Monkeyfist.com: Sense and Offense

Prince Harry: ...and another thing that bothers me, Your Grace: suppose my right hand offends me, and I cut it off, well, what if my left hand offends me as well? I mean, what do I cut it off with?

Prince Edmund, the Black Adder: Er, yes, yes, that is a knotty one...
The Black Adder: 1, episode 3

What follows is entirely my own words and thoughts, meant mainly for my own amusement, without anyone (worth caring about) in particular in mind, and what bits seem unkind with regard to your native intelligence, moral worth, or good sense are at worst failed attempts at self-deprecatory, if gentle, irony. If you think otherwise, please go directly to hell and burn in the excruciating fires thereof for all eternity.

That is disclaimer enough, I hope, to warn off the timid, intrigue the thick skinned, and, as usual, have no effect whatsoever on the determinedly clueless.

Three bits of information that may make what follows (and what preceded) intelligible to the casual reader:

I've been reading, and having read to me, quite a lot of Jane Austen. Even so uncouth a barbarian as myself could not help but be affected.
I saw, while driving, a man who is striving to be a "Triangle" (i.e., Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, North Carolina) phenomenon. He stands on street corners displaying crudely lettered signs with slogans designed to "irritate" the "PC crowd". The latest I saw were: "Hunt the lemurs" and "Pave the wetlands"; on his Jolly Rogers flag (which was new to me) were "Hunt the whales" and "Cut down the rainforests"---do you, too, detect a theme? This "sign kook" (SK) has been going at it for two or three years now, and has even gotten some press (as "local color", I suppose). His idea, it seems, is to show that there are Republicans in Chapel Hill. Or something. In any case, after not having seen him for a while, this encounter jostled something in my head.
I am feeling, in turns and simultaneously, grumpy and cheerful.

Item two is what prompted this writing: I have been something at a loss just how to respond to the SK, not just in my behavior, but in my own mind.

My behavior is actually the easier to handle: For lack of anything else sensible, I ignore him. To engage, especially publically, is to lose---that is the nature of the game he's set up. If I express offense, I have no humor; if I express humor, I have no opposition. The wise course of action, then, is to ignore, though not pointedly.

(For the less experiencedly snotty, to ignore pointedly is to give a kind of (negative) attention, and any attention at all suffices to engage. For those sensitive to irony, feel my pain in writing this essay! For the determinedly clueless, if you're still with us, please go back to sleep.)

But I just don't know how to react to him. Part of me responds spontaneously with a bit of pique which then resonates a moment before transforming into a mild sort of bemused disgust (attended, of course, by the touch of unsettled confusion I mention above). There is something odd about this fellow, and something sad. It's not just the content of the signs...or the expression---lord knows that I've seen equally lame at plenty of left-leaning demonstrations. Of course, more often than not, the latter bear some grace in virtue of their sincerity. In contrast, satire tends to derive its grace from either cleverness or audaciousness.

And that's the point: the SK's signs are neither clever, nor audacious---but he thinks that they are (audacious, at least; and perhaps clever for their audaciousness). But they manifestly aren't. And his standing out there day after day (why?) attaches both the lack of satiric virtue and the lack of reflective understanding to his very person in an unmistakable way. I realized that I am embarrassed for him and discomforted by having to witness that embarrassment.

It is at this point that my conundrums ensue. He certainly intends to discomfort the likes of me---liberal, looney, leftist, academic PCer that he would take me to be (though, I confess to nose-ringlessness). Surely, however, he wants me to be discomforted by my own beliefs, or by an oversensitive sensibility. I am suppose to be outranged, offended, and, perhaps, provoke into doing something unwise.

Indeed, as I recall, he claims to succeed in this with some people, who give him the cordial finger. Of course, it's more "hip" to be friendly, whether you're a righty or a lefty. The righties show their solidarity and bravery by "standing with him" against the overwhelming totalitarian forces of PCdom! (Where do they get this?) The lefties show their tolerance, "good humor", and fundamental laid-backitude (a key component of being non-PC).

Naturally, I don't entirely dismiss the content of these signs: They are not unlike views expressed by James Watt when he was Secretary of the Interior! But clearly, the evil of their being held and expressed is mostly proportional to their likeliness of someone acting according to them. There is a subtler danger, which is roughly connected with desensitization and with the simultaneous narrowing and expanding of the permissible range of debate.

I don't think it would be unreasonable to take offense at his actions. I think they are mildly offensive, in fact. Perhaps they are highly offensive but I've just trained myself not to take (or, at least, not express) offense (so as not to fall into the trap of reacting, and then being dismissed as PC). Perhaps my pity at their pitousness diverts my outrage. But all this confusion just highlights the narrowing of the debate (finding them highly offensive is to be shunned or ridiculed) and the expanding (things which are properly shunned or ridiculed can be expressed with good humor).

So I find this to be one more moment in the ongoing struggle to determine the bounds of sense and offense. And to the victor, goes, not the spoils, but the right to determine the spoiled.