It's not funny, but I agree with it. I guess that's better than laughing.

Today’s Combat! post is going to be unusually short, because I spent the time during which I normally write in my blog waiting for the Bresnan technician to come out and install cable internet in my new home—an expedience which, ironically, was supposed to make it easier to write in my blog. I also spent all the other time I usually spend doing stuff waiting for the Bresnan technician to et cetera etc. Just because Bresnan tells you when they’re coming doesn’t mean it has any significance to them. They’re like a college sophomore that way.

Anywhom, during the six or so hours I was deprived of the internet today, literally threes of you sent me this video from the Onion News Network. If you somehow haven’t seen it already, I urge you to watch it immediately. Entitled “Victim in Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck,” it depicts a small town riven by the news that the young honor student killed by a drunk driver is not the Fox News star. It’s funny. Then again, “funny” is a subjective term, especially if you’re moral mountaineer Melissa McEwan.

Extremely loyal Combat! readers will remember McEwan from our long, possibly tone-deaf discussion of when and why rape jokes are funny in September.* She runs the feminist blog Shakesville, which took the Onion’s piece to task in this extremely terse entry. Much like Beck himself, Shakesville is something I consume primarily in order to experience righteous anger. The main focus of McEwan’s blog seems to be pointing out public remarks, jokes, television commercials and t-shirts that are offensive, as when she took Alec Baldwin to task for joking that his teenage daughter should be “sent to a Chinese re-education camp in the mountains for five years,” on the grounds that it was racist. She also writes extensively about So You Think You Can Dance.

Based on her comments in her own comments section, McEwan seems to object to The Onion video on the grounds that it is “eliminationist.” It was a term I had to look up on Wikipedia, but Shakesville’s commenters seemed to know it well, along with a laundry list of other -isms. In my opinion, there is something to a joke about the EMS responder arriving at the scene of the crash and “just praying they were okay or that it was Glenn Beck” that goes beyond simply advocating the death of a political opponent, but whatevs. That’s not what strikes me about the objection to the video voiced by the general Shakesville community. What strikes me is how relentlessly personal their relentlessly politicized worldview is.

The Onion video isn’t “eliminational” or “eliminationsistic” or “elimination-based.” It’s eliminationist—the use, as an adjective, of a noun that refers to a person. Eliminationist becomes a totalizing category—the way Alec Baldwin’s hyperbolic remark isn’t race-related (it’s not, by the way—China is the place where they have re-education camps) or racial but racist. Once it is uttered, Alec Baldwin has not made a racial joke (again, he hasn’t anyway, but stay with me); he is a racist. Ironically, the worldview that McEwan and her readers are ostensibly committed to eradicating—the reduction of individuals to categories like “woman” or “homosexual” or “trans-gendered”—is the same one they have adopted. A quick look at the comments section—in which those who say they’re not sure the joke in the Onion video is purely about killing Glenn Beck are quickly labeled eliminationists themselves, and eventually banned (that is, um, eliminated)—confirms the degree to which the ideological has supplanted the human, and the person is reduced to the totality of his or her transgressions.

Plus, there’s this guy explaining how he’s trained himself not to find stuff like The Onion funny anymore: “I think you’re making it too hard. You might chuckle, then tell yourself, ‘sorry that actually isn’t funny. I’m not going to laugh.’ Rinse, repeat.” Now that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.

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