Boy, Did We Get Suckered By A Really Low Level Shell-Game Con

That piece from the New York Times I excerpted in an update yesterday had this passage in it:

Mr. Bruce often poked fun at the liberals of his day. “I used to go to civil rights marches, but Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles kept bumping into people,” he joked. What animated most of his best work was an aversion to moralism that seems out of step in an age of internet outrage. “When you get to morals, they’re just your morals,” he said in his Carnegie Hall concert in 1961, perhaps his finest recorded performance. “They’re not even morals. They’re mores.”

This cynical jab deftly reduces principles to inherited customs and displays a gift for intelligent wordplay. But it’s also easy to miss his point. Mr. Bruce’s bits are dense and require close attention. A loose improvisational performer, he didn’t patiently set up premises, emphasizing clarity. Instead, he used a jazzy rhythm and spoke quickly, in bursts of stammering digressions that mixed repurposed Yiddish with rhetorical turns of phrases that aimed for literary pleasures.

Um, first, I've listened to Bruce's stuff and that's not what I get out of it.  And the description in the second paragraph both misunderstands what's going on in jazz improvisation and it contradicts itself. It is an elevation of incoherence (Bruce was a heavy drug user) into intellectualism.   And there's the "blind joke" at the expense of two real geniuses by a cheap, rinky-dink, faux genius.   But that's not what I found most interesting about it.

If "When you get to morals, they're just your morals," if "They're not even morals.  They're mores," then all of the moral platitudes over "free speech" that constitute the case for the deification of Lenny Bruce, the entire "free speech - free press" industry line of bilge, is meaningless and there would be nothing wrong with putting Lenny Bruce in jail for what he said on stage.   If moral relativity is valid, not to mention what it really is, moral nihilism, then the cops who arrested him for using whatever words they busted him for are as right as the self-righteous "free speech" champions who turned a pretty unfunny comedian into some kind of moral icon.

That was one of the earliest parts of the conventional 1950s-today catechism of pseudo-liberal, pseudo-lefty pieties that fell apart when I subjected it to rigorous examination.   The moral relativist-nihilist doesn't really believe what they're claiming, they want those aspects of moral absolutism they like to be taken as morally absolute when they want it to be but they want to deny the existence of moral absolutes when it suits them.  That they do it over some of the lesser aspects of morality as they can profit from it is as telling.  By "profit from it" I mean exactly that, making money.   Which is why free speech - free press absolutism is so popular with performers, writers, publishers, TV and radio and movie executives even as they fill the airwave with fascists and neo-Nazis and racists and NRA figures, with porn that eats up and spits out lives,  whose moral depravity kills people in the name of profit and power.  And it is especially stupid when it asserts a moral obligation to allow even Nazis and Stalinists and Maoists, the KKK, etc. a platform when, on gaining power, they would abolish all free speech and every other one of the civil liberties in exactly the same way that the Republican-fascists are destroying the rights of Black People, Latinos, Women and LGBT people. 

Liberals in the 1950s and 60s got successfully duped by the people who held those positions, and they were duped through the media and the desire to be considered fashionable.  They were duped into accepting positions and stands that have, in the realest of real life, ended up electing Republicans, the servants of the rich and fascist starting in 1968 as the Yippies sandbagged Hubert Humphrey and got Nixon into office.   We fell for some of the stupidest frauds because of one of the dumber PR campaigns in American history.   It was really not much different from how the Northern intelligentsia in the post Civil War period got suckered out of the morality that ended de jure slavery only to have it reimposed as de facto slavery for the next hundred years. 

The traditional American meaning of liberalism,  founded in the morality of the Jewish Law as expounded by the Mosaic tradition and expanded by Jesus, depends absolutely on moral absolutes, I have come to see that if you abandon those moral absolutes that are essential to producing egalitarian democracy, you will lose egalitarian democracy and all of the benefits of it.   That such schmucks as Lenny Bruce and the desire to be kew-el in 1964 could talk liberals out of that is nothing to be proud of.   Continuing it in the history of the next fifty-four years is everything to be ashamed of  and proof of the stupidity of those who did and do it.

Update:  I didn't say "kew-el" to be funny, I said it because I knew it would annoy the kind of people who get annoyed by people making fun of the cool kids.

Update 2:  I always thought it was stupid that that tiresome and stupid habit of, especially, New York Jewish comedians to insert Hebrew or Yiddish words into their tiresome routines, due to the the odd and peculiarly strange habit that that was like an idiot card for the audience to laugh.   Some of the worst never-once funny comedians of the post-war period made a career out of that,  Jackie Mason comes to mind.   Even when I first heard it back in the early 60s if not earlier,  I thought it was pandering to a petit form of antisemitism.  That Lenny Bruce did it is nothing especially surprising, he didn't have much talent which is why he went to shock and offensiveness and obscenity in place of being funny.

Update 3:  I knew that because those schmucks were on network TV and I heard them on TV.   You really are becoming senile if you've forgotten what was on TV, your source of 90% of what you believe you know.  Like I said, you have no clue what life outside of the NYC bubble is or was like.