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Indiana Launches Anti-LGBTQ "Snitch Line," Users Flood With Memes In Protest
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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Don’t you dare pledge allegiance! Don’t you dare play the anthem! Don’t you dare promote capitalism!
I still very clearly remember reading Harrison Bergeron in school and having some idiot school teacher act like "that's that socialism kids!"
How the hell is that socialism? A reference to income based taxation? If anything, following the big scary Soviet and PRC model, they'd have pumped Harrison full of roids and told him to rip a capitalist pig dog in half for his landing.
And, of course, Vonnegut agrees it isn't about socialism, no matter what American school teachers have been ordered to teach.
https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/may/05/vonnegut_lawyers_could/
It's a fnord.
I mean you wanna be technical about it socialism is a much wider spectrum of ideas than Communism. There are definitely people who define it strictly by the presence of the worker co-op or as anti-capitalist but that's one floating idea in a nebula. Market Socialism for instance is basically a blend of capitalism and socialism where things like capitalist incentives are still maintained but regulated and systems of social support are expanded to make up for the gap of the whole capitalist "not my monkey not my circus" washing of hands of social responsibility to be an active part of a community. It's basically anti-capitalist in the same way putting up a privacy fence is anti-neighbor... So a wide spanning income based taxation could be construed as sort of Socialist but its basically the air we breathe as far as a norm goes.
But Harrison Bergeron is more like the Conservative satire of what "Cultural Marxism" looks like in practice. The strawman idea that is designed to make people clutch their individuality and random blessings like something someone wants to forcefully take away from them... It's a metaphor for things like social programs and inequality conscious measures that lift up disadvantaged people to allow them access to participate in society but not a particularly good one as it pre-supposes that lifting someone up is the same thing as crushing persecution of the naturally gifted.
Your teacher was half right, the story is about Socialism but it's a hostile framing of Socialism in complete bad faith using the conventions of science fiction to paint an overblown dystopia with hyperbolic absurd metaphors that underline the anxieties anti-civil rights advocates had when it was written.
The whole thing makes more sense when you consider that hardcore disability advocacy groups that started the path to creating the ADA basically was beginning to gain traction when the book was being written.
Ah, I see I was unclear on some points.
I am not saying the author is a conservative making a bad faith arguement about Socialism. Quite the opposite. He's a leftist making the strawman cold war anti socialist rhetoric and turning it up to 11 to be absurd. But this actually has nothing to do with the intention of the author. While Vonnegut was for the most part was known for his anti-war anti McCarthist bent not all of his catelog is cohesive. Harrison is one where his intentions, at least in his writing execution, were fairly grey. He was writing the Conservative conception of Cold War depictions of Socialism and civil rights advocacy but its one of those death of the author moments where the satire struck some perceived "truth" with a conservative audience. Knowing the author it is generally leftist is what allows you to unlock the actual possible intentions of the satire but that effect is sometimes negated due to an unfortunate habit of the polarized audience.
Think of it as a Steven Colbert Report effect of satire. You expect absurdism to be recognized in a work based on external knowledge of the author and the level of over the top tricks you employ but your audience... If they exist on the other end of the spectrum doesn't recognize who you're making fun of because you instead miss the mark and create a warped mirror that makes you popular on both sides. Colbert, in character, was extremely popular in conservative spaces because he essentially masqueraded as an over the top demagogue and they took his satire as their own "sticking it to the libs". This particular story ended up being so on the nose to conservative belief at the time that they took it and literally and are using it as their own propaganda.
Yeah, definitely missed your meaning towards Vonnegut's intent.
And you would think he made it a bit obvious when Bergeron rips off his weights and declares himself Emperor, but as you say the conservatives typically don't see that as an unreasonable attitude.
It is my fault for being too ambiguous in my phrasing.
But yeah... Dude's teacher going "and THAT'S Socialism" is essentially the effect at play. When you hit all the reinforced points of Conservative emotional reactive training with just a bigger hammer they don't know to look for the cues that the author and the message are at odds. . A lot of the rhetoric of Conservativism is based more on vibe than on solid social or media literacy so if you just replicate the vibe the programming kicks in to stop thinking critically. They do recognize it as hyperbole... Most of the time. I have known some spectacular idiots
You've probably noticed but all but the absolute most obtuse satire does not work on conservative audiences.