Rowling’s grievous fault was to think. In a piece that
appeared in the Washington Examiner, “J.K.
Rowling’s Lonely Fight For Women’s Rights”, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another thinking female, noted that Rowling, questioning a phrase recently put
into currency – “people who menstruate” – had tweeted: “’People who menstruate’
I’m sure there used to be a word for those
people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
The humorless post-modern world soon after came tumbling
down on Rowling’s head.
“The advocacy group GLAAD (The Gay & Lesbian Alliance
Against Defamation),” Hersi Ali noted, “accused her of being ‘cruel’ and ‘targeting
trans-people.’”
Used to dying on literary hills – no one owns the English
language – Rowling responded, “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction.
If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and
love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many
to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
No one seemed much interested in debating the propositions
put forth by Rowling, especially that thorny last one.
“The woke left,” Hersi-Ali writes, “is seeking to “cancel”
her, newspeak for trashing her reputation, for this ideological heresy.” Far
from targeting or harming anyone, Rowling “is simply fighting against the
erosion of women’s rights. She is warning of what happens when women’s rights
are subordinated to transgender rights. She is urging all of us to think
carefully about what is being done on the basis of a warped ideology of
‘intersectionality,’ which conjures up a strange, inverted hierarchy of
victimhood and grievance.”
Logic and right reason in the post-Marxist, intersectional universe is no longer a part of rational debate. If you can demonstrate
you are a victim of some historical indignity, however remote, and you can
claim, legitimately or not, a grievance for a moral wrong visited upon you or
your remote ancestors, you need not argue your case in the court of public
opinion. You have won; the debate will have been decided in your favor, by all
the people who matter, before a word is spoken. You are part and parcel of the
wounded intersectional universe, and you may with impunity “cancel” anyone who
challenges your claim – the intersectional militia consistently confuses
“rights” and “claims”—to intersectional orthodoxy.
Sometimes this strategy boomerangs. Over Independence Day
weekend, the Hartford Courant reported, “a statue of Christopher Columbus in front of
Waterbury’s City Hall on Grand Street was beheaded. Police are still
investigating.” Columbus has all but disappeared from the public square in
Connecticut, but the war now threatens Yale University, named after Elihu Yale,
who…
Shall we allow NPR host, Yale alumnus, and political writer
for the Hearst chain of Newspapers, Colin
McEnroe to thread this needle?
McEnroe acknowledges that Yale was not a nice man: “Yale
funded Yale with money he made from his leadership of the East India Company,
which participated significantly in the slave trade. I believe there is no
evidence of Elihu Yale owning slaves, but there are two paintings in which he
is shown alongside “servants” who are slaves… Others have argued that Elihu
Yale wasn’t — as far as we know — a champion of slavery. He was in the
trans-oceanic business of buying and selling, and slaves were an essential part
of that economy. There’s a counter-narrative that Yale was actually very
directly and quite lucratively involved in the trafficking of Indian, as
opposed to African, slaves.”
In any case, Yale’s war on modern sensibilities involved
only Indians – not American Indians, but rather Indians from India. But Yale “helped
lead a company that bought and sold human beings, and that is an inescapably
terrible thing.” It all sounds very Columbian. Columbus owned no slaves,
certainly not African American slaves. Slavery was introduced into the New
World more than 200 years after Columbus died.
Are Yale’s sins against the exquisite moral order of the 20th
and 21st centuries, so full of murder and slavery, black enough to require
Yale to shuck off the Yale name? Amid all the name changing of our own morally
tender age – Indians, American Indians, that is, have quietly disappeared from
the public square, like Columbus -- what is the chance, on a scale of 1 to 10,
that Yale will redeem itself by casting off the name of a man who winked at
slave-trading and may have profited from the selling of human flesh, unlike Columbus?
“Actually,”McEnroe tells us, “the best reason for renaming
Yale is also the reason it’s not going to happen. It would be really hard work.
It would disrupt an iconic culture. It would be a shock felt ’round the world.
“I’m fine with getting rid of statues, but it’s really not
that difficult to do. People fuss a little. The statue goes away. The pigeons
get used to the new one. It’s kind of a cheap date with our consciences. And,
if we’re honest, toppling statues is really fun. You can’t beat virtuous
mayhem.
“Renaming Yale would really mean something. That’s the
reason to do it.”
And it’s also the reason it will never be done. Changing the university's name would almost immediately devalue its status – not to mention
the value of the diplomas Yale has in the past handed out to its mostly white privileged alumni.
Yale diplomas are not just sheepskins, the way flags are not just painted
cloths and statues, defaceable and decapitatable, stone and marble.
But in the leftist bear pit, only those things cherished by
the right are expendable. Biology, reason, real history, and even Rowling, the most
popular author of children's' books in the post-modern world, must fall to the
ideological ax wielded by the newly anointed mob of revolutionary saints.
Got it.
Comments