Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Harry, Harry, Harry (I)

By now, most of you know, Prince Harry of England recently attended a costume party dressed in a Nazi uniform, and the for-public-consumption outrage uproared and stamped its hoof threateningly in the dirt. Mark Steyn writes a column about the big Hollywood premieresque indignation.

As a service to our readers, I include a handy table of costumes of both evil people and not evil people as whom Harry could have dressed and the uproar those costumes would have provoked:

Costume	Reaction:
Nazi	Because certain segments of the punditocracy continue to harp the x=Hitler equation, they must continue to reinforce the public's opinion that Nazism and Hitler are the worst evils ever produced in the world, even though by twentieth century standards, they were a pretty standard lot of totalitarian killers of innocent people (see also Stalin, Tse-Tung, Amin, et al.)
Commisar	Red chic is so fashionable and retro ironic. Pass.
Mongol Horde Member	Sure, they raped, pillaged, and razed villages in the manner of Ghengis Khan, but that was so long ago it's a worthless analogy to use on Bush or Blair, so Harry gets a pass. Unless he's savaged, so to speak, for mocking a barbarian of color.
The Devil	As an icon of evil used by one or more major religions, the Devil has no more meaning than kitsch to the intelligentsia, many of whom the plebes could argue are already in the Devil's pocket.
Jesus Christ	The professional shriekers only respond to the outrage of a select few Christian moonbats who would express outrage over this continuing example that Christians and Christ are the only thing you can dress up as for Halloween without outrage except for theirs. Those silly people, getting so upset for nothing, the intelligentsia would cluck.
Pontius Pilate	Who are you supposed to be? ask the chatterers. Who's that? they ask when told.
Mohammed	After someone at the fanatic edge of Islam cuts Harry's head off, the shrieking classes say he asked for it by offending the sort of people who would cut your head off.

So the outrage sort of fits into the total program of presentation, where Nazis are bad bad bad not so much because they're totalitarians who tried to take over Europe and who killed a lot of people (which differs from the European bureaucracy only in body count, but not so much in intent), but because Nazis are bad, bad, bad. Because the Nazis have to be bad so that creatively-challenged dissenters can compare current world leaders to them thoughtlessly.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:14 AM