Just Duck

So, catch me if you’ve heard this one. Actually, don’t even bother. It’s pretty much a given in these circumstances, if you’re in the same spheres as I am — or even adjacent, come to think. Everyone has heard this one.

Someone decides that the best way to make a splash is with the gin of hate and the tonic of unfounded accusations. It doesn’t really matter who it might be: it can be a politician, a writer, this guy on the street who decided to waltz into a comedy club and start spouting off on mic. The subject is kind of irrelevant too, except — the subject is a little bit downroad from them, so to speak.

So the narrative unfolds. If the speaker is a sensitive sort, they might grok why their words might be hurtful: they might just make an apology on their own. If they don’t understand, but they’re reasonable, they might reach out to ask their peers, even folks outside their monkey-sphere, why their statement hurt others. And in honest faith, while that can sometimes be read as ‘just asking questions’, particularly if impolitely phrased, I would be glad to help people understand that in an effort to add to the general fund of knowledge.

Some folks double down.

I haven’t a sufficient frame of reference to say whether this is more or less common than in prior times, and anecdata are so commonplace when it comes to ‘the past was better than the future somehow’ that anything I might offer is comparatively meaningless. But the speakers aren’t the central concern here anyway. Doubling down upon one’s horrible decisions is just a very human thing to do.

This specific method of doubling down, however, starts to get a bit grating. A particular line has once more arisen from the churning abyss of bad faith, like an especially noxious bubble in Labyrinth’s Bog of Eternal Stench. It has a few different variants, but they all go something like this:

“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it.”

Being as we are suspended in a world in which time is somewhat more malleable than it used to be (and space, it feels, somewhat less), I’ll try and keep the preliminaries to the last year — in part hoping that I might maintain some brevity.

(Yes, I know. Too late.)

In October of 2021, Dave Chappelle, comedian of some note, released a special named The Closer upon a small streaming service of which some of you might be tangentially aware. The closer is, definitionally, the final joke of a set, a kind of ‘last word’, which makes the title much akin to the ever-inaccurate Final Fantasy… but that’s beyond the point.

In the set, he told one or two transmisic jokes at length (and, believe you me, there are only two jokes, like the worst possible variant on The Aristocrats) which were… shall we say… ill-received, not merely externally but internally. Terra Field, hitherto of the company, explained in a Twitter thread that she was fundamentally concerned with the damage it would do to the transgender community.

In the thread, Field notes for the benefit of the readers a great many trans folks who are no longer with us, and therefore cannot possibly be offended by Chappelle’s transmisic spiels. Or so one assumes, anyway: one can safely guess that these folks, if currently outraged, are having a very difficult time expressing it to those of us on this Earthly plane.

Field has since left the streaming service in favour of more viable outputs, but before she did, there were no end of people, all in all, saying,

“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to be involved.”

2022 has been a particularly banner year for many in the Grand Old Party, a turn of phrase so direly evocative of men in fancy suits sipping drinks in unison that the smell of bourbon, horse musk and lemon permeates this entire paragraph.

At this time of writing, the volume of anti-LGBTQ+ bills in various state legislatures, not to mention the federal Senate and House in the United States, has exceeded past years by a significant factor. As NBC put it, in 2018 there were 41 such bills — and by March of this year, no fewer than 238 had been written and proposed.

Nor was March the high point of the hatred for anyone who dared to present themselves as other than entirely cisgender and heterosexual … or who has dared to claim bodily autonomy. A recent Supreme Court document has promised to overthrow Roe v. Wade, a case which defined the concept of citizens’ privacy in many ways and has been used as a precedent for many a case concerning exactly that, each of which is now likely to be overthrown.

Justice Alito has since alluded to the future repeal of cases such as Lawrence v. Texas, which specifically stated that men have the right to have sex with one another without being thrown in jail for it. So, abortion, sex, and general autonomy.

But every time a case like this pops up, and the states criminalize being human beings, the same refrain appears.

“If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

Except… that’s just it, isn’t it? Over and over, those same words are repeated, as though everyone in society has the same choices, as though everyone can simply… choose to be somewhere else. To be someone else.

What a laugh. Mobility isn’t a common trait, and it’s never been. A New Yorker article from 2014 speaks of this in terms of social mobility, but it’s more than that. Any illusion thereof has always been just that, and reserved for the higher echelons of society. One can’t just choose to leave. One can’t just choose to quit.

Certainly, one can’t stop being trans, or gay or lesbian or bi, just based on a decision someone else made.

And one can’t just choose to stop watching, not when everyone else is doing so, and their preconceived notions are getting fed through a funnel, filling them with hatred, spite and lies.

In the event that someone comes at me with a bat or a gun because Gervais and Chappelle have told them that people like me are abusing little girls, my decision to stop watching that hatred doesn’t make a wick of difference. All that those people are saying is eleven words, over and over.

“When someone tries to punch you in the face, just duck.”

Oh, and one last codicil.

Ambushing an audience with a spiteful little bigot at the opening of your set doesn’t play well with the ‘just leave’ argument when they’ve spent $100+ on getting tickets to your show.

Just saying.