Comedy, Chaos, Correctness

I've said many times before that some people just seem to have trouble with counter-intuitive thought. Many of those people seem to be fundamentalists, conservatives and in this country typically, Republican.

Most especially I agree with actor John Cleese in saying that fundamentalism is easily viewed as silly, more easily laughed at and all for good reason.

And laughter is the best medicine. We have become dour, too conservative, too politically correct in our orientation and fear of offending anyone. People have been speaking out on this. On how our fear and political correctness has gone off the tracks. People like comedians like Louis CK and Jerry Seinfeld. And when someone like Jerry says it, we should really pay attention.

I'm not talking about hurtful comedy, I'm talking about comedy doing what it should do. It should question our mores. It should cause some chaos. At least, but mostly and simply, in you mind.

Some comedians are railing against people like Louis and Jerry but they are missing the point (and being unknowns, trying to make their own marks no doubt). Comedy should challenge us, it should question our positions and it should make fun of our stupid behaviors and actions.

I've heard it mentioned several times this past year using actor and comedian Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden's catch phrase on his old short lived 1955-6 TV show The Honeymooners, The show only ran for one season but it ran seemingly forever in syndication.

"One of these days Alice, Pow! Straight to the Moon!"

It is an indicator of how things have changed up till now regarding violence against women and infers how back then it was more socially acceptable for a man to hit his wife.

I think however that some people misunderstand that reference. Actually, we owe Gleason a big thanks for bringing that out on this show. Because it wasn't sanctioning the behavior of wife beating, we weren't laughing at and condoning that behavior (though surely some did).

Still, it was bringing it to light in a 1950s conservative society where people simply didn't talk about it whenever it did happen. It was swept under the run, ignored, it made people uneasy and they didn't know what to do or how to handle it and the laws reflected that. That being in a time when children and wives were still very much considered chattel, property, in a dying holdover of more ancient and unenlightened times.

Gleason made not light of it, but fun of it. And the initial sign of the death of behaviors is laughing at it.

As example, in the 1800s the books about Dracula and Frankenstein came out. In the early 1900s the films about those monsters came out, scaring audiences everywhere. By the mid 1900s films were making fun of such monsters in films like Abbott and Costello Meet the Frankenstein (in 1948 and another with the Mummy in 1955).

We are fearful of things until we outgrow them and then we start to make fun of them. Sometimes the first step to devalue our fears and overcome them is to make light of them and then outright laugh at them and make fun of those who make us of them.

It made a wife beater and that kind of a man look foolish. We laughed at him, sometimes uneasily, bu we laughed. It allowed us to look at something like that in a less tense moment, giving it not the avoidance behavior it usually evoked, but distance enough to view it, and in the back of our minds, even later on and over time, when we could consider it more judiciously, to view it openly and derisively.

No one ever thought Ralph was actually going to hit or hurt his wife, and many thought if he did, Alice would end up having the last word anyway. It was obvious he loved her and her continued love, support and her own derision of his actions allowed us to realize that he must be worth viewing than sometimes his words and actions would indicate.

I don't doubt there were some men back at the beginning of that show who thought he should hit his wife at times, but I'm willing to bet that by the end of that show's single season run, even those men thought differently than at the beginning.

Comedy can have that kind of healing effect.

Archie Bunker on All in the Family was a more recent version of all this. That show on television back in the 1970s put political correctness on its head and in a tailspin. Political correctness can be misleading at times and we have to consider that.

Of late many comedians are refusing to do even stand up comedy on the college comedy circuit because students are so lost in their morass of political correctness. Wake up! There is more beyond comedy than the obvious and direct and we do need to laugh and laugh hard sometimes, at our ridiculousness.

It has been said that pain + time = humor. What is wrong with that and what could be better than understanding that and applying some social conscience to it to positively evoke change? But it has to be allowed, in order for it to happen. We have to allow ourselves the discomfort to laugh at what isn't politically correct first for it's magic to come to fruition. Let it happen.

Maybe it didn't affect change completely back then in Gleason's day (though for some it did). Still, in the realm of the history of comedy and our country it certainly has. It was a first crack, a step up out of, one more step into our evolution in comedy and our overall social consciousness, that eventually allowed Archie Bunker to arrive on the scene. And from Archie came so much more change.

