Will the coming decade make the 2010s look like the 1950s?
The predictable media response to comedian Dave Chappelle's SNL appearance is a sign of desperation from a servile intellectual class that doesn't understand the regime change that's coming.
I’ve pictured it for years: a point in the not-too-distant future where our social mores will look vastly different than they do today. I can’t say with total certainty that this day is coming, and I certainly can’t guarantee that it’s coming soon — I mean, has Chinese society ever moved away from the tyrannies entrenched during the Cultural Revolution? If history is any example, perhaps Western societies will be stuck with our current manifestation of policed speech, in some form or another, for quite some time.
But I do feel like change is in the air…
Eventually, it’s going to become acceptable — indeed, encouraged — to say things out loud and in print that are for the moment forbidden and come with severe punishment. Should we ever get to that point, the people who went along with the current program will do the exact same thing they’re doing now, which is: do their damndest to blend-in and adhere to whatever the new set of demands are going to be. Of course, the people who most vociferously policed speech and called for the sanction of others will change their tune according to whatever tune is put in front of them at that time — we can bet on that.
Perhaps more importantly, though: not long after this future arrives, once the dust settles and people feel like they can breathe again, a new regime of will inevitably replace the one we have now, and we’ll be expected to conform to its demands. But I’m getting ahead of myself — Dave Chappelle hosted Saturday Night Live recently and, in his usual way, he addressed head-on the controversies swirling around Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving, both of whom have garnered accusations of anti-Semitism. (See the video clips below if you want to dive-in.)
Not incidentally, SNL posted the clip (above) to its YouTube page (without bleeping-out the word “nigga”) and, at the time of this writing, the clip has gotten 6.5 million views.
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Predictably, the appearance drew the usual response from a certain breed of media figure that simply doesn’t understand that regime change is coming — and coming at their expense. A finger-wagging NPR piece, for example, should be read as a heave of desperation from a servile intellectual class that’s going to be the first to see the guillotine or the gulag when the soil turns over on our social standards, as it always does.
What stands out to me about the NPR piece is that, while author Eric Deggans makes some points I find insightful and dextrous, he doesn’t seem to have a tolerance for the fact that a comedian wouldn’t have neat-and-tidy answers for all the things they can get us to laugh about and think about at the same time. It’s as if it’s never occurred to Deggans (and so many others) that you can walk away from an artist’s performance completely unsure of whether boundaries were crossed. That uncertainty, alas, has been declared intolerable.
If we wanna roll our sleeves up and get into the thorny subject of Jewish representation in American media, the lingering cloud of suspicion toward Jews among African Americans, and the manifold implications now that Kanye West, Kyrie Irving, and Dave Chappelle have stepped into the fray, I say: have at it. But those subjects require nuance, honesty, frankness, bravery, and a clear-eyed willingess to navigate discomfort. The establishment media has rendered itself utterly devoid of those attributes, and I can’t think of a single establishment media figure I would trust to capably handle cutting through the noise to get to the substance.
There’s a difference between so-called “sensitivity” and ostrich-like refusal to broach a topic in the first place. And even worse than not broaching forbidden topics out loud, we’ve created a climate of intellectual self-incapacitation. When we’ve become so accustomed to sticking within certain parameters when we’re just thinking on our own or talking amongst friends, automatically spitting-up pre-packaged phrases as if they were religious incantations, waiting reflexively to be cattle-prodded back into the bounds of approved speech, we’re in trouble.
But I don’t think we’re in trouble for much longer. I believe the writing’s on the wall, and the message seems quite clear: we’re at the cusp of a sea change. Even as a lifelong Democrat who identifies as left-of-center/far left, I find it quite pathetic that SNL has devolved into a bastion of cookie-cutter pro-Democrat bias aimed at bougie coastal values and people who needed to stoke their anti-Trump obsession for four years on end. The blindness towards middle America coming from media outlets like this (and others like The New York Times) verges on contempt.
SNL sticking by Chappelle signals a shift on the horizon because it means that NBC’s executives read the tea leaves and made the calculation that the rewards of giving Chappelle a platform in the middle of this controversy were going to outweigh the risks. And they were right. I mean, Chappelle’s monologue could just as easily have been criticized from the opposite angle as an establishment-serving gesture where he threw Kanye and Kyrie under the bus, even as he pleaded for the audience to take it easy on them.
The great thing about a comedy routine, though, is that you don’t have to know what it was that you just watched. You don’t even have to have confidence in Chappelle’s outlook on the matters he was drawing attention to. You don’t have to trust him! Or view him as a sage or an oracle. All you have to know about his or any other comedian’s routine — to know that it was worthwhile — is that it worked its way past your defenses by getting you to laugh, and that you were left reflecting on things you hadn’t considered from the same angle. Comedy, much like music, doesn’t have to spoon-feed you into a sense of comfortable resolution.
For about the last 8 years or so, I’ve been watching the clock like a passenger sitting on the platform at a train station, waiting for the next youth generation to tear through this wall of repression disguised as righteousness. Surely, young people today must feel the same constraints on their basic instincts that kids felt back in the 1950s and 1980s — to crack jokes, to say forbidden things, to rock out, to wallow in adolescent angst, to come to terms with their sexuality, to flex their mental muscles, to rail against all the adult systems they instinctually know are lies that condescend to them.
Which means that we’re due for an art movement that desecrates today’s hallowed pieties, much like what we saw in the ‘60s and the ‘90s.
We can only hope. But, at least by my indications, we appear to be well on our way…
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