captainclickycat:
sirfrogsworth:
I’ve been a little confused by the revisionist history of people saying Dave Chappelle was never funny. Maybe not everyone dug him, but he has been on quite a few GOAT lists for stand up. During his peak in the 2000s it was not uncommon for folks to consider him the best performing stand up since Carlin and Pryor. I was among those people. Perhaps the people saying he was never funny were too young to appreciate him during that time. I don’t know.
But I don’t think we need to pretend like he always sucked. His fall from grace is an important thing to acknowledge. With people like him and JK Rowling, we are collectively trying to figure out how to deal with artists we love letting us down. It’s a good conversation to have. If we just say “well, they always sucked” I think we are avoiding dealing with it.
I’m glad JKR was mentioned comparatively too because she’s always the first person I think of in these discussions about revisionism.
And yeah it feels like a side effect of purity culture tbh. People feel this need to try and easily pigeonhole media as either Good or Bad and if it’s Bad it was always bad and people should be ashamed for ever liking it, but if it’s Good it’s exempt from criticism. Which is just… not how anything works. There’s something almost victim-blamey about it, although that’s probably the wrong phrase. This idea that you can somehow sniff out Badness through someone’s work even when it hasn’t really made itself apparent yet, and anyone who doesn’t just isn’t trying hard enough, and “if I’m just careful and vigilant and only consume the purest of pure media I can avoid falling into the trap of getting attached to something Bad!! I knew all along!!” feels like it’s coming from the same line of thinking as “you should have known there was something shady about that guy!”
The point about thinking only bad people can be radicalised being dangerous is an extremely important one.
There was a time when JKR was viewed as the unproblematic queen of the left. It may not have been in the text but she made Dumbledore gay when it was barely legal to mention anything queer to children (I’m being very literal there. The first five books were published and the sixth written when Section 28 was still law and no publisher would have been legally able to mention a gay character in a children’s book).
At that time the very idea that she could ever be viewed as homophobic, or ever even remotely consider siding with a Conservative government on any issue was bizarre. The face she showed the public was inclusive and very anti Tory.
But she also went from as poor as you can be without being homeless to astronomically rich in a short period of time, had the eyes of the world on her and was really quite viciously stalked and harassed by the less ethical corners of the press. Her phone was tapped, her children stalked, friends she hadn’t spoken to in years and distant family members had people turn up on their doorsteps trying to dig up any possible story about her.
As a result she wound up extremely paranoid. I live in Edinburgh. A workman who came to fix something at my house told me he’d worked on a garden wall for her and there had been a rule of no phones allowed anywhere near her property and there was a line around the house that they weren’t allowed to cross or even approach. I’ve heard similar stories from people who have friends living near her.
People who live in that kind of state of paranoia (whether justified or not) are very easily radicalised by anyone who plays on their fears and offers any kind of safety, whether real or imagined. Yes, it could be that the bigot who has recently sided with the Tories on several occasions was always there underneath. But it also equally possible that in the past there was only ignorance on some things and that the bigotry and political swing is new and entirely the result of paranoia enabled radicalisation.
The desire to retroactively demonise everything she’s ever done and assume she was bigoted from birth is understandable, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of how people can and do change for a whole variety of reasons and that sometimes even the best people can become something you’d never have imagined possible.
It’s actively important to remember that good people can go down some horribly twisted paths, because if you reassure yourself that ‘good people’ will always remain good then you lose the ability to self reflect and examine your own ideas, or examine the difference between an actively malicious viewpoint and a confused and ignorant one.
