AP File Photo:
Rappers Kanye West (L), JAY-Z (R)
When Kanye West again declared himself a
Trump supporter on Twitter, going so far as to publish a photo of
his POTUS-autographed MAGA hat, literally millions of Americans immediately got
the vapors.
Either that or the Twitter gestapo got their revenge -- unless the
sudden disappearance of huge numbers of the rapper's followers is merely an
"inconsistency"?
Many declared West had “gone off the
deep end,” gone crazy, although the man was demonstrably more brilliant and
more creative than 99.9% of his decriers.
That these same people are the most
slavish and pathetic conformists is the least of this. What these attacks on
Kanye demonstrate in bold face is what has lurked beneath the surface for a
long time -- liberals and progressives are the reactionaries of our time.
It is also a further demonstration
of a near complete lack of intellectual curiosity or emotional imagination, an
inability to grasp the "remote" possibility that a highly intelligent
black man could possibly think differently from them. Something must be wrong with him. Could anything
possibly be wrong with them? Nah!
But why reactionaries?
When I was a young fellow traveler
with the New Left (circa 1965), it was the worst accusation you could make.
A reactionary was someone who was living in the past, taking us
backwards, what the Trotskyites called the Stalinists -- and vice-versa.
Back then, a group of people, Tom
Hayden and others, anxious to breathe new life into a Marxist ideology
seriously tarnished by Stalin's supposedly-accidental"excesses,"
promulgated, in the Port Huron Statement, a socialism "with a human
face."
It was propaganda, of course, aimed
at themselves as much as others, but this Generation of 1968 product was
remarkably successful, beyond their wildest dreams, I would guess.
Over the decades and into today, they were able to infiltrate just about every
aspect of our culture, creating an atmosphere where -- in nearly every aspect
of our society -- nothing was good as is or even relatively satisfactory.
Therefore, the fight must always go on. Perpetually.
And at the heart of this fight -- as
if to differentiate from the Stalinists -- was the idea of race. We were
naturally imperialists and racists. We were born that way. That
accusation would be primary, even though the Civil Rights Act was signed into
law in 1964 and such discrimination made illegal.
That meant things like the civil
rights movement would always have to go on as they were because, in Marxist
parlance, "the struggle continues." (La lucha continua,
etc.) And on and on until this day.
People like Maxine Waters and Al
Sharpton now are no different from what they were then -- only richer. But they're still fighting, still tilting against racist
and sexist windmills, even if they're not there. And if they are
not there, then they will manufacture them, so they are able to fight them.
And so, over the years, developing
and evolving from them are now several generations of "mini-me's,"
spouting the same rhetoric, sometimes exactly, sometimes finding new variations
of the same tunes, as Social Justice Warriors, etc. It's now the very
air we breathe.
So along into all this comes a dude
like Kanye. He finds this vision
stultifying and, dare I say it, boring. He thinks he's more than race.
Imagine that. He must be crazy, although race may be -- of all
things -- biologically meaningless.
Way back in 2000, this appeared in
the N.Y. Times:
Scientists have long suspected that
the racial categories recognized by society are not reflected on the genetic
level. But the more closely that researchers examine the human genome -- the
complement of genetic material encased in the heart of almost every cell of the
body -- the more most of them are convinced that the standard labels used to
distinguish people by ''race'' have little or no biological meaning.
Somehow I think this would have
pleased MLK. As I remember the civil rights movement from my own
participation, we were all fighting for integration.
Well, not all, but
most of us.
We were, like Kanye today, fighting for a world where
race is irrelevant. Liberals and progressives of today seem to be doing
the reverse. Not only are they reactionaries taking us backwards, they're
segregationists.
This is especially true on our college
campuses, which have turned into nightmares of racial separatism. No wonder so many young people are in turmoil from
Kanye's tweets. They can't stand his rationality -- and basic decency.
In fact, they've barely been exposed to such a thing.
What West's saying in his fashion
makes simple common sense -- we are all individuals and should be judged
accordingly. We should also have the freedom to act as individuals,
not as slaves to some ideology or world view or, worst of all, somebody's
idea of political correctness -- or finally as a black man, a yellow man, or
any kind of color man.
If Kanye West were to be in a mental
hospital for his thoughts, the sane man would be inside the asylum and the
crazy people without. I think I've heard that somewhere before.
Roger L. Simon - novelist,
screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media - was recently interviewed on his work
by CSPAN'S BookTV. You can find that interview here
