don't make no sense no more.
— John Prine
After millenniums of suffering second-class citizenship, Western women can take heart in the fact they're at last on equal footing with men.
You'd think they'd kick back and relax, at least a bit.
But, no.
A lot of Western women are still incensed and, as a result, unable to tolerate a man's literary opinion when it differs from their own.
I ran headlong into that anger yesterday when I (naively) commented on an article posted by the feminist historian Max Dashu on her popular Facebook page, "Suppressed Histories Archives."
The article, by a playwright named Sands Hall, described how Wallace Stegner plagiarized the diary of a Victorian woman, Mary Foote, when he wrote his Pulitzer-prize winning novel Angle of Repose.
Hall's contention was that Stegner stole more than a diary; he stole the diarist's life.
The unanimous tone of the steamy comments by Dashu's fans rankled me.
I am, after all, partial to Wallace Stegner and to all novelists' right to fictionalize.
Those comments called Stegner "morally bankrupt" and "corrupt," a "colonizer," "thief" and "oppressor" who enjoyed "destroying a woman's character and reputation."
He was also compared to a rapist.
For good measure, Dashu's fans indicted other loathsome males for plagiarizing women's writings, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Jung, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Einstein and Homer."I wish Stegner were still alive to be shamed, sued, and stoned," one fan wrote.
Stegner should go to the "chopping block," said another.
"A curse on the name of Wallace Stegner," added another.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
"Who do we cancel next?" I commented.
Big mistake.
For my five-word comment, I was told I was "petty," "cheeky," "hysterical," "reactionary" and "misogynistic." And I was assaulted for my age—even though Max Dashu is three years older than me.
But wait, there's more. Adding nuance, I commented further:"Trump's chickens have come home" |
Jon Kent and BFF |
I arrived at this conclusion when one of the agents, self-described as "passionate about creating spaces for those from historically marginalized communities," mentioned she was using her free time to ponder whether or not "to cling to one's own marginalization."
Another, self-described as "queer," said she was using her free time to study the "rise of the feminist anachronistic costume drama."
A third, self-described as an avid foodie, mentioned that she was using her free time to "exchange tweets with a BIPOC travel blogger" while she studied "decolonizing veganism."
WTF?
These are bright, educated, well versed people.
Why do they think and speak in these patently silly terms, leftover scraps from French philosopher Michel Foucault's lunch?
Teachers are to blame—and what conservatives call the "absence of intellectual pluralism" in colleges.
Teachers have allowed '70s-era jargon to substitute for thought, and identity for virtue.
Ask yourself: before you can "decolonize" veganism, you have to "colonize" it in the first place.
But how do you do that?
Do you sail a ship full of conquistadors to the New World and take over a vegan coop by storm? Do you loot and pillage the kale section and enslave all the stock boys? Do you seize all the kale, repackage it as Swanson's Cheesy Spinach, and ship it back to Spain? Do you cite divine rights to justify all this?
Possibly.
I had a logic teacher in college, a Brit, whose Cambridge training prohibited him from ever telling a student that his or her comment in class was inane.
He'd just listen politely, smile, and reply, "Possibly."
After a couple of weeks in his course, you understood he was saying, "That's utter nonsense!"
While I have nothing but admiration for queers, feminists, vegans, BIPOC, and literary agents, I cringe whenever I hear one of them say she wants to "decolonize" something or "open a space for the marginalized" (lest we be "uncritical" and "non-inclusive").
A voice inside me—with a British accent—says, "Possibly."
Because, no matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney.