{"id":769,"date":"2005-04-14T04:56:47","date_gmt":"2005-04-14T04:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:06","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:06","slug":"jawboning_cultu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=769","title":{"rendered":"Jawboning Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Yglesias disagrees with Amy Sullivan<\/a> on the issues of culture.<\/p>\n

He dismisses<\/a> her position by suggesting that<\/p>\n

a) It’s just posturing for electoral effect, hence shoddy;
\nb) There’s no real harm flowing from the media;
\nc) If there were, it’d be constitutionally protected anyway.<\/p>\n

But taking this crowd at their word and assuming they actually don’t want to see censorship, what do they want? Feckless posturing a la Joe Lieberman, I suppose, where politicians will publicly denounce various shows, movies, or video games they find distasteful and then not do anything about it. That’s better than censorship, and if it’s really what the Democrats need to do to win elections I guess I’ll live with it, but it’s pretty silly. Does anybody really want to see America’s elected officials operating as freelance cultural critics? Wouldn’t that be a little silly? Aren’t they bound to do a bad job of it? More to the point, such an effort would only be meaningful if the (implicit, at least) threat of censorship lurked in the background, just as the politicians of several generations ago convinced the comic book industry to start censoring itself by making it clear that if they didn’t do it, Congress would. This isn’t an improvement over actual censorship by any metric I can think of. Which would all be worth contemplating if there were a substantive problem this was supposed to be addressing, but it seems to be nothing more than a crass stunt.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, actually it’s not.
\nFirst, there’s an intermediate set of steps between embracing Whoopi Goldberg onstage – after she riffs on her anatomy and the President’s last name – and marching into Warner Brothers with a five-gallon jug of gasoline, some rags, and a Bic lighter.<\/p>\n

Yglesias names one of them – criticize publicly – and casually dismisses it. There’s an even simpler one, which is simply not to invite entertainment figures who think that making gynecological jokes in public is a good idea.<\/p>\n

There’s another simple step, which is to say – instead of “This is the heart and soul (and bush, I guess) of America,” after a performance like Whoopi’s – “Whoopi, I’m really disappointed in what you just said, and I’d like to take this moment to apologize to my honorable opponent.”<\/p>\n

You don’t have to threaten censorship in order to publicly disapprove, and to suggest that others should as well.<\/p>\n

I have a deeper theory about the role of “legalization” – the concept that all social forces must be reduced to laws – in modern liberal thought, but it’s not fair to hang that issue on a casual post of Matthew’s. Because the only points he seemed to see in it were the use of the law, threats to use the law, or “do whatever you want.”<\/p>\n

Those are not the only possible actions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Yglesias disagrees with Amy Sullivan on the issues of culture. He dismisses her position by suggesting that a) It’s just posturing for electoral effect, hence shoddy; b) There’s no real harm flowing from the media; c) If there were, it’d be constitutionally protected anyway. But taking this crowd at their word and assuming they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}