D.B.Tarpley's Amazing Ass Blog-6/1/18

Greetings people and peoplettes,

First, a warning: (There is offensive material contained within this blog consisting of extreme racism. If you are easily offended I strongly recommend that you do not read any further.)

Thank you.

This entry is inspired by the tweet issued by the “comedian” Roseanne Barr which will undoubtedly end her career. But before we get to that ‘Holy Fucknuts!’ situation let me take a moment to set the stage: Racism, it’s everywhere. It is a prevalent force in today’s society and it is driven by ignorance.

A society’s humor reflects it’s norms in a way which is undeniable so I thought I would take a moment to relate some jokes which have impacted me over the years. A couple of these jokes use the ‘N’ word. This word is hard for white people to say and hard for black people to hear, especially coming from white lips. So, for the duration of this blog in an attempt to ease any social pain these jokes may inflict I will be replacing the ‘N’ word with the word ‘Fluffernutter’. It sounds ridiculous but then the whole concept of letting a single word hold that much power over an entire society is a concept which I find beyond silly.

All jokes are born of pain; someone is getting hurt and we laugh finding comfort in the fact that it is someone else and not us slipping on the banana peel. It is often through great ignorance that this humor comes about. Someone stupid does something dumb and we laugh at their slow cognitive process. You can group these jokes together by whichever stereotype the dumb person is. It can be a Polish joke – classic, a blonde joke – personal favorite, or if you are an Alabama fan you can make it about your rival replacing the subject with ‘Auburn fan’… whatever works for your personal aesthetic.

Of course in this day and age anyone can take offense at anything. I could tell you I had a Polish uncle who loved telling Polish jokes but that doesn’t mean that a person of Polish decent doesn’t have the right to be offended by such a joke. After all, those jokes were born by New York City xenophobic ‘natives’ fearful of the influx of European immigrants who needed a way to undermine these newcomers so that they themselves could feel justified in their emotional response.

For example –

((Q - How many Pollocks does it take to change a light bulb? A – 3… 1 to hold the bulb and 2 to turn the ladder.))

These jokes proved to be so popular that they have transcended their original purpose to find their way into the national lexicon. No one with an ounce of intelligence actually believes it takes 3 Polish people to change a light bulb... 2 tops but never 3. Jokes featuring slow people are funny; but only funny if you are actually talking about people who are not in fact certifiably slow. For example you can’t tell a Polish joke and replace the subject with someone who is afflicted with mental retardation. It just does work within the comic paradigm. The mistake has to be the ‘fault’ of the person who is being poked fun of, and not an unavoidable medical condition. And all this of course is implied within the unspoken code of this thing we call ‘joke’.

The same can be said of blonde jokes. No one actually believes that blonde hair creates a slowing of synaptic connections.

((A blonde, a redhead, and a brunette are all about to race in a prestigious breast-stroke competition. The starter pistol ‘POP’s and all three dive into the water. The brunette and the redhead shoot across the pool to the finish line but the blond takes quite a while to complete the race. When she reaches the end she pulls herself out of the pool, huffs over to the judges’ table, and declares – “I don’t know but I’m pretty sure those 2 were using their arms!”))

Some people are offended… mostly blonde people and most specifically blonde women because the majority of these jokes have a sexual element to them. So where do we draw the line when all jokes seem to have elements of racism, sexism, ageism… folicalism? If the subject is a slow farmer then you have what… ruralism? There are too many damn ‘isms’ out there.

((Missus Brown sends her husband Earl over to borrow some eggs from their neighbor Farmer Jones. Earl walks into the Jones barn and sees his good friend Clem standing in front of a tractor with his pants down around his ankles rubbing his penis all over the hood. “What in tarnation are you doing Clem?” asks Earl. “Well the missus done up and left me so I went and saw that brain doctor in town and he told me I should do something to attract her.”))

The preceding needs to be read aloud.

Jokes using the word fluffernutter or a variation thereof are of course the worst. Given this country’s historical relationship with slavery and the fact that the word fluffernutter was essentially developed and used exclusively as a means of demeaning an entire group of people based on nothing more than the color of their skin - a means for white slave owners to place these people, these objects they owned, in a place of ‘lesser than’ which would then appease the owner’s frame of mind. If black people were ‘lesser then’ – not even human, often compared to apes – then the owners could rest easy at night knowing the moral conditions they set on the situation satisfied any qualms they may have had with the whole right and wrong thing tumbling around in their head.

This is why the word fluffernutter is so important. It became the main tool used to mentally disparage generations of men and women from the inception of colonial slavery right down to present day. Here is a joke I read growing up. It was collected in one of those ‘Truly Tasteless Joke’ books which were really popular in the mid-eighties. And I read several variations of this joke throughout the series –

((A truck driver stops at a truck stop and picks up a redneck headed the way he is driving. The two strike up a decent conversation along the way when suddenly a deer races in front of the truck causing him to swerve. The cab careens into a ditch while the trailer swerves hard to the left, busting open to spill the cargo, a load of bowling balls, all over the interstate. The redneck leaps out of the cab, grabs a baseball bat from the floor and exclaims, “Quick, we have to smash them all before they hatch!”))

