Rewriting, Washing, Scrubbing American Culture

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The perpetually offended/persecuted believe they are being oppressed, as do the individual offenders. There's no winning with that.

 

I have two Facebook friends I went to school with that are the woke white lefties out of central casting. I’m closer to one than the other, but both come up with demands for what people should be doing that make me think “sucks to be you.”

I have many more friends who are loud and proud right wingers, although the yelliest of that group have been on mute for a while now.

 

I'll wade in a bit here. Analysis and opinion, not judgment.

For a long time - decades - the cultural left functioned as a shock-and-offend operation to the establishment. It wasn't necessarily or even consistently profound - was Jim Morrison profound? Were the Sex Pistols? Have any of QT's movies - but especially the early ones - made important moral statements? - but it consistently challenged an established conservative framework. It also often left out - or leveraged for comedy or kicks or shock - non-white, non-male, non-cis peoples. I don't think the cultural left necessarily did that out of a purposeful framework - I think your old-school shock-and-offend libertine had a "you do you" kind of worldview. The old "ruthless on the surface, broadly tolerant underneath" type.

And that's changed. A lot. The cultural left is not the libertine, anarchic left today. The cultural left is closer to a squarish, religious mainstream, calm by comparison to, say, the music scene from 1966-1996, co-opted by corporate America. Anything goes? No, it doesn't. Some things don't go at all, in fact. And the things that do go - that are popular - seem at times quaint. I wasn't a particular fan of the American Pie/Old School/Hangover genre of movies, but I'm not sure you're going to see them any more. The Hangover made $270 million stateside in 2009. Hard R comedy. The only hard R comedy in the top 30 BO this year is No Hard Feelings. (Unless you count Cocaine Bear, and I don't, which is 24th).

For very understandable reasons, we're just moving into a more cautious, reverent era. Less brash. Less bawdy. Less room to make the jokes that never were appropriate, whether it was John Hughes or Stanley Kubrick or a random person making it.

The appropriateness of the joke hasn't changed; people knew it was inappropriate.

What's changed is the cultural left's collective desire to be much more appropriate than it was even 15 years ago.

That's a function of new voices - previously unheard - getting more time at the mic.

 

It's weird how many folks find it hard not to be a jackass. It's not. Just pay attention and say you're sorry when you fuck up, and don't try to make yourself a martyr. Don't wanna be a jackass? Don't be a jackass. If that's hard for you, well, honestly, you're probably a bit of a jackass.

As to whether we should alter art. Sure. Why not? It's not like the old art goes away. We do it all the damn time. How many times has the Mona Lisa shown up in some altered way through the years? Thousands. And she's still there smiling on a wall in France. Huck Finn will still be out there; there will just be a different version someone else can read without feeling attacked. They've got like 8 billion versions of the Bible; ain't gonna hurt us to have another Huck Finn on top of the one we already got. The idea that cultures change doesn't mean you entirely turn your back on the old culture; you just acknowledge that a lot of folks looked past fucked-up things at the time, and we shouldn't do that any more. I said a lot of things in middle and high school that I now know I shouldn't have. But I grew up. Heck, there's crap I didn't know was offensive 10 years ago that I know is today, but I'm not gonna start a thread trying to pretend I'm some kind of victim and that me being called out for something puts me on the level of Spike Lee.

"If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow." -- Woody Guthrie. Wise man.

 

Please explain what movies I made? I don't understand.

Food for thought, if not for objecting to Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's would I still be seeing a white guy acting out a racist trope in the movies (and millions of kids following suit on the playground)? Of am I just being too sensitive?

 

I think it's more the question of, who gets to decide what is jackass behavior. What are the terms? Most-easily offended person in the room wins?

Christianity has a generally surprising answer to that question, and it's: Yeah, probably.

Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak.

It's what the Christian right really doesn't get.

 

The tastes of the cultural left have changed. It isn't, uh, Dennis Hopper's left wing anymore. (Or Kubrick's for that matter.)

 

So those are my movies? I'm tagged with representing the "cultural left"?

 

My general rule: If I say something that offends someone that wasn’t intended to offend, I apologize and move on. Try to learn from it. I’m not in their shoes, so it’s not my place to decide what should offend them. If I don’t understand why it’s offensive, I either ask or try to find out myself. Pretty easy with today’s internet. Sometimes I think it’s merited. Sometimes I wonder why. Either way, I accept that I’m not seeing things through their eyes, so I may not be able to entirely understand.

 

The Christian right isn't Christian or right.

 

No one is playing the victim or pretending to be one.

What I would like to see is for those who are offended by one shitty thing to be consistent and speak out against those who use similar shitty things 10 times without brushback.

 

Adding to this: I think the difference between someone who is a jackass — or a bit of one at least — and someone who accidentally acts like a jackass is what comes after. Rolling your eyes and apologizing and then showing you really don’t think it was a big deal, or just sticking with it and saying well you didn’t know so you shouldn’t be called out, that’s jackass behavior. You see that all over social media, not just here.