Can’t appease a mob
The most remarkable thing about our “woke revolution” (for lack of a better phrase) is the extent to which it has spread so far so rapidly with so little resistance. Companies and institutions have fallen in rapid succession, “captured” as the result of pre-emptive surrender attributable to fear and lack of backbone.
Ideas that would have been considered fodder for Onion parody just a few years ago have not only gained traction but acquired status of holy writ, even if strongly opposed by large (apparently powerless and intimidated) majorities.
In traditional Marxist theory, the culture (“superstructure”) of a capitalist society reflects the values and helps preserve the status of the dominant class (the capitalists who own the means of production, the economic/materialist “base”), to the point of inducing a “false consciousness” among the exploited workers, but we now have not congruity but sharp disjunction between the values of our dominant woke culture and the moderate, even conservative-leaning values of the nation it sits atop.
The latest evidence of the totalitarian nature of our woke red guards and the ease with which it is possible to acquire the dunce cap comes from our alleged paper of record, The New York Times, which is under assault by transgender activists and their celebrity and media supporters, even from members of its own staff and prominent contributors, for “editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people” (according to one of the group letters sent to it).
At one point, a truck with a billboard was witnessed driving around the paper’s headquarters with the message, “Dear New York Times: Stop questioning trans people’s right to exist & access to medical care.” The usual hiring demands were issued to make amends for the sins against LGBT+ orthodoxy, in this case for the hiring of more transgender writers (who would then, presumably, tilt the reporting in a direction acceptable to the activists and thereby also establish the principle that only activists get to report on the issues for which they’re activists, however dubious that might be vis-à-vis traditional journalistic standards).
The irony enters when considering that perhaps no paper has been more obsequious in tilting its news coverage in a woke direction in recent years than the Gray Lady, particularly when it comes to reporting on transgender issues.
If woke virtue signaling constitutes an effort to acquire immunity against woke attacks, that effort appears to have dismally failed in The Times’ case, perhaps because of an inability on the part of those who run it to understand why the woke pick the targets they do.
As columnist Michael Goodwin notes in The New York Post, “the editors have only themselves to blame. After abandoning standards of fairness to push a crazy woke agenda, they are suddenly discovering that appeasing the far left is impossible. The crash course in common sense comes with the lesson that the more you give the radicals, the more they want. And they don’t ask, they demand and make threats.”
Put differently, you can never fully appease the woke; all you can do is try to deflect attacks onto other unfortunate targets, and thereby hope to buy enough time for Thermidor to arrive and end the reign of terror before your turn comes.
As such, one might think that the inability of even The Times to receive immunity would convince others that the only way to win the woke game is to refuse to play it, beginning with an adamant refusal to cede moral superiority to the woke goons (coupled with a rejection of the claim that they represent the “LGBT+ community,” or any other).
We are reminded along these lines of an obscure, early form of woke activist pressure from the late 1970s when professional race hustler Jesse Jackson (the original model for Al Sharpton and others who grasped how easy it was to exploit white liberal guilt), insincerely upset over what he claimed were racist lyrics in one of the Rolling Stones songs (“Some Girls”), threatened a boycott of the band, apparently assuming they would quickly capitulate, perhaps even issue the usual groveling apology coupled with protection money in the form of a sizeable check to the “Rainbow Coalition.”
Mick Jagger’s response at the time was unexpected (at least by Jackson) and admirably succinct: “If you can’t take a joke, it’s too - - - -ing bad.”
Jackson went off to boycott others more willing to bend the knee; he is now largely and appropriately forgotten, while the Stones still fill up football stadiums at $200 a ticket.
Bottom line: The woke only attack those who care what the woke think about them; if you don’t care, and make that abundantly clear, they have no power over you.
Cancel culture thus acquires its influence only to the extent that we signal beforehand, as The Times and so many others have, that we are afraid of it and willing to be canceled.
So wouldn’t it be refreshing, even invigorating, if the next time the woke mob seizes on a target, the target responds to their demands the same way the lead singer for the “world’s greatest rock and roll band” once did?