Donald Trump is sometimes fortunate in his opponents. The town fathers of West Hollywood have adopted — unanimously! — a resolution calling on the City of Los Angeles and the L.A. Chamber of Commerce to remove Donald Trump’s star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Their reasoning? Trump’s “disturbing treatment of women and other actions that do not meet the shared values of the City of West Hollywood.”
West Hollywood values. I am on record as a fan of Los Angeles. I like the place very much. I think West Hollywood is A-okay. But I’m not sure I would cite “West Hollywood values” in a moral crusade. Maybe that’s just me.
In any case: If that’s going to be the standard, then get out the jackhammers: Fatty Arbuckle is still on the Walk of Fame, I believe, along with a not insignificant number of men accused of sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and worse.
I told this story on Glenn Beck’s show the other day. Forgive me for repeating myself. There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, about a Chinese Communist party official who got it into his head that the street lights were all wrong, that red should mean “Go!” because red is the color of the Communist party (red indicated the Left generally until that stupid CNN election map a few years ago), and the Communist party was, he thought, the agent of capital-H History, the vanguard of human progress, etc.
A higher up in the party (Deng Xiaopeng in the version I heard), picturing a hundred million fender benders in Beijing and beyond, put a stop to that, inventing an ideological pretext: People should stop on red as a sign of respect to the Communist party.
I like that story.
Part of me wants to encourage these fanatics. Yes, let’s dig up the Hollywood Walk of Fame until nobody is left but nice people—it’ll be a hell of a lot shorter. Yes, let’s change the name of Austin to Socialjusticeville and make it the seat of Social Justice County. (Stephen F. Austin and William Travis were involved in slavery, you see, and the takfiris in Austin want to change the city’s name.) Let’s let them burn the works of Mark Twain, and let the editors of The Nation grovel like worms every time some witless clucking Caitlyn on Twitter doesn’t like a poem they publish. Let Berkeley turn the campus over to literal blackshirts. Let’s crucify Scarlett Johansson in the public square.
Call it the Shining Path model of conservatism: Hasten the crisis to bring forward the underlying contradictions in the dominant paradigm.