Craig Simpson: D'Oh!

Craig Simpson is a reporter on the Rubber City Radio stations and a frequent guest on Eric Mansfield's NewsNight Akron. Now he also runs a blog and last week posted about Akron's JCC hosting Maccabi Games, a Jewish youth athletic event. The post is, ah, problematic and Jill pointed it out. In response to comments from Jill and I, Craig says he's only kidding.

Actually, he says he was kidding and that some of his best friends are Jewish and that if anyone is offended, he's sorry. Yes, the Lighten Up crackback, the My Best Friends defense and the If You Were Offended non-apology apology. The three favorites of people who say stupid crap and won't own it. A trifecta of douchebaggery. Well played, sir.

Oh, and he tells me to be a real man. So apparently my offense has to do with my lousy bench press, or something.

*Sigh*

We shouldn't have to keep having this conversation, but apparently we must. So here are a few tips for navigating the treacherous straights between effective satire and actually trafficking in hate. And I'll type slowly so even Craig can understand.

First off, people have to know you are kidding. No, really. Because, you see, the reason that these stereotypes are so powerful and destructive is that people actually say them and mean them. And mean harm by them. By this measure Simpson's post fails. He starts off arguing that Jews shouldn't sequester themselves from the rest of society for exclusive activities. This is a stock Limbaughian rant. Without knowing whether Simpson is actually Limbaughian, it's impossible to know that he's kidding.

Then he segues into a bit about what interfaith games might look like. This is painfully unfunny but at least it looks like it's supposed to be funny.

Then the head-snapping last paragraph:

Come on, the Jews have most of the money and run most of the business world…do you REALLY need to rub it in our faces have your own freakin’ Olympics!? Just stick to penny-pinching, lawyering and filling up the upscale communities in America’s suburbs.

I'll wait until you recover from the spasms of laughter.

There.

This, apparently, is where he goes so over the top that he thinks anyone would know he was kidding, Would that it were so. In fact I know intelligent professional people who think think nothing of trafficking in the standard money-grubbing Jew stereotype.

In his defense Craig maintains that his Jewish friends thought this was all Big Laffs. Setting aside the real possibility that his friends were just being abundantly polite to their ignorant but harmless goy friend, this argument still falls. His friends have a context for knowing that he's kidding -- the context of knowing Craig Simpson. Without that context it looks like he started a standard right wing diatribe and in the last paragraph shared too much.

Which brings us to a second problem. If you are going to satirize hateful stereotypes, actually satirize them. Just reiterating them isn't satire. Simpson is engaging in the Andrew Dice Clay method -- pretend to be a bigot by actually sounding like a bigot, but do nothing to make the bigotry sound ridiculous. In the Diceman's case, the satire claim was just window dressing to make his actually bigotry look something close to respectable, but his audience was laughing at the objects of his rants, not with them. In Simpson's case, it just turns out to be not funny, unless you share the actual views he posts.

By the same token, understand that if you are satirizing, you are still trotting out ideas that hurt people. It's a project you should approach with some delicacy.

Finally, if you try this and it doesn't work, admit it. I've worked this line myself -- in the immediately preceding post in fact. It's easy to make a mistake and hurt people. Where I come from, a big part of being a real man is to admit when you've made a mistake. And no, "I'm sorry you were too sensitive to know I was kidding" is not actually an apology, it's an insult.

Looking over Simpson's work, it doesn't look like he has the chops to thread this needle. Stick to sounding smarter that Phil Trexler, Craig. It's about as high as you can aspire to.