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| -Land of the Free |
| Steyn: The Appropriations Committee has Passed Sentence |
| 2017-05-16 |
| FTFA But even to have to point that out is a defeat: As we agreed, the minute you have to state something so butt-numbingly obvious as that Shakespeare wasn't a Prince of Denmark or a Moor of Venice, you've lost. We've all lost. We're in a mad world, where it seems entirely normal for literary magazines to rule on what fictional characters a novelist is permitted to conceive. Unlike the two Canadian editors, Lionel Shriver didn't go the perhaps-we-ought-to-have-a-debate route. She decided to throw the whole cultural-appropriation thing back in the appropriators' faces and appeared on stage wearing a sombrero. Naturally the organizers of the so-called "literary festival" stampeded to dissociate themselves, and most of the literary bigfeet could muster no more than tepid and equivocal support. Lionel is nobody's idea of a right-wing loon, but she recognizes, in a way that Kay and Niedzviecki did not, that you can't tiptoe up to this issue and meet the Appropriation mutaween halfway. "Screw off, you totalitarian tossers" is, in fact, the only reasonable response: As I said, Lionel is nobody's idea of a hardcore right-winger like yours truly, but she's discovering that, when you need 'em, the respectable writers like, say, Francine Prose are never quite there for you. Jonathan Kay is likewise no right-winger, certainly not compared to his splendid mum Barbara. If memory serves, Jonathan has introduced me on stage in Toronto on two occasions, for both of which he volunteered his services. But more recently he has been on a bit of a political odyssey - to the point where he helped Justin Trudeau "write" his memoir. (It's not cultural appropriation if a francophone Liberal, or presumably a Pushtun warlord or a Bhutanese yakherd, pays an anonymous ghost-writer to pretend to be him.) Over here on the far right, I'm always happy to have people meet me halfway. Indeed, at the moment, on everything that matters - trade, war, health care - there's very little agreement over anything on the American right. But on the left it's different. Increasingly, their view is that the great questions have been settled, there's only one correct answer, and you have to get all of them right - because an 80 per cent ally is, to the new mutaween, a 20 per cent enemy, as Niedzviecki and Kay have discovered. As it happens, there's one almighty cultural appropriation going on right now. Indeed, it's a heist. The United Kingdom has become the acid-attack capital of the world. Female genital mutilation is practiced in "medical" clinics from Michigan to Melbourne. The taharrush has spread to Cologne and other Central European cities. Ritual beheading has come to French Catholic churches and upstate New York. And if you protest, "Look, I totally deplore all this cultural appropriation. I think it's outrageous that Britain and America and Australia and Europe are culturally appropriating acid attacks and FGM and beheading and honor killings", you're told, "No, no. That's diversity. It's vibrant. What's not to enjoy? It's a beautiful mélange - just like this new Homeland Security proposal to ban laptops from cabin baggage on translatlantic flights, because a western cultural artifact is being appropriated and weaponized in the cause of eastern jihadism. What a rich cultural co-mingling..." Much more at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #2 Wait a minute. The subject of this piece is a magazine that is published by the Writers' Union of Canada. I think I see the problem. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2017-05-16 12:12 |
| #1 All fiction is alternate reality. Alternate reality is Science Fiction. Nobody currently lives in Science Fiction so there is nothing to appropriate. ... Think about it. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2017-05-16 08:58 |