Telling Tyranny To Get Bent: Why I Attack Wokeness in Art & Culture

Notes from the trenches of a necessary war.

If you’ve been following my words and ideas for the past few months, you’ll know that I’ve developed a certain volcanic hatred for wokeness, especially when it slithers into the arts and curls itself around creators who dare to express ideas that don’t conform to woke orthodoxy.

Being a writer, musician, and aspiring filmmaker myself, I can’t help but fear for the future of our culture.

It looks grim.

Bleak, even.

Wokeness, as I see it, cares less about the skill, talent, and originality of creative practitioners, and cares more about their race, gender, sexuality, and other immutable characteristics, which completely misses the point of art.

Wokeness thinks that pigment and genitalia are perfect and absolute metrics for a creator’s worth.

When I see authors, musicians, filmmakers, comedians, and other artists — even those functioning as worm food — enduring death threats from social media mobs, sustained reputational damage, and cancellation simply because they said some Bad Words that offended a few porcelain people, my knee jerk reaction is to scoff at naysayers who claim that outrage culture is something that only exists on Twitter and has no real life consequences.

Get real.

People have lost their jobs over the mere utterance of some syllables.

Wokeness is on the warpath and has claimed many victims.

Some of my critics have accused me of being a hardline right winger because, so far, my critiques have only focused on the radical left and its efforts to stifle fugitive voices.

There are a couple reasons for my preoccupation with the radical left’s scorched earth moral crusade:

First, currently, conservative ideas are not represented to the same extent in our culture as progressive ideas are.

The media, tech sector, entertainment industry, academia, and other major cultural domains generally lean heavily to the left, which means that much of the content we consume and interact with has a progressive strain coursing through its veins.

It’s a matter of course that major conservative figures simply don’t have the same amount of power to cancel ideological heretics as liberal figures. (They have in the past — I’m still pissed at all of the grief the religious right gave heavy metal and horror movies back in the ‘80s.)

However, rest assured that I will brutalize any conservative attempt to cancel a talent on political grounds, with the same devilish glee that I eviscerate the left’s attempts to do the same. Scout’s honor.

Second, my political views are all over the place (seriously, I have conservative, libertarian, liberal, progressive, and other views that are hard to categorize), so I don’t really care that, say, a celebrity has some terrible, half-formed political ideas.

We all do.

But that’s not why I go after them.

I go after them when I see them using their prodigious platform to lecture the world on who to vote for, nag us to care about the same naive issues they care about, and present insidious and poisonous initiatives as compassionate and fair.

Really, it has less to do with one’s political views and more to do with what they do with them.

And as a fierce defender of art and artists, I’d love for there to be a greater chasm between politics and culture.

Art in its purest form, I think, has no political allegiance.

Art, and pop culture even, should serve as havens from the clickbait headlines and schoolyard-level debates that dominate our national discourse.

However, because of wokeness, too many potentially great, or at least amusing, works and creators aim to remind us of the angry world screeching at us from our smartphones.

I do my best to counteract this cultural venom from as apolitical a stance as possible, primarily because I think that artists can aspire to a ground higher than merely taking up arms for this season’s Social Cause.

Unfortunately, it’s the SJW-minded who have the social megaphone, barking orders to keep creators from marching out of step from the rest of the Woke Brigade.

This is a deadly way to foster a thriving creative class, but Woke Folk think they’re doing the world a favor by defanging creatives to preserve the feelings of a fragile few.

No.

I want a milieu in which artists are free to experiment and fail and offend and transgress with fugitive words, images, and ideas.

I think we all do.

Risk and bravado are the one-night-stand parents of innovation, and, don’t lie, a part of you idolizes the cultural outlaw you wish you could be.

As I put the finishing touches on this article, I feel a little groovy from cheap rum and the euphoric tones of The Youngbloods’ “Get Together”; I’d probably be berating wokeness with the full spectrum of my profound profanity pulled from across multiple languages if I weren’t.

But it also means that I’m completely candid when I type this:

My sarcastic assaults on wokeness are fueled by a bleeding heart.

I daydream of a halcyon tomorrow where artists have the liberty and license to create without fear of persecution, regardless of their identity, background, creed, or social status.

If I see stone proof of an artist being discriminated against because of a trivial aspect of their existence, I will enthusiastically join in the fight on their behalf to secure their right to create, and bring out my heaviest intellectual artillery to do so.

But wokeness only aims to defend the rights of creators who fall within certain groups of a hierarchy that’s always in flux.

I treat this notion with the same respect a rabid wolverine shows to a ground squirrel.

Whether it’s the Black Russian that I’ve just started sucking down or my own bone marrow bullheadedness, I simply refuse to adhere to a rule book that’s constantly being rewritten to accomodate a weird puritanism that just happens to be in fashion.

Surely we’re capable of learning from our maltreatment of past geniuses who, in their respective eras, were dismissed as weirdos, rebels, crackpots, and apostates, and accept that those who currently hazard to break the future and replace it with something better are best equipped to forge a more vibrant destiny for all.

The duty is on us to give artists the room to make the kinds of mistakes that lead to accidental importance.

And if there’s anything that stands in the way of all of that Kumbaya claptrap I just laid out for you, it’s wokeness.

So fine.

Hurl your silly, vacuous accusations at me as I continue my battle on this neo-Victorian prudishness.

I don’t give a fucking fig.

My fight also includes defending your right to offend me.

Join us at Humanity Dawns, where we bring to light the darker parts of our humanity.

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