The Redeeming Value of April Fools
April 3, 2023
Atlanta, GA
What New Year’s Eve is to drinking, April Fools Day is to comedy. Each reveals why some activities are best left to the professionals.
Fortunately, this April Fools Day fell on a weekend, when juvenile jokesters are easier to avoid. For the most part, we evaded the predictable parade of infantile pranks.
But real life is foolish enough…and harder to escape.
With its lame antics and tall tales, April Fools may be the most annoying day of the year. But it does have one redeeming advantage. It might be the only occasion when people scan the daily news with skeptical eyes.
Not even a decade ago, much of the lunacy we’re routinely fed would’ve been derisively dismissed as blatant farce. Now, as the last few years made painfully clear, most people eagerly lap whatever’s being dished.
Just five years ago, few would’ve believed “The Science” could unleash (and its lab rats so meekly accept) dystopian diktats to combat a germ.
If only such obvious idiocy as elbow bumps, “social distancing”, “shelter-in-place”, plexiglass shields, aisle arrows, church closures, school cancellations, cordoned playgrounds, cardboard “spectators”, clean and dirty pens, mask mandates, travel restrictions, nursing home internment, restricted funerals, and hypodermic apartheid had been imposed on the first of April, perhaps more of the marks would’ve been wise to the con.
Then again…turnip trucks overflow, and plenty are born every minute. It’s as if every day is April First, with few suspecting they’re the butt of the joke. Unfortunately, most of the gags aren’t laughing matters.
In an horrific atrocity last week, a deranged transsexual murdered six people (including three nine year-olds) in a Nashville Christian school. From major media, government, corporate, and entertainment outlets, the outpouring of support and grief came fast and furious…
…for the “transgender” community!
Despite every major institution bending over backward to cravenly accommodate their ludicrous “lifestyle”, caravans of crazed cross-dressers invaded state capitols to demand respect for their perverted preferences. Demented and tawdry, these crass displays would’ve been seen in a saner age as tasteless attempts at misplaced “humor.” And then all the miscreants would’ve been shown the door or summarily arrested.
But in our warped world, normal people are expected to accept such mentally defective outbursts as justified bouts of righteous rage. Only when victims are Christian is it compulsory on members of a targeted group to bow before their avowed assailants.
Imagine if, after the horrific church shootings in Charleston, Southern partisans had piled into capitol rotundas insisting attacks on their identity had caused the carnage, all while demanding protection for their lifestyle and prominence for their flag. It would’ve been considered a cruel joke.
Yet in the funhouse mirror to which we’re confined, the Revolution rolls on. The cultural assault is unrelenting. Attacks on tradition is a tactic tried and true since tumbrils rolled to the Place de Grève.
Much as their French antecedents reconstructed the calendar and “decapitated” statues, contemporary jacobins pound at the pillars of American history.
Monuments are toppled or effaced. Holidays are corrupted or erased. In a more serious era, we’d think these faddish tantrums were tossed in jest. At minimum, those pitching the fits would be put in their place or sent to their rooms.
But now, they’re given charge of the whole house. It started a few years ago (after the aforementioned murders in Charleston) with calls to eradicate commemorations of cursed Confederates.
While most Americans assuaged misplaced guilt by relenting to the ransacking, a prescient minority warned the historical whitewash wouldn’t cease in the South.
The Confederacy wasn’t the true target. It was merely the outer wall of a fortified castle. But once it was breached, the drawbridge fell and the moat was crossed.
After forcing Lee to surrender a second time, the vandals insisted they’d sound the retreat. Instead, having conquered Spain, they spanned Gibraltar. Now they threaten to take North Africa, and conquer the entire empire.
During and after the George Floyd riots, even monuments to Jefferson and Washington began to fall. Now many wonder whether any should stay. Schools, teams, and towns changed their names from historic heroes to ones more ideologically acceptable or innocuously abstract.
Anyone who opposed this punchline, which would’ve seemed absurd ten minutes ago, was suddenly transformed into a fascist white supremacist who oppressively acknowledged only two sexes and one definition of marriage.
Orwell observed that he who controls the past controls the future. And he who controls the present controls the past. But even someone with Orwell’s sense of humor couldn’t have written this sordid script.
Not that he couldn’t foresee the rise of digital currencies, electronic surveillance, and the RESTRICT Act (he essentially did). But the brazen absurdity of the climate scam would’ve been a whoopee cushion even Kafka couldn’t have placed.
We’d think no one in his right mind would fall for misanthropic jesters reviving pre-industrial power to calibrate global temperatures. Yet we’ve got clownish officials with straight faces claiming to “save the planet” by presuming to eliminate a trace gas that’s essential to life.
Stop! Our sides are splitting!
Meanwhile, the same jokers who want us to deprive ourselves to save the world are more than willing to provoke and prolong a ridiculous conflict that could immediately end it.
For years, US geopolitical geniuses propped buckets of water above the Ukraine, and dared the Russians to walk thru the door. Last February, they finally did. In typical knee-slapping fashion, it’s the innocent bystanders who are getting wet.
On a lighter note, our economic merrymakers couldn’t help but get in on the act. Indeed, without these rapscallions, the entire depraved vaudeville act would need to pack its bags and hit the bricks.
For more than a century, the Fed has donned its red nose and big shoes. Ever since, it’s strewn a plethora of banana peels and squirted water in our face.
If not for these rogues, the laugh-riots of the First World War and Great Depression couldn’t have occurred. Without those, the Nazis, Commies, or World War II couldn’t have gotten an audition. Absent their acts, the wars against Koreans, Vietnamese, Poverty, Drugs, and Terror would never have made it past the casting couch.
The Global Financial Crisis and distortions of Quantitative Easing…the rise of Donald Trump…the calamity of the Covid Regime…and the catastrophe of the Climate Cult: none of it would’ve been possible without counterfeit currency from a compliant central bank.
The consequences of funny money are everywhere. And the joke’s on us. But the only ones laughing are those who pull the prank of running the press.
JD