Crap from Facebook: June 11th, 2015

I feel kind of bad about writing this one, not because of its content, which should be impeccable. Rather, I've neglected to take the time to keep up my "Crap from Facebook" posts, and the material that has finally motivated a revival is from the same friend who I already milked for material a couple of times in the past. I'm not doing these to single people out. This isn't meant to be a space for me to chastise my friends! And in fact, I've seen more egregious bullshit from other friends, but I didn't remember that I might want to do one of these posts until now. So I'm going to endeavor to amend the deficiency. Hopefully, this post will soon be followed by some obnoxious reposts from March on Monsanto or some political nonsense. I see that sort of thing all the time. I just need to remember...

Anyway, the piece that drew my ire is this one: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/09/politically-correct-jerry-seinfeld-comedy-marginalised-voices

I have another misgiving about this topic, which is that the author is one Lindy West. Through some circumstances, I've run into her writing several times, and I know by now that I've never found her to say a single thing that is insightful, profound, intelligent, or impressive in any way. She spouts utter drivel. Usually, when I encounter a thinker of this caliber, the writing is so incoherent that I am mercifully spared from actually attempting to read crap all the way through. But Lindy West is a bit different: she can use words to form sentences. Damn, when I put it that way, it seems like a compliment. That was not my intention. There's some old saying in grammar that a sentence expresses a complete thought. So yeah, Lindy West can do that. She can express a complete thought. Fine. Not every thought is a good thought, and when it comes to good thoughts, I doubt that she's ever had one. It may seem that I'm just baselessly deriding this person, but that's a step up from the treatment she gives people: I haven't mined a quote from her and mocked her in a rampant display of shrillness and dubious imagery, I haven't strawmanned her, and I haven't used her position as a foil to peddle some petty agenda of mine. I've spend this entire paragraph deriding her, but, unlike her, I am not just making shit up. I'm not that stupid. And speaking of this paragraph, I am not actually a good writer, so I diverged from the original point of the paragraph, which was that I have misgivings about devoting my attention to the work of someone I've already recognized as producing content with no redeeming value. Yeah, I'm here to waste my own time blathering over crap I saw through links on Facebook, but I want to hold myself to some sort of standard. And yet, at least a couple of my friends are actually enamored of Lindy West. So maybe this is kind of worth doing? Whatever, let's just get on with it.

The bit she's critiquing is a radio interview with Jerry Seinfeld. Now, in the interview, Jerry Seinfeld does gripe about college campuses, specifically with regard to how comedy is treated, but he also talks about his 14-year-old daughter and implies that the issue is something to do with young people in general. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's not conflating the two, but his rhetoric does suffer from some imprecision. While there's definitely overlap between colleges and young people, not all young people go to college and not all people in colleges are young, and those young people who are in college tend toward some general commonalities that might not hold for the broader population of young people. Blah, blah, blah no big deal. Also, because Jerry Seinfeld doesn't elaborate on some of what he says, I'm sure a lot of listeners are prone to miss the point. While I won't bother to do all of his elaboration for him, there's something to be made clear in the part where he talks about his daughter. She responds to her mother commenting that she'll want to see boys by saying, "That's sexist." And that response doesn't really make sense. Granted, not all teenage girls are interested in seeing boys, but the parents of the ones who aren't would naturally want to know if that's the case, and there's no implication that this is what's going on here, no suggestion that the conversation was anything like, "No mom, I'm gay." Rather, the implication is that the girl just blurted out, "That's sexist" because she's young, has acquainted herself with the term "sexism," has learned that it's bad, has enough understanding to know that it deals with taking an attitude toward others based on sex, and has become flustered or annoyed with something someone said toward her that is based on sex. I can guess that the mental process was something like that because I can vaguely remember making similar statements myself when I was around the same age. And yet, the fact is, what the girl's mother said is not actually sexist. So, she demonstrates a poor understanding of the concept of sexism, and wants to use the word anyway, which leads to some frustration for her parents. I've seen the same sort of thing with kids and racism. They'll assert, "That's racist" about something that isn't actually racist and I'll think, "Uh, wow, racism is pretty serious business and you should probably just shut the fuck up until you appreciate more about how things actually work and what racism really means." It happens. Such are the follies of youth. By the time people are in college, most of those problems are hopefully worked out, but I can see how, for someone in an older generation, seeing younger people grow up with terms like racism and sexism being thrown around a lot, and seeing that continue as they move into colleges could be a source of some consternation.

