I'm too much of a coward to put this in my feed, but I need to vent my rage somewhere about the Sight and Sound movie list. It's the only critical event I ever look forward to. Nothing surprises me anymore, and yet this did. The idea that Jeanne Dielman can be acclaimed as the greatest movie of all time by the world's greatest experts: I don't know what to call it but a disgrace... Why was it chosen? Well, look up the director...
On the one hand, I find most arguments against more diverse representation to be absolutely loathesome things. I want no part in them, I want nothing to do with people who advance them, I see the people on my side of this argument, and it fills me with hatred and misery. It is a conscienceless maintenance of a status quo that keeps billions of people crushed under history's wheel until they repay what's done to them, defended by reactionaries too stupid to see that they by defending things as they are they're only signing their own death warrants.
And they have so provoked the revolutionary class that the past has now been rewritten as nothing more than a wholesale oppression by white men of the rest of the world. The rewriting of the past to suit the intersectional values of the present is a totalitarian impulse that could kill literal billions - values most people hadn't even heard of ten years ago! It has lead my country to the brink of civil cataclysm - and not a single person of influence on my side of the political spectrum has been brave or introspective enough to examine our own role in it. And now, we have to lock step with any and all politicizing of art - which is inevitably politicized to fit only one rubric.
The way out of all this is the humanities. It has always been the humanities. It will always be the humanities. Science is value neutral, but the contemplation of life is what got us out from underneath nature, from underneath god, and god willing will one day get us out from underneath social pseudo-science. There is literally no space for art anymore without the interference of the most unsubtle, blatant version of politics. Art is the best tool we have to help us understand politics, but a thousand times in history, politics proved to us its extreme unfitness to help us understand art.
This lock step is going to create such a backlash for the very people it's supposed to help. Take it from this unknown Jew who's trying to write a very long and overly ambitious novel of Jewish oppression: if the price of greater respect for Jews from the mainstream world was the Shoah, I don't think it's been worth it for us. If immediate greater approbation for minorities means that white males put mass numbers of them to death, how can that possibly be worth its price to the very people trying hardest to advance this cause? What good is it to prove yourselves right about how terrible white males are if the only people left are white males?
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