CoopScoop: Dave Chappelle, The Squid Game and the Midterms (Resend(
The left must stand for freedom. Period.
October 22-23
By Marc Cooper
The much publicized “virtual walk-out” by employees of Netflix protesting the company’s airing of Dave Chappelle’s The Closer was supposed to draw hundreds, even a thousand to last Wednesday’s rally.
Instead, it sputtered into a much smaller affair of maybe dozens.
Maybe the Netflix workers had some second thoughts when they kept reading reports about how many millions had seen the comedy special and just how much revenue it was producing for their bosses (and how that might have something to do with job security).
In the end, I really don’t care what the Netflix employees think as they have no credibility with me. Certainly, some or maybe all of Chappelle’s blistering put-downs pissed off some of them, but they are apparently quite selective in their outrage. They think Chappelle is offensive? Have they combed through Netflix’s current catalogue of thousands of commercial and crap titles and found nothing else redolent of, say, sexism, racism, or national self-idolatry?
I have no problem at all saying I loved every minute of the Chappelle special. I laughed till it hurt. And so did many others as The Closer held the Number 1 viewing spot on Netflix for several days after it debuted.
With 75 million subscribers and 200 million viewers in the U.S., Netflix aggregates a pretty representative cut of the population. And they voted with their clickers. I am also curious to know how many others who laughed with me would now be afraid to even admit they watched the show, let alone liked it. (Note: Chappelle’s special rates 35% from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 99% from the audience).
Ah, yes. I am defending Dave Chappelle.
Furiously so. What is most offensive to me is the thought that other self-appointed censors yearn to decide what I and others might here, see or read. Do we really want to flatten out the culture even more and expunge and erase not only every rough edge but satire itself?
There can be only one legitimate reason to abridge speech and that is when there is an incitement to immediate violence. Period.
Hardly the case in 72 minutes of comedy, no matter how offensive it might be. Watching Chappelle this week was evocative of witnessing former greats like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor stand on stage and directly confront the social and cultural consensus of the moment.
And the cultural consensus of our moment is the passel of woke-liberal “principles’” that in the remarkably short space of a decade or so have gelled into inviolate and rigid commandments.
Whether you are an Antioch undergrad, a newspaper reporter, or a corporate pencil-pusher, you are now subject to a number of New Rules that police your activities, your speech and even your thoughts if you should dare to give them material form.
Worse, there’s a sort of truly sinister gaslighting that accompanies this Cancel Culture. When you pipe up against it, you are now told, there is no such thing.
If you believe that load of crap, read no further.
In the meantime, room for debate in the liberal-left space, where it has traditionally been robust, continues to atrophy. There are only “correct” or “anti-racist” or “LGBTQ+ friendly” or “pro-trans” dictates that must be adhered to 101%. There are no longer any grey areas and there are certainly no unanswered questions.
Slip up and say “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” and you are immediately cast as an enemy of the people and worthy of a Twitter mob attack and, perhaps, loss of your employment. More likely, some aspect of your individual identity will be teased out, turned against you and then marked as the root of your deviance (“oh, typical toxic white male sexism.”) You cannot possibly understand my lived oppression because you are a relatively privileged…fill in the blank.
It was very clear to me what Dave Chappelle was intending. He was giving the Social Justice Warriors with their competing claims of victimhood, a bitter taste of their own medicine. He was saying, in essence, well…if you adhere to the notion of a hierarchy of victimhood, consider that I, as a Black man, might have a more valid claim than a comfortable white Lesbian.
I also though that Chappelle skillfully landed the plane in his last 10 minutes when he told the story of Daphne, the trans woman who opened for him some years ago, defended him, was punished with a Twitter lynching and then killed herself. No more dramatic way to say, what offends you more? Me tweaking the trans? Or a PC Twitter Mob driving my trans friend to suicide?
