I didn’t anticipate writing three posts in a
row on the unending furor over public speech.
However, after Roseanne abruptly lost her newly rebooted sitcom over a
bizarre late-night tweet I felt I had to cover the same terrain once more.
Free speech has become something of a crapshoot
lately. Offensive statements—and just
about anything can be offensive to someone when it reaches a large enough
audience—can cut even the most successful public figure’s career short. Just like that.
But not all offensive speech is created
equal. Roseanne, for reasons peculiarly
her own, tweeted that former Obama Administration official Valerie Jarrett was
the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes. (Figuratively, I’m sure.) A furry of apologetic follow up tweets did
nothing to save her; Roseanne then compounded the problem by claiming that she
wasn’t responsible because the Ambien she took made her do it.
Just as the Roseanne controversy was
escalating, Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.” Bee was referring to a photo Ivanka tweeted
showing her with her son. Bee attacked
the hypocrisy of the photo while the Trump Administration’s deportation
policies separated mothers from their children.
A fair criticism, I thought, though Bee’s choice of epithet was wincing.
So, what’s the difference between the two
cases? Roseanne’s out of a job. Bee lost a couple of sponsors but at least
her show wasn’t canceled. It’s up to you
whether this outcome is fair. The
conclusion you come to probably depends on which side of the Trump Divide you
sit. Take your cue from the top:
President Trump expressed regret over Roseanne’s firing; his press secretary,
the godawful Sarah Huckabee Sanders, demanded TBS cancel Full Frontal.
Running in the background are conflicting
narratives. One is that so-called
political correctness is unnecessarily ruining people’s lives for exercising
their First Amendment freedoms. The
other is that certain individuals are hiding behind the First Amendment to
justify hate speech. Either way, it’s
clear words matter. But to what extent
do they reflect or shape belief?
A linguistic theory of sorts, known as the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis even though neither of the men it’s named after ever
formally stated it, says that words shape our worldview. Ideas vary over whether words are merely an
influence or are a determinant. The
conceit that one can shape thought through language is controversial but it
extends into the current debate over speech.
More on point, there is the matter of whether we can change not only
discourse but social relations by changing how we talk about them.
Left and Right alike accuse each other of intolerance. It’s true that progressives, especially on
college campuses, are sometimes overzealous taking on perceived social ills,
and I suppose that is a kind of intolerance.
But if both sides are intolerant, what they’re intolerant of differs
demonstrably. Conservatives target
people and groups for characteristics they cannot change, such as race,
ethnicity, disability, gender, and sexual orientation, or for cultural
differences like religion and language.
Progressives oppose behavior and language which diminish the rights and dignity of
others. Conservatives want to preserve
existing oppressive hierarchies while progressives want to uplift the
oppressed.
The kerfuffle (or covfefe?) over Samantha Bee’s
takedown of Ivanka Trump underscores this polarization. Ivanka is a privileged woman who enjoys a
safe existence while ICE and the immigration courts break up Latino
families. The paradox becomes even more
bitter when we consider that the First Daughter is herself the child of an
immigrant mother. How we square the
circle of who is worthy in the conservative universe is dependent upon a simple
heuristic.
It goes like this. Whiteness is superior to all other races, but
it is particularly superior to the black race.
Masculinity is superior to femininity.
Heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality. Cisgender is superior to transgender. The able-bodied are superior to the
disabled. Christianity is superior to
all other faiths (except perhaps Judaism).
English is superior to all other languages. Western culture is superior to all other
cultures.
In this calculus Ivanka Trump may be a daughter
of an immigrant, but her mother was a European
immigrant so that’s okay.
Immigrating to the U.S. the “right way” is particularly important. A colleague serves in the state legislature,
and in her campaign literature she likes to mention her parents were immigrants
who “came here the right way” (which is to say from Europe). The “right way,” if you haven’t figured it
out already, is code for Europeans Only.
The alleged weakness of our immigration laws,
such as the President’s latest concern over so-called chain migration, is itself
subject to double standards. Please
indulge me in a short personal digression.
In graduate school I was a teaching assistant
in my university’s teaching and learning center. Our director was an aging, absent minded
woman I’ll call Marilyn. Marilyn was an
inept administrator and, despite being our institution’s alleged subject matter
expert, was herself a poor classroom teacher.
Marilyn was in way over her head and quickly became defensive about her
work. Instead of taking the advice of
those who suggested improvements, Marilyn began instead to depend on the other
grad assistant in the office, an international student from Eastern Europe
named Katya.
