Barbarians At The Gates

My morning routine usually includes a perambulation through various news and social media sites so that, among other things, I can find fresh fodder for this blog. Fortunately, the cultural-political sandbox is a target-rich environment, and, today, it did not disappoint.

Behold, the term “gatekeeper.”

I've used "gatekeeper" on many occasions (nineteen different blog articles since I launched this endeavor, to be picayune) to describe the role that our mainstream news organizations have assumed for themselves. Rather than inform us of the happenings of the day, they create narratives, then curate and spin the news they offer us to support those narratives.

An apt usage, or at least I thought so, and history agrees.

Turns out, "gatekeeper" has a somewhat different usage in contemporary vernacular:

• That asshole who tells you that you can't celebrate Lunar New Year unless you're of Chinese or Chinese-adjacent culture, is a gatekeeper.

• That asshole who tells you you're not allowed to cook or sell ethnic or cultural cuisine unless it's your own ethnicity or culture, is a gatekeeper.

• That asshole who tells you you're not allowed to laugh at a joke because it's not funny and/or offensive, is a gatekeeper.

• That asshole who says you cannot have an opinion on abortion/race/oppression unless you’re a woman/minority/oppressed identity group member, is a gatekeeper.

• That asshole who tells you you can't claim to be a fan of a band unless you can name half a dozen obscure tracks and have liked them since they were hauling their own amps in and out of a rusty van, is a gatekeeper.

• That asshole who calls you out for professing to be a fan of a team only after they started winning... oh, wait.

We all have some "gatekeeper" in us. Sometimes, it's calling out the inauthentic or the hypocritical, but sometimes, it's about asserting exclusivity in some form. We're wired to want to feel special, so we find many (often innocuous, but not always) ways to chase that feeling.

Music and sports are fertile ground for such behavior. One of my oldest friends once admitted that he didn't want johnny-come-lately riffraff to like music he's enjoyed his whole life, presumably because it might cheapen his own enjoyment. It shouldn't, of course, and the open-arms person would welcome everyone who found what he's known all along, but there's obviously something in our DNA that resists that inclusive attitude.

Nowhere do we see this more in those who talk about inclusivity. Quite the irony, that, especially since their domain is not the heated but benign squabbles about music or sports, but rather culture and society itself, with consequences of substance. Nowhere will you find greater peril of shunning and exile than among the woke. One 'wrong' opinion and you invite a chorus of denunciations about how "you can't think that" or "you can't say that," followed by a demand for groveling apology. They include only those who agree with them.

This would be fine if that's where it ended, if all that they did is say "you can't be in our club." But, no, that's not good enough. Your opinion must be quashed. It must be excluded from the society - no one should be allowed to hear those opinions. On top of that, you must be punished for daring to have that opinion. That's why academics who diverge from wokethodoxy are shunned or shown the door.

Their growing problem is that they're excluding all the interesting and fun people, things, and ideas from their safe spaces, ivory towers, and echo chambers. If that hallowed ground the gatekeepers are preserving from the barbarians is dull and boring and insipid, why should the barbarians care to enter? A good band is a good band, and some OG nitwit who wants to keep you from fully enjoying that band is an annoyance, but if the band being gate-kept sucks, you won't care.

As Groucho Marx put it,

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

Or, as Hyder Simpson opined in the Twilight Zone episode The Hunt, when told he couldn't bring his dog Rip with him through the gates of 'Heaven,'

Any place that's too high-falutin' for Rip is too fancy for me.

I've covered this ground before, here, and here. Heather Mac Donald's concept of "personal bureaucracies" is also apt. All these suggest the practitioners embrace the notion of a "cool kids' table" that excludes the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads... as well as Nicky, Vinnie, and Tony.

Thing is, all those deplorables, bitter clingers, and otherwise un-woke barbarians are a lot more fun to hang out with. Conflicting opinions can be shared without inviting nuke-from-orbit destruction and Twitter-horde cancellation. Disagreements can get loud and spirited, subjects can be broached, and words that have been expunged from the wokexicon can be uttered (LATINO! LATINA!! MOTHER!!!) without invoking outrage and expulsion from Eden.

The gatekeepers’ Eden doesn’t seem like a cool place to be. That from which they’re excluding us is more of a minefield than an idyllic garden.

Seems like they’re doing us a favor.

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Yes, indeed, there's a bit of salty language herein, as can also be found across the years of my blogging. This is a blog for adults, so I offer no apologies. Indeed, I have advocated the use of one of these words, because it is woke-proof perfect.

The Perfect Word

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.