That’s it… that’s the joke. The ‘humor’ comes from the fact that the redneck believes the bowling balls to be fluffernutter eggs. I guess you could say the focus is on the ignorance of the redneck in the face of such a basic biological fact but the tone and the inference is still one of raw, unchecked, blind hatred. I believe that when I initially read this, at the age of let’s say 13, I might have smiled. But by the time I got to the third of fourth iteration of it, the fact that it simply wasn’t funny and was purely mean spirited began to dawn on me.

As you grow up you make mistakes and you learn things. I definitely took some time to develop a sense of what is correct and what is not when it comes to humor. A few years later, let’s say I was 15, I ran to my really good black friend and told him this joke –

((A big black man walks into a bar, strolls up to the first little white guy at the end of the counter and says “I’s big, I’s black, and I loves to fuck white women.” The little white man begins to shake all over, slowly backs away from the bar and leaves. The big black man moves down to the next little white guy at the bar and declares, “I’s big, I’s black, and I loves to fuck white women.” The little white guy spits his drink back in the glass and runs away. Smiling a huge grin, the big black man ambles down to the last little white guy sitting at the bar, a polish chap by the name of Worshowski, and states bold as day, “I’s big, I’s black, and I loves to fuck white women.” Worshowski replies, “I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t fuck a fluffernutter either.”))

I was really excited to tell my friend this joke. Somewhere in the back of my mind it made me hip, down, able to say something most people can’t. Surely he would know ‘I’ wasn’t racist. The punchline was the idiocy of the Polish man. I wanted to share a cool laugh. I wanted to be cooler than I so obviously was. My intentions were good. The results were not.

I could see the hurt in my friend’s eyes. I tried explaining the joke only to make it worse. I was genuinely confused. I was very fond of my friend and I would never intentionally hurt him. But I knew I had. I had to ask myself, ‘Am I the bad guy... Am I the asshole?’ I don’t think either my 13 or 15 year old selves were bad people. They were just ignorant… uninformed. And this is the crux of all racism… ignorance.

I count that moment as one of the most shameful in my life but I also realize it as a teachable moment because I learned something valuable. My friend and I remained friends through graduation but time has of course erased all that. That's just how life rolls. At the time though he realized I was genuinely clueless and I had to open my eyes to the fact that I wasn’t as cool as I thought I was.

So now we get to Roseanne Barr – a seasoned professional stand-up comedian with over 30 years in the business of telling jokes. She knows everything I just discussed in and out and more. And yet she tweeted something she later called a ‘bad joke.’ I think it is safe to say that what she tweeted doesn’t qualify as a joke… much less a bad one.

Let’s break it down – Muslim Brotherhood (I think she was trying to refer to some mythical parallel to the Aryan Brotherhood, like some sort of black supremacy hate group bent on world domination; but the only actual Muslim Brotherhood is a collection of academic Muslim scholars who banded together in the late 1920's to promote social activism within their community through political organization and charity work… so in a way that’s a compliment.) + Planet of the Apes (This can be taken 2 ways, either as a film franchise with 9 films to date, or as an actual planet covered with apes. Which would be odd because then you have a political organization and a planet, two abstract objects, mating to create a person. I am sorry people I am just trying to find some sort of logic here… I am trying to find the ‘joke’.) = Valerie Jarrett.

It is obvious when any attempt is made at dissection that this ‘joke’ is nothing more than an attempt to take a black woman and put her in a place of “lesser than”. There is no wit, there is no story there is only a statement that the woman is equal parts Muslim – as if that were a dirty word, and ape – which is a comparative throwback to the days of active slavery. The sheer ugliness of this comparison should in no way, shape or form ever be titled, ‘joke’. This can only ever be called hate – without innocent naiveté or mistaken hubris.

This was a vicious, intentional, ugly and very personal attack. Which in and of itself would be fine but for the fact that it compares black people to apes - way beyond the point of being culturally insensitive. Roseanne's extensive platform amplifies the damage these words can cause.

ABC was right to cancel Roseanne. They would have been right to have executed. I wouldn’t piss in her mouth if she was dying of thirst. What she did was malicious and born of ill intent. Whatever her personal feelings for Valerie Jarrett’s policy decisions as a member of the Obama administration, comparing her to an ape solely in the context of her being black was not only ignorant, it was evil. I take it back… I would piss in Roseanne’s mouth, but only to help her swallow a crusty, dry turd. And that’s no joke.

My favorite racial joke of all time was told to me by that friend in high-school I mentioned earlier. He told it to me after I told him the joke about the Polish man in the bar. It goes like this –

((Q – What is black and blue and floats down the river. A – A white man who’s been telling fluffernutter jokes.))

Point taken Wallace.

Point taken.

Until next time, keep a joke or two in your back pocket and have yourself an amazing ass day.