J’accuse…!
John Cleese is the Problem
John Cleese, of Ministry of Silly Walks fame, or perhaps better known for his role of narrator in Beethoven’s Christmas Adventure (2011), recently posted an old comedic skit on Twitter that got almost 100K retweets and more than twice as many likes. Cleese has pitched for everything from banks to beer to the Czech Olympic Team (don’t ask), but now he’s pitching for the feckless nugatards of his generation who inherited their parents’ victories over the Great Depressions and Dictators only to spend it on aluminum siding and leisure suits. All breeds of entertainer of that generation have squandered their inheritance by whistling past graveyards while Marxists murdered tens of millions, corporations strip mined the economy, and bankers inflated away the middle class.
Cleese’s short skit starts with “We’ve heard a lot about extremism, a nastier, harsher atmosphere … less friendliness and tolerance and respect.” Despite these negatives, “the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good. The great thing about enemies is that you can pretend all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness is in you.”
With this fragile premise, Cleese then provides a selection of enemies, depending on whether you’re on the left or the right. “If you join the hard left … authorized enemies include… multi-national corporations, public schools, moderates. … Extremists on the hard right get unions, Russia, communists, moderates….”
Of course, it’s hilarious that “moderates” is on both lists. He ends with, “Once you’re armed with one of these super list of enemies, you can be as nasty as you like, and feel your behavior is morally justified … and still think of yourself a champion of the truth, a fighter of the greater good, and not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are.”
And so Cleese argues that getting worked up over these “authorized enemies” is extreme, while the mentally-healthy position is of the omni-targeted “moderates.” According to the grand reveal in The Meaning of Life, which Cleese co-authored, the meaning of life is: “Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” And thus we have the Moderate Credo.
Perhaps some of Cleese’s extremist examples are extremist, but much of it seems to suggest that people shouldn’t be outraged at the outrageous. Having an “extremist” reaction to the Chinese Communist Party enrolling one or three million minorities in concentration camps (happening right now) or live organ harvesting (also: right now) or California’s metastasizing new feudalism or Chicago’s shocking 30% murder clearance rate is ‘extremism,’ according to Mr. Cleese. (Yes, if you’re in the market, then you’ve got a better than 50/50 chance of not being caught for murdering someone in Chicago.) Or, if Mr. Cleese is more provincial, perhaps he’d find “extremist” if one were a wee bit grumbled by the Rotherham Rape Ring, wherein Pakistani men raped an estimated 1,400 children over a few decades. After all, Mr. Cleese probably supports the Rotherham authorities, who are assuredly all quite moderate.
Cleese’s position is one of apathy shrouded in reasonableness. He can affix the “extremist” label freely on others while parading about with the mark of the moderate, thus avoiding the necessity of offering any substantive argument. It’s a kind of emotional anti-intellectualism in which his generation specialized and has the unique advantage of being quite profitable. Perhaps the Moderate Credo is: One should not abdicate principles for free.
Halcyon Apathy
John Cleese grew up in an era of peace and luxury. He was six years old when WW2 ended and that, for his generation, was the war to end all wars. There would never again be anything about which one could get so worked-up. And he silly-walked his way past terrors greater than WW2 while bullying easy targets (religion, the government, the French).
The most rapid expansion of the British economy occurred in the 1950s, Cleese’s formative years. Unemployment was very low, and optimism was very high. Of course, at this same time, entire swaths of the British Foreign Service were being infiltrated by the KGB, including the bulk of the senior leadership in the British Embassy in DC. The KGB’s favorite recruiting ground was Cambridge, probably because of the wide selection of gullible gentry but I wouldn’t know for certain as I didn’t attend Cambridge in those years. But Mr. Cleese did. Maybe he can tell us.
About the same year he entered Cambridge — the same Cambridge that eagerly entertained communists — Mao began seizing crops that resulted in the starvation deaths of 20 or 30 or 40 million Chinese. But honestly, who’s counting and who cares as long as we can read a good book every now and then and avoid eating fat? We wouldn’t want to be extremist. Or fat.
And it wasn’t too long after, in the 1970s, that had Mr. Cleese not been so moderate he would have noticed that Britain’s great manufacturing industries had mostly vanished, including the bulk of its rather robust automobile manufacturing. Was that the fault of the unions or the multi-national corporations? No matter, they’re both on the list of things about which we shan’t get too extremist. After all, we’re only talking about people’s livelihoods, and what better way to realize the “don’t eat fat” mantra than not eat at all? That is, after all, living together in peace and harmony with Mao.
Mr. Cleese’s skit is not comedy; it’s an inoculation against principles. It’s apathy masquerading as reasonable moderation based on the mantra Calm down. Avoid eating fat. And try and live together in peace and harmony. And if a Pakistani dude in the U.K. rapes you and then the CCP rips out your kidneys, and your liver, and your gall bladder, and your heart, well, maybe you didn’t avoid eating fat. It would — can’t we agree? — be quite extremist to react to the violent loss of your own gall bladder (or anyone else’s, really). And if the government and the multi-national corporations sell of your children into debt-slavery, well, calm down.
Laughing at the decline of the civilization that birthed modernity would be cowardice, but, under the new management of Cleese’s generation, hedonistic apathy was given a fresh coat of paint and a new name — moderation — and the predictable resulting national suicide could be secured with but a few more lies about peace for our time.
However, if we were to come into possession of principles and thus begin down the slippery slope of “extremism,” we might not be hired by a multi-national corporations, or a few dozen, as Mr. Cleese has. Principles are bothersome because not having principles pays well.[1] And that is the great innovation of Mr. Cleese’s generation.
The depth of the anti-intellectualism of Cleese’s position is severe; it’s a response to the emotion of WW2 without any analysis of the causes. We avoid another Hitler by preaching moderation and doing another Tostitos commercial. And yet, who permitted the Nazis to metastasize from beer-hall-putschers to brown shirts with Panzer divisions?
Ah, yes, it was the moderates. These are the same moderates who responded to the CCP massacring thousands of student protestors in Tiananmen Square by doing yet another Tostitos commercial. And when the Chinese Communists viewed your Tostitos moderation, they took it for a signal to enslave and murder millions of Falun Gong (mostly by removing their organs while still alive), re-educate millions of Uyghurs, and renege on their Hong Kong agreement with the U.K. As a moderate, Mr. Cleese is sure to love what they have planned for Inner Mongolia.
Or, is love extremist now?
[1] Cleese has been a pitchman for: American Express, Texaco, Tostitos, Lexus, Heineken, Westinghouse, Intel, Planters Pretzels, Titleist, Schweppes, Nestlé Milk Chocolate, Royal Mail, Sony, DirecTV, Canadian Club, William Hill Bookmaker, Accurist, Giroblauw, Postbank, EAC Multilist Real Estate, Compaq, Maxwell House, Magnavox, Talking Pages, Cellnet, Health Education Authority, Norwich Union Direct, Tele Danmark, Sainsbury’s, Melba toast, Artistdirect.com, Electronic Arts, Little Tikes, TBS, TV Spielfilm, Kaupþing, Bank Zachodni WBK, Elgiganten, Hashahar Ha’oleh, Accurist, AA, Dogtober, Czech Olympic Team, and Specsavers.
On the topic of cheap products, here’s a story about the slaves who make many of them: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/if-you-enter-a-camp-you-never-come-out-inside-chinas-war-on-islam
