely questionable, like: "The president is a socialist", or "healthcare reform is unconstitutional". Of course, what they want to say, and what they should say, is something to the effect that they hate this man that those people elected president and they want to kill him – but only people like me, elitists with Ivy League degrees – people who actually have read Das Kapital and who have studied constitutional law – talk trash like that.

If you don't know better, apparently, you demand to see the president's birth certificate – suddenly, every American is on border patrol – and you start claiming that there is nothing about separation of church and state in the first amendment, even though the supreme court has ruled on the point more than 25 times since 1878.

Look, America is a very sad place right now, which is what the Tea Party movement and the midterm elections are about. I could analyse the particulars, but then I would be no better than the whole 24-hour media machine – which, given that unemployment is at 9.6%, is lucky that no one has noticed that they don't exactly do their job. If the news outlets were actually reporting, they would tell us the honest and awful truth: the United States is a post-industrial empire in decline, like England or Belgium or worse (is there worse?). There is no next. We are at next.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/05/us-politics-us-midterm-elections-2010

[ixion]

1. Stupid is the new black.

I'm moving to the country. :hide:

[madmax]

3. huh?

[Igel]

4. It's a take off on a fashion metaphor.

"Black is in."

"Red is the new black." I.e., "Red is the color now most popular or fashionable, replacing black."

". . . Is the new black" has long since achieved cliche status in this usage, going back perhaps 5 or more years.

My favorite is "noire is the new black."

Not everybody understood the allusion to fashion and style. But they managed to find a new interpretation that made a sort of sense. They did it with the race-track expression "stay the course" (parallel to "stay the night", i.e., don't leave for the time specified) and reinterpreted it to mean "maintain course". Staying the course in Iraq would mean "staying until the job is done" according to the old definition; the newly imputed meaning understands it to mean "not changing strategy". So "X is the new black" acquired, for some, a racial meaning as they interpreted "black" to mean skin and not cloth.

Hence you get "Muslim is the new black," which to some speakers is primarily going to mean that "being Muslim is now all the rage, really fashionable" and for others is going to mean "now Muslims are the dominant target of racism and oppression."

At least the reinterpretation of "stay the course" didn't yield utterances with pretty much obligatorily contradictory meanings.

[madmax]

2. Before KO, Rachel, DU and others

around 1999 I turned to the UK Gaurdian for my news. Especially during the 2000 debacle.

They're still doing a damn fine job putting their American counterparts to shame. Thank you UK Gaurdian for helping me keep my sanity throught those years.