The title of Lindy West's article is: "What do the politically correct brain police have against venerable man comedians like Jerry Seinfeld?" And then, before the body of the article, there's this sub-header: "The vintage observational jokester says killjoys are ruining comedy. But where he sees a threat, I see marginalised voices finally being allowed into the club." Well, I'm sensing a theme here...

Beloved funnyman of yesteryear Jerry Seinfeld (ask your parents!) took to the airwaves this week to offer his hoary wisdom on the state of modern comedy.

Congratulations, we're one sentence into the article and you've found five different ways to call Jerry Seinfeld old. Ha ha ha, oh yes, he is indeed 61 years of age after all. I'm delighted that Lindy West knows what a thesaurus is, but this is all very silly and pointless.

A plague is upon us, he warns. Harmless jokesters and joy-bringers are literally being figuratively strangled by the long, thin goblin-fingers of “political correctness” (which is a fancy term for “not treating people who are already treated like garbage like garbage”), even though all they were trying to do was just say anything they want to, the way they always have, without ever being questioned or criticised by known killjoys such as “people of colour” and “women”, and with zero regard for the institutionally oppressed groups upon whose backs their industry has been stepping for generations in the service of shallow, straight white dude “catharsis”.

I know that I said she could form sentences, but I forgot to mention that she can also form run-on sentences. This is a mess, and "literally being figuratively strangled" is so distracting that I have to suppress my gag reflex and move on to parse the rest of this crap. So, we have "harmless jokesters" "long, thin goblin fingers of political correctness," "without ever being questioned," "killjoys such as people of colour and women," "zero regard for institutionally oppressed groups," and, "shallow, straight white dude catharsis." All of those things are attributed by Lindy West to Jerry Seinfeld and he didn't say a single one of them, nor say a single thing that implied one of them. Lindy West pulled those accusations out of her ass.

Is that so wrong? Jerry Seinfeld, hero, is here to say “yes”; yes, that is so wrong.

He didn't call himself a hero, either. I remember reading about how it used to be common in some media to pay writers by the word. Now I'm left wondering if Lindy West is being paid by the misrepresentation. She throws enough of them out there for that to be plausible.

“They just want to use these words,” he explained, weeping probably, but in a brave way.

I've seen this before. It's kind of Lindy West's shtick. She likes to pretend that other people are crying. I'd have thought that most people would see right through this tactic, would be put off that she's trying to disparage others by baselessly connecting them to behavior associated with weakness. She not only made up fake tears and attributed them to Jerry Seinfeld, but then went on to sarcastically explain them away. And this is someone who is supposed to be, according to discussion on the Facebook link where I saw this, "a vocal champion for and activist pushing for greater inclusivity in traditionally male dominated media spaces." Really, guys?

“‘That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudiced.’ They don’t even know what they’re talking about ... I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot people tell me: ‘Don’t go near colleges.’ They’re so PC.” Yeah! Take that, words! No PC college phony is going to convince me that words have meanings.

Words, sure do have meanings. And since that was Jerry Seinfeld's point, Lindy West is agreeing with him while making a show of disagreeing with him. Apparently people fall for this?

Why, back in Seinfeld’s time, you could run a sitcom set in New York City for nine entire seasons and only feature 19 black people ever (18 of whom were one-off background characters such as “the waiter” and “the guy who parks cars”) – and if anyone tried to do words at you, you could just pretend they didn’t exist.

This is an abrupt transition into a hit piece. I'm not going to go back and watch the entire run of Seinfeld to ascertain whether I agree or disagree with this complaint, and I'm also not going to go back and dredge up old Lindy West articles so that I can complain about how those ones were shitty too. This blog post will run long enough as it is without pondering the details of the Seinfeld sitcom.

Nowadays, because of Twitter and electric mail, you get the brain gestapo completely up your underpants if you so much as publicly fantasise about making a black media personality your erotic slave. Or if you produce an innocent web series with an almost-entirely white, male cast, only 20 years after you were criticised for doing the exact same thing with your sitcom. The PC police might not know what “racism” is, but Seinfeld does, and it certainly isn’t either of those things. And yet the PC death-grip on comedy is so fierce that Seinfeld has only managed to accrue $820m so far. The horror.

