ByDaniel Greenfield March 16, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
The recent controversies over politically correct rewrites of James Bond novels
and Roald Dahl’s children’s books highlights just how dependent a woke
culture industry is on the works of dead white men, like Dahl, Fleming
and Tolkien, who were anything but politically correct.
Or even living, but currently politically incorrect white women, like J.K. Rowling.
Woke culture has filled every school with graphic sexual books like Beyond Magenta and Lawn Boy
which describe 8 and 10-year-olds having sex, but can’t generate any of
its own classics. That’s why Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story
Company for $686 million,
Amazon paid $8.5 billion for MGM, whose crown jewel is James Bond, and
has spent over $1 billion to make its own woke version of Tolkien’s
mythos. (New woke Lord of the Ring movies are also coming.)
Disney
built an empire churning out woke versions of everything from Marvel
comics to its own classic cartoons, including Peter Pan and Pinnochio,
and other works by dead white men. The rest of the culture industry is
frantically trying to conglomerate and amass enough intellectual
property of its own to also cannibalize, denounce, bowdlerize and then
cash in on every year.
Woke culture is the parasitism of the
creatively untalented and politically authoritarian. It runs on
monopolies reprocessing the works of all the retroactively canceled
talented artists and writers, blending the splendid feasts of the past
into differently branded cans of woke cultural spam.
The massive
intellectual properties that serve as the profit engines for woke
companies are the works of the unwoke. And the woke haven’t figured out
how to replace them. Boycott efforts of Hogwarts Legacy, a new Harry
Potter game, failed miserably with sales currently approaching $1
billion, despite a systemic campaign of intimidation and reviews
condemning the author.
What’s the woke counter to Harry Potter?
Mr. Felker-Martin’s ‘Manhunt’: a transgender fantasy novel that kills
off Rowling. All the men in ‘Manhunt’ turn into zombies, and the
trannies hunt them down along with the feminist ‘TERFs’ who refuse to
believe that they’re women. Despite heavy promotion by the media and its
publisher, Tor, it currently ranks in 40,382th place.
Woke culture industries are busy rewriting and censoring the works of Fleming, Dahl, Tolkien, and for that matter Dr. Seuss,
who was a liberal stalwart of his day, because they can’t equal them or
even come close to doing so. There’s even a “diverse” and “inclusive” rewrite of Shakespeare. Unable to create their own work, they’re reduced to censoring classics.
Totalitarian
leftist regimes have a history of this sort of thing. Both the Soviet
Union and Communist China removed any mention of the bible from Robinson
Crusoe. Still unsatisfied with the result, Soviet censors rewrote
Crusoe more broadly to emphasize that individuals need to be part of a
collective society. Woke rewrites are not a new idea and reflect the
same issue.
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence
in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime,” Supreme Court
Justice Potter Stewart had argued. Woke culture has no confidence. Like
most censors, it is incapable of creating, only destroying because it is
wholly political. It is no coincidence that the works it is obsessed
with possessing and destroying are mostly imaginative creations,
fantasies and escapist wish-fulfillment, that it both desires and hates.
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of
fairy-stories,” Tolkien wrote. “Why should a man be scorned if, finding
himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?”
Political
censorship pursues and subverts escapism in particular because it offers
a measure of freedom in a society whose culture controllers have turned
it into one giant political prison. It’s no wonder that they are unable
to duplicate the appeal of works that were genuinely subversive or
escapist and otherwise free. Wokeness can appropriate free culture, but
never duplicate it.
The Left is subversive only when it comes to
undermining existing power structures not under its control. In any area
where it seizes power, it ceases to be subversive and becomes
authoritarian because its subversiveness was never aimed at seeking
freedom, only power. Once that power is achieved, subversive creativity
becomes authoritarian censorship.
When the Left’s grip on the
culture became total, it ceased to produce, to publish or to even think
subversively. Its idea of subversion, in fiction or in comedy, is, like
‘Manhunt’ or SNL, limited to the humiliation and destruction of enemies.
And that’s no different than North Korean propaganda. That is why
cultural wokeness produces nothing that lasts more than the moment.
Rooted in the politics of the moment and the neurosis of the elites,
overshadowed by fear and rewarding political commitment and artistic
mediocrity, it serves only when nothing better exists.
Unfortunately
the remnants of a better culture are all around us. That’s why they
have to be censored or banned as reminders of what we have lost and how
worthless our pottage is.
Wokeness, like most rigid ideologies,
poisons creativity. A decade ago, the New York Times explored Chinese
frustration over America’s ability to make movies they could not.
“A movie like ‘Kung Fu Panda’ could have been produced only in an
atmosphere of cultural and artistic freedom that China doesn’t enjoy,”
the paper suggested. America has a whole lot less cultural and artistic
freedom in 2023 than we did in 2008. And our cultural offerings, like
China’s, now reek of formulaic propaganda made by third-rate
mediocrities with the right political standing.
Censors have the
right politics, but no creativity. Their rewrites, remakes and
reinventions are tiresome. This has been the apolitical criticism of
woke reinventions like Paramount+’s Star Trek Discovery or Amazon’s
Rings of Power. Invention requires vision, but the woke vision is
directed at taking over. Once they’ve seized power, the vision ends and
the tedious conformity begins. That’s why woke culture is politically
regimented, yet creatively disordered. The censors are up to date on the
number of minorities who have to be in every scene or chapter, but no
notion of pacing or rhythm. Their creations have nowhere to go because
they have already arrived. Utopians have no concept of the past or the
future, only the crushing mandates of the present.
History, to
the woke censors, is a litany of the failures of the past while the
future will be an even more glorious xerox of the present with no
further dissent, opposition or even questions. And yet it is that very
past that holds the treasures of imagination, art and ideas that they
appropriate. The world as it was before their politics took hold and
crushed the life out of it, leaving behind cultural deserts of black
glass, still speaks with untold clarity, wonder and freedom. They try to
leave it behind, to remake it in their own image and to denounce it,
and yet it calls to them.
Censors have no creativity and
therefore no culture. Despite woke claims that they love diversity, what
they actually want is sameness in thought, in speech and in all things.
When they censor, they try to make works that were once very different
feel the same. Stories that moved millions are reduced to intellectual
property, to brands, styles and costumes, and then swapped
interchangeably in the same handful of plots that can only ever add up
to one thing.
The story must be subversive of the enemies of the
system while upholding the virtue of the system. The tastes and values
of the elites must be flattered while those of the enemies must be
exposed. Stories have been made out of such crude material since time
immemorial, but works that have genuine subversive energy do different
things. They break free of the political formulas and ridicule the
censors. And that no authoritarian cultural oligarchy will allow.
Our
woke cultural industries, like those of Orwell’s 1984, are concerned
with rendering any such dissent unpublishable or unfilmable, while
rewriting the past to conform to the present. But this only draws people
more strongly to the original creative works of the past. America is
becoming Soviet Russia and Communist China. And just as Russians and
Chinese were drawn to American movies because they tasted of freedom, so
westerners are drawn to their own past.
As America was to the
citizens of Communist nations, the past has become to us, a land of
wonders where great dreams were possible, that we may reach for, but
never touch. The more Soviet citizens reached for America, the more the
Communist leadership counteracted the appeal with stories of the horrors
of capitalist life, racist lynchings, poverty and violence. Our own
Communist leaders now tell us the same horror stories about the past.
They fear the past.
And they should.
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