And what about toast, and earthworms?
So where does all of this leave woke itself, or the broader push for social, racial and environmental justice that has been growing roughly ever since the death of Michael Brown in 2014 sparked the Black Lives Matter movement? What happens now to the idea of being more open to sometimes uncomfortable challenge from minority perspectives that were previously suppressed: of saving the planet; uncovering forgotten histories; inclusivity at work; “be kind”? That isn’t dead. If anything, it’s quietly going mainstream.
Wut?
Social justice is not the same thing as “environmental justice” and climate change isn’t fundamentally political. What to do about it is politicized (but shouldn’t be), but the change itself is not responsive to whether we shout “fascist!” or “wokerati!” at it.
For what else do you call it when the 60-year-old head of MI6 declares his pronouns on the social media channel X, or retired GPs and priests are getting arrested on climate protests?
What else do I call what? Those are two radically different things, so there’s no point in calling the pairing of them anything. What else do you call it when Oklahoma plays tennis, or goats tell you their pronouns? What else do you call it when random item 1 or random item 2? Eh?? Eh??! I want an answer!
I’ve seen this a lot, the condensing of all ostensibly progressive causes into a great, faceless ideological black hole. The logical endpoint of the moral-bidding-war meltdown that is “wokeness” is that it becomes a singularity: to those inside, it’s a realm of infinte virtue. To everyone else it looks literally pointless. “Woke,” both the word and the movement, always had not-so-subtle transcendental, spiritual connotations: a shade adjacent to nirvana.
The city-funded community centre at the heart of Toronto’s gay village provides a great example. About 20 years ago they put up a mural on the side of the building which loomed over the heart of the neighbourhood. It depicted a middle-aged leatherman, shirtless but clad in fetish gear — black German police-style visor cap, leather harness, chaps, black boots, etc. — next to a teenage girl straining to crush her breasts into a binder. The message was clear: adult men’s fetishes and distressed teen girls’ trans identities are to be the community’s new areas of activist focus.
And sure enough, that was exactly what we saw the community centre focus on in the ensuing years.
Credit where it’s due: they do pick apt murals. Just a couple years ago the leatherman-with-trans “boy” mural was replaced with a new one, just as prescient as the first was in capturing the cultural mood inside the building: now it’s a raised fist — a universal symbol of righteous protest — filled in like a quilt with patches that depict the “progress” flag, various shades of the colour brown (skin tones, one presumes), animal hide prints (animal rights?), blue waves (the environment), and miscellaneus patterns whose symbolism I can’t decipher. That tracks with the direction “wokeness” is going: an incoherent melding of anything anyone claims to be a virtuous cause into one big nondescript fist of self-righteousness.
I’ll bet that the people who work inside that community centre think they’re at the epicentre of all virtue, that their noble mission has naturally expanded from serving gays in the time of rampant AIDS and gay bashing, to LGBT outreach, to LGBTQ+ propaganda, to 2SLGBTQQIA++ hysteria, and now at last they’ve arrived at righteousness in its true, pure form, having transcended individual causes.
I know for a fact that the gay people who live and work in the neighbourhood have little or no use for the community centre’s services anymore. I am one such gay person, and I wouldn’t darken their bloody doorstep. This “community centre” offers nothing to me but insults and condescension.
I am afraid I can’t find the emoticon for delivered in the tones of Leonard Nimoy as Spock, but “The connection, Jim, is merely sociological, not logical”?
I just looked it up and I slightly misremembered the old mural. You can’t see the leatherman’s lower half, so there’s no chaps or boots, and there’s a woman in a wheelchair, too, for some reason. Here are the old and new murals:
https://imgur.com/Iv31Pdx
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‘or goats tell you their pronouns’:
After Kristy Noem had shot her young dog, I wonder whether the goat she picked on next tried to tell her its pronouns before she shot it, injuring it seriously, and then rushing back to the house as it lay in agony to get another cartridge to finish the job (presumably she was using a double-barrelled shotgun, not an AK15 – she should surely have used the latter for massacring animals in a gravel pit). A lot of people are, so to speak, up in arms about her behaviour, but I feel sure it confirms her position as front-runner for Trumps VP, at least in the mind of Trump.
Arrrrggghhhh
She used one of those punishment collars on the puppy in order to ‘train’ it – something that naturally made the puppy more unmanageable. I wonder how her own children have come out of the hell that living with a mother like that must entail?