I have been watching two sorts of time travel stories over the past few days. The first is the second season of The Umbrella Academy, in which our intrepidly diverse family finds itself in the Dallas of 1963. One of the family, Allison, is a black woman, and she quickly finds herself caught up in the racial division and unrest of the times. She marries a man who is an organizer in the civil rights movement and takes part in a sit-in at a segregated restaurant. She works at a racially segregated beauty parlor. When the rest of her family find her and things get really weird, she finally tells her husband that she has come from the future, and that there really were going to be better times ahead.
The second is the rush to re-segregate as practitioners of right-think act as quickly as possible to segregate themselves from any suspicion that they were ever attracted to any idea except the official story, and to banish the tainted from any opportunity to spread their wrongthink. (It's kinda like the scene in The Umbrella Academy when the hard-working white male who is doing what he has been taught to think is right by the morality of his fifteen minutes compares the lesbianism of the woman (I'm not supposed to say that actually, as the character to whom he is speaking, Vonya, is played by someone who self-identified as a lesbian in the first season, and since she was then a lesbian playing a lesbian, everyone was happy, but not she self-identifies as a homosexual man and has a male name in the credits. And I thought what happened in the series was weird.)--anyway, Ray tells Vonya about hoof-and-mouth disease, and how any taint of it must be eradicated before it spreads to the whole herd.
One of the hefers to be killed first, if I may continue to use Ray's analogy, has been Parler. Parler is (was) a social media platform sworn not to censor its users. When it first started, I signed up, because I want to avoid living in an echo chamber. I have 'friends' on Facebook with as diverse a range of ideas as Facebook allow, but I wanted to see what was happening elsewhere. I didn't always remember to post my cat photos to Parler, but I did make an effort to copy every even vaguely political post I made on Facebook and to paste it on Parler. In many cases those posts were quite critical of President Trump, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'the fucking moron'. Such posts often got 'likes', even 'hearts', on Facebook, and sometimes reasonable discussion on Parler. When, however, I would post something approving of an action of the fucking moron, or critical of President-elect Biden, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'Mr. Potatohead', I was called a variety of rude names by my good loving liberal, come-together friends on Facebook. If I were to be taken to Room 101 and say that Parler is (was) a hate platform, I would have to say, at least until the rats were let loose, that O'Brian must have been thinking of Facebook.
The racial segregation of the 1950's is quickly being replaced by intellectual segregation. Mr. Potatohead's cabinet is touted as being very diverse, but it's a diversity of appearances, not a diversity of ideas. Of course it is not even discussed in anything like those terms by the faithful. Just as many groups consider people of other races not to be human, the Party denies that anyone who disagrees with them can even be an intellectual. At least that has been my experience. After years of being considered an intellectual, I have lately been called just about every kind of stupid because I voiced my opinion that Mr. Potatohead is not worthy candidate for the presidency, and that Harris is even worse.
There is, not surprisingly, no room for nuance. (Cue the case of Brett Weinsten.) I have made clear my opinions about the fucking moron's failures. He was not someone I would have chosen for the presidency. But now I am supposed to shut my mouth and say nothing counter to the wonders of the winter of our discontent made glorious by the rising of the son of Scranton.
At least during the days of racial segregation there were efforts, at least in mid-nowhere where I grew up, to provide separate but equal accommodations for the race that wasn't quite human enough for common discourse. So in mid-nowhere, the first ancient school building to be replaced with something modern was Booker T. Washington. In the new day of intellectual segregation, those who are not quite human are simply denied any platform possible.
What could go wrong? (In The Umbrella Academy, segregated for years from the rest of her family, Vonya destroys the world.)
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