Toadie Meaningfully Remains Seated
The secret to blogging relevance, if you want some inside info, is to stay a good four or five days behind the news cycle and then issue a boring, contrarian take in mild support of an indefensible toadie squid who nobody likes. To wit:
During the Olympics Opening Ceremony last Friday, Vice President and Koch Industries' Castrated Captain America Doll, Jesus Freak Edition, Mike Pence (and Mother) neglected to stand and applaud when the unified South and North Korean delegation made their way around the stadium. This apparent disrespect was met with calls of hypocrisy and pettiness and general mockery. These are all bad takes. The correct take is that it's fine, actually, that Pence failed to stand up and cheer for the unified delegation of athletes. Good, even!
Pence didn't stand and cheer for any of the other delegations, either. The Vice President of the United States of America stood and applauded for the American delegation of athletes--even if some of those athletes righteously want absolutely nothing to do with him--and that's fine, too. Just fine.
Every single one of the "Pence should have stood" pieces might as well have been written by North Korean state media. Kim Jong-un managed to parlay the constant threat of violence and chaos he wields over the region and the world into a perfect little propaganda campaign. Everybody complaining that Pence "should have been the bigger man," or whatever, and stood to honor the athletes coming together for peace and unity and sport are Kim Jong-un's useful idiots.
It would be one thing if the outcome of this Kim-buya moment ("Booooo!") were anything but a foregone return to the status quo. Perhaps if there was any reason whatsoever to believe that the Pyeongchang Olympics were the beginning of the end of the Kim dynasty, or the beginning of the end of the regime's nuclear ambitions, or might provide any benefit whatsoever to the people suffering under one of the world's four or five most oppressive governments--maybe then Pence could be condemned for failing to express his admiration for the athletes, at least.
But we're talking about North Korea! A brutal cult-of-personality-led authoritarian regime whose crimes against its own people are far too numerous to list, but can perhaps best be summed up by the fact that the North Korean population has been so consistently malnourished for the last 70 years that they're three inches shorter than their genetic brothers and sisters to the south. That's fucking nuts!
You can't just be like, "hey, let's separate the politics from the athletes, here." These athletes are victims of a lifelong party indoctrination scheme that brings them to the capital at a young age (or they are selected from already inculcated families), turns them and their families into elite party loyalists, and still doesn't trust them to come back home of their own volition. They aren't free persons choosing to unite with their southern counterparts in a bid for human unity and a more peaceful future, they're Stockholm-syndrome'd propaganda weapons of a murderous despot.
The South Koreans were understandably concerned that North Korea was going to do something to fuck with the Olympics. (Like Russia probably did.) As recently as a month ago, they were threatening the South simply for having diplomatically gestured politely at the United States. North Korea promises to obliterate the South as a matter of regular course. The Olympic unification theatrics were not borne of a good-faith negotiation to bring long-warring factions together for a peaceful three weeks of harmony--this was a hostage situation. Why stand up and cheer for that?
One of the dumbest things people say in politics is "what if [the other guy] did that?" It's a way of suggesting that the thing you're mad about (or not) is actually just a cover for the ad hominem distaste underlying your claimed position. It often results in false equivalences like this one, in which Vice President Joe Biden and Useless Toadie Footstool Mike Pence are placed on similar moral planes. And maybe the above-referenced outrage really is rooted in the sincerely held belief that Mike Pence should not be considered capable of taking moral stands at all--maybe you believe he lacks that authority, simply because of who he is. That's fine, I guess. Whatever. I'm not about to argue in favor of Pence's righteousness, which is minimal-to-nonexistent. But don't take that general disregard for his moral authority and forget that it's entirely possible that even someone with whom you profoundly disagree can occasionally be in the right.
Like, for instance, when he pointedly doesn't stand and cheer in celebration of a display engineered by a homicidal dictatorial maniac intent on extracting all value from the people of his country in the pursuit and maintenance of his own power and glory, a parodic pantomime of confederation immorally extracted at gunpoint from a democratically-sanctioned government suffering the very rational fear of terroristic reprisal. (That he did smugly smile, stand, and applaud at another mostly terrifying stage-play under really quite similar circumstances is neither here nor there, for now.) If it had been Joe Biden sitting there all steely-eyed, dramatically stoic next to a tight-lipped Dr. Jill Biden, there wouldn't have been any outraged tweets--except from the Fox News crowd, of course, who would have found their meaningful sitting childish and petty and unbecoming of "the bigger man," whatever that is supposed to mean. And that's dumb. There's nothing about this highly orchestrated faux-harmoniousness that is worthy of our applause. Eat shit, Kim!
