Writing
about the viral “Diane in 7A” story — a “Bachelor” producer’s story, told on Twitter,
of his dealing with a rude airplane passenger on Thanksgiving by harassing her
via passed notes — Salon previously noted
“Nothing about Gale’s story passes the smell test.”
And,
indeed, Elan Gale has admitted that he made Diane in 7A up.
So
concludes a saga that “won Thanksgiving”
even despite the creepy, sexist valences of a man telling a woman, via repeated
notes, “Eat my dick”; Gale tweeted, last
night, a picture of “Diana [sic] sitting in a chair.” The chair was
empty.
Though
Gale’s been praised
for “brilliant writing and execution” even in spite of the fact that the long,
convoluted saga of Diane would seem not to have happened, there’s very little
substance behind the story that caught the imaginations of Twitter users over
the Thanksgiving holiday. All the reader had to go on to presume Diane deserved
a series of notes telling her off was Gale’s own point of view. The follow-up
story by an anonymous commenter that Diane was real — and she had
cancer! — complicated unduly what had been a cut-and-dried story of
a woman who needed to be put in her place, and the man who did so. The
internet’s collective willingness to call for blood because a woman was alleged
to have been rude was only the latest sign of how internet users simultaneously
abandon skepticism and embrace absolutism when surfing. In the era of viral
“wins,” the entire world, now, is one carefully massaged, edited, and satisfying
episode of “The Bachelor” — just don’t think too hard about the implications. (Daniel D’Addario, Rude airline passenger “Diane
in 7A” was a hoax, Salon.com)
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- - - -
The question is, Daniel, who do you displace
your mother's worst aspects onto in order to keep her pristine? My whole
sense of you is as someone who wants to see most of society clamped down, with
a genteel overclass benefiting from everybody else's frozenness (i.e. “Frasier”).
This is mom at the center of court, with a bunch of effete "kids"
making sure no one ever shows a true mirror to her, by applying a thousand
different strictures to make everyone feel that anything off the cuff might be
deadly to them. They'll just learn to smile nervously and shut down—better for
making that much more territory available for genteel play!
Noam Chomsky just had an article here at
Salon where he said liberals were partly to blame for a broken working class,
for evil — something about them applying rules that would rightly infuriate and
frustrate working class communities while just being amenable good play for
themselves. This was pretty close to Chris Hedges' view of liberals over the
last 30 years as well—whom he accuses as actually
hating everybody not their own, and for purposes of class definition,
foisting the importance of manners, of "boutique issues", so that
those who with ease navigate all the complex particularities regarding race,
gender + just seem evolutionarily superior to all the clumsyies out there
who with dismaying ease ruin any good effort they might put out there with any
of a number of outrageous remarks and gestures.
Just thought I'd point out that there is
another Left out there, and they're essentially calling you guys treason ...
ultimately for worse, however hard it is right now to spot.
Vail Beach@Emporium I
wish you'd take another stab at making this point. I think you are saying
something profound, but you have expressed it incoherently.
Thanksgiving has us thinking family. If we
had a mom we could barely just deal with, the drew us to frustration, rage, we
often end up displacing these qualities so that they apply to someone else — in
this case, this fictional maternal lady that Gale dreamed up, whose crime is to
obscenely presume upon the "little people". That way our rage gets
vented at our moms for presuming upon and humiliating us when we were young — but
elsewhere. And we can be good sons and daughters in the company of our
wonderful, self-sacrificing moms again.
That's the first part anyway.
* * *
The second part is that we're living in a
time when growth has to be restricted and repressed. Every century has them,
with Linda Colley talking about how in the latter half of the18th-century the
aristocracy consolidated itself, how moving into their ranks became more
difficult, and how there became that much more many tells to see if someone
possessed an aristocratic "polite vision." The result was that the
educated pastor couldn't pass, for the aristocrat could see multiple levels
where he was limited to foreground—the result, really two different species of
people, a la Jane Austin's vision. In the 19th, you had really Romantic growth
until the end of the 1850s, where as James Wolcott says, "gentility rolled
in and laid out the doilies." And now, with Wolcott again pointing out
how, compared to the "spread-eagle" 70s, "the meritocracy has
fully sunk its Vulcan death-grip on journalism, the culture." And also
Richard Brody, explaining how "Gravity" shows how liberals prefer a
complacent, self-congratulatory world view, where anything really
wild/different/aberrant gets filtered out. People are to be trained into
decency.
So though we're all talking this ninety nine
vs. one percent split, what we at least as much have is a split between those
with an intrinsic "polite" vision and those not trained since birth
into it ("Berkeley", Iowa Workshop, New Yorker, twitter but never
post in comment sections). Liberals like Daniel and his friends are very much
okay with that, because however much they would wish them better wages and
health care, they really don't want them too much part of their picture—gross!
And they're the now. However, on the horizon, are these other left voices that
keep on wanting to associate with the working class, create some kind of folk
union with them, and are suspicious of those of their ostensible peers who are
forever harking at all the prejudiced attitudes.
I'm guessing we're going to hear a lot more from
these kind of leftists, and the age of minority promotion and suspicion of the
mass, will be turfed, in favor of collective nationalism. This won't be better.
Emporium / Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Link to Salon article:
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