If only the culture wars would take a vacation
More controversies in which I hate pretty much everyone involved.
I asked everyone to keep quiet and not make any waves while I was gone last week, and most of you complied. No new pandemics started, the Russians haven't yet resorted to nukes, and any planned alien invasions of earth remain on hold.
Good job, everyone. But while real news sometimes gives us a break, stupid culture-war BS we won't remember by next month works constantly. The outrage machine won't feed itself, you know.
For example, I'm told that the state of Florida plans to teach schoolchildren that slavery was kind of good, actually.
It's a bold move, Cotton. (Actually, this might not be the best time to mention cotton in any context.)
Ron DeSantis is a red-meat culture warrior par excellence, always on the lookout for whatever plays to the worst instinct of his political base, so trying to downplay the horrors of America's original sin sounds perfectly believable if you're already inclined to hate him.
And, as I've said many times before: if the news story perfectly confirms all of your pre-existing beliefs, it's probably BS. For once, DeSantis is kind of getting a bad rap:
On the face of it, the allegation seemed absurd. It didn’t pass the smell test. How could any state school system in today’s America claim that slavery was good? On the other hand, would mainstream media organizations and the Vice President of the United States lie? Hmmm, tough call. So I went and looked at the Florida standards myself.
Florida’s State Academic Standards — Social Studies, 2023
Don’t trust me; take a look yourself. There are many pages on black history, but nothing in them claims slavery was a net good.
Instead, there are sections covering black notables and heroes.
[…]
There’s much much more, but buried in it, there was also the one sentence that attracted almost all of the media’s attention.
That’s it. One short line says that slaves got skills “which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” This is a fact of slavery worth discussing. There was a status system even within slavery, and slaves with skills—blacksmiths, carpenters—had higher status than those without—those working in the fields.
I’ll bet a shiny Shiba Inu coin that at least one solidly blue state has similar language in its own history curriculum.
The thing is, as Nick Cattogio argues, DeSantis did kind of bring this upon himself after years of playing to the “anti-woke” gallery:
…as I write this, indignant rants about the new curriculum continue to boil over from the White House to The View. Why are so many so eager to punish DeSantis over this sin-that-isn’t-a-sin when he has so many actual sins that he might more properly be punished for?
We might answer that question with a question. What has Ron DeSantis done to earn the benefit of the doubt on this controversy from anyone observing it from afar?
[…]
DeSantis deserves, and will receive, no benefit of the doubt from the center-right either.
Chris Christie was asked on Sunday what he thought of the governor disclaiming responsibility for the state’s new curriculum amid the controversy over it. “You know, the fact is that Gov. DeSantis starts these things for political advantage,” he said. “He tries to take political advantage of them, and then he says, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t do it. I wasn’t involved. I mean, that’s not leadership, Margaret.”
That’s an underrated point about why it’s hard to defend DeSantis on this topic. One may believe, as I do, that his experts had good intentions in crafting the new curriculum but I don’t believe the governor has good intentions in picking the political fights he picks. Viewed within the context of his strategy to become president, his drumbeat of culture-war campaigns—hopping from anti-woke to anti-gay to anti-vax and back again—feels like an increasingly sweaty attempt to convince the GOP’s illiberal base that he’ll antagonize all of the groups they dislike more than Trump would. He does indeed “start these things for political advantage,” as Christie says, not that you’d know it from the latest primary polls.
As invested as DeSantis is in his image as a “policy guy,” in other words, the details of each individual policy ironically don’t matter much. (Which may explain why so many of his culture-war initiatives end up being enjoined in court.) What matters is the signaling, the performance of cultural antagonism in official acts. So, yes, I believe him when he says that he “wasn’t involved” in drafting the new curriculum. Why would he have been? His interest in the subject surely peaked on the day he got to talk about something called “the Stop W.O.K.E. Act” on Fox News, a shrewd political play in a party where more people think racism against whites is a “big problem” than racism against blacks.
How much can one rightly grieve the unfairness with which he’s been treated in this matter, then? It feels like just deserts, a case of a culture-war demagogue getting a taste of his own medicine for once. Fairly or not.
As for his critics, the temptation to finish off DeSantis once and for all, even if the grounds are dubious, must be overwhelming.
But you can only stretch your credibility for a “good” reason so many times before it breaks:
The left-wing hysteria over this smells suspiciously like the left-wing hysteria two years ago over Georgia’s new election law, which Joe Biden preposterously described at the time as “Jim Crow on steroids” and which led to Major League Baseball yanking that year’s All-Star Game from Atlanta in protest. A year later, that law made possible record-breaking early voting that enabled the reelection of a black incumbent to the U.S. Senate. MLB is now considering Atlanta as the site of the 2025 All-Star Game.
