Kill the Past and Make Yourself a God

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No one has ever been brave or virtuous before. They tried, In Brave and Virtuous 1.0, but they couldn’t pull it off, because they only had pieces of paper. A few people now are the very first to ever succeed at being SO AMAZING, because of like TikTok and stuff, which makes other people very angry.

Thus explaineth Rolling Stone, which presumably publishes stuff like this because they have an editorial drinking game around the office where the players have to try to top Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Actual headline, and don’t miss the is-this-from-Google-translate subhed:

“History has shown us that those in power are obsessed with turning any form of accountability into a phenomenon that is intended to bring us into sudden doom.” Wouldn’t it be fascinating to know what that sentence is supposed to mean in English? It reads like Johnny Cash’s Cadillac, assembled from unmatched parts over the course of twenty years. A form turns into a phenomenon that obsesses with intending something, and then, at random, here comes doom, which we’re brought into like we’re walking indoors with a police escort. Hunter Thompson also got high in the offices of Rolling Stone, but then he also wrote real sentences.

Anyway, sneak around the paywall here to find out how we’re now more advanced than everyone else who ever lived:

Cancel culture is a way for a new generation of people to practice free speech. The way that we cancel today is more advanced because of our rights as a people and our access to digital communication tools. What opponents of cancel culture get wrong is the act itself: It’s not what we’re doing that’s new; it’s how we’re canceling that’s different. It’s not the fault of the general public that society’s more progressive than in previous decades. In fact, that should be the goal of a democracy. Perhaps the consequence of a more democratic or progressive society is for the most powerful to recognize the limits of control they once had.

Reaching for an example of the way the oppressed can now speak truth to power because of access to new rights and new technologies, Ernest Owens comes up with

(okay, keep waiting for it)

Meghan Markle. No, I’m not kidding. The oppressed person is Her Formerly Royal Highness, the Television Princess of Montecito, Actual Meghan I’m Still Not Kidding Markle, whose version of speaking bold new truth to power is that she argued with Piers Morgan, who embodies power:

When British media personality Piers Morgan publicly attacked Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, on a March 2021 episode of Good Morning Britain, he didn’t expect the immediate backlash or that he’d soon be exiting the show.

Morgan slammed Markle for seeming to criticize the royal family and complaining about the bigotry she faced within the family and from the British press. Many viewed Morgan’s comments as insensitive to Markle’s mental health and racially insensitive given the often-racist coverage she’d faced from the British tabloids as a Black woman. The station had received over 57,000 thousand complaints regarding Morgan’s comments from disappointed viewers, including one from Markle herself. Public pressure is speculated to have played a role in Morgan abruptly leaving Good Morning Britain after nearly six years on the air.

Prior to social media and civil rights advancements, men like Morgan would likely have gone unchallenged. Today, he is put in a position to have to reckon with his behavior—even if he still gets to remain rich with some level of influence.

Finally, historically oppressed royalty in castles have a way to strike back at people on television, and it “is speculated to have played a role” in something. Still don’t think we live in a golden age?

This is, you are not hallucinating, his actual argument:

1.) In ye olden times, people couldn’t speak truth to power;

2.) Now the formerly powerless can speak truth to power because of the Internet;

3.) For example, Meghan Markle.

Now, Ernest Owens is doing a modified Max Boot™ here, inventing a monolithic and stultified pre-Internet media environment: Prior to social media, powerful men and their powerful institutions would have gone unchallenged, but now we have a way for people to say things. Personal request to Ernest Owens: Explain the causes of the Protestant Reformation. Remember how Martin Luther nailed that website to the door?

Print culture, the stuff on paper before God made Mark Zuckerberg, was explosively potent and breathtakingly vibrant. John Wilkes. Thomas Paine. These are not obscure examples.

But more specifically, because Owens is talking about whiteness and the supposed newness of racial pluralism — black Meghan Markle rebuking white Piers Morgan, a world-historical first — the richness of American print culture around questions of race and power is astonishing. In the 1820s, the black abolitionist David Walker published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, and began smuggling it to slaves in the South. Walker’s argument was that the way to defeat slavery was to refuse to be owned as a slave, and for people who faced enslavement to personally and immediately kill anyone who tried it. “If you commence,” he wrote, “make sure work.” Kill them, and make sure they’re dead. But for the first time, you see, 21st-century Oberlin undergraduates and Meghan Markle are challenging power.

And then there was this loser named Frederick Douglass, but he wasn’t important. Didn’t have social media, you see. He wrote some whatever on paper, but tl;dr.

(W.E.B. DuBois: also never tweeted.)

It’s a plague of twits, narcissistic adult children who have no context for anything in the present because their knowledge of the past ends at Stranger Things. “We’re the very first,” they say, having never once looked behind them.

By the way, here’s who Ernest Owens is:

As an openly Black gay journalist, he has made headlines for speaking frankly about intersectional issues in society regarding race, LGBTQIA, and pop culture. In 2018, he launched his growing media company that specializes in multimedia production, consulting, and communications. 

In June 2016, he made a viral post on Twitter that called out superstar Justin Timberlake during the BET Awards.

He’s very famous for tweeting at Justin Timberlake. See, people didn’t used to be able do to that, because those in power obsessed an intended phenomenon into sudden doom. THINK ABOUT IT.