Millennials aren’t taking offence. They’re hunting for victims | Spectator USA"...To refresh your memory, the American magazine the Nation printed a formal apology for running a harmless 14-line poem by a white writer about homelessness.
The poet’s sins: using the word ‘cripple’ and adopting a voice lightly evoking what I gather we’re now to call ‘AAVE’: African-American Vernacular English.
Facebookers were incensed, comments huffy.
The poet apologised, too.
I decried this ritual progressive self-abasement as cowardly and undignified.
But it’s worth taking a second look at that story as a prime example of screaming emotional fraudulence in the public sphere.
Employing today’s prescribed lexicon, those apologies regretted the ‘pain’, ‘harm’, and ‘offence’ this sad-ass little poem had caused to stricken communities.
But let’s get real.
None of those poetry readers felt any pain.
(Remember pain, actual pain? Drop a brick on your foot in sandals. Yeah. That’s ‘pain’.)
No one suffered any harm — either tangible or psychic.
Why, I wager that those irate chiders in the peanut gallery were no more genuinely offended than the magazine editors doing damage control were genuinely sorry.
What is the real emotional experience of pouncing on minor infractions of rules right-on activists seem to be making up as they go along, and which only proliferate and grow more exacting the more cravenly the rest of us obey the last ones?
(The latest: ‘stay in your lane’, or ‘white writers shalt not use AAVE’.)
Nothing short of exhilaration.
Crusaders relish locating another paper dragon to slay.
In the guise of suffering and woundedness, the overriding emotion in call-out culture is a sensation of triumph..."
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