FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Fuck all this shit. Beasties.
•   I know it's been days since this Lionel Shriver's boo-hoo but I happened to see an interesting comment about it on Facebook and it encouraged me to look harder. Shriver, you may recall, was given rough treatment at some stupid Aussie literary conference, allegedly because she championed writing characters of different ethnicities than oneself. Shriver has the right to create such characters, of course, and people who think she shouldn't have it are indeed idiots; originally I was left wondering why she cared what people who were clearly beneath her contempt thought about that or anything else. But then someone published excerpts of what Shriver actually said. Turns out she thought she was already oppressed -- that is, that she suffered the kind of oppression that doesn't actually prohibit you from writing or publishing or doing anything, really, but makes you feel righteously politically incorrect -- a feeling one gets from reading lookit-the-silly-college-stoonts stories in the Daily Mail. Jim C. Hines:

...Shriver presents the example of a party at Bowdoin College, wherein hosts were punished for passing out sombreros at a tequila-themed party. You can read more about that incident and form your own opinions. It’s interesting to note that this wasn’t an isolated incident at the school. “Last fall the school’s sailing team hosted a ‘gangster’ party where attendees were encouraged to wear stereotypical black clothing and accessories,” and “In the fall of 2014, Bowdoin’s lacrosse team held what was billed as a ‘Cracksgiving’ party that featured students wearing Native American garb..."

In other words, it sounds like the kids at Bowdoin were behaving, not like brave free-speech warriors, but like assholes, and the school regulated -- a questionable decision, maybe, but not the coming of the Fourth Reich. Oh, Shriver wasn't done with her catalogue of censorship yet: "At the American Music Awards 2013," she told the crowd, "Katy Perry got it in the neck for dressing like a geisha." And now she's in a concentration camp. Kidding! She remains one of America's richest and best-loved recording artists. But she, too, has known the oppression of not having everyone love her all the time.

Just before the Hines section I quoted, he said something that should go on a sampler or on the entablature of a building:

Look, if you’re going to claim you’re not allowed to write a certain type of fiction, you need to back that up.

And the Facebook comment I mentioned began thus:

Why do I always have to dig down five links to find an article that will actually tell me what the original offense was amidst some long list of grievances for these stories?

For the same reason that Rod Dreher's tales of homosexual tyranny always comprise thousands of waste-words and sputters, underneath which is usually buried a tiny noppression, e.g. someone saying curse words at a bigot: Because if people knew what such people were actually so worked up about, they'd never stop laughing.