Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is thinking about CHIMING IN. She writes:

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in.” — George Orwell in the novel, 1984

Georgie said a mouthful there! We see it with the attack on Taylor Swift now for failing to chime in on hate for Trump. I will return to this in a bit.

When I left my little left-wing sect in 1979, I lost most of one set of friends. In fact, unbeknownst to me, the group voted specifically to disinvite me to their convention held every other summer at Oberlin. I had had no intention whatsoever of going, but they felt it was necessary to make sure their members got the message that any deviation on their parts would result in similar shunning. A powerful social control tool, that. Used by all cults, political or religious.

I remained a left-of-center Democrat for over 20 more years, basically until 9/11. When Senator Paul Wellstone – who had made a MAJOR pledge to serve only two terms – announced his intention to run for a third term and turned out to be exactly like any run-of-the-mill lying, promise-breaking politician, I bolted to the Republican Party. Naturally, he had to break the promise because he was such a “fighter” for us that he felt we needed him.

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want any politician to fight for me; I just want him to get out of my way and leave me the hell alone.

When I not only supported Norm Coleman against Wellstone, but became his speechwriter, you can imagine the hue and cry in my group of die-hard leftie Jewish friends, almost every last one of them a very nice person. They believed that we had simply lost our minds.

Now in case there’s any reader who does not know that Minnesota is as Blue as an Antifa delayed-adolescent holding his breath because Trump is #NotHisPresident, let me remind you that Minnesota is the only state (out of the Obama 57) that didn’t go for Reagan either time. I made my living entertaining corporate, women’s, and trade groups all over this great land, but probably at least 30 percent of my business was still in my home state of Minnesota. Which was an easier commute in any event.

One morning, I fielded a phone call from the male president of a professional psychology group looking for entertainment for an upcoming national meeting to be held in Minneapolis. This would have been in 2002 or 2003, during W’s first term. In our conversation, certain cues made me picture a balding, grey-ponytailed guy. We had a pleasant chat, and he even became kind of flirty, despite my mentioning my husband several times. Things were going swimmingly as we were about to close the deal. We discussed the venue, my fees, how much time he wanted me to fill, where to send the contract and the like. Then from nowhere he said, “If you could work in some material about this effing war criminal Bush, it would be great.”

Uh-oh.

I said, “Oh, I don’t really do politics in my act. It usually alienates one half or the other of my audience. It’s just pretty generic humor that can unite us all and get us laughing.”

Long pause. Then, noticeably more frostily: “Well, in THIS organization, that won’t alienate anyone.”

“Ah, I see.” I can feel my chickens evaporating before they’re hatched.

And then, “You DO agree, don’t you, that that effing idiot is an effing war criminal?”

Sigh. “Sir, I really hate talking politics with potential clients, but, no, I think it is slightly more complicated than that.”

Click. It was the first job I lost from failing to chime in, but far from the last.

Whenever I hear lefties whine about McCarthyism and the so-called “black list” (which I’m pretty sure is now a racist term…), it makes me laugh. Yeah, yeah, like every single pendulum swing in human history, some people who were not “commies” but only sympathizers, got swept up in the desire to clean out the government and unions of real card-carrying Communists whose stated goal was to overthrow the government of the United States. But thousands of them were actually guilty as hell. My sympathy is limited.

Ask James Woods or the tiny handful of other conservatives in Hollywood how many jobs they have lost. And now, as we said at the beginning, Taylor Swift is being virally hounded, not about supporting Trump, Land O’ Goshen! (as my grandma used to say), but about failing to chime in on hatin’ on him.

Ms. Swift’s net worth is reportedly somewhere between $280 and $380 MILLION dollars. If she never worked another day or sang another note, she couldn’t spend the interest on that, whichever one it is. (I love the discrepancy in Website estimates of more than $100 million dollars, a small rounding error, I guess, in that financial ozone layer.)

I hope she holds firm and resists the bullying. Talented, smart, gracious, pretty, AND an inch below six feet tall, I am in awe. And green with envy on the height thing. If only we could do a kind of socialist “redistribution” of height, split the difference, and we could both be 5’6”. I would be so much thinner!

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