The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

 

 I have explained the terrible compulsion behind some of my posts--unless I post about whatever stupid thing is gnawing at me, I don't get to move on to other business--and here this weird thing is, still nibbling at my neocortex:

A queer music artist did a dance performance in a devil Hallowe'en costume and right-wingers decided Hollyweird was shoving Satanism down their throats. 

There's a long history of regarding Satan and music, especially popular music, as connected and it's certainly been written about before, so I don't need to hash out the secular and profane aspects of modern music. But this isn't really about that, or not quite.

In a climate that has tried to start a "satanic panic" over Drag Time Story Hour that has since boiled its way down to getting books banned and even removed from schools--it isn't Satan that's the problem. Sam Smith isn't a satanist, they are queer. And it isn't Devil's Advocacy on my part to point out what I think is the real problem folks like Matt Walsh or Ali Alexander have: The real problem is they are homophobic, transphobic grifters--the hate dollar keeps them going.

It's the funniest part of the culture war--on our side, we talk about Poe's Law, where outrage among the religious right is so daft you can't tell parody from their actual genuine product. But I always suspect it's because the genuine product itself is so adulterated with self-conscious schtick. 

On their end, they think we are feeding babies to Satan (allegedly) when most of us cultural left folks really don't believe literally in the biblical bogeyman. The saying that the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing people he didn't exist isn't quite right. The greatest trick ever pulled was telling people there was supernaturalism behind their actions, and therefore they had to listen to priests and other jumped-up demagogues instead of thinking for themselves. 

Our sin is scoffing at their "deeply held beliefs"--which is their only basis for anyone going along with them. And I also scoff at them for getting all exercised over a singer in a shiny little top-hat with  horns.

Give me a break!

MTG and Entropy

 

The funny thing with the recent Tweet I want to highlight from perpetually aggrieved Rep. MTG is that she right off the bat starts with the most obviously offensive thing that liberals actually don't defend. She writes:

"If you are defending pedophile priests and those that protect them, groomer teachers & Disney LGBTQ propaganda, Drag Queen story time, saying it's not Satan convincing women to abort their unplanned child, and that children can be mutilated to change their gender, you're wrong."

While I'm in favor of freedom of religion, I've long deplored the Catholic Church's cover-up of pedophilia in the clergy and would not ever defend it, and many people would tend to agree with that--particularly former Catholics and people who define themselves as atheist, agnostic or "none of the above" religiously. If anything, the Church's protection of perhaps 2-5% of clergy in those hopes of preserving its worldly reputation and self-defense against outside criticism has displayed the rot of an organization closed to debate. 

Where she goes from there is a peculiarly tightening circle of pronouncements of less certainty--groomer teachers? Sure, I think teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau or Pamela Joan Rogers or Debra Lefave are deeply troubling, but it seems to me that this is not exactly what Greene is referring to. She appears to be considering simply being LGBTQ-affirming with being a groomer, and with being Disney "propaganda".  

The common understandings of words like "groomer" and "propaganda" have negative connotations and she is employing those negative connotations to distort the impression of the actual things many teachers (like a teacher recently censured for putting up rainbow stickers in her classroom) might do without any malicious or nefarious intent or what Disney had done (mildly support LGBT people).

To put it bluntly, she's trying to make people agree with her wildly false interpretations of the world. And no, Marge--I know a lie when I see one. Sorry. 

She also throws in Drag Queen story time which is a thing that amuses me--wearing women's clothing isn't a problem when I (cis-gender female) do it, but suddenly becomes a problem when men do it? So weird! And yet, I imagine there's considerable overlap between the people who would consider a man wearing women's clothing wrong and who would definitely ask a woman "What were you wearing?" if she were sexually assaulted, so I guess there's that. But there's nothing really disturbing about reading by a drag performer in a well-attended public setting vs what quite normally-attired, heteronormative persons have gotten up to when quite out of sight.

Maybe her real problem is people being exposed to books in the first place. There is a GOP war against schools and libraries, after all. 

The Satan part is entirely "creation by Marge" in that she recently said women were consorting with Satan in hopes of entrapping a man with their foul ensnarements and chemical conjurings...which is some wild Malleus Maleficarum throwback which I find fairly extraordinarily on-the-nose. And last of all, her comments regarding surgery or mutilation don't display that she understands anything about the subject at all. 

But of course, people who disagree with her POV, however uninformed it might be, are the ones who are wrong. This is how a person ends up spouting weird things about Jewish space lasers--a closed system choking on its own decay. It's a fascinating thing to see so concisely within one Tweet the range from epistemic closure to entropy rapidly increasing in a thick skull.