Sustained Objections

Beneath the AK47 controversy is a much larger, deeper, societal issue, that of a language divide between generations.

Our generation was born with profanity – we are used to it, immunized. This has created a divide between our generation and the way we talk and hear each other and the way we are heard by others – this has created newspaper headlines of misunderstandings, which is the case here with AK, he is not and never was threatening or suggesting actual violence – he was expressing disapproval in a language where saying “we should rape her” is not an actual threat, but an equivalent to saying “she’s an idiot”.

Our generation brushes that off, and replies with a resounding “NO U!” or something similarly trite.

This is the result of the erosion of meaning in language caused by oversaturation – if you have ever taken a venture onto 4chan.org’s random imageboard, you will see a variety of racist, sexist, and violent remarks – rendered impotent by their lack of meaning. Nazi symbols? I’ve seen thousands. The n-word? Every rap song I’ve ever heard, and posted so much it’s lost its shock. Fag? Gay? Those words are so cheap now you pretty much have to use the word queer, or qualify gay with “actually” in order to communicate the intended meaning.

This communication gap is not just present in the erosion of power in profane words, but in other ways as well, particularly that we communicate to each other in movie quotes. When Napoleon Dynamite first came out there was a whole week where I could not understand what my friends were saying until I saw the movie. When they said “we use the buddy system, no more flying solo”, or “Tina, come get your dinner”, I did not understand what they were talking about. After I saw it, I did. That serves as a decent analogy to how we speak and how we are understood by others who have not lived the life of immersion in the profane, the words simply carry a different meaning as we have never experienced those words as taboo or powerful – we see them just as meaningless as words like love or beauty.

What we have done is created the freedom of utterance at the cost of meaning. Those words that artists and “revolutionaries” went to jail for are the same words that dominate the discourse of those my age, noise drowning out signal. The value of fuck has plummeted in its proliferation, writing it is not even worth the fraction of a calorie burnt by keystrokes.

But I think this is part of a longer subject – how the language of those my age and younger will change as it is forcibly integrated through employment with the language of the pre-internet generations – we can’t say “That proposal was sooooo gay” to our bosses, or tell someone to bring us coffee or we’ll rape their ear with a shovel – an awareness of meaning comes when we are placed into the private and established structures of employment. The man is there, the man is watching, and if you want to keep your job you had better learn to speak the language of “the 21^st century” a language where any statement that could be perceived as political or as having actual content or meaning is best substituted for a sentence with no moral content of any kind. It is the language of “tolerance”, or, more accurately, the language of intolerance of intolerance, zones of no hate, and zones of no truth, the language of deliberation, and it is the language of fear.

In the aftermath of the horrors of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of Totalitarianism, we have become so afraid of intolerance that we do not allow for its expression – but the problem already is that by doing so our culture has bought into the violence of a suppressive relationship – an inquisition into every statement to try and find a hint of sexism, racism, elitism – intolerance – because those who do not accept to the subscribed nonsense can simply be written off, their arguments can be invalidated, no longer must they be engaged as people, but instead can be branded as enemy, as other, safe to ignore. Categorized.

I want to say this right here, I believe in respecting human dignity. I believe that everyone does deserve an equal opportunity to succeed. That life is invaluable. I believe that ideas and people are always worthy of consideration, are always to be engaged, and are never to be totalized or cast away as others, to become victims of categorization. We should refuse to buy into that language, the language of “never again”, because when you subscribe to it, you already surrender hope and exchange it for fear.

In the same vein we should refuse to play reactionaries, we should not be constantly pointing out reverse-racism, reverse-sexism – because built into that language is a bitterness that perpetuates antagonism and traps us in primordialism.

We should not support the language of a survivor who cannot overcome the past, or the language of the victim, looking at the present for sympathy and condemnation, looking towards the future only with fear.

What we should support is the language of progress, a language that does not create victims or categories, but instead a language that allows people to be people.

Welcome to Sustained Objections.

Often blogs begin with a long-winded introduction telling you everything you would ever want to know about the author and more. Typically, it then goes on to make promises that sound like New Years Resolutions, and, like New Years Resolutions these promises are seldom kept, the author loses interest, or discovers that blogging is not the goldmine they thought it was, and so, the blogs die, and become food for the vultures advertising Viagra and any number of illicit predatory products in the comments section.

That is why I am not beginning by constructing a giant shrine to narcissism or creating a huge statement of purpose that raises the bar so high not even a pole vaulter could reach it — instead, I want to offer one sentence that says everything you will ever need to know about this blog, about me, and about our times, it is this:

Intellectualism is not dead.

Despite New Media or anything else, we continue to explore the times we live in and continue to make efforts to understand the world around us, even if our thoughts are surrounded by Google Ads, the lights are still on and we are still home.

With that all having been said, I’d like to personally welcome you to Sustained Objections and invite you to send any thoughts you have my way: DCH at @[thistextmeansnothing] sustainedobjections.com .