Identity politics is present even when you feel like having a snack

Katherine Timpf has an interesting beat at NRO.  She covers the enshrining of the state of being aggrieved as some kind of virtue, and its encroachment into ever-more-personal areas of life.

She has two pieces today: a report on a well-regarded high-school football coach getting fired over his team's tradition of dashing a watermelon to the ground and eating it after a victory, and a story about a bakery that promotes its gender-free gingerbread "figures" as something consumers should find attractive because of their moral superiority to gingerbread men.

Stories like these point up a theme I've been exploring here for a couple of days now: the suicidal element in the postmodern leftist mindset.  So great is the Freedom-Hater's zeal for leveling and equalizing everything that it becomes his or her central preoccupation, even as mortal peril breathes down his or her neck.  I think we can safely wager that the parent (of an athlete on an opposing team) who originated the outrage over the watermelon knew damn good and well that Coach Walpole and his players hadn't even considered a racial association when carrying out the tradition.  And for the baker to merely offer  gingerbread women would have been, in her own estimation,  to pass up an essential opportunity to make a statement about patriarchy.

I was about to start this paragraph with this statement: "One thing you have to hand to our enemies is that they understand human nature, particularly the difference between males and females."  Then I realized it was true of each of the entities in our array of our enemies - ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Iran, North Korea, the Latin American communist bloc, China - except one: the progressive / Democrat / pro-tyranny-and-decline crowd that lives and works among us.  That last group takes a cursory glance at human nature and decides that it can and must be changed in the name of some kind of "equality" that has never existed anywhere.

And that's why we're sitting ducks for conquest by any of the other enemies I listed, perhaps in some combination.  A skirmish between a strategically savvy, well-equipped, fiercely determined brute on the one hand, and an emaciated lunatic who hears voices on the other is not a fight the outcome of which is in doubt.