Politically and culturally the N.Y. Times has lately become even more “Woke Central” than Indiewire, particularly, it seems, in recent coverage of the Oscars and the film industry.
They’ve been agitating for woke advancement and urging powerful white people to recognize that, more than anything else, whiteness represents an essentially evil and corrupt mindset as well as a soiled and heinous history (The 1619 Project) and is therefore burdened in the eyes of God and history with completely appropriate guilt — a stain that can never be washed out but can at least be atoned for by white people hanging their heads in shame and perhaps even hiding their faces from public view for the foreseeable future.
There can only be one way forward, and that is to keep the doors open to all gifted and worthy people of color (African American, Latino, Asian) while continuing to guilt-trip white people over under sideways down. Forget proportionality in terms of the industry workforce or general population demographics. The bottom line is that whiteness is believed to be deeply flawed and corrupt, particularly in the matter of older white males, and that the term “older white male” has become, in fact, an epithet. For some time now. Obviously.
And if you say anything other than “what’s happening today is obviously a necessary and approvable thing in terms of redressing the sins and injustices of the past”, you are not only an intransigent racist but part of the problem and therefore a prime candidate for possible cancellation. And so the smart move is to simply shut up.
Just to be on the safe side, Hollywood Elsewhere is taking this opportunity to reiterate its strong support of keeping doors open to all non-Anglo movers and shakers, and to reiterate my belief in the constant channelling of appropriate shame about my white heritage, and to never forget the ugly things that white people have been responsible for in decades and centuries past. I know I sound facetious to some extent, but at the same time I’m being 100% sincere — anyone who would deny the dark legacy of paleface rule in this country is living under a rock.
At the same time this is why Trump is going to win next November. Because a certain under-educated portion of 60.7% of the U.S. population doesn’t want to be guilt-tripped and finger-wagged over and over. They’re angry about the p.c. Torquemadas, and they’d rather live under an ugly rightwing monster who will leave them alone (i.e., won’t lambast them for their endemic failings) than deal with constant accusations and shaming and outrage-venting from the progressive left.
Ask any Average Joe to choose a present-day political analogy for “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the old Twilight Zone episode. Seven or eight out of ten will point to wokesters.
