In one of the more surreal social trends of the snowflake decade, Americans have suddenly declared their own old O.K. hand symbol a white supremacist gang sign... or something... and therefore taboo. Apparently the whole thing started with 4chan, which I failed to notice since, like any individual capable of reason I for one could not give two shits what Four Chan does eight ways from Sunday the sixteenth. Years later more and more find themselves talking about the OK sign being a white supremacist symbol as though it's a fait accompli.
The real question is of course: WHY!?!
Why would the entire rest of the populace allow the worst elements of their society to dictate public discourse, to simply claim a common piece of nonverbal communication as their own? Why play along with the morons? Despite the attention the media insist on lavishing upon them, white supremacists still amount to no more than what they've been for the past three generations: a violent but minor fringe group, tragically damaging to isolated smaller communities but comically impotent on a larger scale.
The answer is of course that it was the polite, urbane, self-righteous politically correct mob mentality which perpetrated the change. Since Y2K and especially after ~2010, as most people grew increasingly wary of bringing offense, the petty demagogues of the grievance industry have had to work harder and harder to find causes for outrage. In one of the safest times and regions since the dawn of our woeful species, in an age of plenty and freedom, the luckiest humans in history are more desperate than ever to invent boogeymen by which to haunt themselves. The word spreads that one and all must be on the lookout because evil subversives are committing "microaggressions" and "institutionalized" evil warrants a never-ending crusade. The sheer scarcity of actual, identifiable white supremacists pushes the self-righteous to strain their eyes harder and harder to find the inevitable mote in their neighbour's eye. Civic watchfulness gains the questionable rigor of a discipline of mystical divination, with any comment, no matter how innocuous, jocular, off-topic or outright trolling, being interpreted as a possible "dog whistle" or a secret weapon of subversives against the righteous.
After all, isn't it precisely because we're so much less racist now than we were fifty years ago that we have to be extra careful? Or in other words: “If any are Scandalized, that New England, a place of as serious Piety, as any I can hear of, under Heaven, should be troubled so much with Witches; I think, 'tis no wonder: Where will the Devil show most Malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?”* This was the thinking of the likes of Richard Baxter and Cotton Mather proclaiming "the certainty of the world of spirits fully evinced" in the late 1600s. How did they know, absolutely know that such spirits surrounded them, such evils assailed them, such struggles ennobled them every single day of their lives? That witches' cats dogged their every step? Why by discerning Witches' Marks of course!
Is it any wonder that our preachers of modern orthodoxy, our puritanical rainbow standard bearers, are in turn so eager to identify more witch-sign, more dog whistles, more microaggressions? Is it any wonder they'd make an art, a faith and a bloodsport of divining the secret evil in the hearts of their fellows? To condemn the entire populace as suspect by declaring one of the most common gestures an infernal incantation, now that is a witch-hunter's wet dream!
Of all the hobbies you cretins could've picked, the world did not need more amateur inquisitors.
___________________________________________
*Jesus Christ, man, as a comma, addict, myself; I gotta tell, you: Lay off the Freaking Punctuation!!!1
No comments:
Post a Comment