Get ready, this is a LONG ONE. With lots of dramatic CAPS LOCK. About POLITICS. And RELIGION. Because I’ve HAD IT.
(last chance. Please feel free to escape to a better website now).
So, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart under any circumstances whatsoever. I’ve explained some of my reasons for not shopping there, so I won’t elucidate them here. But here’s the thing – I don’t call what I’m doing a "boycott." I don’t church it up; I just don’t shop at Wal-Mart, and that’s the end of the story.
So it annoys me greatly to see that a Facebook group has sprung up encouraging people to "boycott" one of Oklahoma City’s best locally-owned places, Flip’s Wine Bar and Trattoria, for basically no reason whatsoever.
The story goes back to the unscrupulous firing of a gay teacher, Joe Quigley, from the Oklahoma City Public School system, and the failure of Gail Vines, an owner of Flip’s and a member of the Oklahoma City School Board, to vote to reinstate him once the Board was ordered to do so by a judge who found Mr. Quigley to have been wrongfully terminated.
Sorry if that was hard to follow; basically some of the gays are all up in arms because Gail didn’t vote the way they’d have liked. And normally I’m all about people putting their money where their mouths are and not patronizing businesses whose owners, staff, or policies violate some strongly-held belief or item of conscience. But seriously, you guys, Gail Vines is one of the least homophobic people on the planet. Her vote not to reinstate Mr. Quigley had categorically zero to do with him being gay; I can absolutely promise anyone that. I don’t know what the reasons were, but I don’t get the sense the boycotters do either.
To accuse Gail Vines of being a homophobe is sort of like accusing Orly Taitz of being sane, or the Jonas Brothers of being talented. Gail Vines goes to my church, Mayflower, which is literally the most liberal church in the entire state. Anyone with even remotely homophobic tendencies wouldn’t be comfortable there. To call this boycott a part of the great fight for GLBT equality is, to put it bluntly, bullshit.
Let’s boil it down: some group of people, in this case The Gays, saw a perceived slight and got all up in arms without having – or, let’s cut the crap, NEEDING - all of the facts.
It’s so typical of America today. One group or person does something that isn’t right in line with the beliefs or agenda of another group, and immediately, there go the alarm bells. Here comes the yelling. Here comes the faux outrage, wherein we get all mad and frothed up about something and then go back to our wonderful lives that are, at best, minimally impacted by the thing we’re all so pissed off about.
The worst part is, I think that when we do things like this we’re just playing to the Great Palace Lie that we ARE these labels that society, or, more to the point, The Advertising Industry, slaps on us. The Gays are a Group That Can Be Marketed To, and so – oh, you’re gay? Here’s a Britney Spears CD, some body glitter, a charge card from Hollister and a whole raft of political opinions you have to cling to without question. Please read from the script.
Oh, you’re a Christian? HOW INCREDIBLY GREAT FOR YOU. Here’s a chain of stores that sells unneeded crap made by underpaid workers in the Third World, and marketed just for you, an entire music industry to call your very own, for GOD’S SAKE YOUR VERY OWN CANDY TO EXPRESS YOUR FAITH, as IF candy could ever really do that, and an whole raft of political opinions you have to cling to without question. Please, just read from the script.
You guys, no one cares about helping you express anything about your truest identity. They’re taking your "identity" all the way to the bank. Britney Spears could give a crap about gay rights. For that matter, so could Bill O’Reilly. There’s money in what they’re doing, or else they wouldn’t be doing it.
We like to tout diversity in America. You know why? Because diversity allows us to divide ourselves up and to make doing so look really holy and just. We divide ourselves into easily-targeted groups for advertisers and politicians, and then we take offense when the people in the other marketing niches disagree with us or do things differently than we do.
Oh, and the people who think they flipped the system, who DON’T FIT INTO SOCIETY’S BOX, thankyouverymuch, with their ironic mustaches and thrift store t-shirts, oh, we’re the worst of all. I can tell you this from a zillion Flaming Lips concerts and outdoor music festivals where all the people loudly decrying the evils of corporate America sport identical uniforms of non-conformist clothing available at retail outlets near you, and they all have iPhones and went to suburban high schools and got to spend a year after college bumming around Europe on daddy’s dime.
Then the politicans, on both sides of the aisle, they line us up and yell at us that the people in the other marketing niches are DESTROYING AMERICA and are unrepentantly evil and must be, themselves, destroyed. It’s like America’s just one big cliquey high school, and we’re all sitting at different cafeteria tables, all looking exactly the same and thinking we are one and each as unique as snowflakes, and just SHOUTING at each other. HERE AND THEY’VE GOT ME DOING IT. BEHOLD MY CAPS LOCK KEY IN THE NAME OF UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE.
All of this is to say, this Flip’s boycott is yet another example of identity politics spinning wildly out of control. We are told that our stupid marketing niche – gay, or Christian, or Latino, or country, or urban, or whatever – defines who we are, and any perceived threat or insult to that identity must be met with swift and unyeilding resistance. We’ve turned into a nation of Sue Sylvesters; we shout as loud as we can until we get what we want, we play the aggrieved minority when it serves our purposes but could give half a flip about other aggrieved minorities when they get in our way. We claim our Constitutional rights are being trodden and compare ourselves to Martin Luther King, Jr., all in the name of getting to trod on someone else’s Constitutional rights. WE ALL DO IT.
To quote Tina Fey, "All God’s children are terrible."
So, what’s the point here? For me, the point is that I want us all to categorically refuse to play this game. I want us each to throw out the script, quit playing to type and stop being so ticked off about things we’re not willing to invest the time to understand outside the echo-chamber of pre-marketed media we know is just going to tell us what we want to hear. I’m losing my faith in America because I’m beginning to realize that we’re a country where the people who get what they want are the ones who yell the loudest. I’d like this to stop, but I’m under no idealistic assumption that it will. But I do refuse to play; it’s like Charlie Brown and the football – if you agree to play, you’ve already lost. I’m not going to argue about politics on the internet – who was it that said that’s like jerking off to your own photograph?
Things won’t ever get better as long as we’re organizing bullshit "boycotts" of people we don’t know for reasons we don’t really understand. But as I already said, I’m pretty much losing faith in the political system to make things better anyway. So here’s what I’m going to do instead: I’m going to go with my church to go feed the homeless every other Saturday from now until Jesus comes back, or until we as a nation decide that it’s entirely unacceptable that some people don’t have a place to live or enough food to live on. Because I used to think that, no matter our philosophies on governance, liberal or conservative or otherwise, there were some things we could all agree on, for instance, that it’s entirely unacceptable that some people don’t have a place to live or enough food to live on. I see now that isn’t true, and it breaks my heart.
There’s NOTHING we can all agree upon, nothing so sacred as to hold us in one accord, if someone, somewhere, can make money off of getting us to fight about it.
I’m going to give money to organizations I believe in. I’m not going to let anyone yell at me or call me names. I’m going to try my hardest not to yell or call anyone else names, either. I’m not going to join some random, ineffectual "boycott" for reasons I don’t understand against a woman who doesn’t deserve it because some overly-sensitive and under-informed members of my marketing group perceived some slight against us. And I’m going to try my hardest – and I’m going to fail, but that’s Okay too – to get up every morning, and go to bed every night, saying the only prayer there really is: "Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You."
