We live in a world full of hazards.
Hazards like getting stabbed for making the wrong joke.
I spend serious thought deciding how sexist it is to say that I’m impressed with the nuances that Dustin Hoffman included to sell the role of Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie.
And that’s the world we live in. It’s awfully hard to have a thought like, “Oh, I like how he’s swinging his feet there. It really sells the role,” without immediately worrying that I’ll get slagged nine colors of embarrassment blue by people screaming at me, “what? Because all women have over-sexualized walks? Rape doesn’t happen because women wear skirts and heels. Did you know that last year alone, in a hundred percent of cases involving men sexually assaulting women, the men were responsible. Did you know that? You hyper-masculine ego-pig-monkey, I can’t even believe we’re breathing the same air. You probably like your toast warm — you sadist — just like the whole Vietnam War. You disgust me. Is that what you’re saying.”
No. No, that wasn’t what I was saying.
I admit, that is a little bit of an exaggeration. A bit. In that it has never happened.
At the same time, things like it have happened. I’ve seen evidence. I’ve sat with windblown people still doing the mental gymnastics to figure out where they went wrong when all they thought they said was, “You know, I saw a man at a gay bar.” We sat, sometimes for hours, diagramming the subsequent exchange and trying to understand the sociopolitical flood that had been inadvertently uncorked and allowed to rush across us.
I understand what’s happening. It’s hard. It’s been a hard century — millennium, really. A lot of very shortsighted people began setting things in motion that hurt a lot of people. Not innocently at all, most of them. Almost everyone who’s done something that’s forced a violent change on the human race did so out of avarice or greed — or because they wanted to see what happened, anyway.
History has been formed by head-cases, grunting their way into positions of relative safety for themselves and failing to have the vision to think about their grandchildren. Moments like the coronation of Charlemagne can change how the whole known world views what a human ought to look like, how they ought to look if they want to be acknowledged as relevant, anyway. We’re talking about a man who remade Jesus Christ in his image. That’s more clout than most people could dream of even if they had all the Lego blocks.
So now we are a cautious people. We are a hesitant people, when it comes to talking about each other. For twelve hundred and seventeen years, we have been recovering from an event that said that in western culture, the first under God here on Earth and by extension the entire known cosmos is a bearded, white, man.
No wonder the hipsters are so insufferable.
If Charlemagne is even the first catalytic event that occurred to try and establish men as somehow dominant, even. I don’t think he is. I think that men have been trying from the beginning of representational art — earlier, maybe — to establish a world view where they are considered superior.
Well, I’ve thought about it, and do you know what kind of group has the time to put hundreds of hours into figuring out how to make themselves look good? Do you? Because I’ll tell you. The kind of group who can devote that much time to making themselves look good is a group that has too much time on their hands. It’s the kind of group that you roll your eyes about in high school and assure yourself that someday they’ll either get a real job or be found mumbling under a bridge somewhere in forty years. That’s how people with too much time on their hands end up.
The fact that we can even talk about this stuff shows huge progress. Sure it took us a while to get here, but parties this big are hard to organize. Believe you me.
I don’t know. I leave a lot of things unsaid because I’m worried. And a lot of the time I’m not worried about who I’ll offend, but I am worried about who I’ll estrange, because those are not the same thing.
You know, like, I feel like I can offend somebody, hopefully on accident, and then have an exchange with them, and we both leave the exchange a little more aware of the world. Maybe we get a little bloodied in the course of educating each other, but we have grown as people.
Estrangement doesn’t seem to work like that.
Because some offense seems politically motivated, you know? Like, I may say, “You know, it’s annoying how easily I sunburn. I sometimes wish I could be a little more like my friend Jose. It would be nice to be a little more tolerant of sunshine.”
And then I lose forty-seven twitter followers to the angry firestorm of people angry about racial insensitivity. You know how it goes. “I can’t believe that you would make a comment implying there’s a genetic difference between you and other people! What are you going to say next? Are you going to demand that all Latin Americans start getting their foreheads branded to determine where they come from? Joke’s on you! Not all Latin Americans are even from Mexico! You are ignorant of all of history!”
That one is a true story. Except for the twitter part.
I don’t know. It’s a hard thing to talk about, and it’s hard to talk about because it’s about language. So of course it’s hard to talk about, because the issue is what you shouldn’t say. And how do you talk about that? Aside from to, you know, say it, thereby potentially being part of the problem.
I like living in a world where people are allowed to raise a finger and explain that some spoken ideas are degrading to them. A universe where that’s allowed is a universe where things can improve. Because I’m not saying we should be allowed to say anything we like without social repercussions. I’m not saying that. Some people already have too much latitude and say hurtful things. That’s not good for progress.
That said, there’s a culture that permeates many places of public communication where it’s common to express aggressive opposition to even the vaguest implication of something even coming close to insensitive to some current issue or other. And it gets a little difficult to keep up with it.
I try to keep ahead of it, but I sometimes feel like it’s a full time job just to know what’s considered rude. It happens to me sometimes that I’ll finally begin to master sensitivity toward some subject or other, and by the time I know how to speak about it with care then it’s already resolved, and I can be as lackadaisical about it as I want, now that nobody is worried about it anymore. I feel like I need a full time secretary just to keep me informed on the hot areas of sociopolitical sensitivity and which side of them my current world-view lands, and maybe predict where the trends are headed next so that I can start proactively becoming sensitive toward the next important subject to arise. Who knows? Canadians may start to protest the fact that I’m always making fun of how nice they are. It could happen.
Because that’s what it really comes down to: which group do you want to avoid being mean to. Because as soon as you start to make a concerted effort to be nice to one side, it seems like you immediately begin to annoy the other. It’s an endless cycle, and I’m never sure how to keep up.
It feels like there ought to be some way of simply saying, “I’m with the good guys,” and leave it at that. Which is already too dualistic for me, because I’m sort of a flower-child at heart. I don’t believe there should be sides. But I’m realistic, and I live in the real world, so I have to make the best of it.
And it’s there to a degree, a space to just do good, if you keep it inside your head and meditate on decency and kindness, and other uncomfortable, unfashionable vagaries like that which somehow seem never to enter into the debates, even though they’re everything that the debates are about.
But it’s not so easy just to “be kind.” You also have to support something, because if you don’t support something, then everyone else will know who their friends are, which may or may not include you.
You have to be careful what you say. Moreover, you have to be careful how you say it. One slip of the tongue and the fragile illusion that you had been maintaining till then that you were a good person will come pattering down around you in a soft confetti rain of mass shunning. You will find yourself alone with the certain knowledge that you have been a wicked person all along, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I’m sure there’s a simple answer. I haven’t heard it yet, but until I hear it, I’ll try to remember what my grandma always says, right after she closes her eyes for a moment in that sage way that she does, her white hair wispy in the light breeze, and the smell of dust rising from all her books.
What she says then, in that moment when what I truly need is advice and clarity to understand the world and all it’s issues, is, almost always…
“Anyway. What was I saying? I was saying something else.”
Thanks, Grandma. That’s exactly what I needed to hear.
Dispatches from the Adventure (Exclusive “news-lite” letter).
Follow the Adventure (Patreon profile. Project announcements will be here).
The Adventurer takes tips (PayPal tip jar).
