Jussie Smollett and the Hazards of Moral Sentimentality

A well-known story says that when President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he remarked, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

Stowe’s 1852 novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—with its melodrama of Eliza’s flight across the ice, of Simon Legree’s cruelty, of Uncle Tom’s martyrdom—had so roused American feelings on the subject of slavery that nothing less than a great civil war could have done justice to either the crime or the novel.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a supreme work of moral sentimentality—of feelings stirred to noble and lethal purposes. The story tore sentimental 19th-century America apart. It ended not with Uncle Tom’s crucifixion but with Appomattox.

Sentimentality may enlist in the cause of justice. Beware: It serves just as often in the ranks of evil. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels deployed sentimental storylines of the Volk, of Aryan purity and blood and soil. Righteousness sometimes waxes sentimental, but so do monsters. Anyone who ever organized a lynch mob in Alabama knew how to sentimentalize white womanhood. Newsletter Sign-up

Today’s media storytelling has perfected a genre of intensely sentimental and spontaneously generated folk tales, especially stories dealing with race and sexuality. Social media and cable news pour forth vividly moralized tales that are sometimes true and sometimes not. The stories dramatize wrongs in order to amuse and polarize what has become the Republic of Maury Povich. They boost TV ratings, ignite apoplexy in our iPhones, and organize Americans along angry ideological lines.

Sentimentality, the regime of feelings, tempts people to exaggerate facts in ways that awaken grievances and encourage hatreds. Social media and cable news move faster than the speed of thought. They flash about in the collective mind, propelled by sentimentality and by sentimentality’s evil twin—rage.

“Today’s media storytelling has perfected a genre of intensely sentimental and spontaneously generated folk tales, especially stories dealing with race and sexuality. Social media and cable news pour forth vividly moralized tales that are sometimes true and sometimes not”

Yes.

EXCERPT---The very words “racist” and “homophobic” have been sanctified......and now possess a political
power, true or not, to be lobbed at perceived enemy lines like artillery shells. In his small mind, victim Smollett
is heroic. The oppressor is the one to blame......the victim is sitting pretty.......awaiting The Big Payoff.

Smollett's victimized personna fought like blazes to get a TV interview. ABC's GMA obliged him. Smollett
was a picture-perfect, fighting-mad victim as he spoke to an unblinking Robin Roberts on ABC's GMA.

Smollett reinvented himself as an especially fierce kind of victim...a cool hero. “I fought the f**k back,” he told fellow-believer Roberts.
And, miracle of miracles, while Smollett was fighting off hate-filled attackers, he never once lost control of his tuna sub sandwich.

==============================

An ego-driven actor, Smollett craved attention. He invented a world full of "microaggressions and institutional racism"
that fed his malignant narcissism. In Smollett's bizarro world of entertainment, CGI creates impossible activist heroes.
Fighting off an invisible bigotry, creating a hate crime was his way to emulate these faked-up heroes, maybe get a bigger paycheck as The Victim.

The self-important Smollett was weaned at the breast of radical black activism. His mother (Maxine Waters says she's
her friend) associated with the Black Panthers and Black radical Angela Davis. Smollett has identified proudly
with the radical black activist tradition. What better way to promote himself?

Good article except the author apparently thinks Matthew Shepard was a victim of homophobic bigots.

Turns out hewas murdered by fellow gay prostitute and former lover Aaron McKinney because McKinney had heard that Shepard had access to a huge shipment of crystal meth (they were both meth pushers and users) and McKinney and his side-kick wanted both the drugs and the money.

This does not diminish the horror and cruelty of the way young Matthew Shepard was murdered. However, at this point even the left-wing Guardian (UK) has run a story explaining that drug and rentboy connections shared by both the victim and the perps, led to the grotesquely sadistic assault that killed him. It was a gay-on-gay, druggie-on-druggie crime.

Talking about Moral Sentimentality narratives?

Really, people need to check their facts.

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