Stupid Moral Panics Always Return
At Least in Texas, They Do
I’ve been reading a very good book called The Accommodation by Jim Schutze which is about how the unelected oligarchy of Dallas came to an “accommodation” with the African American population there during the Civil Rights era of the 50s and 60s. Basically they offered token desegregation in exchange for no riots. One chapter, kind of a side-note to the main subject, is about how some local yahoos in 1956 appeared before the Dallas Park Board to demand to know “who was responsible for the large proportion of works by communist artists displayed in the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.”
The organization pushing this nonsense was the Dallas County Patriotic Council. According to a pamphlet they produced, “It is one of the basic premises of communist doctrine that art can and should be used in the constant process of attempting to brainwash and create public attitudes that are soft towards communism.” The museum board more-or-less folded in the face of these McCarthyite clowns. So they decided to go after one museum board member who was “a Democrat, a liberal Democrat at that, and he did not happen to be a Christian.” This possible subversive was Stanley Marcus, owner of Neimann-Marcus, whose store the reactionary nitwits threatened to picket unless they got their way. But Marcus was tight with the memebers of the oligarchy, so a few phone calls settled the issue that day.
“For a long time after Marcus had won the battle over ‘red art',’ the Dallas museum was still loath to acquire or hang any contemporary art. ‘They associated contemporary art with everything that was godless,’ Marcus said.”
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about the current news story about how a local group of busybodies succeeded in getting a graphic novel removed from Katy ISD schools and a talk by the author cancelled. The leader of this protest is a local nut named Bonnie Anderson. She is quoted in the Houston Chronicle that the book promotes “critical race theory and Marxism.” What goes around, comes around. This hateful idiot continued, “I checked all the books out and watched all of (author Jerry Craft’s) interviews and he discusses microaggressions, which is a racial term coined by the conceptual founders of critical race theory. That let me know the ideology of these books.”
The name of the book is New Kid and it is a by Jerry Craft. The book tells the story of seventh grader Jordan Banks who is enrolled in a private school where he is one of the few kids of color, and how he has to navigate this. I haven’t read it (or even heard of it until this news story appeared), so I can’t speak to it’s “Marxism”. I am pretty sure that Jordan doesn’t seize the means of production, though. I did watch a few of Jerry Craft’s anodyne videos and only found one where he used the word “microaggression”, which so offended anti-masker Bonnie Anderson. Here is that video:
Bonnie Anderson is a steaming pile of human shit. Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte wrote, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” But in this case, it’s a farce following a farce.
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