But what do we have now?

Will be another? Can we ever get over ourselves, our current infection of over political correctness?

Jackie Gleason, "The Great One" as he was called, we thank you.

It is out fondest hope that one day, soon, another will eventually take your place.

Brain Lock in Political Mindsets

The problem with conservatism, fundamentalism, esp. in religion is, brain lock. Call it what you will, mind lock, concept lock....

Whenever you take that tact, you lock out being open minded and able to see the whole picture. We desperately need open minded people, to be open minded. In fact, more so everyday. Do not view life and things through emotion, preconceived beliefs, personal and platform agendas.

We do not need more people who point at the open minded and claim they aren't being open minded. When what they are really saying isn't that those people aren't being open minded, they are actually saying those people are not open minded to... their closed minded ways.

View things through a yearning to know the truth in things.

Support what is the actual and not, what should be.

Work toward what should be (in your mind) if you wish, but don't force reality now as it is into what isn't. Even if you believe it should be a certain way. Face it. If it's not, it's not.

When conservatives (et al) look at so called liberals or progressives who aren't afraid to chance change in a calculated risk attempt to better things, they will claim they are the ones with brain lock. But that is because those people are already open minded and against being closed minded, so that to any closed minded individual, it would certainly appear to them as brain lock.

When you have the truth, how can you alter that? The trouble there is the other side claims the same. Only they can't back it up with facts, just faux facts, twisted concepts and emotion.

As an open minded individual, one can only be, in interfacing with those types of people, compassionate enough to communicate. With brain locked individuals, in order to communicate with them one has to keep communication open (as painful as that can be at times), while trying to properly explain reality to them.

Because they believe they have the truth, in their minds, how can they alter it? It seems to them, in their spiritually sick ways at times, that they are trapped. They don't mean to be bad people, it's just that their mindsets, their beliefs and the basis for those beliefs, are defective. That's always been the thing I found most disturbing about religions.

They claim to have all the answers (if God is talking to you, even through a book, he's obviously knows everything, right?), and yet, they don't. Logic and reality dictate that sooner or later you will hit a situation that is a conundrum and then what? Well, things usually don't goo very well from that point on.

Whereas, in accepting the difficult in life and that we don't always know everything by simply following the rules or God's laws, we can effectively evoke change and find the best and not just the most accepted answers to problems. Those ways of thinking are in part what has led us to the current situation with high prison populations, so called wars on drugs (citizens), anti so many things like gays, women's rights, human rights (questioning what those are in the face of God's dictates), and so on.

In being the open minded individual, that leaves the closed minded, the brain locked ones to think you are the closed minded one.

It is a conundrum and a mental and logical loop that is exemplified in how Iran deals with gays, to take an extreme example in order to personify a point.

If you are gay there, you are considered against the quran, Iran's laws, and therefore their petty god (there, that is a prime example of how not to talk to the closed minded by denigrating their beliefs, their holy book, their deity).  It may even feel good to you do do it, but don't. Negative behavior puts you into their camp, and I'd suggest whole heartedly to stay away from there.

If you try to accept a gay in Iran, you are going against their laws, the Quran and therefore, God.

The Quran (therefore God, both) say you must kill gays, and so?

Transsexuals.

The Quran says nothing about that, so it must be okay. Though I assume had Mohammad known about this technology back in the ancient desert days, he'd have commented upon it. Funny God didn't mention it was coming, to him. It would only take a couple of mentions of things like that in the ancient (especially desert religions of the middle east) holy books, to prove their points, and yet, nothing. No mention of Transsexuals, the internet, or cell phones.

If you're Gay in Iran, your options are that you can die there (put to death either by the state or friends and loved ones), leave, or have a sex change.

Can you imagine how that messes up your head to lose your gender, when you don't want to, in order to be who your insides are screaming at you, that you are?

Bad things are going on in not just Iran, not just, America, but in other large and great nations like Russia with the current vein of Putinism. Nationalism, is dangerous. It's a great thing surely when positive things come of it, but as we have seen in the past, it can turn quite ugly too.

