Liberalism: How far can the line go?

I was watching a TV special on CNN the other night in route on a flight from NYC to Los Angeles…it was called “The History of Comedy”. In one of the episodes they focused on how one liberal comedian, named Lenny Bruce, had waged a war against mainstream America. He was determined to be able to use any form of previously forbidden profanity in order expose the false promises of the 1st Amendment (as he saw it). His conviction was something that we had never seen before on this issue…Bruce was kicked out of many comedy clubs and arrested a dozen times or more for his overtly “vulgar language”…He only had support from some on the far left …..his perceived attack on common decency cost him his livelihood in a very short period of time. He lost it all…and some say it cost him his life, though the official cause of death was drug overdose. Persona non grata to most, a martyr to some on the far left, Bruce inspired a whole generation of comics….most notably George Carlin who soon came out with his famous “7 words you can’t say”. Luckily for Carlin, Lenny Bruce took the bullet …but more about that later…

When I was a young kid growing up in Glendale, California in the 70’s, the standards were quite different than today. It was the post MLK “I Have a Dream” era. The people in my community knew where the line was drawn at that point in time. It just wasn’t acceptable to treat blacks any differently than ourselves. The line had been drawn once and for all. “It was as old as the Scriptures, and as clear as the American Constitution” That is what JFK said in his famous Civil rights speech that directly shoehorned the Civil Rights act of 1964. Almost all civilized Americans, except for many in the South, knew that discrimination against blacks was not only wrong…but not even supported in the Scriptures….even with our 2 century long history of institutional slavery, it was relatively easy to bring the racists to their knees rhetorically.

But, with that liberal battle won, the door opened to others who felt oppressed. Women grew tired of being pinned in a substandard strata in American culture. They were tired of subjugation and limits to what they could accomplish as individuals. Many were tired of being objectified and sexualized. This fight has not been won but the standards have changed dramatically...there is still much ground to be gained but not many people today would say, out loud, that women don't deserve the same place in society as a any man. Like with so many "lines", that line should never have been drawn in the first place, it was residue from the Caveman era but men were all too reluctant to change.

Prior to the 70’s, and even the 80’s and beyond…it was socially acceptable in much of our country to castigate the gay community….normalizing a homosexual was considered a “bridge too far”. It was considered a violation of the scriptures. The devout Christians, Catholics, and religious Jews felt they had God on their side in THIS fight…they weren’t backing down. Besides, at that time imagining two men or two women kissing was just more than the collective consciousness of America could stand. To show two men kissing (even in an “R” rated movie) would surely lose the audience…all but the remotely fringe. AIDS was seen by many as retribution by God for a sinful life….You couldn’t be racist but surely you didn’t have to accept homosexuals, right?

But, like MLK before them…the Gay community would not relent…they didn’t have as centralized a movement nor did they have an individual force like MLK to hold the naysayers to the fire…but as a group the Gay community was a brick wall. They would not back down…in part because a relatively high percentage of the entertainment and media community identified as gay. The gay community was articulate and powerful. I don’t know when exactly it happened but sometime in the last 3 decades of the 20th century the gay community claimed victory; they won the argument. It always helps to have an ever new crop of young people when you are introducing a more liberal concept…and they rode that wave. Now, Gay pride isn’t just a slogan….it is a reality. Only a small group “on the fringe” would isolate gay men and women, ”coming out” parties became as common as Bar Mitzvah’s. It was time to turn the page…another win for the liberals, another time the conservatives had to floss the dirt out of their teeth.

In the dawning days of the 21st century….the LGBT community felt it was time to wage yet another war….Gay marriage! Certainly all Republicans, and most democrats would be willing to die on that hill, right? This would be the unifier. I mean, we are not going to let gay people get married…that is an institution sanctified by God. As late as 2012 President Barack Obama, by all accounts a liberal, said that he did not support Gay marriage….that was less than 5 years ago…and that goes for Hillary Clinton and many many others as well…the paint hasn’t even dried yet on that new revelation in the Dem party. But, amazingly, in my opinion, the strength of the LBGT community made it Federal Law…it might be one of the single most miraculous legislative achievements in American history…it was like a car that went from zero to 100 m.p.h. in 2 seconds..No, it was like a horse that went from zero to 100 m.p.h. in 2 seconds. It showed, refreshingly perhaps, that you if you have enough that is “right”, you can often find the “might”. It proved that democracy doesn’t have to move glacially as Hillary Clinton reminded us during the campaign.

About 3 years ago we saw Caitlyn Jenner go on TV with Diane Sawyer in a two hour interview to discuss her becoming a woman…a Transgender. Before that the Transgender issue was “deep background”…. peripheral vision at best. She went on the cover of Vanity Fair in a bustier and she won a bunch of awards for being courageous and she became mainstream by most standards. It seemed to happen in the dead of night.

Even more recently I accidentally caught an episode of a show on HBO called “Girls”. It stars an actress named Lena Dunham. I knew very little about the show but I knew that Dunham was a very unabashed believer in free expression and she felt entitled to have all the privileges that girls more attractive and skinnier are afforded in our world…I soon found out exactly what she meant. In that one episode I saw Lena Dunham fully naked in several different scenes…most all of them, actually. In one of the scenes she was having sex…and in another very short scene she was sitting on a chair in a bathing suit catching the sun’s rays when she decided to expose her genitals. The scene was clearly designed for that one gesture; that’s all that happened in that scene…apropos of nothing. It came off (to me) as an “in your face” effort that was targeted to anyone who would criticize her for challenging the stereotypes of femininity, being overweight and not traditionally attractive. The grenade she threw was designed to take out all of those people. In a world where about 99% of all nudity and sex on film is gratuitous, this might have been the Gold Medal winner. I know that if I found it somewhat disturbing…someone who embraces virtually every liberal principle regarding civil rights, then I can’t imagine how it was playing in Ohio. I used to listen to MLK speeches on my own when I was a little kid. I actually prefer gay men to straight men and I am almost a militant feminist…but I wasn't sympathetic to this...it was not only designed to be a poke in the eye to the sexually modest, but a poke to everyone who didn’t see things the way Lena Dunham sees things. She may have thought of herself as Rosa Parks but it didn’t come off that way to me….and then…I started to understand (better) why so many have felt like “liberals” were asking too much of them…the line had been crossed for many; my line had been crossed.

