“That Face: The urge to smash a teenager’s face represents a new iconoclasm against masculinity” by Bruce Bawer, City Journal, January 23, 2019.
“What’s Really Toxic is ‘Toxic Masculinity’ ” by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal, January 22, 2019.
“The New Bigotry” by Noah Rothman, The New York Post, February 3, 2019.
Bawer, a champion of freedom and an articulate cultural critic, has long supported same-sex marriage and Christian values while warning of Islamic and Leftist threats to liberty.
Here, he’s countering the mass media’s demonizing of the Covington Catholic kids, fresh from The March For Life, while wearing “Make America Great Again” caps. Bawer observes that all the videos of the events in D.C. are evidence that, “the boys were innocent – quite remarkably and impressively innocent, in fact.” He notes that, “Over the course of more than an hour, they were confronted, first, by a fanatical group of religious bigots, the Black Hebrew Israelites (who claim to be the real Jews), who pelted them with racist and homophobic abuse, to which the Kentucky boys, quite admirably, refused to reply”. But media gave a pass to these fake “Hebrews” who were shouting, “faggots” and “cracker asses” at these boys while a media privileged Native American activist falsely accused the boys of attacking the “Hebrews” and he lied again when he said that the boys yelled, “Build the wall!” and blocked him. Bawer sees that it was this lying Native American activist who “got in their faces, chanting, banging a drum, and telling them to go back to Europe because they had no business in America, which belonged to Native Americans” – a routine chant of the politically correct.
Sadly, for these boys, they match the Left’s most despised “intersectionality”: white, male, cisgender, Catholic, pro-life, pro-Trump, et al. Bawer discerns that the event “was interpreted, by the kind of people who are determined to interpret such things in such ways, as the condescending reaction of a privileged young straight white male toward a much older representative of a minority group”. Some said, the targeted boy’s smile was “smug”. Others twisted it into a “smirk”. In Orwellian Newspeak, it was a “facecrime”.
Self-styled elite don’t get the meaning of a calm Christian’s smile in the face of hate. A Muslim pundit goaded: “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” An SNL writer tweeted that, she’d “blow … whoever punches the MAGA kid in the face”.
These, of course, are all projections, the stories of those who “see” only what they want to see, what they’re told they must see – or else! But, projection prevents a realistic perspective and never leads to an accurate awareness or to any honest reconciliation.
Hymowitz, author and literature professor, addresses what she rightly pegs as a “social-media stoning of the Covington Catholic boys”. She faults the false narratives of “toxic masculinity” and well understands that the meme, itself, is toxic. And she wisely adds: “It’s contagious”. She cites a showbiz writer’s posts: “I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents.” After this vile dreamer was fired, his GoFundMe page was set up. It prompted still more hate – pro and con.
Even before that boy who was ruthlessly singled out had gotten back to Kentucky, he and his family were doxxed and getting death threats. He said: “I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to defuse the situation.” The videos back him up, as he’s simply standing there at the Lincoln Memorial, quietly smiling into the face of racist animosity, faithfully living out, on that day, the dream Dr. King preached on that same hallowed ground on another day, before even this boy’s parents were born.
Unjust: Social Justice and The Unmaking of America is Rothman’s new book. Ben Shapiro calls it, “an elegant and thoughtful dismantling of perhaps the most dangerous ideology at work today.” For all who refuse to accept Shapiro’s intelligent endorsement, there’s Joe Scarborough’s: “Rothman examines a movement more focused on political retribution than the search for justice, explaining with great insight how it has poisoned our politics, coarsened our culture, and turned us into a nation of victims.”
In his essay, Rothman grants: “On a basic level, nothing could be more American than the idea of ‘social justice’.” He explains: “Theoretically, it is an ideological commitment to equality and fairness.” However, he perceptively recognizes that, nowadays, “In reality, it is something far more sinister”, having been bent into “the new bigotry”.
Everyone is inevitably stuck inside one’s limited sense of self. It begins at an early age. As self-centered, it’s experienced as victimhood, for, repeatedly, one doesn’t get one’s own way. The “way” that one imagines one “needs” things to go is an unmixed fantasy. This irrationality fails to recognize that all circumstances of life in this world are a mix.
Conflicting tribal agendas are nothing new. But new terms, “identity group”, “identity politics”, are coined to give vogue to the same old spin of the disgruntled. Still and sadly, personally experienced and self-centered identity confines one to a perspective that isolates, even incarcerates, one’s “self” inside one’s mere version of oneself, while also caricaturing all “others”. This then inoculates one against learning to realistically identify with any other person or group.
The benighted, self-centered point of view blocks the way into empathic recognition of one’s self-in-others. It cuts off any pragmatic connection with “others”, thus reinforcing isolation instead of identification. Then, it’s so easy to assume and assert: “You can’t understand what I’ve been through, what my people have had to endure from your people, and what we still have to endure.” In a sense, of course, this is the case for all folks – for no one lives another’s life. Yet, distinguishing one’s own gripes as more valid than others’ gripes, misses another avenue into identification with the other gripers.
Squatting alone inside ourselves, stuck in self-isolation and anger, we cannot see how alike we all are. Still, throughout history’s clashing cultures, folks have learned that our own experience can be a pathway into others. The Golden Rule, in positive and negative forms, gives us universal insight, from “us” into “them”. Sly old Shylock got this. But, today, we mustn’t read “dead white men”. Yet, we’re all enough alike to know that how I want others to treat me, I can assume others want me to treat them and how I don’t want to be treated, I can assume others don’t want to be treated. But, intoxicated self-pity, pitting self against others, portends no empathy or reconciliation, only more reprisals.