Everybody is crying “wolf,” and if you push back against them you're tarred as a pro-wolf beta cuck and/or a wolf supremacist.
Then there's the tempest over music with an offensive video and lyrics, but with everyone taking the exact opposite position they held during the Tipper Gore years.1
That is, it's now a left-wing article of faith that the children!!! must be protected from provocative songs, while conservatives are firmly on the freedom-of-speech-and-consequences-of-said-speech side and also insisting that Jason Aldean is the new Merle Haggard just like people once compared 2 Live Crew to Shakespeare.2
A prominent gun-control activist is taking credit for getting Jason Aldean’s controversial song pulled from Country Music Television for being “racist and violent.”
Aldean, 46, has been accused of promoting violence with his latest song “Try That in a Small Town,” which includes the inflammatory lyrics: “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up / Well, that s–t might fly in the city, good luck / Try that in a small town.”
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, brought attention to the lyrics in a tweet posted Sunday night, in which she said the song is “about how [Aldean] and his friends will shoot you if you try to take their guns.”
[…]
Aldean sings in the first verse: “Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk / Carjack an old lady at a red light / Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store / Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like.”
He continues: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you’re tough.”
The “Dirt Road Anthem” singer defended himself against the accusations, writing in a statement posted to Twitter, “In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous.
“There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it — and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage — and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music — this one goes too far,” he continued.
I heard the song on the radio a few months ago and instantly dismissed it as pandering dreck that doesn't even have a decent hook to partially redeem it. Classic Jason Aldean, then.3
I'll go this far in his defense, though: for all the talk about how the video tries to gin up bigoted fears of African-Americans, most of the rioters featured therein are as white as a HuffPo editorial board meeting. (“I hear a dog whistle. Therefore, you are a dog.”)
Aldean's team did score an own-goal by shooting the video at a Nashville-area courthouse where a Black man was lynched in 1927. But, as Saving Country Music notes, this was more likely because it was a convenient filming location than any alt-right signalling:
The whole linchpin of the controversy is the revelation of the The Maury County Courthouse where the video was shot being the site of a lynching. But all evidence points to this being an oversight as opposed to an active effort to underpin Aldean’s song and video with a more surreptitious message. It’s a media “gotcha” as opposed to a substantive criticism. The Maury County Courthouse is just a courthouse located conveniently to Nashville.
As the production company TackleBox has pointed out, the location has been used to film scores of films and videos without controversy, including 2009’s Hannah Montana: The Movie with Miley Cyrus, a 2022 holiday film, A Nashville Country Christmas with Tanya Tucker, and another 2022 holiday film, Steppin’ into the Holiday with Mario Lopez and Jana Kramer.
Kind of fitting that it's also been used for Hallmark Channel movies, because once you strip away all of the overblown controversy, the song is about as slight as an assembly-line cable TV Christmas movie.
Or when the “Old Town Road” guy released that video with the devil and stuff. You remember that, right?
Right?
Seriously, that happened.
Aldean (who grew up in a sleepy, backwater burg called Macon, Georgia, population 157,346) isn't always bad. He's had a few good country songs, like “Drowns The Whiskey,” a duet with Miranda Lambert, and…um…well, “Drowns The Whiskey” is pretty good, anyway.
This time, you've wandered way off the trail. If you look through the whole proposal to whitewash black history in Florida, you find that it wants students to learn that "everybody else" was into enslavement, and "many did it much worse" and then "so, really, what we did wasn't so bad, see?"
There is no "good" enslavement, there is no "bad" enslavement. There is enslavement. Period. I think you people in Canada might not understand it because you didn't have to deal with the institutionalization of enslavement, with a basic political document that affirmed white supremacy by declaring slaves were "3/5 of a person" and a Supreme Court dominated for the first 80 years by enslavers, who constantly ruled in favor of enslavers, and who finally declared that African Americans could never be citizens and no rights a white man had to recognize. And then after the country's bloodiest war, the enslavers were allowed to recreate their antebellum system as "home rule" - as the Florida "guidance" calls it (the rest of us know it as Jim Crow) which the new rules really don't want people to study too well (because they don't want them noticing how they're working 24/7/365 to recreate that).
You might look up how it is that all the black Canadian citizens got there. Most of their ancestors got there because people like my three-times-great-grandfather, a Quaker Abolitionist, were willing to ignore the rulings of the allegedly-"supreme" court (a similar version of which no exists today) and operate the Underground Railroad to help all those former slaves get to Canada where their "vocational training" on the plantation could be put to good use for their self-advancement.