And ‘tis a pretty toy to be a poet.
Well, well, Meander, thou art deeply read,
And having they, I have a jewel sure.
Go on, my lord, and give your charge, I say:
Thy wit will make us conquerors today.-Marlowe, Tamberlaine the Great
Freddie De Boer doesn’t quite tap-dance on the grave of Social Justice/BLM/MeToo/PC 2.0/Woke Era, but he does announce that It’s So Over. He takes a lot of words to say it, but he drills right down to the seething stupidity of it:
“I watched as huge numbers of people employed at newspapers and magazines and digital media outlets morphed suddenly from center-left incrementalist Obama liberals into relentlessly-yelling activists, and I saw them act as though they had never been anything but. They were technocratic wonks who were passionate about globalization and deregulation and then, suddenly, they were doing Gloria Anzaldua cosplay. I saw people adopt an abstruse and alienating vocabulary, piece by piece, and again they pretended like that had always been the way they talked. (There was one specific day in the middle of last decade where you could watch “BIPOC” spread like wildfire across the digital media community on Twitter, literally one day that took it from unheard of to ubiquitous.) I saw the adoption of critical theory-derived ivory tower politics happen en masse, because people were afraid to look uncool. I saw social justice become a matter of fashion. I saw hundreds of people pretending that they had read James Baldwin. Just a wild, strange, bumbling, frenetic time. I’ve often wondered what percentage of the people who took part did so for sincere reasons rather than out of fear or self-interest. 10%?”
That’s correct, dear boy. Because this wasn’t a movement, but a Purity Spiral, no different from Salem in 1692, Paris in 1793, or Moscow in 1936. Because humans are monkeys, and they will do monkey things. Hysteria is hard to resist. Thus, your call for the Left, or the Media, or whoever, to examine themselves critically and ask of themselves hard questions will come to nought. Everyone’s going to MoveOn.org, just as William Stoughton did. Shameful displays of monkey behavior are not analyzed, the are thrown away with a few curt words. Some People Did Some Things.A fellow by the name of Lorenzo Warby has published a now five-part series with the Subtitle “Women are not a finer form of Homo Sapiens”. I came in at the end, because of course I did (someone undoubtedly restacked it, thank you, whoever you were). Over the course of this final essay, he confronts the reality that feminist women are bad at policing their own bad behavior, and this has enormous consequences for the institutions they run.
"It is an open question whether Western societies can survive as free, democratic, technological, open-scientific societies if the corrosive effects of feminisation supercharged by careerist feminism continue. Women are not a superior form of Homo sapien. Adding women does not always improve things.Our societies will continue to degrade if we cannot have adult conversations about the upsides of men, and the downsides of women. Something that the pseudo-sophisticated narcissism of careerist feminism seeks to sabotage.
Many societies would be improved by more egalitarianism, including — even especially — gender egalitarianism. I wish Alice Evans would stop talking of the need for feminist consciousness. No one needs more, or indeed any, feminism. At least not of what the careerists and zealots have turned feminism into.”
This is as like to be ignored as Freddie DeBoer’s call for the media to take itself to task for its Twitter Witch Trials. But it does point a way forward: rejecting feminism forgendersex egalitarianism. Creating a society in which men and women likewise have voices, and are celebrated for their unique contributions, and are analyzed by male as well as female metrics, could be one of the means by which progressivism saves itself from itself. They are, fortunately or unfortunately, ill-suited to take it.
Poetry is an aristocratic, or at least, bardic, art. It is the playing with words to achieve rhetorical, emotional, or narrative effect, to uncover esoteric truths. Everyone who says “poetry is gay” publicly self-identifies as a peasant. If you are offended by this label, go read Homer and Beowulf and shut the fuck up until you know what you’re talking about.
The right tells me how to behave.
The left tells me how to speak.