Curmie was mostly done with this essay prior to learning of yet another school shooting, this one with a death toll of at least 21, about six and a half hours west of Chez Curmie. That situation is, of course, most on all our minds at the moment. Going ahead with this post, Curmie admits, is in part an avoidance mechanism, because he just doesn’t want to deal with the fact that the politicians, especially but not exclusively on the right, have prioritized campaign contributions from the NRA above the lives of schoolchildren (and teachers). I just don’t want to wrap my head around that right now.
#1. Lufthansa’s Unconscionable Anti-Semitism. So, apparently a few orthodox Jews refused to wear face masks for a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Budapest earlier this month. Many US Jews started their journey in New York and were changing planes in Frankfurt to continue on to a Budapest flight. Many if not all of these people were on a pilgrimage to the small town of Bodrogkeresztúr as part of an annual commemoration on the anniversary of the death of Grand Rabbi Yesha Steiner, who died in 1925.
We can disagree, Gentle Reader, about whether mask-wearing
is a medical necessity, an essentially useless exercise in virtue-signaling, or
somewhere in-between, but the fact is that both nations and corporations are
free to set their own rules. Don’t wear
a mask; don’t get on the plane. Simple as that.
So Lufthansa staff enforced the rules, and did not allow those
passengers to board. So far, so good,
right?
Well, they took the policy a little further than that. Citing the article linked above:
Lufthansa staff allegedly blocked all passengers who were visibly identifiable as Jewish from boarding their connecting flight, German daily Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung reported. Local German media reported that the staff excluded those passengers who were recognisable as being Jewish because they were wearing skull caps or had sidelocks.
This would be a German corporation, in Germany, deciding
that all Jews, not just those refusing to obey the rules, present a
problem to public order and must be quarantined, lest they… well, whatever
nefarious thing they might do. Not the
best of looks, there, Lufthansa.
Naturally, whether out of honest conviction or risk
minimalization, the highers-up at the airline and the local pols scrambled to
apologize. Lufthansa proclaimed “zero
tolerance for racism, antisemitism and discrimination of any type,” and the
anti-semitism commissioner for the state of Hesse asserted that “this is
discriminatory and not a trivial matter, and all the more reason why the
company’s top management should also feel personally responsible for
apologising for this incident and taking a clear and unequivocal stand.”
Sure. Unsurprisingly,
the Anti-Defamation League is unconvinced of the sincerity of the corporation: “This
non-apology fails to admit fault or identify the banned passengers as Jews. It
also refers to them as a group, even though many were strangers. They had one
commonality—being visibly Jewish.”
Curmie knows little to nothing about German law—whether
there were criminal offenses committed or whether Lufthansa can be sued in a
civil case. But he does know this much:
Lufthansa had better do a full-scale investigation culminating in firing the
offending employees—at the very least the supervisor who was recorded saying “everyone
has to pay” for the handful of Jews who violated the mask order, “it’s Jews
coming from JFK…. Jewish people who were the mess, who made the problems ...
just for this flight.” If not, they
will not only lose all credibility as an ethical corporation, but they will
also be lucky to escape with only eight figures of lawsuit payouts.
#2. Netflix and
the Warning Shot. There’s no one to
cheer for in this one. Netflix, which
recently underwent the first quarter of declining subscriptions in a decade, is still flexing its corporate muscles, sending what one headline
calls a “warning shot at its woke employees” who objected (for example) to the
network’s continued affiliation with Dave Chappelle, whose comedy special those
employees regarded as transphobic.
Here are selections from the “Artistic Expression” section
of the new corporate culture memo:
Not everyone will like — or agree with — everything on our service…. While every title is different, we approach them based on the same set of principles: we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices….
As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.
Things get a little vexed on the free speech arena
here. Some topics are inherently not
funny; others bother only those who need more bran in their diets. Curmie has never found Chappelle even
moderately entertaining, so, not having seen the Offending Object, is
ill-positioned to comment on the extent (or existence) of its
offensiveness. But, of course, although
the brouhaha seems centered on a single offering—Netflix’s original fare is
largely progressive in tone. Those on
the right who cry “Woke” may do their cause little good, but they’re not
fundamentally wrong.
Netflix is, above all, a business concern. They want to make money for their investors and
employees alike. They’re going to buy
the programs they think will attract viewers and not the ones they think won’t
do so. That’s the way it works. If enough people want to see a Dave Chappelle
special, it’s going on Netflix. Same
goes for projects like “Don’t Look Up,” another show Curmie hasn’t seen, but
which his more conservative friends decry as leftist propaganda. Perhaps it is; Curmie won’t care unless he’s
forced to watch it, and for all the attempts from left and right alike, we
aren’t there, yet.
It is tempting, of course, to grant at least some sway to
the Netflix employees who are legitimately offended by the network’s
offerings. They—at least some of them—do
not want to be associated with programming they cannot support. (Others, let’s be real, live to be
offended.) But we’re not talking about a
closed system here. As Netflix’s recent
hemorrhaging of subscribers, largely due to competition from Hulu, Disney+,
etc., suggests there are other employers out there. Capitalism as practiced in the US falls well
short of a perfect system, but it’s the one we’ve got, and failing to recognize
that reality just isn’t a good place from which to start an argument.
#3. Not content with
being censorious asshats (the usual hat-tip to Ken White for the felicitous
phrase) in public schools, a gaggle of right-wing pseudo-Christians with a
desperate need for increased fiber intake have shifted their focus to Barnes
& Noble. According to a couple of
second-division pols looking to boost their images with the yahoo set, the
Virginia Beach Circuit Court found “probable cause that the books Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury are
obscene to unrestricted viewing by minors.”
Curmie asks you to note, Gentle Reader, that whereas we all
make typographical mistakes from time to time, the quotation above is a
grammatical and syntactical nightmare. It
was written and posted on Facebook by a lawyer, Tim Anderson, who apparently passed law school without making a stop at 6th
grade English on the way. (He mentions “parent
consent” later in the same post.) More
to the point, it hasn’t been corrected in the ensuing week, suggesting that he
believes what he has written makes any damned sense. The one thing that is clear is the not-so-veiled
threat to file (or encourage others to file) nuisance suits like this all over
the state: “Suits like this can be filed all over
Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools.” Oh, jolly.
Barnes and Noble is hardly Curmie’s
favorite store, but they responded with the only logical statement: that they carry “thousands of books whose subject matter some may find
offensive…. We ask that our customers respect our responsibility to offer this
breadth of reading materials, and respect also that, while they chose not to
purchase many of these themselves, they may be of interest to others.”
An important point is made in an
article on the Book Riot site: and not merely that “Neither book fits the
definition of obscene and neither book is pornography.” Rather, they note that “As a private
business, they are not only allowed to sell what they wish to sell, but they
are under no obligation by anyone to move materials out of their facilities.
Further, no private business like the bookseller would simply ‘supply’ books to
the school district.”
The books in question, by the way, are (of
course) recommended by the American Library Association as being of particular
interest to… you guessed it: teens. And, of course, there
But, easy as it is to make fun of the
Bible-thumping hordes who seek to ban books they haven’t even skimmed, it’s also true that there are such things as legitimate concerns… they just
don’t seem to be applicable here. What
is available to the general public—books, movies, whatever—ought only to be off
limits if there is real consensus, not if just the wackadoodle puritans don’t like it. Requiring a text for classes is a different
standard, but simply having teens (or anyone) have access to material is
essential to a society that is actually free.
What we’re seeing isn’t a dystopian novel—not 1984 nor Fahrenheit 451—but it does seem like the first chapter of a prequel to those books, and that is quite scary enough.
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