I’m back after my trip to England and Scotland, and I missed you all. I’m hoping that everyone survived the brutally Simpson-less fortnight, and to make up for my absence, I’m going to post several extra columns over the next week with some highlights from the trip.
Today, though, I’ll just touch on a few mock-worthy political stories I’ve seen since I’ve gotten back. But only after pointing out that one of the blessings of a good trip is to escape politics for a while.
In fact, only three very brief political things happened during the two weeks I was gone:
1. An Uber driver in London was a Middle-Eastern fellow, and when I asked where he was from, he said, “Jerusalem.” And then, before I could say “Shalom,” he said more quietly, “Palestine.”
Needless to say, that particular “shalom” remained holstered. I also managed to overcome my smart-arse instinct to say, “Oh, is that Jerusalem anywhere near the Jerusalem that has been the capital of Israel over these last several millenia, minus a few centuries?”
2. As we rode a bus around London during our first day there, we drove through the West End, and for 7 or 8 consecutive blocks, we drove beneath at least six hanging lines per block which were strung from a building top on one side of the road to the other. And from each of those lines hung 5 identical flags.
If you thought that maybe those flags were Union Jacks, or the flags of many nations, you would be wrong.
Each one of them – all 200-300 of them – was the ugliest new variation on the LGBTQ+ flag. It’s the one with a purple circle on a yellow background added to the increasingly jumbled colors and shapes from previous iterations of the flag.
By the way, I looked this up so that you don’t have to, (You’re welcome), and I found that the new circle represents intersex people, somehow.
As a properly raised Midwesterner, I find the impulse to advertise your sexual tastes in public to be super weird. If you ever come to visit me at Stately Simpson Manor, you might find an American flag out front, and possibly a seasonal or holiday flag.
But you will not find a flag touting heterosexual sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
You will also not find a yard sign saying that, “In this house we…” followed by a line-item sexual menu. (e.g. “…enjoy cowgirl position” or “missionary” or “costumes and foreplay.”)
But equally as weird as hanging a sexual preference flag over your streets in the first place, is hanging literally hundreds of them! All right, we get it: you’re not straight! Can we please move on?
3. Our bus driver for the tour was a great Polish guy named Tomac, and I quickly learned that he had the kind of bracing, unedited transparency of many Eastern Europeans.
When talking about the variety of tourists he has driven for, he mentioned a man from Iraq who was on his last tour. He said, “When I first learned he was from Iraq, I obviously thought, ‘Suicide bomber?’ But no! He was really nice guy!”
After three decades in a politically correct liberal arts department, I can only be grateful that I didn’t have a mouthful of coffee when he said that. Because my resulting spit-take would have been disastrous.
Anyway, more about my trip in a day or two. But for now, I’ve been home for three days, and a quick skimming of the news provides ample evidence that our politics has not gotten any saner while I was away.
Consider the case of reliably dimwitted Dem congressman Steve Cohen, who was in a hearing on the subject of whether transgender “women” (i.e. dudes) should be allowed to use women’s locker rooms without the consent of actual women.
Since the only logical, reasonable answer is “no,” Cohen was a hard “yes!”
But even he had to acknowledge the problem his idiotic position would cause. He admitted that,“Things should be dealt with in a different way,” and went as far as suggesting, “putting up some type of… barrier… in a women’s area of a locker room.”
I’m no architect, but I think that such a “barrier” might also be called a “wall.” So Cohen just proposed using a wall to separate a transgender locker-room space from a female locker-room space.
You know what you just described as a solution there, Steve-O? Separate locker rooms for men and women.
Why didn’t we think of that?
Speaking of people who don’t understand basic human biology, you may have heard that one U.S. state has followed the lead of the Netherlands, by crowning the first-ever biological male winner of a beauty contest.
Surprise: it’s California! There an Asian fella calling himself “Monroe Lace” won the “Miss San Francisco” contest.
Let’s just skip right past the fact that, “Do you know who the current Miss San Francisco is?” sounds like the set-up to a very bad joke, and land on the fact that in addition to not understanding how gender works, “Lace” also doesn’t understand how metaphors work.
Because after winning, he said, ““Every time I put on the sash, the weight of it reminds me of the weight of my job; of the responsibility I have to make a difference for young children.”
First, unless your sash is made out of leather – and in San Francisco, who knows? – it is practically weightless, a fact which makes implying that it is heavy a particularly inapt metaphor.
Second, can we PLEASE leave the young children out of this? Apparently not, as CBS reports that Lace spends most of his days visiting elementary schools. A video clip showed him reading a children’s book called “Sparkle Boy” — about a young boy who enjoys wearing women’s clothes — to a 4th grade class at Tenderloin Community School.
Or was that a book called “Tenderloin Boy,” read to 4th graders at Sparkle Community School?
Ugh.
Finally, you may have heard that Disney is producing a live-action movie version of Snow White, due in theaters next year.
The good news is that after several years of woke films that bombed like the Enola Gay, a crumbling streaming subscriber base at Disney+, declining attendance at their grooming centers – er, parks – and a stock price that has been sliced in half, Disney brass has learned their lesson, and is aiming for a respectful, traditional update of the timeless classic.
HA! I kid! Several years of critical and financial failures have taught them nothing, so they’re going to create a soul-deadeningly woke monstrosity that is guaranteed to fail even harder.
How woke is it? Recent photos from the set and insider reports indicate that they’ve cast a Hispanic actress as Snow White, six of the dwarves are now normal-sized (but ethnically diverse) actors, and Prince Charming has been removed from the plot entirely.
I’m not making that up. Only one of the seven dwarves is a dwarf!
And while actors of all ethnicities can play many, many characters on screen, there are limits to that kind of flexibility.For example, you shouldn’t cast Jim Gaffigan as Black Panther, or Dylan Mulvaney as Genghis Khan, or Whoopi Goldberg (with or without a fat suit) as Karen Carpenter.
And you can’t cast a person of color as Snow freaking White!
This is not hard, Hollywood! The character’s name contains both “Snow” and “White.”
You need someone of pallor in that role. (Might I suggest a certain Massachusetts senator?) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
And you can’t cast Andre the Giant, Wilt Chamberlain and the starting lineup of the Chicago Bulls as the 7 dwarves!
And without Prince Charming, who is going to wake Snow White up from her enchanted sleep? Gloria Allred?
If they had a shred of honesty left, the Disney execs could at least re-title the film, to prevent misleading any potential viewers.
Would “Mocha Brown, Six Diversity Hires and a Dwarf” fit on a movie marquee?
Maybe not. But you know what would fit nicely on a bumper sticker?
“Biden delenda est!”
“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Monroe “or is that Marvin?” Lace, 2024!
Martin Simpson 