{"id":6876,"date":"2014-01-06T14:39:14","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T22:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6876"},"modified":"2014-01-06T14:43:06","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T22:43:06","slug":"pajama-boy-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/pajama-boy-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"Pajama Boy Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Will Kane of\u00a0High Noon<\/i><\/a>\u00a0Pajama Boy wasn\u2019t. Somehow we as a nation went from the \"Photoiconic Marlboro Man to Pajama Boy \u2014 from the noble individual with a bad habit to the ignoble without a good habit \u2014 without a blink in between.<\/p>\n

There are lots of revolting things in the Pajama Boy ad. After all, how can you top all at once a nerdy-looking child-man dressed in infantile pajamas while cradling a cup of hot chocolate with the smug assurance that he is running your life more than you his?<\/p>\n

The Liberal Body-Snatchers<\/b><\/p>\n

Still, there are one or two even scarier thoughts.<\/p>\n

One, did the Obama appendage, Organizing for Action, really believe that\u00a0such a sad-sack image<\/a>\u00a0might galvanize anyone about anything? \u00a0And two, did they really think that Pajama Boy would resonate with any young people outside of the New York-DC circus, as if to assume he would be persuasive: stay cool with retro geek glasses, pajamas, and hot chocolate like Pajama Boy, and then, presto, rush out to buy an Obamacare policy?<\/p>\n

Out here in the rural middle of California \u2014 or most anywhere 30 miles inland from the coasts \u2014 Pajama Boy would last about two seconds pruning vines, or walking about the local Wal-Mart parking lot with his hot chocolate. Yet put him where his foot-padded pajamas bring dividends and for the last five years we all have lived out the consequences of his ilk\u2019s ideological dreaming.<\/p>\n

The great mystery of America today is how many of us have joined Pajama Boy nation \u2014 20%, 40%, 60%? \u2014 and how many want nothing to do with such metrosexual visions of a huge state run by a nerdocracy, incompetently doling out other people\u2019s money. How many were on board for Obamacare, more entitlements, and lectures from the apartheid elite on inequality and fairness, versus how many turn the channel at sound of His voice.<\/p>\n

Sharpton Good \u2014\u00a0Duck Dynasty<\/i>\u00a0Not?<\/b><\/p>\n

This past week the question of two Americas seems to be playing out even in the trivial psychodramas of bastardized popular culture. If Michelle Obama\u00a0photo-ops<\/a>\u00a0and consults with Al Sharpton \u2014 of Crown Heights riot, Freddie\u2019s Fashion Mart, and Tawana Brawley\u00a0notoriety<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 is anything off-limits?<\/p>\n

As I understand liberal popular culture as expressed in television and entertainment, David Letterman \u2014 cynical, dry, raised eyebrows at each ironic smirk \u2014 can pun on air that Sarah Palin\u2019s 14-year-old daughter\u00a0had sex with a baseball player<\/a>\u00a0in the dugout.Or\u00a0Martin Bashir rails<\/a>\u00a0that Mrs. Palin should have excrement and urine inserted into her mouth, or Chris Rock suggests that the 4th<\/sup>\u00a0of July is\u00a0\u201cWhite People\u2019s Day,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0or Jamie Foxx jokes about \u00a0how fun it was to play a character\u00a0killing white people<\/a>. Fine, free speech is free speech. To each his own. Let the seller and buyer establish their own codes of speech. Live and let live and all that good stuff.<\/p>\n

But, on the other hand, you must not, as a real-TV celebrity, dare to suggest off-camera that male sodomy is somehow less \u201cnormal\u201d or perhaps less \u00a0\u201dmoral\u201d or hygienic than is heterosexual intercourse. (The downside of sodomy in\u00a0this Miley Cyrus age<\/a>\u00a0of anything goes rawness is oddly\u00a0a taboo subject<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The White Trash Zoo<\/b><\/p>\n