About the only sensible take I read in the onrush of pearl-clutching pieces that his performance provoked was from Helen Lewis writing in The Atlantic. I urge you to read the entire piece. Here is how she characterizes Chappelle’s deliberate manner in pressing the buttons of outrage:
“Is the story here “rich comedian attacks marginalized community” or “Black comedian attacks elite consensus”? That’s why The Closer is structured as a series of dares. Does this joke bother you? What about this one? Early on, the audience bridles a little at a joke about the Chinese origins of the coronavirus. Chappelle soon warns that it’s only going to get worse. Running through the culture war’s greatest hits, he dares critics to take unequal offense, and prove his point about a hierarchy of suffering.”
I find it instructive that the Netflix show that Chappelle displaced (temporarily) as Most Viewed was the 9-episode South Korean The Squid Game — which I just finished and highly recommend. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has his own censorious concerns, suggesting that the bloody, gore-filled series that features 450 desperate “players” being shot down and murdered in some very creative ways is just too gruesome to be seen by kids. But he recognizes that the popularity of The Squid Game resides in its very clear standing as a parable to the relentless grind of Late Capitalism:
“[T]he episode of “Squid Game” titled “Hell” isn’t about the competition, in which one false move equals a bullet to the head. It’s about life outside the arena. It’s about a putatively affluent society in which the divide between rich and poor — and between lucky and unlucky — is gaping. To land on the wrong side of it is to be damned.”
“That this vision appeals to so many viewers, especially young ones, suggests a chilling and bleak perspective — on capitalism, on “freedom,” on individual agency — that should stop us in our tracks. In the jarring, horrifying first episode, as contestants begin to be killed by the dozens, an unidentified mastermind cues up music and pours a cocktail to savor along with his view of the massacre, which calls to mind the school shootings that a generation of American children have grown up with. God is an assassin, tipsy and merciless in his gilded lair.”
And this is where Chappelle, Social Justice Warriors and the political moment all link up.
I am convinced that one of the major contributing factors to our current political crisis has been the liberal-left descent into race and gender based identity politics at the precise moment in history when we need the exact opposite: a mass-based, multi-racial movement that advocates for the interests of the bottom 90% of Americans.
Indeed, The Squid Game finds its strength in its brutal portrayal of the mechanisms of social control and compliance. The wealthy and the powerful laugh out loud and sip champagne while watching the desperate hoi polloi fight and kill each other for the chance of winning a huge monetary reward.
In our society the powerful have always relied on myriad instruments to keep those below them divided. Race has been their most effective weapon. That so many who now claim to favor social justice are also so ready to genuflect to the decidedly dead end of defending Identity Politics is truly amazing.
Lefty writer. Freddie de Boer, writing on his substack blog says:
“Effective left politics are about convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared self-interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others, too. That’s how you build a mass movement, by appealing to people’s sense of self-interest and showing them how they can help their neighbors while they help themselves. But because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition.”
As we edge toward the midterms. we are witnessing the reaction, the very reactionary reaction, to last year’s summer of activism. The upsurge of BLM demonstrations and, yes, the Defund the Police slogan (which is still alive on BLM sites), have given rise to the moral panic over Critical Race Theory and the spawning of thinly-disguised racist parents movement in the public schools.
It’s hardly the fault of BLM that racists decide to mobilize. But, it is a responsibility of liberals and progressives to pay some attention to what sort of politics we hope can be successful. And the blind parroting of BLM (which seems to lack much of a program beyond reparations) and their obeisance to the SJW dogmas, produce nothing except fuel for the insurgent right.
The agenda for social change continues to be hampered and threatened not only by a rising Fascist right but also by a faltering, weak Democratic leadership. And to that duo we can also add the aggravant of a stratum of misguided Wokeanthologists.
This is no time to wallow in self-referential and limp psycho-politics. The midterms are likely to begin a decade-long of Republican electoral dominance, at least in Congress. The Democrats, if they wish to survive and not allow consolidation of an authoritarian Radical Republican regime, will have to expand its voter base into rural America where the Trumpies now stand unchallenged. Activists on the left edge of the party and beyond will also have to find relevance or face political extinction.
That relevance can only be found in a politics that speaks to the immediate material, economic and educational needs of all Americans. What we all have most in common are the shortcomings of this system. No unity — no progress. About that simple. +
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