Gender neutrality? That is a tough one for me to wrap my head around. Maybe I will know later but I don't know (now) if that is a goal that should be considered "progressive". Where do we go from there....do we see animals and humans as being equal?....that is a serious question that I don't have the answer to. I'll get back to you on that. It's all happening so fast.

Now, back to the comedy…. Recently I saw on T.V. a very funny and very famous comedian named Louis C.K.. He was making a joke about child rape. I looked further and found out that Louis C.K. has many comedy routines that mention rape, and at least one other that mentions child rape in a different context. One of his comedy routines talks about “don’t rape unless you have a reason”. This offends me on so many different levels that it is hard to describe…and though I recognize his right to say whatever he wants …..I recognize my right to find it disturbing, thoughtless, insensitive, and a little twisted. At that moment I felt I had one thing in common with the “right wing”, the Trump voters.

Everyone has their “lines”. We accept gay marriage and homosexuality…at least most of us do…but how many would be ok with legalizing sex with children, or sex with your brother or sister?….those are “lines” too and by today’s standards they (appear) seemingly un-crossable. When I hear liberals say that we should accept Islam because it is a religion and we have to accept all religion I go back to my liberal manual. It says that I am encouraged (if not obligated) to speak out against any individual or any group that espouses bad ideas, like hatred towards gays, subjugation and oppression of women, opposition to free speech, forced membership in a “religion”. After all, isn’t this what liberals have been fighting for for decades…and yet, I am not allowed to denounce an ideology, replete with burqas and scriptural references to violence, and death for those who would satirize their prophet, etc.? Liberals are telling people that they have to accept this ideology or they are un-American and racists….even as the most fundamental tenet of Americanism is Free Speech and civil rights to all. Islam is fundamentally against that…and often Islam IS the government in countries that are predominantly muslim.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I think it is fair to say that for many there have been too many “lines” that have been crossed….we aren’t necessarily better off because 12 year olds find it acceptable now to tell adults to “F**k off”. Being able to call a girl by the C word isn’t progress. Calling girls and women “bitches” isn’t a reflection that we are a better society…having music lyrics that are amazingly misogynistic and full of constant curse words is not something that should make us hold our heads up high….

I am not pretending or trying to draw lines for anyone else….but I know that if I am feeling uncomfortable, then something has changed….and, just because we are normalizing what I consider in some cases to be extreme behavior…that doesn’t mean that the next generations are better off for it……with some things, certainly yes, and with others…certainly not….it is in the proverbial eye of the beholder…and how we “behold” is so very dependent on our parents and our upbringing…it’s all so complicated.

For those, like me, who are not riding the “Trump train” it seems breathtaking. We just can’t understand who would support this utterly pathetic and crude person.. But, the reality is that approximately 40% of the public does, in fact, support Donald J. Trump. There are many reasons…some are financial, some are religious, and some, I suspect, are because the “lines” are moving far too fast for much of America. Many in America find it too difficult to align with liberals. Much of the world is fighting back as well….England rejected it’s more liberal leader less than a year ago as well as the European Union. Even liberal superstars like Denmark and Canada are starting to see a rise in far right sentiment. “Even in Denmark, that progressive utopia, liberal confidence in democracy has frayed. The left-wing Social Democratic Party governed Denmark for much of the 20th century, but now it keeps losing elections. We’ve lost most on this question of immigration, foreigners,” says Molly Worthen in her piece today in the Sunday Review section of the NY Times.

To me, the most unacceptable and bizarre societal norm in this country, something that virtually everyone accepts as normal, is that we can have 1 out of 6 people living in poverty, and we can have others who have 50, 60, 70, even 80 billion dollars---more money than someone could spend in 1,000 lifetimes. There is no societal burden on the extremely rich to do something for the extremely poor. It is acceptable (the way it is acceptable to walk down the street) to completely horde obscene amounts of personal wealth and to do absolutely nothing for people who are starving. It shouldn’t be a law that you have to help those less fortunate…it should be a societal norm…like saying “Excuse me” when you bump into a lady in the grocery store and knock all of her groceries on the ground, or like saying “hello” to someone when they say “hello” to you, or like coming to the immediate aid of someone who has collapsed on the sidewalk in front of you. There are no laws that enforce these societal norms…but in a civilized society that claims even a kernel of empathy and compassion demands them. I'm not sure you can call yourselves a civilized society with that status quo intact. I can't accept people who collectively have more wealth than 99.9% of this country. It's bankrupt in all the areas that really matter.

Myself, I don’t know what are the limits of liberalism…it can’t be defined. There may not be any absolutes anymore. Time changes our definition of “acceptable” but there have to be some ideas that are unacceptable, right? You will have to decide for yourself, and society will decide what will be the collective standard….and it will be redefined….and redefined again….sometimes Reconstructed, sometimes Deconstructed. It depends on you!

My opinions...