Note: that first comment isn't about Jerry Seinfeld at all, but is instead about some other, different person. I've never watched the show about comedians, cars, and coffee, so I'll not comment on that complaint, although it just looks like more hit piece fodder at this point. Also, he didn't complain about not making enough money, so there's another misrepresentation.

This unfairness, as you can see, is bad for fairness; it is bad for the constitution in some way, I’m sure; and it is bad for college students who are probably really clamouring for the vintage observational stylings of Jerry.

He didn't say that, he didn't invoke the constitution. Lindy West is making shit up again, of course. And while she can keep on poking at his age to see if something will happen, I'd bet that more college students would find Jerry Seinfeld funny than would find Lindy West funny.

OK, look: our divergent political priorities aside, I actually don’t mind Jerry Seinfeld. I liked Seinfeld the programme. If I was a person who got stoned, I would enjoy watching Bee Movie while stoned (a bee is a lawyer and has implied sex with a human woman!!!). But his past work does not entitle Seinfeld to our eternal adoration or unconditional support. In fact, he isn’t even entitled to be a defining, authoritative voice in 21st-century comedy – particularly when his response to the broadening scope of his art form is one of mistrust, defensiveness and gloomy prognostication.

 He didn't say a single thing against younger comedians!

Even the old guard forfeit their clout once they start to reject innovation and challenge. (I’d much rather hear Cameron Esposito’s perspective on the state of comedy in 2015 than, say, the ghost of Buster Keaton’s – the prospect of a talking comedy-ghost notwithstanding – not because he’s irrelevant, but because she is of this moment.)

Well, here are some complete sentences, but I'm not sure what the point is.

What Seinfeld is reacting to is not the shrinking, ossifying death of comedy, as he seems to believe; it is the vibrant, expansive unfurling of comedy, and the multitude of growing pains that come along with it.

He didn't talk about either of those things!

It’s absolutely true that some individuals use political correctness to disguise what is, in reality, a regressive devotion to propriety. There are people who simply have no sense of humour. It’s possible that a small few just relish the takedown but don’t care about the politics.

How remarkably self-aware of you, Lindy West.

But none of that has anything to do with whether or not it is correct to treat people with dignity and care; to call them by the names they’ve taught you; and to remain open, elastic and humble enough to catch up when you’re behind and apologise when you’re in error. No one is required to do any of these things, but that doesn’t mean they’re not good things to do.

 And?

I used to think it was a given that, at any comedy gig I attended, I’d have to grin through a number of brutal jokes about my gender: about beating us, about raping us, about ranking us, about reducing our already dehumanised existence to a handful of insulting stereotypes. And I went ahead and grinned – because, I thought, that’s just how we joke.

Yes, yes. We live in different worlds and consequently I have no idea what the fuck you're going on about. But that doesn't excuse you being a wretch.

We must have agreed. Someone must have signed a contract. This is the price if I want to be in the club. (And that’s not even touching on the way female comics are treated offstage.)

Again, different worlds. I'm not even criticizing here, just expressing that I can't relate. It's like those stories I hear about women who were raped, and then about some awkward conversation they had afterward with their rapist. I just can't picture being in that situation. I've always thought that if someone actually succeeded in raping me, that there'd be no way for a conversation to take place between the two of us because a rapist cannot do much conversing while buried in the cold, cold ground. And hey, it's never happened and never come close to happening, so I have the privilege of not needing to actually go down that road. It's all hypothetical to me and perhaps I'm completely wrong. But still, this sort of thing is completely outside my experience.

But, of course, there is no contract, and I’ll never fully be allowed in the club no matter how obedient I am. As long as sexism goes unchallenged, I’ll always be “just a girl”. But because I’m a girl, my complaints about sexism are dismissed. It’s a loop. And that devaluation is vastly compounded for people of colour, trans people, gay people, disabled people – anyone who has spent the past few decades as a stock “edgy” punchline.

Jerry Seinfeld didn't say anything sexist. Or rather, he didn't say anything sexist in the clip Lindy West referred to. Perhaps he's said something sexist at some point—I don't know. She's not challenging sexism here, though. All she seems to care to challenge with this piece are Jerry Seinfeld's age and his wealth. And now she wants to complain about sexism going unchallenged. What?

