The Unshifting Night of Unreason

"The beautiful people, the beautiful people
It's all relative to the size of your steeple"

Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People


As I sometimes like to brag, I don't own a TV (really I just play so many damn computer games that I can easily numb my mind without minding the numbskulls on cable) but I do end up ingesting bits and pieces of what's hot and not these days when visiting people who're still into that sort of thing. So, late this spring I caught a few scenes of one of the many, many hospital dramas out there "The Night Shift."

One scene in particular from the season 3 opener episode amused me to no end. I love to hate this sort of facetious political correctness, especially when it's so artlessly, blatantly shoved down viewers' throats. The episode featured American doctors treating a teenage bride in the Middle-East, with all the flamboyant rhetoric this implies. Male and female white doctors admit the girl in her burqa and begin examining her, which generally involves actually looking at her and not just several square meters of black wool. Her husband bursts in spewing all the entitlement and moustachiod fury of a '70s children's cartoon sheikh stereotype. He demands the male doctor leave immediately, shouting him out of the room because no man but he should see his wife, because cultural relativism trumps reason or even the girl's right to decent care.

The female doctor of course rather curtly and without compunctions orders the male doctor to leave. 'Cuz relativity. Only then does the female doctor also order the husband off. Suddenly shifting from a hurricane of moral righteousness to fuming obedience, he now exits, stage whiplash. Then we get the inevitable scene of the politically aware American woman liberating the poor downtrodden local girl.

I love that scene. It convinced me never to bother watching that show again, but I still love how decisively it displays left-wing fundamentalists' strict pecking order based on birthright. The Western male's function is to absorb abuse from everyone else involved. Being male but a noble savage trumps being a white male oppressor but still relegates you to the status of a brutish oppressor of innocent, angelic womanhood. Presiding over the whole affair reigns the properly indoctrinated upper middle class matriarch dispensing the wisdom of identity politics unto the lower orders of being.

I swear, it could only have gotten better if a black lesbian single mother Buddhist, bearing the last silmaril upon her brow and waving a crucifix of Andrea Dworkin, then descended upon the scene to, in turn, kick the white girl out of the room and set this whole cosmic hierarchy to rights.