I Forgive Laura Ingraham: For Being a Disingenuous Limb of the Devil.
When cluelessness sinks to self parody, the proper response is encouragement.
I submit the following:
- Laura Ingraham is more to be pitied than censured
- Many of our problems stem from our elderly watching too much pornography.
National pundit and lady-I’ve-never-heard-of, Laura Ingraham is taking a lot of heat for her attempt at pandering comedy. Laura is getting unfairly yelled at for acting as a mindless conduit for whatever garbage her writers think is most likely to maintain add revenue. I’m sure she’s an unpleasant person, but blaming her her for the contents of her speech is like kicking a rock because you stubbed your toe on it. She would’ve said anything they told her to.
I highly doubt that Laura has any convictions or opinions when acting in the capacity of “TV Lady”. If we indulge the fantasy that Laura Ingram “said” anything, the media still gives her too much credit for cogency when quoting her. Her comment that “The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.” comes from a sarcastic monologue in which Ingraham feigns outrage at Alexandra Cortez’s for claiming that American households no longer have “Furbys and two mini-vans”. Laura, pretends to take this comment as an affront to decency and launches into a tirade in which she claims:
- Alexandra is out of touch because lot’s of American’s still have two minivans, just not in her precious New York.
- The way of life characterized by Furby ownership is dying because illegal immigrants ruined it.
If you got Ingraham’s comments second hand, you might think that there was some danger of her being taken seriously. In fact, she might as well have been screaming, “I’m so out of touch that the only thing separating this monologue from an SNL sketch is the fact that I’m not wearing a wig!”
Another bizarre feature of this incident, is that Alexandra and Laura (by which I mean the hive mind responsible for the monologue) agree on every material issue. They both admit that Furby’s aren’t what they used to be and that the lifestyle and values of the average American are changing. The only point of contention is whether “all that boring crap from the 90’s that nobody cares about anymore” is beautiful and worth preserving.
Laura’s comedy routine ends with a vomit inducing reference to the fact that Laura owns a minivan and thinks it’s “Totally cool, just sayin’”. I say “vomit inducing” because you can see Laura wretch just a bit, at the idea of driving a minivan. If she is driving a minivan, she really doesn’t want to be. Truly, insincerity does to TV conservatives what irony does to Hipsters. Come to think of it, those guys are the only ones who own Furbys anymore.
Please don’t think I missed the fact that the statement’s I just referenced made up only a tiny portion of an 11 minute video. The segment was 2.5 minutes 90’s nostalgia and 8.5 minutes of something I like to call “outrage porn”.
I think of pornography as media which produces strong feelings but which is “utterly without redeeming social value.” In other words, the rest of the segment was just a random series of images and anecdotes curated to induce a feeling of galvanizing excitement in a FOX news audience. Then, as is tradition, Laura’s pay masters tacked some trite bullshit onto the end of the piece to help the audience forgive itself for wasting it’s life:
“There is something slipping away in this country, and it’s not about race or ethnicity. It’s what was once a common understanding by both parties that American citizenship is a privilege, and one that at a minimum requires respect for the rule of law and loyalty to our constitution.”
If you think the above counts as a thesis statement for the rest of the video, I have some ocean-front property in Florida to sell you. (Which will soon be under water.)
I don’t advocate banning pornography outright, but I admit it has a dangerous property. If you are “into” a particular genre of pornography you don’t get “out of it” by seeing it more. Nobody ever says “I’ve already seen 400 deep-fakes of Sarah Palin, I don’t care if I ever see another.” Constantly watching the same genre or pornography actually makes you less sensitive to quality, and more sensitive to the quantity and intensity of the stimulus.
These pornographic images of illegal aliens climbing the border walls and committing crimes, alter the brains of FOX viewers and make them hungry for more. At first, they just need to see an illegal immigrant cash a social security check. After, a year of 24/7 FOX news coverage, they need harder stuff. They need slightly darkened mugshots of illegal aliens who have murdered police officers, and they need the police officer to be a married veteran, and they to see need it for 10 minutes.
It’s not about hate. They just NEED it. Do you understand me? There’s a place for amusement, but things have gotten out of hand, and I think these people would do well to cut their porn consumption and find an active hobby. Perhaps cycling or BJJ. It’s not a big sacrifice, FOX will only be more stimulating when they come back to it later.
I’m a free speech absolutist. I don’t support hate speech bans, but I do think pure obscenity (as defined by the supreme court) is a special case because it’s doesn’t have any semantic content. I’d support regulations that treated purely pornographic portrayals of divisive issues as if they were obscene and required parental warnings before segments like the one Laura Ingram presented. As for Laura herself, I don’t wish her any harm. I’d love to see her take a year off, drive her beloved Minivan through the beautiful wilderness of this great land, and discover herself. There’s no telling what she’d say if given the capacity to form her own opinions.
