Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 88 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT The Privilege of Irony
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.05.2014
It got her off to feel sorry for Will and his little broken heart, and he's using it. One bloody valentine at a time, which gets him what he wants -- both to hurt her and to win the case -- but only takes out little chunks of her: He has redefined the field of play, he has united his heartbreak and his litigation style into a single unbeatable strategy, that scorches the earth and hits her in places she didn't even know were vulnerable. It served her ego, but now she needs to serve the client. And whether or not Will ever gets over her, playing into it is just giving in to him, and she can't afford that anymore. Time to change.
MURPHY TESTIMONY
There is no more vexing nor perfect symbol of the age, in our current cultural consciousness, than Ryan Murphy. He's old, rich and white; incredibly talented, very gay. And we have this thing on the left I recently heard described perfectly as "Calvinism without God" that leads people lacking in a certain kind of privilege into a grasping blindness of their own other privileges, into entitlement to speak for everyone, because it's all sinners and saints. He's gay, so he's a good guy, so it doesn't matter what outlandish -- sometimes horrible -- things he says on behalf of women, or people of color, because hey: He's one of the good ones.
But the thing is that we are all good ones. It's not about being a good person, it's about being aware that your life is unlike other people's lives. Black people may have it harder on average than white people, but that's not the problem here: The problem is that you will never have the right to speak for another person, regardless of how hard you have it. You're still speaking from a position of privilege, or else nobody would be listening. And what we're missing in this discourse is that essential fact: That being gay doesn't mean you get women, or black folks, or poor people, any better than anybody else, and certainly doesn't mean you get to speak on their behalf. The thing that white feminists call "intersectionality" when what they mean is, their right to tell black people what is up. The exact thing Peter needed Geneva Pine to explain to him for like half an hour.
If you have no malice in your heart, you are doing pretty good. But it's still the easiest trap in the world to fall into, because we are coming out of the time when the line was between good and evil, and into a time when the only line is in versus out. His stand-in here even says, beautifully, that he did the white-people cover alongside a rap version of a white-people song to show "how two cultures [need] each other" and "kids moving beyond the hate" -- two very good things to want and to talk about! But also two things dictated by the million other ways in which he's on top, and point directly toward the "I don't even see race" place that actual evil people use, like the phantom fantasy of "reverse racism," to justify their bullshit. (Or the "level" playing field that pretends a goofy white-guy cover of an already goofy rap song is the same thing as having some black kids rap a Weezer song, or the idiotic "level" playing field that gives rise to Men's Rights activists purely on the basis of our more destructive and naïve stabs at feminism.)
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