‘Social Justice’ and the End of Fun
4th June 2016
The Other McCaine laments his lost youth.
Today I was scrolling around feminist sites when I saw another angry young Tumblrina ranting about the patriarchy (because a guy was rude on the subway) and it hit me why this bothers me so much: When I was a teenager, life was fun because America was a free country.
Don’t get me wrong. There was plenty of misery and loneliness in the world during the 1970s, but people didn’t have to tiptoe around in fear they might say something “offensive” to somebody. In fact, America in the 1970s was arguably a Golden Age of free expression. The great convulsive upheaval of the 1960s — stuff that happened while I was in elementary school — had the effect of undoing many of the constraints on art, music, literature, movies and TV that had previously imposed limits on what you could say or write. So when I was a teenager, my buddies and I could listen to comedy albums by George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Cheech and Chong saying stuff that was hilarious in part because it was stuff you weren’t supposed to say. We went to the movies and saw Blazing Saddles, Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House — movies that were a deliberate poke in the eye of “good taste.” National Lampoon was full of wicked satire, “Doctor Demento” was on the radio every week, Saturday Night Live was in its glory days and, for anyone with a sense of humor, the 1970s was a great decade to be alive, because there were no rules.
I remember those days. Good times.
This is what Milo Yiannopoulos and the “Dangerous Faggot” tour is all about. Milo doesn’t even have to say anything to spark a left-wing riot on university campuses. His mere existence offends progressives so much that you could shut down any college in America for a day, merely by announcing that Milo would be there. If he missed his flight and didn’t even show up for the speech, you’d still have a bunch of angry fat girls with bad hair stomping around campus chanting stupid slogans, claiming to be “traumatized” by the thought that someone who disagreed with them had been invited to speak. So if Milo missed a connecting flight in Atlanta or Chicago, he’d still be trying to get a new ticket and meanwhile, outside the university auditorium 800 miles away, protesters would be screaming themselves hoarse in paroxysms of rage for no reason at all.