This was my stance more than a decade ago when Show Boat was staged in Toronto and some members of the black community objected on the grounds that it was racist. Many of my friends thought otherwise. For all I know, they may have been right, because it’s difficult to describe Show Boat as a racist musical. Nevertheless, I felt that if some blacks thought that it was, their feelings were more important to me than my own artistic judgment. I think tolerance is also about that.
Show Boat is a “racist musical” only in the sense that the blacks get the best roles and the best songs – “Ol’ Man River”, “Bill”, “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man Of Mine”. Its authors were classic New York liberals – Oscar Hammerstein went on to write “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” (to hate persons of another color) in the score for South Pacific, a song which so offended theater owners in the south they insisted it be cut from the film version. The Hal Prince revival referenced above subsequently opened on Broadway, and I remember Paul Simon, a latterday New York liberal, telling me how much he loved the show.
If you throw over Show Boat, one of the great works of the American theatre, because somebody’s “feelings” (however manufactured) are more important, what else are you prepared to lose? In such a world, there will be nothing left. To discard a work like Show Boat is to deny history, which is to deny reality, and that’s rarely a smart move. In the name of “tolerance”, you’ll wind up in a society that tolerates nothing – nothing genuinely enquiring or provocative, or even mildly controversial. Even liberal rabbis should know better.
Watching a grown man congratulating himself for placing “their feelings” over objective truth, Kathy Shaidle put it more bluntly:
It is sad to see someone like Dow Marmur still stuck in that illusory mindset, all these years later, trying, in public, to talk himself into believing something he knows full well is absolute rubbish.
In a letter unconnected to the rabbi’s thoughts, a British reader Peter Monro nevertheless reminded me of something that seems relevant, Orwell’s far-sighted concept of 1984 – “Crimestop”:
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc,[4] and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
There’s a lot of that about.
THE STEYN-HUGGER
Saying the unsayable
IN THE VILLAGE VOICE the other week, the playwright David Mamet recently outed himself as a liberal apostate and revealed that he’s begun reading conservative types like Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. If he’s wondering what he’s in for a year or two down the line, here’s how Newsweek’s Jonathan Tepperman began his review this week of another literary leftie who wandered off the reservation:
Toward the end of The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s new book on the roots and impact of 9/11, the British novelist describes a fellow writer as ‘an oddity: his thoughts and themes are… serious – but he writes like a maniac. A talented maniac, but a maniac.’ Amis is describing Mark Steyn, a controversial anti-Islam polemicist, but he could just as well be describing another angry, Muslim-bashing firebrand: himself. Talented, yes. Serious, yes. But also, judging from the new book, a maniac.
Poor chap. What did Martin Amis ever do to deserve being compared to me? As Mr Tepperman concludes, the new Amis is “painful for the legion of Amis fans who still love him for novels like The Rachel Papers and his masterpiece, London Fields.” But the masterpieces were in the fast fading good old days before he transformed himself into a fellow who, as a recent profile in Britain’s Independent put it, “chooses to promote the writings of a Canadian former disc-jockey called Mark Steyn”. I’m not sure which half of that biographical précis is intended to be more condescending. At least the “disc-jockey” bit is “former”, whereas the Canadianness is, alas, immutable: You can take the disc-jockey out of Canada but you can’t take the Canada out of the disc-jockey. In fact, it was The Independent which “chose” to promote the writings of the ghastly colonial platter-spinner. Having obtained an exclusive interview – the first with Mr Amis since he found himself declared beyond the literary pale – the Indy’s man “chose” to spend most of his brief time with the eminent novelist bemoaning the non-eminent disc-jockey. It’s a very curious interviewing technique: “But enough about what I think of Steyn. What do you think of Steyn?”
The profile concluded that Amis had descended into a kind of schizophrenia, torn between “the left-wing… nuclear-disarming multiracialist” and the “Steyn-hugger”. An even more renowned literary personage sent me a note after The Independent’s piece appeared saying that, if you’d held a competition a decade ago to invent the phrase least likely ever to be appended to Martin Amis, “Steyn-hugger” would be pretty hard to beat. It’s faintly surreal to find oneself cited as the principal reason for someone else’s fall from media grace, and it’s not terribly fair to dear old Amis. His approval of me is very limited: Steyn, he says, “is a great sayer of the unsayable”.
In Canada, depending on how Maclean’s forthcoming “human rights” show trial shakes out, it’s legally unsayable. But Britain has not (yet) reached the benighted condition of a land policed by “human rights” commissions, and so for the moment Martin Amis refers only to what’s merely socially “unsayable”. He seems to have concluded that across the last 30 or 40 years the citizens of enlightened western democracies have allowed their public discourse to wither to the point where they almost literally lack a language in which to examine the critical challenges to our society.
Amis wrote the central essay in The Second Plane – “The Age Of Horrorism” – a couple of years back. It dwells on the “extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture” and remarks that “the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak among the rank and file of the Muslim male.” Which is all but unarguable. But, ever since, he’s found himself writing pieces to which editors append headlines like “Amis: Why I Am Not A Racist” and “No, Look, Honestly, I’m Not A Racist”.
He has a point. Islam is everything but a race. It’s a religion – which is to say (if you’re an atheist like Amis and his friend Christopher Hitchens) an ideology. It’s also a political platform and an imperialist project, as those terms are traditionally understood. It has believers of every colour on every continent. So, if Islam is a race, then everything’s a race – from the Elks Lodge to the Hannah Montana Fan Club to the British Airways frequent flyer program. Moreover to denounce as “racist” any attempt to discuss Islam is to accept that being Muslim, like being black, is a given, fixed, unchangeable. That’s what many of its adherents believe: According to one poll, 36 per cent of young Muslims think that anyone attempting to leave Islam should be killed. That’s not young Muslims in Yemen or Waziristan, by the way, but 36 per cent of young Muslims in the United Kingdom. However, there’s no good reason for British non-Muslims to endorse the view that one can only be Muslim unto death. “Racist”, of course, no longer has anything very much to do with skin colour. It merely means you have raised a topic that discombobulates the scrupulously non-judgmental progressive sensibility. I wonder if one reason we seem so bizarrely fixated on “climate change” and the flora and fauna is because it’s one of the few subjects we can talk about without having any dissenting view greeted by cries of “Racist!” For the moment.
4
“Ingsoc”, you’ll recall, is a contraction deriving from “English Socialism”. Poor old Orwell got so much right but even he couldn’t foresee that the very word “English” would be deemed beyond the pale in a scrupulously sensitive post-national Britain. Still, it’s not hard to imagine a smiley-face government regulatory agency of “Canadian values” called “Canval”.
Whoops, don’t want to give anybody any ideas.