Carnival has existed for centuries as a space where people could shed their inhibitions, forget social conventions, laugh, stop trying to look serious and respectable all the time, and instead be irreverent and disrespectful for a change.
We don’t have carnavalesque spaces any more. Whenever anybody tries to make a joke, an army of sour puss prudes emerges to lecture on some entirely idiotic distinction between “punching up and punching down.” And then some idiot begins to share tales of horrible trauma caused by the joke, and all fun dies under the angry glares of the self-righteous.
The congenitally humorless publish endless exhortations denouncing people for not taking every one of their neuroses into account when trying to express themselves.
In the absence of regular, socially acceptable ways to vent, playful, irreverent impulses curdle, rot, and begin to emit noxious fumes. When they finally escape – and the repressed always returns, no matter how much you try to stuff it under a mountain of prohibitions – they look like Trump’s mocking of the disabled and inspire a burning desire to rebel by inflicting a Cruz or a Trump on the world.
There is a crowd of people bearing responsibility for the bastardization of the political space that we are witnessing, and the prudes who trawl social networks and blogs looking for a sentence, a word or a pronoun to feel mortally offended by are among them.
Clarissa's Blog 
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