Thursday, June 1, 2017

A Quick Thought on the Kathy Griffin Thing…



“Mrs. [Jones] is a piggy pig pig…”

--8 year old me wrote this on Big Sister’s homework for her teacher, Mrs. [Jones] (can’t recall her name). I’d never met Mrs. [Jones], but I’d often heard my sister and her friends calling the teacher this name.

    So, comedienne Kathy Griffin professionally made a video and shot some photos of her proudly holding a mock severed head of Donald Trump. She’s apologized in a rather lame fashion—she says she didn’t expect the reaction. Whatever…this isn’t just about her.

     Once again, there’s a dog not barking which bothers me: this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The photographer didn’t say “Uh, Kathy, you know holding the president’s severed head like this is a bit creepy, and it’s not even Halloween,” and nor did anyone else on her production crew for the video indicate that such an act of hatred might be inappropriate in a country where half the population voted for Trump a few months back.

      It is very clear there is a distinct hate-filled subculture that lives in a bubble, simply unaware of the reality in this country. It wouldn’t be such a big deal, except this hate culture is very embedded in our media. Much as my hatred of Mrs. [Jones] as a child was an ignorant hatred borne from what I’d been told, I can’t help but suspect, very strongly, that quite a few people hate Trump not from any real knowledge of Trump, but merely from what they’ve been told, by a caste of media people so filled with hate that nobody down the line in the production of Griffin’s “comedy” noticed there was anything remotely odd about holding a bloody effigy of Trump’s head.

     I’m not exactly a fan of Trump but I find it sad how many have been swayed by the “two minute hate” sessions of Trump that the media creates, over and over again.

     I never did apologize to Mrs. [Jones], but in my defense I was an ignorant child, and never did meet her (sadly, she died of cancer before I was old enough to be in her class)—I did get in trouble for vandalizing Big Sis’s homework, of course.


     What possible defenses can Griffin and the media which have created this environment of mindless hatred provide?

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