How bizarre that the\u00a0Duck Dynasty<\/i>\u00a0characters and Pajama Boy\u00a0reverberated the same week<\/a>. I have never watched\u00a0Duck Dynasty,<\/i>\u00a0and have only glanced at the expanding genre of white working class reality dramas, from tree cutters and gold miners to ice truckers and boat captains: Cussin\u2019 good ol\u2019 boys, who lose their temper when failing to start the generator, have big arms and bigger guts, and are to remind us (within limits) that once upon a time we all used to be more like them\u00a0than Ezra Klein and Jay Carney<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Who watches these shows? Perhaps\u00a0the majority of viewers<\/a>\u00a0are those who still admire muscular strength and the earthy ability to make a living from nature (and not work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the local Department of Motor Vehicles), and a smaller percentage who find these aborigines odd, but also oddly compelling in their reminder that the people like themselves who run our country could not sharpen a chain saw, change the oil in their car, or unplug their own sewer line. This latter group is curious about the uncouth people who can do these things.<\/p>\n

The A&E controversy grew even stranger in that pet white aborigines from the rural south are supposed to shock us by their blunt talk and religious hocus pocus, but only if they stay inside the bars of their zoo cage and thus only ham it up within the parameters\u00a0of politically correct hillbilly-ese<\/a>. The Pajama Boy mob at A&E must know that the Ducks, should they speak like those in Silicon Valley or act in accordance with Upper West Side protocols, would have zero audience. Is the logic of\u00a0Duck Dynasty<\/i>\u00a0that the few left in America of the 1940s can spout off in a neat way to us \u2014 but only without putting their paws and snouts too far through the bars of their cage?<\/p>\n

Obama as Pajama Boy<\/b><\/p>\n

Pajama Boy is the bookend to\u00a0vero possumus<\/i>, the faux-Greek columns, the Obama rainbow logo, cooling the planet and lowering the seas, hope and change, Forward!, \u201cYes, we can!\u201d, the Nate Silver infatuation,\u00a0Barbara Walters\u2019 \u201cmessiah,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0David Brooks\u2019 crease, Chris Matthews\u2019 tingle, and the army of Silicon techies who can mobilize for Obama but not for Obamacare. These are the elites without identities who feed on the latest fad. They are the upper-crust versions of those who once mobbed stores to buy the last Cabbage Patch Kids doll, or had to have a pet rock on their dresser. Obama, after all, was the lava lamp and\u00a0Chia Pet<\/a>\u00a0of the young urban progressive.<\/p>\n

If I were to focus on just two of the many characteristics of Pajama Boy nation in the Age of Obama, one would be that the consequences of one\u2019s ideology apply always to someone else. Obama obsesses on inequality, but cannot even go through the populist motions of avoiding Martha\u2019s Vineyard, or not dressing like a nerd for golf at the latest tony course.<\/p>\n

He is an arugula-eating man of the people who tries to bowl only during election season. Michelle rags on the 1%, but still hits Costa del Sol and Aspen. Obamacare for us; for congressional staffers and insiders something quite different. A Nobel Prize and a half a billion dollars for guru Al Gore; and dumping Current TV\u00a0on a fossil-fuelled, anti-Semitic authoritarian Middle Eastern regime<\/a>\u00a0to fund more good work of our green Elmer Gantry.\u00a0 Amnesty for illegal aliens, but private academies for liberal kids far from the ensuing chaos of the public schools. \u00a0Pajama Boys are fiercely liberal so that they can fiercely avoid the people they so champion and are so afraid to live among.<\/p>\n

Second, the architects of Pajama Boy nation always expect others to go on despite rather than because of them. The frackers must frack so that Obama can brag about their productivity, while he bites his lip and looks pained to billionaire coastal benefactors about pumping liquid into the bowels of their Mother Earth.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Barack Obama was back out to again brag about his three supposed accomplishments: One, the deficit is shrinking; two, the gas and oil picture is brightening; and three, we are not witnessing anymore shut-downs of government over the debt ceiling. He should have added \u2014 \u201cWe do best when no one listens to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Savings accrued from the sequester that was forced upon Obama by those Tea Party nuts in the House. Gas prices are dropping despite the efforts of Obama to stop fracking and horizontal drilling on federal lands. \u00a0Senator Obama himself voted to shut down the government under George W. Bush, rather than to raise the debt ceiling \u2014 having once passionately adopted the very stance that he now demonizes others for.<\/p>\n

