by Jim Branco
The matter of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2244 has been bothering me ever since I first heard about it. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so much, but now I finally understand.
Forget, for a moment, the content of what Mr. Chapman said to his 24 year old son. The problem lies in the fact that his son recorded it and sold it to the Enquirer. The Enquirer went public with this private conversation, and Duane Chapman lost his job.
This was a private intra-family conversation between father and son. The sort of conversation that is, and ought to be, the most frank and least accessible to outside ears. Such conversations are seldom politically correct.Whether the topic of discussion is women, work, government or changing the engine in a car; the language is likely to be liberally sprinkled with profanity and irreverence. Sometimes those conversations contain rather harsh judgments.
Tucker Chapman wasn’t pleased with what he heard from his father. So even though he is 24, he acted like an immature brat, and chose to use a recording to undermine and destroy his father in a fit of childish anger.
What Tucker Chapman did lies beyond the pale, because he violated the sacred trust of frank father-son conversation, and opened it to the entire world. Now his father is in a battle to save his livelihood; and the inheritance he could have left his children, both in terms of money and especially in terms of the wisdom of his experiences, has been greatly diminished.
Like most childish behavior, what Tucker Chapman did may have provided a moment of satisfaction, but in the long run he will be diminished by it. He has diminished his father to crawling on his hands and knees to seek the approval of people who hate him. He has also, likely forever, destroyed his father’s trust and will forever be bereft of the benefit of his father’s experience and his true ideas and opinions.
When all of this is over, Tucker Chapman will still be the sort of dishonorable whiny little brat who would destroy someone’s livelihood over a private argument. In all likelihood, the girl will leave him when someone better comes along. And when he’s wondering about an easy way to get the pilot bearing out of a crankshaft, his father won’t have an answer for him.
But the thing that bothered me most about this, and that really unsettled me, was the eerie way in which the whole episode reminds me of the Soviet Union. Family members would turn in family members for saying things that weren’t permitted to be said. It created an environment of oppression and fear where people’s distrust of each other was so intense they could never unite to throw off the tyrant.
The term, Politically Correct was invented by the Marxists in the old USSR to specify the things you were, and were not, allowed to say. It isn’t a new invention at all. It was brought into the United States by cultural Marxists intent on destroying our cultural structures. If you aren’t familiar with Marxism, you may be surprised to discover that racial pejoratives weren’t permitted since their entire philosophy is founded on the notion of human equality and interchangeability. Does this idea sound … familiar to you?
In the USSR, the utterance of a politically incorrect statement to a traitorous relative could result in the loss of your livelihood.
In the United States, the utterance of a politically incorrect statement to a traitorous relative cost Duane Chapman his livelihood.
I sincerely doubt that Tucker Chapman has the level of introspection necessary to understand and appreciate the profound nature of the evil he has perpetrated.
I don’t care what his father said, as long as it wasn’t a plan to commit heinous crimes against the innocent, it was Tucker’s job to keep his mouth shut and take it like a man.
But being a “man” is not just a biological matter. It is a matter of honor.
Maybe he is “male,” but Tucker Chapman is devoid of honor, and thus is not a man. The real sickness of this episode is how a male used a system of Soviet-style thought control to destroy someone. Undoubtedly, he is too self-absorbed to even understand the true depths of the shame he should feel.