Bret Stephens, the NYT’s star climate change denialist
columnist, got shamefully smeared on Twitter for writing, about Woody Allen: “If
Allen is a pedophile, he appears to have acted on his evil fantasies only once.
Compare that to Larry Nassar’s 265 identified victims.”
These twitter feminists, as the ever heroic Katie Roiphe has
named them (Roiphe, in the Stalinist conditions prevailing in the U.S., has
only been able to avail herself of our imperiled freedom of speech lately on
CBS news, Harpers Magazine, and Slate. In other words, she has been muffled
just like Solzhenitsyn in the U.S.S.R!), have found something a bit fishy about
a defense that seems to come down to, come on, one little rapish situation with
a little girl is no big deal. Of course, as Stephens defenders have pointed
out, he did not mean that at all! What he meant was, Allen, who at the time was
taking nude photographs of his partner’s 18-20 year old stepdaughter, was way
way too busy to go after other of Mia Farrow’s adopted children.
So there’s that.
But, seriously folks… one of the under-remarked elements in
the backlash against the Metoo moment has to do with class and race. You
guessed it! For what were conservatives like Bret Stephen writing in the 80s
and 90s and 00s? Why, they were writing screeds about how bad welfare was,
since it was just rewarding the “irresponsible” behavior of the “underclass”.
This irresponsible behavior was presented, almost always, as libidinous. Those
poor men just couldn’t keep it in their pants! All of which added up to a
culture of immorality. One that needed the firm hand of the policeman.
Well, hmm. So we flashforward to the 10s, and what do we
see? The apologists for the plutocratic class, and in general for the upper
level of management, have suddenly gotten groovy! If Mr. Allen was, say, Joe in
the D.C. slums of the 80s, taking nude pics of his stepdaughter, I’m pretty
sure the Andy Sullivans and the Bret Stephens of that time would be shocked,
and using this as evidence of a wholesale breakdown of responsibility by the “poor”,
otherwise known as the exploited working class. But give Joe in the D.C. slums
a couple of million dollars, make sure he is white, and low and behold – we can’t
puritanically persecute him! That would be awful, and evidence that the PC
crowd is executing its master plan:Stalinism in America!
I laugh. I have to laugh. I have to say that the whole Trump
era suffers from the fact that its violence, its nonsense, its racism, its lack
of even a figleaf of logic, is so damn laughable. A killing joke.
No comments:
Post a Comment