Will Smith arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Sunday, March 27, 2022, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif.In the silly Rock, Paper, Scissors game that’s become our world, celebrity slaps beat Russian invasions any day. Climate change never had a chance; it’s just too boring. Give us violence, in any form at all, that’s more to our tastes.
Chris Rock told a tasteless joke that shouldn’t have been made, betraying the long decay of American comedy. Excepting Mark Twain, our culture has never been able to produce any real satirists, though Rock is the nearest thing we have today to Twain. Our comedians are mostly just humorists of the banal, commercially conventional kind, court jesters of corporations and commodified opinion. They’ve always worn thin.
And then there’s the issue of race. Is race involved? Who gets to say? If not a moment of white fragility, it was certainly a moment of angst for many white viewers. And why is this sort of violence, Black violence, so visceral a thing for some to see? Yet there is, I think, a discernible moral. Or rather, there is in this spectacle a trace of that immoral thing common to us all. And that is the wickedness of sincerity. The critic Lionel Trilling, was correct. Sometimes one can indeed “observe the moral life in the process of revising itself.” He was talking about the rise of sincerity and authenticity, a germ of immoral thinking which has infected us all.
But Smith, of course, is not an outlier. Again, this is us, my friends. Yet, if anything good can come of this spectacle, perhaps it’s that some may discover how shallow such sentimentality really is. It is not character. It is not virtue. It is only spectacle. And that it’s become the moral orthodoxy of our nation means that we’ve all become just as ethically incoherent and petty as Smith.
good to see yall actually cover black on black crime for a change.