It is February 11, 2021.
So far the year does not seem like a big improvement over 2020, but hope springs eternal.
I wasted precious hours this morning on the culture wars. First reading about the latest incident of a person fired for voicing an opinion. I wanted to comment but first had to make sure I had the allegedly evil utterances right. I wasted time trying to find the exact words, then thought better of it and quit. I treasure my online friendships and don’t need the aggravation on social media.
The recipient of the outrage storm was unknown to me until today. There are huge gaps in my knowledge of pop culture.
Apparently Gina Carano, the actress in question, has been making other statements that are considered ‘problematic’, but they or her general character are not the topic of this post.
The reason I feel compelled to wade in was the way in which her words were first twisted to say something I doubt she intended, then this misinterpretation was repeated mindlessly across many news clips.
We see this a lot and it drives me nuts.
Remember the storm over Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic verses?
The Muslim world was incensed because supposedly Rushdie had portrayed the wives of the Prophet as prostitutes.
No, he did not say that.
What he did do is create a character, the madam of a brothel who worries about her business in the new climate of piety.
She has a brainwave: she names her best girls after the prophet’s wives, and continues to do a brisk business. The prophet’s wives themselves remain untouched.
Mordecai Richler wrote a book titled “Oh Canada, Oh Quebec!” that supposedly insulted the women of Quebec by calling them brood sows.
No, he did not say that, rather the reverse.
He accused the Roman Catholic church of treating Quebec’s women as brood sows. Not the same thing at all.
As for the latest fuel for the hashtag outrage mob, let us first show the actual words, then my take on them.
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
The lady does seem guilty of the sin of hyperbole. In this she is right in tune with the spirit of the times. Also, ethnicity is a permanent characteristic, a political view is not.
However I see neither anti semitism nor trivialisation of the Holocaust, both of which she stands accused. Again, rather the contrary.
What I see her compare is not so much the victims of persecution, but the social process of ‘othering’ that laid the groundwork for the persecution that took place later. I don’t see her say “Being a Republican today is as bad as being a Jew was in Nazi Germany”. I rather see a warning. I see her say “be careful with inciting so much hate, look where it can take you.”
I may be hopelessly naive. But I shall continue to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least to start with.
2 comments:
I also believe that the actress in question was fired wrongly. What I could find of her words were taken out of context or in the wrong manner, as you've pointed out. She had posted other opinions, which she later apologized for after having been corrected by her co-star. But changing one's opinion doesn't seem to matter to many people: "You said this on this date, therefore it must still be true!" type of thing.
Just because one is wrong about one thing doesn't make one wrong about everything.
Exactly. There is so much disordered thinking right now. Nuance is hard to come by, as is logic. I have always been politically left wing, but this whole quest for moral purity and the unforgiving climate is driving me away.
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