God rules? He certainly does in Iran. With those who are closed minded. And we want that here, Christians? Now I know not all Christians want that, but if you don't shout from the top of your church pulpits and shout these people down, then you are tacitly agreeing with them.

You do have a responsibility to speak out when those representing you, do, and mistakenly so. Just as they do in Islam, and have, but still not loud enough. And shouting to the world isn't good enough. Some action, at some point, is or may also be necessary.

America was based on having a more open mind than England.

So why are we trying so hard to be even more closed minded than England, or Iran? We have a ways to go before we achieve Iranian levels of closed mindedness, but as they are loosening things up there lately, we are tightening them up here and running the risk of one day, surpassing them.

Do you really want that? To be more closed minded than someplace like Iran?

Hopefully we will at some point, and before we hit equality in that, to notice what damage our closed mined are doing, those who are not seeing yet the errors of their ways. In some cases the massive error in their ways. And I group the gun nuts in all this mess, the open carry fools, the anti immigrants types and, the NRA. People all who may never see the error of their ways.

Which was why America was set up in the first place. Right?

Now, if we can just keep from letting them control our nation...completely.

Are Gays a Godsend?

Are Gays, in becoming normalized in society, a Godsend for the heterosexual community?

I would argue yes. Someone posted the other day on a Facebook group, how behind every great man there is a great woman at home using the Clintons and others including Andrew Jackson as examples. I responded that I thought its very useful for there to be someone behind somebody out there doing great in the world, but it doesn't have to be a woman, it can be a man. And the reason I thought that, I think she thought I was countering what she had said and I wasn't.

But the reason I had said that was when I read what she had posted, I thought about Gay males and how there is no woman at home, let alone a "good" woman for one of those men who is out doing great in the world. There's a man at home. And so there was an exception to the rule, and one that neutralizes what she had said. And it was a big exception too, really. In so far as it being a woman. Though it certainly half backed up what she was saying,

So my point being about how it's good for heterosexuals is because we have to look at this in a gender situation in a kind of gender neutral way because of Gays. Certainly a lesbian couple could have a strong woman at home so in a way this more concentric to Gay males. But if we look at the psychology and sociology of this, through that filter it gives us a kind of neutrality that I think is useful in examining heterosexual couples.

Not just because there can be house husbands in a heterosexual marriage or coupling, where the wife is the worker, but because I think it gives women more understanding about their situation if we look at it from both sides or that is to say, in a neutral way.

Of course we're going to have to consider gender roles the specific gender role in that particular family unit in some kind of therapy setting. But I see all of this, the need to look at things this way, as a boon and not a detriment as a lot of conservative, religious fundamentalist types are saying.

We have needed to do this for, well ever, forever. It's sad that it took something so socially extreme in nature and socially upsetting as Gays coming out and fighting and getting their rights. When we should have come up with this on our own long ago. Especially religion should have had the foresight to see that we did this on our own.

That however, is one of the downfalls of religion in general. That it is stuck in the times that it was first created. Due to geocentric, ethnocentric and tribal values, typically being heterosexual and male dominant, these values tend to remain as originally perceived at the time of the creation of the religion. Which is yet another argument against religion in that if it couldn't foresee this, there really is a problem in the consistency and logic of what the religion professes to be true in relation to their "Creator" and teachings.

Whereas if it were a true religion about a true Godhead, this would have been settled forthright in the way the religion's literature was initially constructed and disseminated to the public. The Theists argument against that fall to the wayside by their own constructs. They would say one simply has to have "Faith" and to ignore that. "That logic is Religion's greatest enemy." And further such nonsense. In that "God" is supposed to be perfect, infallible and omniscient, obviously that is not the case as "He", "She" or "It", truly isn't as has been shown over the millennia time and time again. Or more obviously, "God" simply doesn't exist.

Butt that really isn't either here or over there. What we need to recognize is that good or bad, Gays are here to stay, and that, by any definition, truly isn't a bad thing and we should make the most of it. Don't bury your head in the sand. Stand up, look around and see what this new world has to offer us, all of us. Because to do otherwise, is to perpetuate the fear, distrust and persecution that has so long been held against disparate races, "unclean" and lower classes in society, women, and Gays.

We're all in the end, just people.