Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 days ago
“Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.
…
My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
> My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
Fundamentalist Christians were the original prigs. It is amusing to see pg try and shoehorn the word on to the social justice movement.
Puritans predate "Fundamentalists" in the American Christian sense of the term, and if we're just following _this_ line of thought (and no others) the Romans were busy setting Christians on fire for garden parties because they were not willing to conform to what the Empire demanded (worship of the Emperor and acknowledgement of many gods).
The behaviors and reactions to benign, relative ideas and thinking from anyone they disagree with are uncannily identical. There is no shoehorn to be found here.
They have much in common.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's important to note whether the person is mocking the southern accent or just imitating it as a form of flattery. Often it's the former rather than the latter. The (vast) majority of the time I hear someone doing a southern accent it's for purposes of making fun of them, especially for being stupid/redneck. I don't think it's unreasonable to be offended when somebody is mocking you.
There is no world where people imitate a southern accent as a form of “flattery” any more than when a White person immitates how they perceive Black people talking or how imitating Indian accents use to be the norm.
Of course the exception I can think of for imitating southern accents would be acting
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> See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice
Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
> are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian
But they haven’t—until recently—had the power to e.g. end someone’s career or ability to perform in New York or San Francisco over it.
> Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
That idea gets very close to
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2009/march.htm
> “I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of society.”
I’m Black and I can go into a long rant about how I disagree with every word of that sentence.
But the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years. The entire crusade against “woke” is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a “minority majority” country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out.
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