Baby It’s Nuts Out There!

My oh my does Western society spend an awful lot of time being upset about things.  Something happening somewhere at sometime, is always offending someone who will then bellyache about it with lighting speed via social media, in turn recruiting a whole bunch more people to moan about it to the rest of us. Our culture it seems is stuck on permanent outrage.

Citizen Tom discusses this in his brilliant post, How Do We Recognize a Bad Idea?, which points out how fighting over such nonsense can be traced directly back to that head honcho of deadly sins, pride.  He links to several other blogs too which touch on the same theme and are very much worth reading.

It seems there’s a lot of offending going on.  Just this past week I’ve learned that the Charlie Brown Christmas special is racist, that the old holiday favorite Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is steeped in misogyny and racial insensitivity and that telling a joke about lingerie on an elevator can derail your career.  And that’s just one week’s worth of grievances!

The nonsense here is almost too much to bear, but now I hear one of my favorite Christmas songs, Baby It’s Cold Outside, has been banned by some radio stations after listeners complained that the lyrics are too date rapey.

I suppose in the era of #MeToo this was inevitable, but pulling it off the air?  Sheesh people get a life.  It’s just a friggin’ song about a playful back and forth that men and women have been doing since Adam first invited Eve over for drinks.  Demanding that it be taken off  the radio is just the type of thing that’s turning #MeToo in to a parody of itself, more like #JumpShark at this point.

I guess I should be happy about all this kerfuffling over dumb things as it must mean life is pretty good otherwise for those doing the complaining.  You know, first world problems and all.  I guess you could also say that I’m contributing to it by being outraged over all this outrage.  Oh well, my blog, my rules.

In closing I’ll leave you with the original Baby It’s Cold outside by Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer.

Trigger Warning: Listening to this song may cause extreme dismay and grumpiness when reflecting on how upside down our world has become in the 70+ years since it was released.

Michael Buble and Idina Menzel also have a great video of it done here with children no less in the starring roles!