People are laughing. A meme has been doing the rounds of the internet – you can try it too. It goes like this: you Google “is insert random object here racist”. The more often you do it, the funnier it gets. You see, the internet is teeming with earnest articles about how various random things which have nothing to do with race are, when you really think about it, somehow racist. Smiling, dogs, knitting, fairy floss – all racist, ad absurdum.
So when the Little Mermaid was defaced, I asked Google if fish are racist. Beyond the pages of mentions of the incident itself, my query returned an academic paper titled Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Exploring Dr Seuss’s Racial Imagination. If the fictional illustrated children’s book character the Cat in the Hat was in fact black, I suppose there might indeed be racist overtones to the demand by the Fish in the pot that he shouldn’t be there while the kids’ mother is not. Voila – racist fish!
Once it was a progressive truism that 'all lives matter', now using this particular phrase is the quickest route to HR.
Jokes aside, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a better way to discredit a movement than by pushing it into embracing absurdist extremes. Yet this is precisely where things are headed. A former British Labour MP wondered whether the Coco Pops monkey was racist. Lego stopped marketing its police sets, and children’s show Paw Patrol silenced its good cop dog character to honour a call by the inhabitants of gated communities to defund the police.
This has nothing to do with the noble, timely and always necessary cause of combating racism perpetrated against real, live human beings. The movement which has coagulated – this time – under the Black Lives Matter banner has hijacked the brand.
It is, as journalist Matt Taibbi scathingly writes, “an elite-sponsored Maoist revolt, couched as a Black liberation movement whose canonical texts are a corporate consultant’s white guilt self-help manual, and a New York Times series rewriting history to explain an election they called wrong”. A movement which has moved irrevocably from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Joking is subversive and, as many dictators have discovered, a harbinger and a cause of their imminent demise. Dictators have always understood that laughter is dangerous to authority. Humour gives oppressed people heart, draws them together and makes mutiny thinkable.
In Risky Business: Political Jokes Under Repressive Regimes, Elliott Oring writes that in “regimes with authoritarian rulers, press censorship, secret police, informers, and summary or extra-judicial trials – as found in Nazi Germany; the former Soviet Socialist Republics and their socialist ‘allies’; Franco’s Spain; Ba’athist Iraq; and I would expect in Communist China, North Korea, Cuba and Albania, and perhaps on occasion in Iran” there is “not merely an effort to control what was printed in the press or broadcast through the electronic media, but an attempt to control what was communicated by individuals face-to-face”.
Under these regimes, there is “an effort to suppress folk humour – the humour of everyday conversation and everyday life”.
The elite-sponsored movement cannot tolerate laughter. The more ridiculous it gets, the more it has to deal in fear. Cancellings are increasing. Quaking corporates have been co-opted into this global theatre of the absurd.
Once it was a progressive truism that “all lives matter”, now using this particular phrase is the quickest route to HR. What a joke. Imagine historians picking over the entrails of these times. Nobody ever achieved that exquisitely Stalinist nirvana, "the right side of history”, by slavishly following the mob.
Some have compared the violent protests of 2020 to the countercultural movement of 1968, which used absurdity to mock establishment mores. But this cancel-happy movement is its own censorious establishment, a bubble waiting to be pricked with laughter.
Every joke, George Orwell wrote, is a tiny revolution. Racist fish, once uttered, cannot be cancelled.
The Link LonkJuly 07, 2020 at 12:15PM
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Why cancel culture can't take a joke - The Australian Financial Review
https://ift.tt/2BsGM2G
Joke
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