House of Eratosthenes

Myself, and others, have noticed something that is more-or-less a constant in left-wing talking points. Said talking points have a proclivity for going through the motions of edifying and elucidating, providing information where it did not previously exist, but when you take them apart factually it emerges that the talking points are just instructions to people to think certain things, with veiled and emotionally-charged scoldings directed at those who are not willing to so think. With little or no factual foundation whatsoever.

In response to that, the left-wing intelligentsia has worked overtime to answer this to charge, and little by little, refute it.

Whoops, no, waitaminnit. No they haven’t, and no they aren’t.

Cal Thomas, call your office. You’re in t-r-o-u-b-l-e…………

…wait until you read Thomas’ response to a comment by Jane Hall. Here, she notes that republicans will try to take down Obama by portraying Michelle as an angry black woman.

JANE HALL, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: I think one way that people who are going to try to defeat Obama is to somehow prove he’s other — he’s not one of us. If they can’t prove he’s a Muslim, then let’s prove his wife is an angry black woman. I think it’s going to get ugly. I don’t think John McCain will sanction it. I think McCain — it’s my opinion he will generally try…

Even though Hall wasn’t suggesting that people ought to portray Michelle as an angry black woman, Cal Thomas seemed to take Jane Hall’s statement as an endorsement of sorts, and here was his utterly reprehensible sexist and racist response to Hall:

THOMAS: I want to pick up on something that Jane said about the angry black woman. Look at the image of angry black women on television. Politically you have Maxine Waters of California, liberal Democrat. She’s always angry every time she gets on television. Cynthia McKinney, another angry black woman. And who are the black women you see on the local news at night in cities all over the country. They’re usually angry about something. They’ve had a son who has been shot in a drive-by shooting. They are angry at Bush. So you don’t really have a profile of non-angry black women.

So now Thomas[,] in addition to smearing Obama, Hillary, and Michelle, smeared all black women as “angry black women,” including such notable angry black women as Maxine Waters, who is “always angry every time she gets on television,” and Cynthia McKinney, who is “just another angry black woman.”

Apparently not satisfied with offending just those women, he goes on to smear black newscasters on local news broadcasts as angry black women who “are usually angry about something”; he smears angry black women whose sons have been killed in drive-by shootings; and then he notes matter of factly that black women “are angry at Bush.” Since most black women are democrats, Thomas has just smeared millions of black women as “angry black women.”

So in the parlance of hardcore leftists who write for DailyKOS, “notice” is a verb enjoying synonymous equivalence with “smear.”

You know, I hadn’t…er…noticed it before Cal Thomas pointed it out. But I do have recollections of black women who aren’t angry, and each and every single one of them is a person I know from talking face-to-face. Electronic media is a very different thing, because in that forum there are powerful nameless faceless people who get to decide what I’m ready to see. And for reasons I don’t quite understand — or maybe I do, and that’s a loathsome thought by itself — these nameless faceless people seem to think the black woman I’m ready to see has to be angry, or else I have little interest in seeing her.

So you KOSsacks are upset with Cal Thomas for pointing it out, huh. That’s about as clear a case as can be imagined of killing the messenger. It seems to me your beef ought to be with whoever’s made the decision that such currency is involved in the stereotype of the Angry Black Woman (ABW). Why does this image travel so fast and so far? In fact, does it? Are we really that ready to digest it, or is this a stereotype that’s being foisted onto us?

You know how I see this…dialog…for lack of a better word? It might surprise you how you come across, KOSsacks. Here, you seem to be pretty enthused at times about viewing things from the perspective of other people, let’s show you how it looks from mine.

WATERS, MCKINNEY, M. OBAMA, et al: Grrrrrr!!!!

THOMAS: Huh. Seems whenever someone wants to show me a picture of a black woman, it’s always an angry one.

DAILYKOS: We’ll show you! Grrrrrr!!!!

I mean, that pretty much captures it. Face it — other than thundering away with your well-practiced theatrical indignation, you’re not proving anything here whatsoever.

Unless it’s something like — you don’t have to be black and female to be angry? Is that the point? Or is it the same ol’ same ol’ purely-populist mob-rule “I find this deplorable and can I get an Amen here?”

Frankly, if there’s some other sentiment you’re wishing to trot out into the public venue to have evaluated by others, obsequious rage seems to have fallen away as the preferred vehicle for conveying it. Yeah it’s pretty tough to bust loose from that after half a century of brandishing it as the only tool worth using in your chest. But using one tool in the chest, is a sign of intellectual laziness. Mr. Thomas is indicted, here, by you, for the a crime that is the essence of the exact opposite, which is intellectual vigor; he noticed a pattern, took in some more data, found the pattern to be substantiated, and noted his observations publicly.

So are you deliberately promoting an atmosphere of intellectual laziness and discouraging one of intellectual vigor? Or are you doing it by accident? Either way, it’s rather telling that you could have challenged what he noticed, and instead like a cowardly prairie dog, have chosen to disappear into that mob-rule-hole of “that’s icky, all in favor say aye.”

From where I sit, women of color are counting on someone to engage in an exercise more forensically taxing…and it seems Cal Thomas is the only one who has delivered. I’m not a black woman, angry or otherwise — but I am a white guy and you know what? We have some ugly stereotypes of our own. We can’t jump, we’re klutzy, we don’t know what’s going on and we don’t care, our wives have to do everything for us from vacuuming the carpet to changing the oil in the car, our kids talk back to us and call us by our first names, we’re such spineless cowards that we let ’em…we never admit it when we’re lost…

Believe me. If a nationally televised commentator like Cal Thomas takes the time to point out “look at the image of the klutzy white man” the last thing I’m going to do is be insulted. I’ll probably search my archives to see if he plagiarized some of the things I’ve had to say, and if I found in the affirmative, better than even odds I’d donate the material to the public domain retroactively and write up a brand new post giving him a big gushy thank-you.

Update: Broadband-and-TV company is doing some work on our connection which yesterday went in the crapper. Things seem to be ship-shape with our home equipment, but the equipment just beyond our doorstep is either overworked or failing. It’s the switching equipment that services about ten or twenty customers in our area, of whom about half a dozen of us have reported problems.

Anyway, during the ten minutes or so I had to halt the blogging and let the planet spin onward without the benefit of my perpetually injected blogger wisdom, I started doing some chores, which included helping my gal out of the shower & drying her off, since one of her arms is out of commission. Surgery last week. Long story.

And of course the bedroom television set was frozen because the equipment was down. Guess what it was frozen on. Michelle Obama. Giving a speech. She looked very, very upset and angry.

That’s a randomly selected frame. Interesting.

KOSsacks, I hope you’re not holding your breath waiting for that Cal Thomas apology.

During, and since Hurricane Katrina, the left media has hammered us with images of angry black mayors, angry black police, angry black looters, angry black gang-bangers, angry black killers, and yes, tons of angry black women, all raging against white people.

After forty years of set asides, racial preference quotas, wars on poverty, free housing, free food, three trillion dollars of welfare re-distribution; and they’re more angry than ever. Why?

Their anger is textbook denial and projection. These angry black women have failed miserably as women, their families are broken, their men treat them badly, their children are in dispair, and they take the easy way out. Blame White men.

Anger is a self-destructive enterprise, and these women are a classic example.
- Mr. Hatchetman | 06/18/2008 @ 17:43
Well, see, the activists have decided any black who isn’t angry isn’t really black.

So all they show us is angry blacks, representin’. Anyone else is an “Uncle Tom”.
- philmon | 06/18/2008 @ 22:51

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Angry Black WomenWednesday, June 18th, 2008

Angry Black Women
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008