The New York Times endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, because she doesn’t suck as bad as Trump of “her intellect, experience and courage.” Lionel Shriver explains why it falls on deaf ears.*
Midway through my opening address for the Brisbane Writers Festival earlier this month, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian engineer and 25-year-old memoirist, walked out. Her indignant comments about the event might have sunk into obscurity, along with my speech, had they not been republished by The Guardian. Twenty minutes in, this audience member apparently turned to her mother: “ ‘Mama, I can’t sit here,’ I said, the corners of my mouth dragging downwards. ‘I cannot legitimize this.’ ”
Stephanie West Allen had sent me a link to the Guardian story at the time, She didn’t like Shriver’s book? That’s fine. She didn’t agree with what Shriver had to say? That’s fine too. But she could not “legitimize this”? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
I defended fiction as a vital vehicle for empathy. If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience, there is no fiction, but only memoir. Honestly, my thesis seemed so self-evident that I’d worried the speech would be bland.
Nope — not in the topsy-turvy universe of identity politics.
The festival organizers went into prevent defense to deflect fears that they would called racists and misogynists and cultural appropriators.
Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power. Among millennials and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.
The weapons of social justice outrage are labels, the perpetrators being called the usual words that were the things liberals once dreaded. Except they were now being hurled at liberals, And Shriver was, most assuredly, a liberal. What she was not was a social justice warrior.
As a lifelong Democratic voter, I’m dismayed by the radical left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy. There are many people who see these frenzies about cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces as overtly crazy. The shrill tyranny of the left helps to push them toward Donald Trump.
And despite prodding, whether sharp or gentle, there is no “discussion” with the righteous. You either accept their religion or you’re a shitlord, a Nazi, a hater. The irony that they hurl epithets for the provocation of not believing exactly as they demand eludes them. Try to explain it and they call you another name.
Ironically, only fellow liberals will be cowed by terror of being branded a racist (a pejorative lobbed at me in recent days — one that, however groundless, tends to stick). But there’s still such a thing as a real bigot, and a real misogynist. In obsessing over micro-aggressions like the sin of uttering the commonplace Americanism “you guys” to mean “you all,” activists persecute fellow travelers who already care about equal rights.
This observation, that only “fellow liberals will be cowed,” might have been true at the outset, or to those who are only now realizing that their failure to adhere to the orthodoxy of social justice puts them in the same box as [name the worst bigot ever]. Here, they thought they were fellow travelers, only to be told they were slave masters and rapists.
In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal — and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math.
One very quickly learns that there is no middle ground to be found with SJWs. They want to start a conversation, wherein they tell you what a racist you are and you beg their forgiveness. Try to explain and await the next onslaught of names, word-salad shrieks and the requisite jargon of privilege, marginalized and more names. It gets tedious.
Call someone names enough times and they stop caring. So an SJW called me a misogynist? That’s nice. Who cares. Rapist? Great. Have a nice day. As words have lost meaning, so too have insults. Shriver’s note that only fellow liberals will be cowed is the first step in the process. They won’t be cowed for long, because they will soon come to realize that there is nothing they can do, short of foregoing all they believe to be right and hopping aboard the SJW express, that won’t result in being called names.
You quickly come to realize that there is no arguing, no fighting and no disagreeing. You soon stop caring about the names. You soon just laugh at them. There is nothing else to do, and you realize they’ve reduced it to a joke.
But do we really want every intellectual conversation to be scrupulously cleansed of any whiff of controversy?
Shriver has yet to get past the “we” stage. What she will soon realize, if she doesn’t already, is that the arrows SJWs shoot only strike other SJWs. Only they cry at being called racist or misogynist anymore, because everyone else is constantly being called such things by SJWs, and the words have been reduced to jokes. Only the SJWs don’t get the jokes.
But what about when the media picks up the stories, as the Guardian did with 25-year-old giver of legitimacy, Yassmin Abdel-Magied? The media has its SJWs too, particularly since the bulk of writers are 22-year-olds, informing grown-ups how they should believe and what’s right and wrong.
When Hillary Clinton called half (though she took back the half part) of Trump supporters “deplorables,” I suggested to a senior editor at the Atlantic that this was a shockingly foolish and counterproductive thing to do. He responded, “but it’s true.” There’s no arguing with emotional “truth.” They believe, and everyone who doesn’t is a heathen. Or a racist, misogynist, rapist, whatever.
So liberals are now conservatives to progressives, having pushed all non-believers away by attacking them with their names and insanely stupid arguments that only appeal to other SJWs. And Hillary Clinton will be the president of the SJWs and not those deplorables like Shriver.
*The well-established phrase, to “fall on deaf ears,” is likely a microaggression (if not macro) as it’s ableist and will hurt the feelings of the hearing-challenged or violates some other tenet of the cause. This is the nature of SJW concern. Sorry, but I don’t give a shit. So I’m a hater? What else is new?
Lionel Shriver is a she ….
Fucking pronouns. At least gender is only a social construct.
I used to call them Motherfucker, now I use Oedipus because the uneducated, cavemen, rapist, misogynistic knuckle dragger, deplorables won’t be get it and be offended, You All!
I don’t get it either, whatever this was supposed to mean.
I’m going to throw this here gratuitously, hopefully Scott allows it:
I can always use something that makes me laugh.
You should try, “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black” and see what happens, just for a good laugh .
You’ll either be berated by SJW’s or cookware manufacturers.
Just saw this. I can’t begin to unlock such achievements.
Self-righteousness is a hell of a drug.
Veganism is an ancient Indian word that means Bad Hunter.
And Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord.
All these special snowflakes are going to aggregate over time and form a vast glacier of ignorance; ushering in an ice age of critical thought. Fortunately, I’m a codger, so I won’t be around to witness it.
Nah, that’s too bleak. Reality will eventually impose itself on those special snowflakes, no matter how much they believe that reality will conform to their demands. That trick works for a while on man-made social conventions, but not on real life.
“Natural Laws have no pity.”
Dammit, how can I keep calling you a contrary old curmudgeon when you keep saying things I agree with? I’ve tried to explain to the rabid Tumblrinas that when you bully and insult people over “the cause”, you turn them into enemies, and your enemies do not give a crap what you think of them, and they certainly don’t give a crap about your “cause”. Because they’re your ENEMIES.
They never get it. It just turns into “well, maybe you shouldn’t be such a egotistical narcissist that everyone has to be nice to you for you to care about our Very Important Thing”, or just “lalalala Tone Argument!”. If we’re lucky, they’ll outgrow it and look back on these years as “man, I was stupid back then”.
Growing up as a Republican (shut up, I got better) I’m very familiar with how your fear of being called a racist eventually just calluses over and you stop worrying about it: They’re going to call you a racist anyway, so don’t even bother deflecting. I can’t deny a certain amount of schadenfreude over watching former ideological opponents have to deal with it, but God is it stupid… Didn’t SJWs read ‘The [nongendered child pronoun] Who Cried Wolf’? Do they really not understand why no one cares that they’re calling Trump (and his supporters) a racist?
Also, thanks for letting me know my southern “y’all” is way more SJW approved than the “yoose guys” I used to have to put up with.
Not being from Brooklyn, I have no horse in this race.