Tuesday, May 4, 2021

1917


The Democratic party is a little like Russia in l917. At first the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, the Trotskyites and Leninites were all united in their opposition to the Czar (Trump). Then there was a split between the political and cultural avant gardes. Socialist realist art and architecture would prevail in the Stalinist era which ushered in a new form of repression.The voices of the Mandelstams, Mayakovskys, Pasternaks and Malevichs would be silenced. Poetry, ironically became more vital in its underground form as Perestroika, but that’s another story. The Biden presidency united all branches of the party and many independents who shored themselves up against a common cause, the destruction of American Democracy, epitomized by the January 6 insurrection. However, now the cancel culture of the left is beginning to mobilize its Newspeak thinking thought police. One-time allies increasingly find themselves on opposing sides, particularly around the issue of free speech. Columbia linguist John McWhorter’s "How the N-Word Became Unsayable" (NYT, 4/30/21). “Just writing the word here, I sense myself as pushing the envelope, even though I am Black,” wrote Mr. McWhorter. McWhorter went on to use the C word and F word in his piece. A subsequent Times headline read thusly, "Debate Erupts at N.J. Law School After White Student Quotes Racial Slur"(NYT, 5/3/21). The Times describes how “The first-year student at Rutgers Law School in Newark, who is white, repeated a line from a 1993 legal opinion, including the epithet, when discussing a case.” The result was a call for apologies. For what? Reading from the record? How do you teach Huckleberry Finn or even Othello? It’s not hard to figure out what words were forbidden during the Stalinist era? It’s certain gulag wasn’t one.

Read "When Not to Use the "N" Word On or Off Campus," by Francis Levy, HuffPost


 

 

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