Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Will She Still Feel Harassed If She's Ready For Clover?

"Will she still feel harassed if she's ready for clover?"

43 years long, that's what the first line of the song sounded like to me. As the decades passed, I began to doubt more and more that what it sounded like to me was actually the first line of the song, "Black Water" by the Doobie Brothers:



But still, up until a couple of minutes ago, that was what it still sounded like to me. It took me about 5 seconds on the Inter Tubes (it's a vast network of tubes) to find out that the first line of the song actually is:

"Well, I built me a raft and she's ready for floatin'"

That makes much more sense and is much less disturbing than what it had sounded like to me for 43 years. The dude's not harassing women, he's building rafts.

It was so easy for me to correct my error there. But it's so hard to talk sense with people who are taken in by fake news. They've got exactly the same Internet at their disposal as I, but they believe that Obama supports ISIS, that political correctness supports something they call "Muslim rape culture," and that Hillary Clinton... has done some horrible things. I've never encountered any other beliefs which were both so widespread and so vague as whatever it is that all of those people who think Hillary is so horrible think she did.

Mistaken beliefs which ought to be as easy to dispel as my former impression that the lead singer of the Doobie Brothers hoped that some woman would no longer feel harassed, now that she was ready for clover -- whatever it meant to be ready for clover.

I don't like it when mainstream journalists maintain that we -- by "we" I mean intelligent people -- should have more understanding for all of those tens of millions of white folks who voted for Trump. I understand them perfectly well: they're stupid. Very stupid. As stupid as it would have been for me to insist all day long, day after day, forever, until the end of my incredibly stupid life, that the Doobie Brothers' song "Black Water" refers to a woman who may or may not now still feel harassed, now that she is ready for clover, instead of going to the trouble of learning what the first line of the song really is. "Will she still feel harassed if she's ready for clover?" -- that's how stupid those tens of millions of people are, and us pretending they're not stupid is not going to make them more intelligent, and it's certainly not going to help us out of our current political predicament. Nobody had any intelligent reason to vote for Trump, that's the truth, and the truth might set us free if we say it openly and honestly enough.

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