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Scarlett O’Horror

On the anti-intellectual Puritanism of people these days
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NPR aired a good short piece yesterday about the film Gone With The Wind, and how Kids These Days don’t care for it. Excerpt from the transcript:

But when I asked 13 students in a Georgetown University film class if they’d seen it, most either hadn’t seen the film or had seen only parts of it. These students are serious about movies. But a lot of them sided with Mike Minahan, 20, who said when it comes to Gone with the Wind — frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.

“Everything I’ve seen about it says it, like, glorifies the slave era … and I dunno, what’s the point of that? I don’t see that as a good time in history … like, oh, sweet, a love story of people who own slaves.”

The students had two issues with Gone with the Wind: race and rape.

Well, look, I don’t like Gone With The Wind, in part because I can’t bear much of that moonlight-and-magnolias foofarah, but mostly because I find it dull. Still, I know it is a film that many knowledgeable people admire, and my sense is that my inability to like it is a fault. I find it incredibly wearying, and even aggravating, that people like Mike Minahan assume that because works of art from the past present a point of view that is disagreeable to modern sensibilities, they can be safely ignored. What a philistine point of view.

I wonder how Mike Minahan would confront the Divine Comedy? After all, Dante has a level of Hell devoted to punishing gay people. If Mike Minahan bothered to examine the Divine Comedy, he would find that beneath the conventional 14th-century Catholic condemnation of sodomy, there is in the poem a sophisticated point about art and creativity. But I doubt Mike Minahan would be able to rise off his fainting couch to examine what the artist is saying.

One of the things I truly cannot stand about this era is the way people feel morally entitled not to have to be confronted with any idea that challenges their settled convictions. It goes beyond the way we view art. Ted Cruz felt that if the Christians of the Middle East didn’t share his views on Israel, he could safely write them off. There are plenty of liberals who look at the white working class and see right-wing rednecks, and think that they can therefore disdain them in good conscience. There are plenty of conservatives who look at inner-city black people and the chaos of their lives, and decide that their concerns and struggles aren’t worth paying attention to.

It’s something we all confront, or ought to confront. How do we care for people, or about works of art, that hold to a viewpoint we find offensive? Do we write them off as worthless, or do we struggle somehow to focus on the worth they have, and try to draw a lesson from it?

I think growing up in the South has helped me understand and embrace the nuances in this issue. I think about the oldest generation, and about the good and gentle white people I’ve known who hold wicked views on race. Their racial attitudes don’t make them devils, but their kindness and moral worth on other issues do not excuse their moral blindness on race. We can all think of examples like this, wherever we are. If we think about it, we are probably the same, in our way. I wonder sometimes what views I hold and think nothing of will be seen by my grandchildren as appalling. Do you?

Anyway, I object to people of the right and the left who would dismiss both art and human beings because they offend against moral correctness. The fact that people, and art, are wrong about something, even something important, does not render them unworthy of your attention or care. In fact, in some cases, the art, or the people, flawed as they may be, judge you; your failure to give a damn reflects poorly on your understanding.

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