Guess what kids!? It’s blog time again. Enough has boiled up and converged in my brain & life, that I gotta’“write it out”! This one has mostly been spurred a friend’s post on Facebook regarding Meryl Streep’s comments at the Golden Globes. Strangely, (to me anyway) two women felt that Streep should have “been grateful for the award” then sat down and shut up. This gave me pause, thinking, “whoa, what? wait!”
I felt compelled to spur discussion with factual information and tried encouraging these women to think about WHY they were saying what they were saying, but they weren’t disposed to discussion. I blocked one after she accused Meryl Streep of living in a Hollywood bubble, not caring about anyone then tell me she didn’t want to read the links I supplied her about the actor’s charitable activities. The other one blocked me when I asked her pointed questions about what exactly was wrong with Streep’s comments and what it was about those comments that upset her after I had expressed my personal passion for the freedom of speech and true desire to understand.
Streep’s remarks were artful, eloquent and simple. She used her position and platform to reflect on the very diversity of the award nominees, and expressed her concerns about the degradation of common decency in our country and her fears about the influence the powerful can have, and finished by charging the press to hold our elected officials to account. The heart of her remarks:
“But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It, it sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. It was -- there was nothing good about it. But it was effective, and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It -- it kind of broke my heart when I saw it. And I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life.
And this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
I see a backlash against her remarks, mostly in the vein of “she shouldn’t use her platform to speak about issues.” A woman is being told to sit down and shut up reflects concepts of control discussed by Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology (www.feministes-radicales.org/... pp. 81-88). She posits that the patriarchy gets women to identify with the male point of view and women become the instruments of control over other women, thus obscuring the actual lines of authority and control. My concern over this trend stems from this concept. Meryl Streep speaking out is seen as a woman being out of control, and by telling her that she should “gratefully accept her award” and leave the stage is an attempt to silence her after the fact, and discredit her going forward. As another commenter on the thread asked (paraphrased), “how are liberals supposed to speak out since we are shouted down as wrong no matter what we do?”
My other, more general, concern regards silencing anyone, at any level. The demand for silence from someone such as Meryl Streep with her position and platform, must be taken as passive support those against whom she is speaking. This is especially true when she is speaking passionately about something that troubles her deeply & affects our country as a whole, namely the darker instincts of the human animal and how modeling them at the highest levels of a society equates with tacit approval. Hence, if we silence Streep, the risk of everyone being silenced becomes more real. And those who silence others or remain silent are as complicit as those in Nazi Germany silently watching their Jewish neighbors being taken away.
I believe many Americans avoid admitting the dark side of our “exceptionalism” which includes slavery, continuing racism, Japanese internment camps, genocide of our native peoples, sexism, expansionism, interference with foreign governments, black interrogations sites, Guantanamo Bay, the 1953 Iranian Coup, etc. Having Meryl Streep hold up an honest mirror that reflects what we don’t want to see/know/accept is uncomfortable at best, and makes a lot of us look purposefully away, preferring ignorant bliss to deeper self-exploration.
I guess the moral of the story is we cannot be silenced or let others silence us, or we will be complicit.