This week Hollywood director Brett Ratner (“Rush Hour,” “Tower Heist”) was forced to resign from a major gig — producer of the Oscars — because while promoting his new movie he answered a question about whether he did rehearsals by saying, “Rehearsal’s for fags.”
This was perhaps the most high-profile punishment ever administered for use of this word, suggesting “fag” has now joined the N-word and the C-word as one of the three Words You Cannot Say.
Yet Ratner was using the slur in a juvenile, frat-house sense rather than expressing revulsion for homosexuality or homosexuals. By contrast, Tracy Morgan said in an alarming and apparently considered standup routine that if he had a gay son, “I’ll pull out a knife and stab that little [n-word] to death” — yet remains employed by “30 Rock.”
OK, “fag” is a slur that offends many. But if we’re going to start calling people out for tasteless use of stupid, derogatory F-words, how about we blow the whistle on everybody calling everybody a fascist?
Civilized people recognize that there’s nothing wrong or even embarrassing about being gay. If someone accused me of enjoying the love of other men, I’d just laugh. (And I do, at the not-infrequent hate mail along these lines.) The derogatory intent just doesn’t have much sting. “I denounce thee, man-fancier”? Ridiculous.
Put me in the company of Oscar Wilde and Stephen Sondheim? Go right ahead. Associate me with Hitler and Goering, though, and I take umbrage.
Hollywood continues to freely denounce as “fascists” those who (for instance) think government spending should return to approximately the level of three years ago. Example: Woody Allen has the Woody Allen character in “Midnight in Paris” castigate “Republican Tea Party crypto-fascist airhead zombies.”
After Morgan’s hate-filled anti-gay rant, Alec Baldwin tweeted, “Oh that Tracy.” A day later, though, he stepped up and took a stand with this Tweet: “No one is making excuses for Tracy.”
That’s it? Baldwin called columnist Michelle Malkin “a world class, crypto fascist hater” during discussion of the execution of Troy Davis. Are all Americans who support the death penalty fascists? No Supreme Court justice dissented from a ruling denying a last-minute reprieve for Davis. Are all nine justices fascists?
Liberals call conservatives fascists. Conservatives call liberals fascists. Even ultra-lib Richard Dreyfuss called fellow super-lefty Oliver Stone a fascist, on “The View” no less.
Sixty-five years after Orwell wrote, “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable,’” this hateful word continues to be thrown around in the most unlikely circumstances. It’s historically illiterate to equate the proposed solutions to the debt crisis with the Final Solution.
Yet it’s far from a meaningless term. It’s a word that tends to be hurled in anger, with the purpose of arousing same. It raises the stakes, and the blood pressure. Let’s reserve it for when it’s really happening.