Stupid people are still dangerous, so laugh, but be ready to defend yourself.<\/p>\n
Woke people are stupid, and stupid people are funny.<\/a><\/p>\n Woke people are funny. They are funny because they are stupid, and stupid people are funny. I insist upon this. If it becomes necessary, and if God grants me the courage, I will insist upon laughter right up until I am in the stocks or whatever modern equivalent these sniveling putzes dream up. When they march me out or lock me up or come for my head, I will laugh.<\/p>\n Recently when I\u00a0expressed<\/a>\u00a0this sentiment online I was rebuked: \u201cNazis were hilarious until they weren\u2019t.\u201d \u201cStupid with power is not funny anymore.\u201d I want to take these objections seriously enough to answer them, because I think they express a real and growing anxiety. It is an understandable anxiety for anyone who sees how dark things could get in this country and around the world.<\/p>\n The upshot of the objection is: critical race theory and woke doctrine are no longer any laughing matter. We sniggered at the Leftists while they worked diligently away, and now they have\u00a0taken over<\/a>\u00a0our\u00a0schools<\/a>\u00a0and our\u00a0government<\/a>. They are seriously engaged in bringing the country down around our ears. In the process, they are doing terrible harm to us and our children. This is nothing to be scoffed at.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With respect, I think this sentiment misses the point of laughter as a weapon against evil. True, there is a flippant kind of mockery which expresses complacency, and that kind is\u00a0wholly inappropriate<\/a>\u00a0for our moment. We can no longer shrug off the absurdism of a phrase like \u201chealth care for trans youth\u201d (meaning chemical castration). Most likely we should have realized that long ago.<\/p>\n And to be fair to\u00a0The American Mind<\/em>, I think we have been more earnest than most conservatives in our insistence that these people mean business. \u201cThose who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,\u201d said Voltaire\u2014and though he was talking about the Christian church, which he despised, he was right that passionate faith motivates real commitment. So, I will grant: if laughter means dismissal, the time for laughing at the woke is long gone.<\/p>\n But there is another kind of laughter that is not so na\u00efve. St. Thomas More famously said of the devil, \u201cthe proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked.\u201d I can only assume that those who reject this advice imagine it was written from a comfortable study somewhere in the English countryside. It was not. More wrote his\u00a0Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation<\/em>\u00a0in the Tower of London, where he was awaiting execution. If ever a man knew whereof he spoke, it was More.<\/p>\n One must resist the temptations of fear and despair, wrote More, \u201cnot only…always with reasoning\u201d but also with defiant contempt. Saints do not only argue with Satan: \u201csometimes they laugh him to scorn too.\u201d Martin Luther echoed this sentiment (Tischreden\u00a0<\/em>ch. 25), as did C.S. Lewis in his\u00a0Screwtape Letters<\/em>, which he wrote to encourage the British people amid the horrors of World War II. None of these men could be accused of taking evil lightly.<\/p>\n On the contrary: there is only one kind of man who can really laugh in the devil\u2019s face, and that is the man who already takes it for granted that the worst people will have their day in this world. And so we earn the right to laugh at our persecutors only when we can proclaim and believe that their day is not the only day, and this world is not the only world.<\/p>\n In other words, the only laughter which can really persist in the face of evil is the echo of another voice, the deep and abiding mirth of \u201chim who sits above and laughs the while\u201d at Satan in his brief rage (Paradise Lost\u00a0<\/em>II.731-2). As Lewis pointed out in his preface to\u00a0Paradise Lost<\/em>, the poem\u2019s depiction of divine laughter at Satan offends many readers’ sensibilities, much as laughter in the face of wokeness offends many well-meaning people now. But Milton\u2019s laughing God is scriptural: \u201che that dwells in the heavens shall laugh them to scorn; the LORD shall mock them\u201d (Psalm 2:4).<\/p>\n All this is easy for me to say, perhaps: I am not currently in the Gulag, and the worst excesses of the woke cultural revolution remain (for now) the stuff of jokes. But that\u2019s as may be. We must each of us pray for strength commensurate with the evils of each day, which are sufficient unto it. Still I do hope that, no matter how bad things get, I will find wokeness funny. For that is the kind of comedy that expresses not complacency but confidence: a confidence that though the devil may rage, we know who will have the last laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stupid people are still dangerous, so laugh, but be ready to defend yourself. Woke people are stupid, and stupid people are funny. Woke people are funny. They are funny because they are stupid, and stupid people are funny. I insist upon this. If it becomes necessary, and if God grants me the courage, I will … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67385,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67384\/revisions\/67385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}