Skins weren't always so thin

When humor goes, there goes civilization. Erma Bombeck
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/ermabombec131317.html

When humor goes, there goes civilization. Erma Bombeck
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/ermabombec131317.html

When humor goes, there goes civilization. Erma Bombeck
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/ermabombec131317.html

 

 

When humor goes, there goes civilization.  - Erma Bombeck

Instapundit linked to an interesting post at brothersjuddblog:

Sales of 'Caucasians' shirts, depicting the Cleveland Indians' team mascot as a caricature of a white person, skyrocketed one day after ESPN's Bomani Jones wore one on a show, the shirt's creator said Friday.

The conclusion at  newsbusters:

So, in other words, Bomani Jones’ stunt backfired. He wore the shirt to provoke anger on the part of white people by flipping the tables and exposing them as hypocrites for being offended by ‘Caucasians,’ while they cheer for the Redskins, Chief Wahoo, the Braves, and so on.

Except very few, if any, white people are offended by the shirt. Proving the opposite of Jones’ point. And that maybe, just maybe, it’s time for race hucksters like Bomani Jones to get a life.

As the Erma Bombeck insight makes clear, humor make life bearable...

The way to make a pluralist multiculturalism workable is demonstrated by  Sultan Knish:

When the Yankees play baseball in the Bronx and the Knicks hit the court at Madison Square Garden, the two teams may belong to different sports, but they're both part of an exchange of taunts and slurs that no one remembers or cares about anymore.


The Knicks are short for the Knickerbockers, one of the derogatory names that English New Yorkers called the Dutch New Yorkers whom they had seized the city from. And the Dutch returned the favor by calling the Anglo newcomers, John Cheese or Jan Kees, which eventually became Yankee.

The English mocked the Dutch and the Dutch mocked English and then both terms became part of the city's cultural heritage and even a point of pride. Yankee may still have a derogatory meaning in the South and in Europe, but in New York, it's on every other baseball cap and the Knicks are on every other jersey; including some of the shorts that resemble the Knickerbockers of the Dutch.

This sort of thing happens a lot in a multicultural society. What used to be a point of insult, blends into the common cultural heritage. The minority teenagers wearing Knicks shorts and Yankees caps care as little about the Dutch and English slurs that got the whole thing started as they do about the Redskins, a term that is as equally out of date and nearly as obscure. 

...
The firemen of tolerance are also the arsonists of intolerance. They start the fires and then put them out. The debate over the Redskins is a classic example of setting a fire and then declaring that they should be able to do whatever it takes to put it out.
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Liberals nurtured on Orientalism and worries about cultural appropriation are uncomfortable with that; but that's their problem. It's perfectly normal for the old wounds to become the bonds of a new society. It's part of the healing process. It's post-racial and post-everything in a good way.
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The common American identity was based on the integration of the good and the bad, the loves and the hates, the resentments and the joys, it combines the high and low points of culture, it mixed together aspirations and slurs, baked it together into something strange and wonderful.
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Liberal political correctness is obsessively consumed with the destruction of any common culture not mediated by their commissars. Their divisive efforts seem calculated to break down any areas where co-existence occurs because the great threat to their political power would come from the revelation that they are not the firemen of tolerance, they are the arsonists of intolerance, setting groups at each other and then stepping in to referee the results.

Promoting the taking of offense at nearly any possible slight is very unhealthy.  Yes, we can get along if our elites stop trying to divide us for their convenience.