Choking on Moscow smogs

Daniel Greenfield writes that

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And sometimes liberty is the price of eternal vigilance against subversive rodeo clowns.

What can’t be seen on the stage of Saturday Night Live must go underground to the Missouri State Fair. In every totalitarian country, the jokes that can’t be told are told anyway in secret places, between friends and to rural and working class audiences. The Soviet anecdote was born out of such restrictions.

Twenty years and a whole other nation ago, a rodeo clown at the Missouri State Fair not only wore a George H.W. Bush mask, but even swapped out a dummy in the same mask that the bull tore apart on the spot.

The nation did not shudder, the politicians did not call for the clown’s head and there was no secret service investigation of a possible assassination-by-bull plot by a gang of rogue rodeo clowns.

But that was America; a strange and different country. It was not perfect, but rodeo clowns, comedians and your neighbor Bob felt free to mock the President of the United States without worrying that the heavy hand of manufactured outrage would descend on their necks.

The new OSSR, that marvelously enlightened empire of wealth redistribution from the working middle class to the government upper class, that beacon of green energy, transgender rights and drive-through abortions, is far too fragile to survive the sort of mockery that the reactionary running dog leaders of the old US were accustomed to.

It is hard to describe that America to a younger generation that has never lived in it and has never known anything other than the liberal morality mobs of the Obama age eager to pounce on some offense of heteronormative white privilege committed against liberal conformity.

Maybe the best way to describe life in the US, before the dawn of the OSSR, is with another Soviet anecdote.

A Moscow cop sees a man poking a hole in the tire of the American ambassador’s car. The vandal puts his mouth on the hole and begins sucking in the escaping air.

“What are you doing?” the cop demands.

Sheepishly the man tells him, “I wanted to breathe the air of freedom.”

Now that even those of us in Sedalia, Missouri are choking on foul Moscow smogs, I wonder whose tires we’ll have to poke through to breathe the air of freedom.