I’m a big fan of Tracy Morgan, so I was chagrined to hear that he said a bunch of crazy homophobic stuff onstage in Tennessee last week. Now Tracy Morgan is bad, at least for a couple of months or until some other comedian does three minutes about loving poon and stabbing his hypothetical gay son. I have not seen video of the act in question, so I can’t say whether it was funny. Initial reports suggest it wasn’t, but who knows? Morgan is not exactly a comedian who works well in precis. The moral reprehensibility, on the other hand, is visible from a distance. While Funny is ephemeral and contingent, Immoral—along with its mumbling cousin, Wrong—is easy to discern. This presents a problem, however. Had what Morgan said been hilarious—like when he threatened to get various Chicago citizens pregnant in 2007—everything would have been cool, or at least arguably cool. It would appear, as Ann Power argued in 1997, that aesthetic standards can either damn or redeem transgressive art, whereas morality is unequipped to make such distinctions. As a result, moral standards are invariably an instrument of condemnation.
Tag Archives: rant
Dylan Ratigan on what’s wrong with America
MSNBC political and financial commentator Dylan Ratigan went all me-after-four-drinks on Representative Kevin Brady (R–TX) Monday, delivering a long rant while the latter clung to GOP talking points and smiled like a man invited over for a big slice of crap cobbler. Props to Pete for the link. Let me first say that I do not usually have truck with MSNBC, for reasons exemplified in Ratigan’s interview style. He begins his segment by pointing out that Wall Street and high finance is one of the few sectors of the economy that is hiring again, which seems kind of ironic given that they were, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, the dildo of our original clusterfucktion. Ratigan then advances the thesis that the stock market, originally conceived as a means of encouraging investment capital to flow to new ventures, has become a “giant sucking machine” that draws money from real industry and into a realm of computerized abstraction. Cue Kevin Brady.