It’s so-called political correctness that gave me the courage and the vocabulary to demand better than that from the community I love. Yes, this cultural evolution is bumpy, but what Seinfeld and some other comedians see as a threat, I see as doors being thrown open to more and more voices.

We have very different understandings of the word "love." Also, "threat."

Video-game critic Leigh Alexander, who is perpetually besieged by male gamers for daring to critique a pastime that is hers as much as theirs, wrote a beautiful meditation on her weariness: “My partner is in games, and his friends, and my guy friends, and they run like founts of tireless enthusiasm and dry humour. I know sometimes my ready temper and my cynicism and the stupid social media rants I can’t always manage to stuff down are tiring for them. I want to tell them: It will never be for me like it is for you. This will only ever be joy, for you.”
Joy isn’t finite. Share. Just share.

Actually, it is finite. Not sure how we went from coming up with different ways to call Jerry Seinfeld old to quoting Leigh Alexander. Nothing really ties those two together. This is just sloppy writing. What do people see in this person?

Oh hey, I'm not done yet. This post is uncharacteristically long for me, but I want one more tangent, since the subject has sort of come up. The title of this article is different from the title that I see on the Facebook link, so I'm assuming that the title was changed at some point. On the Facebook link, what I see is: "What do the politically correct brain police have against straight white dudes like Jerry Seinfeld?" I don't really know why the title was changed, but the original title and the references to whiteness remind me of something...

In the past, I've argued against the utility of the concept of "white privilege" but this has usually been on account of the "privilege" component, the notion of privilege as monolithic: privilege is a countless mass of myriad, hidden advantages, and all white people have all of this white privilege, but no one who isn't white, who is "PoC" gets those advantages. The real world doesn't work in that way. People know it, but they ignore it. And anyway, I don't think that "privilege" is a workable concept. Or, to be more terse, I reject the existence of "privilege" (and when I say that, I people don't react well to it, but whatever). However, there's the other component of white privilege: whiteness. I don't care for it. "White" doesn't hold any significance for me. There's a database at my job in which someone else, not me, put "white" for my ethnicity. That's not even a real ethnicity! My sister has actually gone so far as to make people change it. If she's labeled "white" on a document, she protests and insists that the document is changed to undisclosed or something. I don't go that far, on the principle that if people want to call me things, they're free to do so. But still, I don't really think of myself as white. And of course, that itself is a sort of privilege. I can walk around where I live and just think of myself as a man, not as a white man, but a dark-skinned man is socially compelled to dwell in the designation of "black man." Blackness is inextricably part of of his identity, and the costs for disregarding that are almost certain to be much more inconvenient than any costs I would face for doing the same. So I'm privileged in that way. In a white way. White privilege.

There's this comedy rap group called The Retar Crew, and one of their members, Gregory Qaiyum, wrote a song, "White Nigga From Drumline" that is mostly about black men recognizing him in a sort of inversion of the token black guy trope, as being "that white motherfuckin' nigga from Drumline." He is annoyed about this circumstance, or at least his characterization of himself for the purpose of the song is (I suspect that the performer himself takes it in stride and is playing the whole thing up for comedic value), but also remarks on being singled out as Pakistani at the airport (which then sets up a scenario of a black TSA officer asking him what movie he was in, for yet another instance of a black man recognizing him as "that white motherfuckin' nigga from Drumline"). So when he's around black people, he's seen as white, but when he goes to the airport, he is pegged as Middle Eastern and racially profiled. And then there's Jerry Seinfeld, an iconic, stereotypical Jewish comedian. Among the people who really make a big deal about whiteness, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Seinfeld wouldn't just be excluded, he'd be vilified (white supremacists tend to really have a thing against Jews, due to a whole mess of historical details). Silly examples, but they're the ones I thought of, and I think that, as examples, they make the point well enough.

My qualm with the "white" part of white privilege isn't so much that I don't care for "white"  as a label or that I don't label myself as white (although that is a factor). I am, after all, of primarily Western European descent. Most of my more recent ancestors moved to the Midwestern United States several generations ago, and finally some of my most recent ancestors migrated to the West Coast. Those people were generally thought of as white, maybe even what would be categorized as WASP. One could say that my people have, more often than not, been whitebread. But that's not how it works for everyone. Some people who are not included as "white" and who miss out on perceived benefits of that will still, when an asshole like Lindy West comes along, be marked as "white dudes" and dismissed as oafish on account of their privilege. Fuck that shit.