This year marks the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, sparked in part by the Roman Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences. The more you paid, the less time you and your loves ones spent in purgatory. As the rhyme of the time had it, “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings/the soul from purgatory springs.”
I couldn’t help thinking of all this when reading of the sordid events at The University of California, Berkeley when a planned speech by the ultra right-wing narcissist and professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was cancelled after around 150 masked thugs used fireworks, baseball bats and various forms of violence to attack those attending the event.
Milo — he and his acolytes rather ludicrously use the single name — is senior editor for the far right website Breitbart News. He is a bit of a legend in his own lunchtime, and most people have never heard of him, but for the hard right and the hard left he is an icon of either truth or lies. Actually he is neither. A fringe journalist with a troubled past, he reinvented himself as a self-defining fierce, fearless spokesman for those waging war against the chimera of political correctness.
His means of fighting this war against an imaginary foe is to insult and mock anybody who annoys him. Liberals, feminists, the overweight, trans people, Muslims, gays — even though he is himself gay and insists on using the term “faggot.” It all becomes somewhat tedious but it arouses those who obviously would like to do the same but lack the ability or the platform. He is a conduit for those who confuse freedom of speech with the license to abuse. The sewers breathe once again.
At Berkeley, most of those protesting were peaceful and responsible but, as is so common, the extremes were triumphant. I use the plural because two sets of fanatics had their way: those who disrupted the speech and those who planned it. You see, this is a dark symbiosis, a grotesque theatre of the absurd where the polarized of right and left destroy the vast middle ground of sensible disagreement and debate.
And nothing, of course, makes the “coin in the coffer ring” as much as playing the victim and crying that free speech and liberty are under threat. There is money to be made in becoming a champion of white, straight, conservative people who have convinced themselves that they are being persecuted.
The violence at Berkeley, and at other such events for that matter, is completely unacceptable. But there is violence in language as well as action. If one degrades a race, marginalizes a sexuality, condemns a people, there tend to be consequences. Surely the recent obscene events in Quebec City taught us that. One fist can do damage; one broadcast, article or Internet rant can lead to a lot more.
Idiots provoke and idiots are provoked. Milo, and for that matter his banal imitators in Canada, have to establish a false problem if they are to set themselves up as the solution. Build it and they will come.
So if you claim that Islamic extremists are everywhere, that we can no longer speak our minds, that media conspiracies are preventing us from knowing the truth, and that being a white man is considered a crime, enough credulous and insecure people will accept it and act accordingly. Witness the election of Donald Trump.
In actual fact there are genuine dilemmas about speech, tolerance, the meeting place of secular pluralism and religion ideas, and the way we deal with justice and equality issues, and these are intensely sensitive and delicate.
It’s because of that sensitivity and delicacy that we have to respond with empathy, compassion, intelligence and — important this — responsibility. Screaming is easy, listening far more difficult; outrage satisfies hysteria and anger, consideration fulfils the intellect and the soul.
The hoodlums in California will be punished and Milo will fade away before most of us even knew he was there. The same, God willing, will happen to those Canadian rightists who assume they’re being rebellious when they’re just childish conformists. But some of the divisions caused will take longer to heal and that’s difficult to forgive.
Personally, I’d just treat these clownish performers with the derision and contempt they deserve. As for the coins in the coffers, integrity is far more valuable than money.
Michael Coren is a Toronto author. mcoren@sympatico.ca
Michael Coren is a Toronto author. mcoren@sympatico.ca
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