I really need to start ignoring Orson Scott Card

[avram]

Wow, turns out Orson Scott Card is not one, but two kinds of bigot. I already knew about his anti-gay bigotry — I’d long ago read his Sunstone essay “The Hypocrites of Homosexuality” in which he advocates retaining laws against homosexual behavior and enforcing them selectively so as to intimidate gays back into the closet.

Now anti-Semitism! In “Community Theater and the ‘F’ Word”, an article for The Greensboro Rhino Times, he bitches about how Neil Simon refused to allow the word “fuck” to be edited out of a local production of Rumors.

This is an issue I don’t actually care much about. If Simon doesn’t want the edits, hey, fine, it shouldn’t be edited. If he was willing to go along with the edits, also fine. That’s not an issue for me. And if the local Utah theater had decided to brave the possibility of a lawsuit and put on an edited version of the play anyway, I don’t know that I’d be all that upset with them.

But Card uses this issue to launch into a rant about New York (“trying to bring New York theatre to English-speaking audiences that haven’t reached the same level of crudeness as New Yorkers”) and intellectuals (“American intellectuals are generally elitist, bigoted twits who are incapable of questioning the biases and shibboleths of their own narrow-minded community”). He imagines that “Among American intellectuals, you know Simon will be generally regarded as an artistic hero for putting those provincial Utahns in their place.” (No, actually, most will never even hear of it.)

And then, just to make sure you know intellectuals he’s talking about, which particular bunch of elitists he believes have control over our intellectual climate and would have the clout to keep a show that offended them from opening in New York, he puts forward an inane counter-example:

Let’s just suppose, for instance, that the new Greatest Comic Playwright brought a play to New York in which several characters routinely used a four-letter epithet for “Jew” that begins with the letter “K.” Let’s suppose that the characters in the play used the “K” word in exactly the places where the “F” word is used today. (“Give me that k–ing gun!” “Go k– yourself.” “Go get k–ed.” “K– off.”)

Uh huh. Message received.

And he’s not even right on a factual level. He’s such a provincial dullard that he imagines we’re just as prissy and bigoted as he is, just about different things. He imagines that “kike” on Broadway would be just as forbidden as “fuck” in Pleasant Grove, Utah, and clearly he knows nothing about the New York theater scene.

Unfortunately, I don’t know a whole lot about it myself. If I were a regular theatre-goer, I could probably cite a dozen counter-examples. As it is, I had to go to Google, and just found one: Home of the Brave, by Arthur Laurents, opened in 1945, and contained phrases like “kike lover” and “lousy yellow Jew bastard”.

(Oh sure, yeah, he supports Israel. Doesn’t impress me. Nowadays you can probably find neo-Nazis who support Israel; they just hate Moslems more than they hate Jews.)

(And of course I found all this through a blog piece about his recent idiotic pro-war, anti-Democrat essay.

Comments

[redbird]

I suspect that this is envy as well as bigotry talking: he says he's written plays, but I've not heard of him as a playwright. Nothing like a few rejections to make someone sure that the problem is the "New York intellectual elite" rather than that New York has every bit as much right to its tastes and judgments as Greensboro does.