The Other Half<\/b><\/p>\n

Half the country may have already tuned Pajama Boy nation out. Millions more or less don\u2019t watch TV other than older movies and a few episodes of some serial like\u00a0The Sopranos\u00a0<\/i>or\u00a0Breaking Bad<\/i><\/a>.<\/i>\u00a0Most expect just three things of today\u2019s Hollywood celebrities: they are mostly spoiled and uneducated; they are very rich; and in their boredom they will find a way to annoy those without their money.<\/p>\n

We also find the grating nasal-twanged voices of our young talking heads on the news shows a tip-off that all their over-clever rhetoric is never grounded in reality. We have no idea whom MTV is awarding, or why, and couldn\u2019t care less. We are sick of slick slightly pornographic commercials, and sicker still of the crude left-wing Victorians who push sex down our throats, but can\u2019t handle a caricatured hick talking just as graphically as they do \u2014 but about sodomy in a way they don\u2019t appreciate. Which is the cruder: to see a three-quarters naked Miley Cyrus on national television stick a huge foam finger toward the anus of one of her performers or to read that a bearded reality star in overalls finds vaginal sex preferable to anal sex \u2014 and then tells us why?<\/p>\n

Most don\u2019t watch Oprah. Rap is a sort of occasional bothersome grate overheard at the service station or parking lot. No one goes to the movies to watch another tired Hollywood script of a courageous liberal maverick who fights the cancer-causing, stream-polluting, CIA-intriguing [fill in the blanks] corporation \u2014 as the actor is paid millions\u00a0by the corporation producing the movie<\/a>\u00a0for his few hours of mediocre work. Company men and women don\u2019t play renegades well anymore.<\/p>\n

We accept that the law is mostly fluid, depending on whether you are one of the noble suffering or the bad and incessantly grasping: sanctuary cities are noble places where federal immigration laws can be safely ignored. Try that with the Second\u00a0Amendment and you\u2019ll be summarily jailed.<\/p>\n

There is a growing tiredness with Pajama Boy nation. Millions are sick of being lectured, caricatured, and slandered for their supposed pathologies by the Sandra Flukes of the age and those in their pajamas who still grasp with two hands their hot chocolate. Add all their annoying Stalinist efforts up \u2014 to selectively going after Chick-fil-A or the Washington Redskins orDuck Dynasty<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 and the public is becoming tired of the shrill nerdocracy.<\/p>\n

How many are revolting against Pajama Boy nation and his bunch, no one quite knows. But I\u2019m beginning to think for the first time since 2009 that the rage and numbers of the disengaged have not crested yet, not quite yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Will Kane of\u00a0High Noon\u00a0Pajama Boy wasn\u2019t. Somehow we as a nation went from the iconic Marlboro Man to Pajama Boy \u2014 from the noble individual with a bad habit to the ignoble without a good habit \u2014 without a blink in between. There are lots of revolting things in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86,278],"tags":[1025,12,1044,40,915,1042,914,1016],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1MU","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9305,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-pajama-boy-white-house\/","url_meta":{"origin":6876,"position":0},"title":"The Pajama Boy White House","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 19, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Meet the 30-somethings who are running our federal government. 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Over the last 30 years, Friedman's nutty idea of maximizing shareholder value as the only responsibility\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8356,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/moral-schizophrenics\/","url_meta":{"origin":6876,"position":5},"title":"Moral Schizophrenics","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 21, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"On campus, on the campaign trail. by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Hillary Clinton in recent months has done the following: She charged UCLA somewhere around $300,000 for reciting some platitudes. 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