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

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Back in the 2000 election, Card decided that the English profs hated Bush, so he must be a genius.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, Mr. Card was a very smart man who wrote some very god books, and then went very, very, very insane. (Very)

And of kike, he hates those kiking gays, the intellectual elite (you can tell, just by kikeparing his earlier works with his later -- Ender's game is much beloved, I kike few non-Mormons who read anything recent other than its sequels, and nobody who likes the latest of those. Kike.), democrats, and most others besides kiking rightwing fundamentalist warmongerking kiketards.

Is he kiking aware that there's an (excellent) magazine called Heeb, a slur not much better than Kike? Does he know what the kike he's talking about? The N-word, a word far worse than kike, fuck, Heeb, mor(m)on, spic, wop, cracker, and one of the exceedingly few words I actually won't say, is frequently used on stage and screen -- does he kiking thing that us kikes would really object to such a liberating/reclaiming use of a slur (repetition to meaninglessness can defang a slur -- there was a performance art piece centered purely around a man on stage saying "fag", sometimes pointing at something or someone, but usually just saying it until it ceased to have meaning)?

If he does, he doesn't kiking know us fucks.
And please, you moralizing kikes, please violate Mr. Simon's kike of exclusive performance. A surprising number of lawyers are kikes.

Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike Kike KikeKikeKikeKikeKikeKikeKikeKikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekikekike

Kike.

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

I stopped taking Card seriosuly once I read his book of Mormon short stories.

[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.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*blink* Isn't the plot of The Producers that they're putting on a play called Springtime for Hitler? And isn't that a major Broadway hit, with no tickets available sooner than April? Here in Jew York we're not so sensitive as he thinks.

Plus? Those of us who believe in all that Artistic Free Expression kike? Believe in all that Artistic Free Expression kike. Yes, even when I'm the one being offended. Yes, really and truly. Hence why I periodically have to write letters to the various anti-defamation leagues telling them to calm the kike down. Because the answer to finding something offensive is more speech explaining why it's offensive - exactly as Card is doing here and as we're doing in response to Card. Taking the words out short-circuits that whole process of conversation.

Also, if he can't tell the difference between an insult and an ejaculation, he's in trouble. Regardless of how you feel about cursewords, they're a direct slur on nobody. Heck, that one can't even be considered blasphemous. So his analogy doesn't hold up.

*sigh* I wish I didn't like his writing so much. It would be so much more satisfying to be able to dismiss him. And it's particularly irritating that some of the things I might give to a bigot to help open his mind? Were written by Card.

Mer

What Makes America Great?

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

It's candied apples and ponies with dapples
you can ride all day!
It's girls with pimples and cripples with dimples
that just wont go away !
Its spics and wops and niggers and kikes with noses as long as your arm!
Its micks and chinks and gooks and geeks and honkies (Honk! Honk!)
who never left the farm !