Junk conservatism

Paul K. writes:

The other day you mentioned your distaste for the term “NAMs” for non-Asian minorities as ugly and dehumanizing. A buzzword that has become ubiquitous in the past week, and which I find absolutely intolerable, is “junk” for the male genitals, as in “Don’t touch my junk.” Watching Fox News today, I heard female news analysts unabashedly tossing around this vulgar expression, and even the normally decorous Charles Krauthammer used it in the title of his current column.

How can anyone who expects other to respect his dignity refer to the most intimate part of his own body with this absurd and disgusting term? In one generation, we’ve gone from “the family jewels” to “my junk.”

LA replies:

I read the same column by Krauthammer at National Review, after seeing Mark Krikorian at The Corner praise it as “outstanding.” My opinion of both the praiser and the praisee has gone down. Not only does Krauthammer turn the disgusting phrase “Don’t touch my junk” into a conservative slogan,—“the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm-election voter”—which is bad enough, but the piece is filled with cheap countercultural attitudes, which, it is evident, Krauthammer picked up in his youth and has never had second thoughts about. But haven’t I always said that Krauthammer is not even a neoconservative, he’s a liberal?

Here’s the beginning of the piece, where Krauthammer makes a hero out of the male air steward who recently slid out of the plane he was on:

Ah, the airport, where modern folk heroes are made. The airport, where that inspired flight attendant did what everyone who’s ever been in the spam-in-a-can crush of a flying aluminum tube—where we collectively pretend that a clutch of peanuts is a meal and a seat cushion is a “flotation device”—has always dreamed of doing: pull the lever, blow the door, explode the chute, grab a beer, slide to the tarmac, and walk through the gates to the sanity that lies beyond. Not since Rick and Louis disappeared into the Casablanca fog headed for the Free French garrison in Brazzaville has a stroll on the tarmac thrilled so many.

Who cares that the crazed steward got arrested, pleaded guilty to sundry charges, and probably was a rude, unpleasant S.O.B to begin with? Bonnie and Clyde were psychopaths, yet what child of the ’60s did not fall in love with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty?

Excuse me, Mr. Conservative Sage, but I also am a “child of the Sixties,” and when as an eighteen year old college student I saw Bonnie and Clyde, with its glorification of murderers, I found it a depressing, demoralizing, deeply unsettling experience. Falling in love with the depraved main characters of that movie was the farthest thing from my mind.

Krauthammer is such an unreconstructed liberal, he probably still loves Little Big Man as well.

And he is so disgusting he even equates (with minor qualifications) “Don’t touch my junk” with “Don’t Tread on Me”:

Not quite the 18th-century elegance of “Don’t Tread on Me,” but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch.

That is simply gross. Yet this is the man the conservative media establishment treats as its leader.

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Karl D. writes:

I don’t know whether or not you are aware, but the term “junk” as it refers to someones genitals is another gem given to us by the black community. I believe it started out as a black reference to women who have a rather large rear end. They would say, “She’s got some junk in her trunk.” It saddens me that such low brow language has wormed its way into the American lexicon and all the way up to our supposed educated elites.

Here are several others that you will often hear many whites of a certain generation say all the time. Not to mention hear, read or see on television and in film. I have given translations.

It’s all good : Everything is all right.
No he didn’t? : I can’t believe so and so did that.
Word? : Really?
Word : I agree
Where you at? : Where are you?
Baby momma / baby daddy : Used when referring to a child’s mother or father. Since tons of black children are illegitimate this has replaced wife or husband.
He’s got game, or He’s got mad skills : He is very good at what he does.
Keepin’ it real : Being honest.
She fake : She’s a phony.
How you livin? : How are you?

Paul K. writes:

You wrote, “when as an eighteen year old college student I saw Bonnie and Clyde, with its glorification of murderers, I found it a depressing, demoralizing, deeply unsettling experience.’

I had the same reaction to it. At that age (about the same as yours) I enjoyed violent action movies, but they had to have some moral focus. “Bonnie and Clyde” is utterly nihilistic. Glamorizing those two freakish psychopaths is like glamorizing the Manson gang or Jeffrey Dahmer.

Anyone who is not repulsed by a movie like Bonnie and Clyde, whatever its “artistic” merits, cannot really be a conservative in my opinion. It is like saying you admire the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe or think that deconstructionism has an important place in literary criticism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 20, 2010 08:21 AM | Send