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I suppose I'd also be opposed to what you people call "cancel culture" if I thought it existed. it exists as much as the "pc mafia" existed thirty years ago.
if these people were supposedly so powerful, what after all did they win? casual racism, homophobia, sexism, transphobia, etc. are much less accepted. there are words we don't say. but it isn't so dramatic. everyone talked like these people were omnipotent
in fact a few people were taken out of context and condemned for views they didn't hold, and a few people lost their jobs who I feel shouldn't have. usually in those cases there was an admixture of stubbornness. but that's a personality problem. you shouldn't lose work over it
but I think for most of us, we saw the world changing and made our adjustments. the world wasn't changing too fast and it wasn't really so difficult. we'd done it before. in my father's generation open racism was the norm, colonialism was a civilizing achievement
in fact I was accused of sexism by a female colleague in 1993, she took a few remarks out of context and imagined I was expressing interest. van morrison had come up, there's quite an interesting linguistic construction in one of his songs
and then I realized that this woman, who was named gloria, was about 5'4", just like the girl in the song... I shouldn't have said anything, that much is clear. but the idea that I'd go in for a woman that small........ if you know me you know how laughable that is
I wonder if she ever let up. my field isn't so large, but it's large enough to mind your own business, which is what I did as soon as the kerfuffle was done. it amounted to a short conversation with my dean about how we had better avoid making the paper.
I'm sure there's a little group of academics who think I'm a creep, never quite knowing the source of the rumour. Making peace with that was difficult.
In fact it's what originally motivated my interest in pseudonymity. Not only Geoffrey H Nicholson, but other names as well. I wrote a number of columns in a much younger female persona throughout the nineties. Very feminist, very chic. Perhaps I'll say who it was sometime
people see themselves, you know? at most they see your identity. so some of the same women who imagined me as an arch-sexist in 1993 were enthusiastically quoting my female alter-ego in 1994. it's all a lot of nonsense. play is the way
perhaps this has become a bit of a ramble. I only mean to say that I was technically a "victim" of "cancel culture" in a case of its genuine excess, and found creative responses. I didn't dig in and become a reactionary gremlin as I see so many doing now
I remember seeing a remarkable play about these themes in 93, with cate blanchett. oleanna. but it was bitter stuff. mamet seemed broken by feminism and I resolved right then not to be, even if it sometimes exasperated me. sometimes at that very moment! https://twitter.com/catebblogbr/status/692000516071645184
mamet to me to be a great artist precisely because he's such a bastard, the model for millions to follow. somehow culturally, "dialectically," we can't get past that moment. it's a shame. some of us are past it.
pardon, that last tweet is unreadable. mamet SEEMS to be.... @jack can we have an edit button?
