What a horrible weekend. While misty clouds hung low overhead, my wife came down with her second bad cold in a month. Accordingly, I hung around the house making meals for her and consequently was forced to observe the world through social media for two days, there being little else to do. I have come to the conclusion that it is no longer any fun being an American. If the first two days of the Era of Trump is any indication, I will need to make some drastic life changes to survive the next four years.
This was the weekend when postmodern critical theory, once the domain of the cloistered tenured radicals of academia came back to bite liberals in the ass. Now that Trump occupies the Oval Office, his spokesmen introduced America to the concept of alternative facts. You can have your facts, and I can have my facts, objective truth being simply a social construct since objective reality doesn't really exist. Checkmate.
Case in point. Yesterday, I saw what I thought was a perfectly hilarious picture on Twitter of a protest placard which proclaimed, "Make them pay for razors if we pay for tampons." I posted it on my Facebook wall with the pithy comment, "Seriously y'all, anyone know where I can score some of these free razors?" I thought that the joke was fairly straight forward, and would require no in depth analysis. Wrong.
I was soon introduced to the fact-checking wrath of humorless, Google-powered progressive millennials. I learned of the scourge of gender bias in the field of personal hygiene products not only here in the United States but all around the world. Apparently, in France there was a 20% luxury tax on tampons but no luxury tax whatsoever on men's razors. Thank God, it was recently repealed. Surely, this was what the protester had in mind when she/he constructed her/his sign. But wait. Isn't the background architecture suspiciously European? And what about the blue sky in the background? Surely, this sign was not from the Women's March in Washington?! Just about the time I was becoming convinced that humor was no longer available to me as a communication tool, I learned of the fascinating field of white balance. No, this is not a racial analysis of athleticism, but rather a photography technique whereby one can take a cell phone picture on a cloudy day and make the sky appear blue using a tungsten something or other. Oh, and the sign in the background is in English...or is it French? Needless to say, I was completely out of my depth and retreated under the assault. That will teach me to try to inject humor into an otherwise humorless weekend.
So, what to do? I have zero confidence that anyone in the Trump administration can be relied upon to tell me the truth about anything. Yet, the vanguard of the resistance, the unhinged, f-bomb spewing left who think the comparative price points of tampons and razors are a thing, leave me totally cold. But this is how life is going to be for the next four years. Maybe I'll call it the Revenge of the Postmodernists.
vero, Quid est veritas?
This was the weekend when postmodern critical theory, once the domain of the cloistered tenured radicals of academia came back to bite liberals in the ass. Now that Trump occupies the Oval Office, his spokesmen introduced America to the concept of alternative facts. You can have your facts, and I can have my facts, objective truth being simply a social construct since objective reality doesn't really exist. Checkmate.
Case in point. Yesterday, I saw what I thought was a perfectly hilarious picture on Twitter of a protest placard which proclaimed, "Make them pay for razors if we pay for tampons." I posted it on my Facebook wall with the pithy comment, "Seriously y'all, anyone know where I can score some of these free razors?" I thought that the joke was fairly straight forward, and would require no in depth analysis. Wrong.
I was soon introduced to the fact-checking wrath of humorless, Google-powered progressive millennials. I learned of the scourge of gender bias in the field of personal hygiene products not only here in the United States but all around the world. Apparently, in France there was a 20% luxury tax on tampons but no luxury tax whatsoever on men's razors. Thank God, it was recently repealed. Surely, this was what the protester had in mind when she/he constructed her/his sign. But wait. Isn't the background architecture suspiciously European? And what about the blue sky in the background? Surely, this sign was not from the Women's March in Washington?! Just about the time I was becoming convinced that humor was no longer available to me as a communication tool, I learned of the fascinating field of white balance. No, this is not a racial analysis of athleticism, but rather a photography technique whereby one can take a cell phone picture on a cloudy day and make the sky appear blue using a tungsten something or other. Oh, and the sign in the background is in English...or is it French? Needless to say, I was completely out of my depth and retreated under the assault. That will teach me to try to inject humor into an otherwise humorless weekend.
So, what to do? I have zero confidence that anyone in the Trump administration can be relied upon to tell me the truth about anything. Yet, the vanguard of the resistance, the unhinged, f-bomb spewing left who think the comparative price points of tampons and razors are a thing, leave me totally cold. But this is how life is going to be for the next four years. Maybe I'll call it the Revenge of the Postmodernists.
vero, Quid est veritas?
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