By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, May 09, 2015
The British elections went rather well, I’d say old boy.
If they’d gone differently this might have marked the beginning of the end of
British elections entirely. Instead, there’d be English elections and Scottish
elections and Welsh elections, not to mention Shire, Westerosi, and Lucky
Charmsian elections (“these exit polls are magically delicious!”).
I’m not a close student of British politics, but I do
have my deeply informed opinions. For example, I think that Britain’s
parliamentary system is kind of bonkers (which is not to say our gerrymandered
husk of a Republic is firing on all cylinders). Also, I think Tony Blair’s
reforms of the House of Lords were a mixed bag. Personally, I liked hereditary
Lords, but if you’re going to get rid of them and strip them of any real power,
the replacements should obviously earn their seats through trial by combat. You
don’t have to be an Enoch Powell disciple to see that Britain is rapidly losing
its common culture (which is just one reason why Scotland wants to leave). Who
could dispute that fighting pits — preferably using weapons chosen at random
from a giant spinning wheel — would unite all classes and races around a common
institution. And if Russell Brand can emerge victorious from a subterranean
garden-rake-and-frying-pan fight with Jason Statham, then by all means give the
man a powdered wig and a seat in the Upper Chamber.
But this is all conventional wisdom for the most part.
I should add that George Galloway (the bigoted carbuncle
of idiocy who until today represented Bradford West in parliament) is certainly
right, “Zionists” are celebrating his defeat — but so are non-Zionists. (It’s
hardly the case that you have to believe in the right to a Jewish homeland to
think Galloway is a hateful buffoon.) Still, it’s no surprise that a man who’s
done all he can to keep his district Judenfrei would believe the authors of his
downfall must be the Jews. For gnostics of a certain bent, the demiurge is
Jewish in nature and therefore responsible for all the evils of this earth.
Who’s responsible for paper cuts? The Jews! Why won’t this toilet flush? The
Jews! Why is Steve Gutenberg a star? The Jews! (The Stonecutters are just a
front!)
If I may reprise an old joke — one better spoken than
written, I should note — and slightly updated: “Who’s responsible for killing
Nicole Brown Simpson and George Galloway’s political career? The Juiiiiice.”
(The trick is to say “Juice” in a sinister, dragged-out
way so that it sounds like “Jews.” Unfortunately, to explain a joke is to ruin
it. So let me offer a new one. What would you get if our friend Daniel Hannan
went on an all-night coke bender and then, in a white-bag fueled rage,
interrupted Galloway’s beer-hall-tirade and pinned him to the floor?
A powdered Whig on a braying Jackass.
Thank you, I’m here all week. Try the veal.)
Urophagia Über Alles
My column today is Doric. But the article I’ve written is
on the escherdrawingesque way (who says only the Germans can make compound
words?) liberals think about free speech.
When I came of age politically, I was told over and over
again, “Stop eating off my plate. I don’t know you.” But I was also told that a
cut in a subsidy for art was logically — and especially morally! —
indistinguishable from censorship.
Look, it’s a free country. If one dude wants to pee in the mouth of another dude, knock yourselves out, fellas (and if you want to see
that, click on that NSFW link). And if you want to turn that into a Kodak
moment, go for it. As the dude gasping for breath downstream said, “Take a
picture, it’ll last longer.”
But I’d rather not be involved in any way. That means I
don’t want to watch. That means I don’t want to hear about it. And I certainly
don’t want to pay for it, not even a little. Indeed, given the option, I’d
probably pay not to see it (“Careful, you’ll give the suits a really terrible
fundraising idea.” — The Couch). But I wouldn’t pass a law banning this sort of
thing. I might support some fairly strict regulations, of course. No erotic
urophagia around schools, playgrounds etc. If you want to drink that sort of
thing, put it in a brown paper bag the way Patches O’Houlihan does.
The Iron Law of Bureaucrats
I should say I’m no free-speech absolutist. I think the
notion that we should treat pole dancing like constitutionally protected speech
while we try to ban actual political speech is just one of the loopiest
manifestations of our popular confusion over the First Amendment. In fact,
government support for the arts doesn’t offend me in theory, it’s just how they
do it in practice that bothers me.
Specifically, I cannot stand the way New Class
bureaucrats think they must be autonomous from the taxpayers who pay their
salaries. Imagine if we lived in anything like the “Christianist” theocracy so
many lefties live in quaking fear of. Evangelical bureaucrats would likely fund
art they liked. The professional Bohemians would shriek — with some
justification — that the state was imposing its values on the rest of us. But
when those same people are in driving the gravy train, they think there’s
nothing wrong — and everything right — with imposing their values.
Of course, this is a problem that extends far beyond
outposts like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Public teachers’
unions and ed-school priests hate the idea that parents and other taxpayers
should have a real say in how education money is spent. Bureaucrats in general
have become a kind of secular aristocracy that resents second-guessing by the
people who fund their will-to-power. (We will discuss this more once Charles
Murray’s fascinating new book comes out, and a whole lot more when my hopefully
fascinating book comes out in a couple years.)
When voters say that bureaucrats shouldn’t spend money on
X, the bureaucrats shriek “censorship!” But it is only the equivalent of
censorship if you work from the assumption that it’s all the government’s money
anyhow. As Bill Clinton once said about the federal surplus, “We could give it
all back to you and hope you spend it right.” But if we did, alas, not enough
of you would spend it on urophagic art.
Shock the Bourgeoisie!
Anyway, how’d I get here? Oh, right. So back in the ’80s
and ’90s, the whole point of subsidizing art was to pay for stuff that
offended, shocked, and stretched the boundaries (and, occasionally, sphincters)
of society. As is almost always the case, what this actually meant was that it
must shock the right kinds of people: bourgeois fuddy-duddies and fusspots,
squares, and scriveners, men in gray flannel suits and bible-thumpers of all
sorts.
Many on the left still like doing that, of course. But
there’s a problem. It turns out that there are lots of people who are even more
shockable than white, Christian men and the women who love them. After so many
years of the Left focusing on making Uptighty-Whitey blush, social
conservatives have grown a pretty thick skin about such mockery. Meanwhile the
same feminists who clapped with glee as Karen Finley rubbed chocolate-qua-feces
over her body to symbolize the way women are treated — and rushed to her
defense when she sued the federal government to pay her to do it — don’t much
like it when anybody else says things they don’t like. And unlike
conservatives, mainstream liberals have rice-paper thin skin about such things,
which is why some think Joss Whedon fled Twitter this week.
(When Finley and the “NEA Four” lost their lawsuit at the
Supreme Court, Justice Scalia wrote: “Avant-garde artistes such as respondents
remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois; they are merely deprived of the
additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it.” This
proved yet again that Scalia is a hoss.)
The notion that certain anointed people have a right not
to be offended has spread with the ineluctable logic of a cancer cell. One need
only look at the reception Christina Hoff Sommers gets on college campuses to
appreciate how times have changed. She gets bodyguards to protect her from
physical attacks while the delicate little flowers get “safe spaces” where they
are protected from words — facts, actually — they do not like.
This is all of a piece with the canard that liberals are
in any meaningful sense libertarian. They are for freedoms that align with
their preferred cultural and social norms — and fads — and they are for
coercion or scorn for everything else. Right-wing means non-compliance and
non-compliance is “hate,” and no one has the right to hate. Épater la
bourgeoisie is so great it must be funded. But épater les féministes or épater
les grifters raciales or — heaven forbid — épater les musulmans radicaux not
only must not be funded, it must be banned outright. It’s free speech for me
and “shut up, racist” for thee.
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