Around

A ton of work to do, so I'll make this quick, I just had to mention it.

I was reading through this journal that I won't name, and there was a section where english majors would submit poems, essays, rants, whatever they wanted to have published, it's a pretty cool journal and I usually like reading it.

Today I came across an "essay" written by someone on the topic of free speech. I read it, while I didn't agree with some of their statements, I agreed with the main point of the piece "free speech is pretty cool, so like, don't tell me what I can say". There was however one paragraph where the author described in detail a performance they had watched that featured someone shouting racial and sexual slurs from the top of a jungle gym in a crowded playground in a park in Buffalo. The performer of this piece (he kept calling it a happening but that's not what a fucking happening is, so I'm not going to call it that) said that it was supposed to express the notion that some of the most harmful language is taught on the playground, the playground really being a metaphor for our infancy.

And you know what? I agree, I think that's a valid point he's making there, and if this were a cartoon or a concept I'd be perfectly fine with it. But in the end, he got up in a playground, and made people upset. These aren't people coming to appreciate a work of art, this isn't an audience, this is a playground full of children, and he wasn't teaching them anything. He wasn't serving some great artistic or philisophical purpose, he was trying to be edgy, he was trying to get a rise out of people, but when his audience of children is standing below him and actually asking him to stop (a point the author brings up as evidence of the work's success) there's a problem with your methods, you fucking tumor.

And of course the author loved it, he loved the shit out of it.

This wouldn't be so bad, I hear about this kind of stuff all the time. Being an arts major means hearing about all kinds of people trying to invent some new form of theatre by trying to offend people to the point of a physical reaction. It's just not that hard to offend people, and quite frankly I don't think you're doing it right if the degree to which they are offended doesn't at least rival the importance of the message.

This wouldn't be so bad ... except for the fact that on the very next page, the exact same writer has written a fucking diatribe of an essay about how personally offended he is by people smoking around him. He wrote a page and a half about how people who impose their smoking habit on the rest of the world are poisoning the air, get this, "and poisoning the minds of the youth in our society by exposing them to images of this murderous habit".

Are you fucking kidding me?

Really?

Jesus Christ.