Katya quickly established herself as Marilyn’s
confidant while alienating everyone in the office except Larisa the
administrative assistant who was not too bright and also
overwhelmed by her job. Katya managed
this because she was dishonest and manipulative and because she was willing to
tell Marilyn what Marilyn wanted to hear in the face of contradictory evidence. Katya would show one face to Marilyn and
administrators and clients. She would
show another to everyone else whom she thought were beneath her, which was…just
about everyone else. It’s fair to say I
despised her, but when you read what comes next you will see she was a
despicable person.
After a couple of years Katya finished her
degree which meant her student visa was to expire. It wasn’t fair that she was expected to go
home when she had become so used to the good life in America. What was a girl to do? Enter Tobias, a warehouse worker with an
easygoing disposition and oatmeal for brains.
Katya swept him off his feet.
After a whirlwind courtship, they wed just as Katya’s student visa was
to turn into a pumpkin.
Did they live happily ever after? you
wonder. Sure, for the first 24
months. After that Katya could keep her
green card even if she divorced Tobias, which is naturally what she did. Katya had realized her American Dream by
signing a paper and peeling off her panties.
Meanwhile desperate mothers and children are dying in the Sonoran Desert
for no better reason than that, unlike Katya, they don’t have the advantage of blonde
hair and blue eyes.
Ah, you say, but Katya immigrated the “right
way,” even if she did stretch the rules a bit.
Sure, but the chain migration bogey that the Trump base is wringing
their hands over can also be construed as rule bending. Refer to the heuristic I mentioned earlier; if
their complexion is sufficiently pale foreigners are not really foreigners. On the other hand, everyone else is
implicitly less human and must be barred, forcefully if necessary, as a
consequence.
Conservative hypocrisies are a given in the
national conversation. Progressives are
hardly perfect, but they know that self-awareness can guide them through ever-changing mores
as we move toward a more inclusive society.
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Comedy Central’s second
annual Clusterfest in San Francisco.
(Think of it as a Woodstock for smartasses.) The closing act on Sunday night was Jon
Stewart, who I’m happy to say is making a return to standup.
Stewart talked a little about the Roseanne /
Samantha controversies and about how his own views have changed as he realized from
time to time that maybe he wasn’t as enlightened as he thought. He pointed out that the conservative hysteria
about speech being policed is basically bullshit. Stewart said the only changes he made to his
own speech was dropping a few words from his vocabulary and stopping for a
moment to think before saying something stupid.
Is this an argument for the draconian
censorship conservatives are so afraid of?
All that is expected is a modicum of consideration of the rights and
persons of others. Not difficult. Not difficult at all. And yet for half the country this small
concession is a bridge too far.
It may be a bridge impossible to cross for some
elements of Trump’s America, however, particularly economically distressed white working-class
men. The establishment has long counted
on keeping the masses distracted by setting them against each other. Referring again to the rules described up-page,
straight white males, no matter how humble, have traditionally had an
advantage.
For these whites on the lower end of the economic
scale, however, social change is a threat to their slim privilege. The end of legal segregation in the South is
one example of this; the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s was
a reaction to this social reordering. As
one man interviewed at the time lamented, “If I’m not better than a n----r, then
who am I better than?” This statement is
sad on several levels, the least of which is that it reflects how
contradictions in the system victimize everyone on the bottom of the socioeconomic
ladder in some form or fashion. Basic
civility is perhaps a luxury for such people when their “right” to dominate someone
even less fortunate is in question.
We’ve only considered public discourse so far. A thornier question is whether changing minds
through changing words can lead to the inferential leap of changing hearts. It is an open question as to how much we can
actually shape character. Past attempts
are an unsettling guide. Consider the
Stalinist era ideal of the New Soviet Man.
A propaganda exemplar more than anything, the NSM nevertheless sought to
leverage cultural diversity whilst presenting a single national
identity. If you believe that words can
shape thought for the better, perhaps a New American really is
conceivable.
But now that we’ve decided we can shape the ideal
individual, that raises the question of how we do the shaping. Self-monitoring one’s speech is a good step
forward, but that won’t work in the absence of social pressure. Slipping down the logical slope, maybe public
struggle sessions reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution would have a salutary result. It would dovetail well with our penchant for
public humiliation as a spectator sport, that's for sure.
In reality, though, any attempt to coerce good behavior
is likely doomed to failure. By extension, it's
not possible to recreate the national character as a whole. Social engineering ignores the truth that
human nature is complex and nuanced even if the idea of free will as it’s
commonly conceived of is not literally true.
The best we can do is to improve our own attitudes and behavior towards
others in the hope it may encourage others to do better.
© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar
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