June 13, 2020
Dead or alive, now is not a good time to be famous.
J.K. Rowling, feminist author of the Harry Potter books, is being publicly attacked by transgender activists and their celebrity supporters for being insufficiently sympathetic toward transgender people.
Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have been denounced for appearing in blackface decades ago.
Statues of Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Christopher Columbus, and Robert E. Lee have been vandalized this week because they have been accused of racism.
Martin Luther King, long criticized for plagiarism and womanizing, recently has been alleged to have been a witness to and encourager of a rape in a hotel room.
It seems that sainthood isn’t as much fun as it used to be.
In the past, iconoclasts (Greek: image breakers) were people known for smashing idols such as religious images that the iconoclasts considered to be heretical. Nowadays we have cancel culture, also known as callout culture, online shaming, and outrage culture, which often occurs on social media and is used to publicly humiliate, ostracize, and bully individuals whose ideas or behavior don’t match those of their harassers. These modern Puritans feel superior to and holier than the targets of their wrath, and therefore entitled to insult and abuse those human beings who don’t share their world view.
I can certainly understand a desire to reform institutions or challenge beliefs that may be harmful to individuals and society. Many police departments are in urgent need of improvement, and politicians such as the current occupant of the White House need to be held to account. Some statues of historical figures, dubbed “ghosts of oppression” by one BBC writer, may need to be relocated to museums.
But I’m concerned about the rising intolerance from left wing and right wing fanatics whose hatred of people who are different from themselves masks an inability to see their own shadow. Anti fascist anarchists have a lot in common with white supremacists, including the tendency to see evil in other people but not in themselves. Black protesters demand that white people change their attitudes and behavior, but say nothing about their own need to reduce their crime rate and build strong families.
In the Salem witch trials of 1692 the Puritans hanged 14 women and 5 men as witches, and in the red scare of the 1950’s Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the lives and careers of many American citizens. But Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Miller in The Crucible later exposed the hypocrisy of those 17th and 19th century Puritans.
And now in the 21st century we have our anti racist crusaders and our white power true believers determined to exorcise the devils in their opponents but not in themselves. And hey – I can be as judgemental and opinionated as any of them. But fortunately or unfortunately for yours truly, I have met the enemy and he is me.
As much as I might enjoy the view from atop a pedestal, now is not the best time to be an icon. Someone would be sure to come along and knock me off my perch. So I’ll just have to hang out with my fellow sinners until such time as I can pose as a self righteous saint and get away with it.
A self righteous saint – just like my left wing and right wing compatriots today.
David Wigginton 