File Whitney McNarry!
In the spirit of Whitney McNally's horribly misguided "spoof," Gothamist imagines that Fairchild Publications is passing around a memo like this:
If you hear someone yelling, "File Whitney McNarry!" that's really "Fire Whitney McNally!" - the Asians sometimes have trouble with the r's and l's. And stop by HR to pick up your coolie hat; they are being distributed so you can enter the building without getting pelted with pelted with thousand year eggs or egg rolls. And we recommend you watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Kill Bill if you haven't. They know kara-TAY, kung pao chicken, and some other violence-without-weapons techniques. Remember, Asian women can be fierce - the lotus blossom thing is a trick.
- jen chung, protesting details," gothamist april 15, 2004
posted April 15, 2004 in printAs if art caused the ugliness
Earlier this month my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, reported that a college student had been expelled from art school here for submitting a story "rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust" to his creative writing class ... Homicide inspectors were called in; a criminal profiler went to work on the student. The officers found no evidence of wrongdoing. The unnamed student had made no threat; his behavior was not considered suspicious. In the end, no criminal charges were brought.
In this regard, the San Francisco case differs from other incidents in California, and around the country, in which students, unlucky enough to have as literary precursor the Columbine mass-murderer Dylan Klebold, have found themselves expelled, even prosecuted and convicted on criminal charges, because of the violence depicted in their stories and poems. The threat posed by these prosecutions to civil liberties, to the First Amendment rights of our young people, is grave enough. But as a writer, a parent and a former teenager, I see the workings of something more iniquitous: not merely the denial of teenagers' rights in the name of their own protection, but the denial of their humanity in the name of preserving their innocence ...
We don't want teenagers to write violent poems, horrifying stories, explicit lyrics and rhymes; they're ugly, in precisely the way that we are ugly, and out of protectiveness and hypocrisy, even out of pity and love and tenderness, we try to force young people to be innocent of everything but the effects of that ugliness. And so we censor the art they consume and produce, and prosecute and suspend and expel them, and when, once in a great while, a teenager reaches for an easy gun and shoots somebody or himself, we tell ourselves that if we had only censored his journals and curtailed his music and video games, that awful burst of final ugliness could surely have been prevented. As if art caused the ugliness, when of course all it can ever do is reflect and, perhaps, attempt to explain it.
Let teenagers languish, therefore, in their sense of isolation, without outlet or nourishment, bereft of the only thing that makes it all bearable: knowing that somebody else has felt the way that you feel, has faced it, run from it, rued it, lamented it and transformed it into art; has been there, and returned, and lived, for the only good reason we have: to tell the tale. How confident we shall be, once we have done this, of never encountering the ugliness again! How happy our children will be, and how brave, and how safe!
- MICHAEL CHABON, "Solitude and the Fortresses of Youth," new york times April 13, 2004
posted April 15, 2004 in art