Culture

Jesus is going to come back and we're going to ask him about The Slap aren't we. He'll be standing there, resplendent in his all his glory, preparing to feed the poor and clothe the naked, when some jamoke on an iPhone will walk up and say, "Did you see this GIF edit where it's totally Timothée Chalamet instead of Chris Rock?" Yes, our long national slapmare has now entered its third week and it shows no sign of breaking. Viral phenomena usually subside pretty quickly but Will Smith's front-hand to Chris Rock at the Oscars has proven to have legs. To show how deep the mania runs, last week I saw an electoral map breaking down which states support Smith versus Rock based on Twitter data.

The New York Times has re-discovered the religious right. In a front-page story, we learn the awful truth that there is a "right-wing political movement powered by divine purpose, whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action." They sing hymns; they pray; they burn candles. They import “their worship of God, with all its intensity, emotion and ambitions, to their political life.” Quite a few support Trump and also protest “against Covid restrictions,” among other unspeakable acts. Once, long ago, I ventured into this dark territory, not armored by the shield of New York Times-style contempt for the deplorables, but like Marlowe heading up river into the Heart of Darkness. It was a hard-won lesson.

It’s the dream of every little girl: Prince Charming rides in on a white horse and asks her to come with him. They gallop off to his castle where he takes her hand, gets down on one knee, and says... “BIPOCs and other marginalized groups face cultural genocide thanks to a patriarchy that encourages heteronormativity and ableism.” To which she sings, “When you microaggress upon a starrrrrrr...” Yes, from out of the “too tone deaf to function” file this week comes the Disney corporation, that peddler of fairytale escapism, which has now gone full woke. Its new business model appears to be as follows: Disney hikes its ticket and merchandise costs, making its theme parks increasingly unaffordable to poor and middle-class families.

When I was in high school in the late 1960s, a bumper sticker, “Question Authority,” became a common sight, as did a button saying the same thing, usually worn on a tie-dye T-shirt or denim jacket. I was among those contrary teenagers who wanted to know, “On whose authority am I commanded to question authority?” The answer wasn’t hard to find. The man who most visibly pushed the slogan was former Harvard clinical psychologist and ardent LSD proponent Timothy Leary. He was known for his counsel “Drop out, turn on, tune in,” which was adopted by his League of Spiritual Discovery, which turned LSD into a sacrament. Whether Dr. Leary originated “Question Authority” or just promoted it is unclear, but that seems apposite.

I can pinpoint the moment I knew I wouldn’t be able to remain, as I had thought of myself until that time, “pro-trans.” I had grown up in 1990s New York City and had known many gender-bending people. Very few called themselves “trans,” but androgyny was in. Drag queens ran the club scene. “Girls who want boys/Who like boys to be girls/Who do boys like they're girls/Who do girls like they're boys,” the 1994 Blur song went. What was the big deal about being a girl who wanted to look like a boy or a boy who wanted to present as a girl? No one was hurting anyone. You like red lipstick, that boy likes wearing a dress. Who cared? I certainly didn’t. It was the early 2000s, the heyday of the blogosphere, and the comment sections were lit.

In her 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” author Joan Didion recalled a Berkeley autumn weekend seventeen years earlier when she was reading Lionel Trilling in a fraternity house instead of going to the football game, a collegiate occasion fixed in the memory of an earlier era, “so exotic as to be almost czarist.” It suggested “the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies,” Didion observed in her crisp, distinctive tone. Before the Sixties, youthful elites were close enough to their patrimony to respect its intellect, energy, values and travail. Liberal guilt, such as it was, rarely went further left than Rockefeller Republican.

Why did Lia Thomas bother changing his name? According to the gender-studies mavens, it wasn’t strictly necessary. A trans woman doesn’t need a vaginoplasty or breast implants. He doesn’t even need to wear dresses. He doesn’t have to date men, or watch Downton Abbey or merge into traffic without checking his blind spots. Those are all socially constructed ideas of femininity. Trans women don’t have to conform to these sexist, patriarchal norms. Womanhood is a state of mind. The question, of course, is: what kind of state? The LGBT lobby refuses to answer that question. The official line is that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman. If Hugh Jackman came out today and said, “Oi, mate, I’m a sheila,” a sheila he’d be. Fair dinkum.

Admiral Rachel Levine, who currently serves as assistant secretary for health in the Biden administration, is not a woman. This is simply a statement of fact. Rachel Levine is also not a powerless, marginalized individual. Yet Twitter as a company seems to believe that pointing out both of these truths is worth suspending accounts over. The conservative satire website Babylon Bee recently found their account locked over a tweet they recently sent naming Rachel Levine their “Man of the Year.” The joke was in response to USA Today naming Levine its Woman of the Year despite Levine not being a woman. By writing this piece and tweeting it out, I and perhaps the Spectator could also find their Twitter accounts suspended.