Politically Incorrect Reading Material

In the early '90s, I was at the gynecologist's office and the Indian woman doctor was trying to make small talk, asking what book I was reading at the moment. "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," I replied. She didn't say another word to me for the rest of the exam. 

In September of 1994, during my first poetry class in grad school at San Francisco State, our professor asked us what we'd been reading over the summer. Responses along the lines of "Gabriel Garcia Marquez" were met with nods of approval. My own response of "Norman Mailer" was met with a sneer and dismissal. (Later, when the gay prof found out that I was also gay, he warmed up to me.)

A couple of weeks ago, when I had my monthly meeting with my (female/gay/Asian) boss, we were genially discussing movies and screenplay-writing (we'd both written one). But when we talked about our current interests, she mentioned the web series "Awkward Black Girl" and I mentioned that I'd been on a Roman Polanski movie binge, including "Venus in Fur" (2013) and his '84 bio and a book of interviews and the 2013 autobiography of Samantha Geimer, his 1977 rape victim. Conversation came to a screeching halt.

Now, to me, all of the books that I mentioned would be topics of interesting conversation. For instance, the "Third Reich" book was written in 1960 by an anti-Nazi American journalist, William Shirer. But all the female Indian doctor heard was "Third Reich." All the gay San Francisco professor, at that time already steeped in nascent race/gender theory instead of actual literary criticism, heard was the name of a writer deemed by his academic fellows to be "toxically masculine." All my current boss heard was the name of a director accused of rape. None of them had anything intelligent to say, and so they closed me down in prim disapproval---sans any knowledge of the Third Reich, or of Mailer's work, or of Polanski's work.

I find the above intellectual dishonesty just as threatening as anything that Putin is currently doing. And since 2016, the Thought Police in the US via mainstream media and social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook have been out in full force, banning Trump (and banning legitimate stories about Hunter Biden and his Ukraine Burisma connections and the foreign money flowing to his father Joe Biden) but yet allowing China and al-Qaeda operatives to freely post on their sites. And college campuses, not allowing any free speech unless it's "radical speech." And cities, allowing their statues to be torn down based on extreme leftists' desires and not on a civic discussion or votes.

It's a fucking intellectually dishonest AND simultaneously criminally chaotic mess right now in this country. And when the inevitable backlash comes, I'll be right there cheering the fundamentalists on. (Never thought I'd say that, but there it is. I feel like the US is in a Weimar era right now---ENOUGH of scumbags trying to cancel everything that came before just because they themselves are not up to the standard; ENOUGH of the Communist and Anarchist "no borders.")