Elemental Ways of Speaking

The longer I live (and here I am at the ripe old age of 38), the more pop culture seems like a giant hamster wheel.  Forward motion is illusory.  We keep the thing spinning just so we can experience the same old stuff every few months.  And I’m not even talking about the Duggars, whom I consider to be as vile an example of human greed and excess as any of the Wall Street bankers.

I’m talking, of course, about Brett Ratner, and the made up conflict surrounding his recent statement that “rehearsing is for fags.”

I’ll get to the nature of that comment in a moment, but first, some perspective.  We’ve been here before.  The most notorious recent example is Michael Richards, who completely torpedoed his already foundering career with a rant about African-Americans during a standup routine.  And just a few months ago  – demonstrating that this issue isn’t the province of any particular race – we had Tracy Morgan claiming he’d kill his son if it turned out he was gay.  I’d be remiss, too, if I didn’t mention Mel Gibson, who has been accused (with good reason) of being insensitive to gays, Jews, and women, stretching back 15 years or more.  Hell, I remember when GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) made him apologize for the anti-gay characters in Braveheart back in ’95 .  The point is, the pop culture landscape is littered with this sort of thing.  Ratner isn’t the first, and he certainly won’t be the last.

And this is one of the reasons why I’m so annoyed with the way GLAAD has once again handled the situation.  Before I dive into arguments like these, I always feel compelled to state my own beliefs, and they are these:

Bigotry – true bigotry – is one of the most idiotic characteristics a person can display.  Whether we’re talking about hatred for blacks, gays, women, Jews, Muslims, white dudes, or Eskimos, it’s a sure sign of limited intelligence, self-awareness, sophistication, and evolution.  The simple fact is that assholes are everywhere, and attempting to generalize based on skin color, sexual orientation, religion, or any other sort of superficial demographic data is one of the most wrongheaded things a person can do.  As for myself, I try to be accepting of everyone, taking them on their merits until they demonstrate behavior that makes them unworthy of respect.  This doesn’t make me a hero.  It just means I don’t believe in carpet-bombing an entire group of people based on my own fear and ignorance.

However.

I also believe in freedom of speech, and in the certainty that a person can use racist/sexist/homophobic language without actually being a racist/sexist/homophobe.  I don’t, for instance, believe that Michael Richards is racist, despite the absolutely vile things he said.  If you’ve read about the circumstances surrounding his rant, I think it’s likely that he lashed out in the most hurtful way possible to verbally damage the audience members he’d taken offense to.  We can extrapolate from there and wonder about the stability of a man who’d do such a thing, but that’s another issue, based in Richards’ propensity for anger and lack of emotional maturity, not his alleged racism.

Fortunately I think the Brett Ratner case is simpler, which makes the outcry even harder to justify.  Ratner is, by most accounts, a pig.  Around the same time his “rehearing is for fags” soundbite broke, he went on record as saying he’d “banged” Olivia Munn when she “wasn’t Asian.”  So, we’re not exactly dealing with an enlightened gent here (which is well-documented in lots of places, like here), and both of these statements are exactly the kind of juvenile locker room immaturity we should expect from someone of Ratner’s caliber.  I’m not saying it’s right that he said it.  It’s clearly insensitive, and he’s a grade-A moron for uttering it in front of an open microphone.

But does he deserve to be pilloried in the way that Richards and Gibson and Morgan have been?  I don’t think so.  The argument I’d like to put forth is that we’ve grown too sensitive as a society, and rather than use this as an opportunity to talk about the casual cruelty inherent in Ratner’s words (which often works its way into the speech of others, especially adolescent boys), GLAAD made him hop on the apology train.  So now we get a public statement of dubious sincerity where Ratner disavows his statement, thereby making GLAAD look as thin-skinned and reactionary as it really is.  But rather than shaming the speaker, why not focus on the effect such words have on others, especially in light of the “It Gets Better” campaign?  Why not try to turn it into a moment where we can unpack the way people toss around the word gay as a pejorative?  Nope.  Ratner apologizes, and the only thing we’ve gained is that we won’t have to suffer through Eddie Murphy as Oscar host.

The really sad thing is that what GLAAD has done by condemning a juvenile, sophomoric comment (that I truly don’t think had any ill intent behind it) in such an over-the-top way is elevate it to the level of something truly malicious.  It’s important to be able to differentiate between the innocuous and the undeniably harmful, and, by treating them as though they’re one and the same, GLAAD muddies the waters.  A statement like Ratner’s is taken much more seriously than it should be, which means that the genuinely hurtful statement is, by necessity, diminished.

I’m emphatically not defending what Ratner said.  Free speech has consequences, etc., etc., and if you’re going to utter idiotic things in the public eye then you’d better be ready for the fallout.  But by the same token I think we’ve reached a point as a society where the fallout has gotten so disproportionate to what was actually said that we’ve managed to infantilize ourselves into a country of thin-skinned, hyper-sensitive children. GLAAD, like it or not, contributes to this every time they publicly shame people like Ratner or Morgan.  Treating all insensitive comments as equally offensive just means that we lose the ability to have an intelligent conversation about the language that binds us.

*****

Current listening:

David Lowery – The Palace Guards (2011)

Current reading:

Paul Griffin – The Orange Houses (2009)