Pajama Boy, An Insufferable Man-Child

[Michele]

Pajama Boy’s place in Internet infamy was secured as soon as the insufferable man-child was tweeted out by Organizing for America.

He is the face of a web ad that is the latest effort by the Obama team to leverage the holidays for conversation about Obamacare. “Wear pajamas,” the ad reads. “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”

And, sure enough, Pajama Boy is wearing pajamas—a zip-up onesie in classic Lamar Alexander plaid—and drinking hot chocolate. He is in his twenties, sporting hipster glasses he could have bought at Warby Parker and an expression of self-satisfied ironic amusement.

Pajama Boy is about as threatening as Michael Cera and so nerdy he could guest-host on an unwatched MSNBC show. He is probably reading The Bell Jar and looking forward to a hearty Christmas meal of stuffed tofurkey. If he has anything to say about it, Obamacare enrollments will spike in the next few weeks in Williamsburg and Ann Arbor.

Perhaps the goal of OFA was to create a readily mockable image to draw attention to its message, in which case Pajama Boy was a brilliantly successful troll. The right immediately Photoshopped him into the Mandela funeral selfie and emblazoned his photo with derisive lines like, “Hey girl, I live with my parents,” and, “How did you know I went to Oberlin?”

But it’s hard not to see Pajama Boy as an expression of the Obama vision, just like his forbear Julia, the Internet cartoon from the 2012 campaign. Pajama Boy is Julia’s little brother. She progressed through life without any significant family or community connections. He is the picture of perpetual adolescence. Neither is a symbol of self-reliant, responsible adulthood.

And so both are ideal consumers of government. Julia needed the help of Obama-supported programs at every juncture of her life, and Pajama Boy is going to get his health insurance through Obamacare (another image shows him looking very pleased in a Christmas sweater, together with the words “And a happy New Year with health insurance”).


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[Norm dePlume]

You don't have to scratch very deep to get to personal hatred, do you?

[Billy Jingo]

You don't have to scratch very deep to get to personal hatred, do you?

You know those people who are different than me? They're stupid.

[Billy Jingo]

Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger, but these crises will be rare and brief. When I consider the petty passions of our contemporaries, the mildness of their manners, the extent of their education, the purity of their religion, the gentleness of their morality, their regular and industrious habits, and the restraint which they almost all observe in their vices no less than in their virtues, I have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

~ Alexis de Tocqueville




I don't know if I have told you guys this but I love The Frog.

[Norm dePlume]

Sounds like de Tocqueville feared the nanny state.

[Billy Jingo]

Sounds like de Tocqueville feared the nanny state.

I think Huxley was a Tocqueville fan.

[Adam]

You don't have to scratch very deep to get to personal hatred, do you?

Yeah, that's what it is. Personal hatred.

It can't possibly be that the fool looks like a fool and is being mocked because he looks like a fool. No siree. Gotta be personal hatred. And probably racism. Because, you know, no one ever mocked anything else ever done by any other President. The Left just showed all sorts of careful deference to George W. Bush when he was in office.

[scott]

You don't have to scratch very deep to get to personal hatred, do you?

Nope.

Just look at the Duck Dynasty Debacle.

[Norm dePlume]

Yeah, that's what it is. Personal hatred.

It can't possibly be that the fool looks like a fool and is being mocked because he looks like a fool. No siree. Gotta be personal hatred. And probably racism. Because, you know, no one ever mocked anything else ever done by any other President. The Left just showed all sorts of careful deference to George W. Bush when he was in office.

Oh, now I get it. It's because this fictitious person from an ad campaign is a fool who looks like a fool. How could I have mistaken that for a raw hate response? Clearly it's based on extensive personal experience with a one-page ad character who doesn't exist.

[Norm dePlume]

Nope.

Just look at the Duck Dynasty Debacle.

Was that an immediate response at first sight? I thought that guy was pretty popular until he made some pretty harsh comments.

[scott]

Was that an immediate response at first sight? I thought that guy was pretty popular until he made some pretty harsh comments.

Yes because GLAAD is that good at coming up with this stuff right away.

Open your eyes, Norm. While their point might be valid, there is nothing spontaneous about it. Weeks or perhaps months of research went into this carefully scripted event, all they were doing was waiting for the right time to turn on the outrage generator.

[Gramps]

You know those people who are different than me? They're stupid.

You have been implying that for all the years I've known you on the nets.

[Michele]

Yeah, that's what it is. Personal hatred.

It can't possibly be that the fool looks like a fool and is being mocked because he looks like a fool. No siree. Gotta be personal hatred. And probably racism. Because, you know, no one ever mocked anything else ever done by any other President. The Left just showed all sorts of careful deference to George W. Bush when he was in office.

If you haven't noticed, it's all they've got lately.

[daveman]

You don't have to scratch very deep to get to personal hatred, do you?

Especially if you just make it up.

[JB]

Yeah, that's what it is. Personal hatred.

Wait. What. Is Pajama Boy black?