Sometimes you read two pieces of writing within a fairly short period of time, and there's just something there. They might not be about the same subject, or in the same style. Maybe one is good and one...isn't. Yet still, the two are connected somehow.
In this corner, an anxious plea from the pop culture virtue complex. Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans want, need, and of course deserve a new Buffy series, but they also want it untainted by creator Joss Whedon*. The idea is as absurd as Harry Potter unsullied by JK Rowling, but guess what? Some people want that, too. The article's author makes a fairly naked plea for Whedon to make some kind of deal to formally step aside so that such a show can go forward without benefiting him? But why on Earth would he do that? If my career had been destroyed by a whisper campaign I'd take pleasure where I could, and the angst of nerds who had decided to turn on me would definitely count.
In another corner we have an essay from Lionel Shriver on what's gone wrong in the raising of young people. As she notes, the idea of building character has become passé, and to some extent has taken the entire concept of learning with it. The child comes into the world knowing what it needs to know, all it will ever know. There's an echo of Rousseau in this, but in application it's led to a great deal of despair.
Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. Where is this mysterious entity to whose nature I alone am privy?
Here's how I see the connection between these two articles. Children as a rule have no chill. Maturation is a process of learning that there are still things you don't know and things you can't control. Turning a screenwriter into an idol and then devoting your waking hours to tearing him down indicates that these lessons haven't taken, and probably aren't welcome. But they must come.
* My aforementioned watch/rewatch of old Dick Van Dyke Show episodes actually put me onto this, as tonight I saw one that Whedon's grandfather John Whedon had written.
2 comments:
The hysteria over Buffy the Vampire Slayer being acceptable to kidults if only Joss Whedon would be willing to give up any claim to the show is simply baffling to me. Whether it's J.K. Rowling being put upon to give someone else the license to the Harry Potter books (How would that work? Do Joss Whedon and J.K. Rowling have exclusive copyrights on the characters they invented? I don't know and wouldn't know where to look.*) Now that Kanye has been 'cancelled' would that mean if someone else owned his popular catalog it would be okay to listen to it again? All this reminds me of a line by the Bard, "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Okay, I looked:
*Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases. In some cases, these things may be protected as trademarks.
*Rowling does not own trademark rights to the Harry Potter brand in the United States. Though the original creator of iconic series, Warner Bros Entertainment has registrations for many aspects of the wizarding universe. (Her income is generated by books sold.)
* Buffy is owned by The Walt Disney Company.
You're right there's an echo of Rousseau in the current situation but even when he was current and most popular his philosophy lead to tragedy during the Revolution. The simillarities between then and now are what worry me. Rousseau's book The Social Contract promoted a utopian dream where society follows a political path formatted by the privileged who know what's best for everybody. The expectations of glory turned into the Reign of Terror followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon.
The word that stood out to me in her essay was 'abandonment'. So many kids have been abandoned to daycare, ipads, and smartphones - living at warp speed since preschool they really have no clue about meat world reality. All of this has been fostered by corporate capitalism and none of it is from the bottom up. When everything is geared toward the fastest way of making money - fame, likes, clicks etc. things are bound to get out of control. I agree with you the lessons must come - it likely won't be long.
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ps: We got your fine package this afternoon. Will thank you properly when we talk.
I salute you for digging up the actual laws relevant to the case. Of course whether or not Rowling or Whedon made money on these derivatives--and somehow they'd probably get at least some, although Rowling is already wealthy beyond her dreams--they're still the sources of the ideas. These wet noodle radicals have already done cancel campaigns on dead authors whose works are in the public domain, so they probably wouldn't be happy anyway. That's not even getting into the assumption that Warner Brothers and Disney are always going to be the good guys. Corporate paternalism has made inroads in some weird places.
The French Revolution and Reign of Terror do provide some concerning precedents. Progressives with no grounding, no ties that they want to keep, tend to fall into endless purity spirals. This can be amusing, but it also can lead to some seriously bad places. St. Just eventually died on the guillotine, and by that point a lot of innocent people had preceded him.
Capital has built a world where millions of young people grow up without roots. Some of them grow up to be performative anti-capitalists. This doesn't really concern anyone in power, since walking away from the market is a lot easier said than done. But while big business has a product to sell, so does the government, schools, etcetera. All of which creates a lot of noise, no room to think. Which explains a lot about the changes in our culture in the last 20 years or so.
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I'm glad you liked the package. Things seemed appropriate.
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