Ladders to Heaven

Sometimes I wonder if we’re trying to heave ladders toward heaven with how anxious we are to pore over the art of the past to find its flaws. 

We are desperate to show how wise and cultured and enlightened we are and just as anxious to post about it so everyone can know about it as we are to find the damning evidence. 

If there’s one thing we can know about the past it’s that we are always growing, always learning, and always evolving as a culture. Each generation is insistent that they are right, and that they know what is correct, not taking into account that in a hundred years someone will come behind them to point out the errors of their ways. 

It’s all about context, culturally as well as in regard to the art or artist. 

Yes, some sins are unforgivable. 

Some ‘crimes’ are unforgettable. 

But to pull out the broadest brush you can to paint everything that doesn’t ascribe to your worldview doesn’t make things better, it just means you want to appear as if you’re on the right side of history. 

The fact is that as long as you’re on the right side of the grave you’re on the wrong side of history because there is always more you could have done, said, or spoken against. 

Judged against someone 100 years from now we may all look like backward idiots who couldn’t see the wall that was rushing toward us. 

We saw it jokingly but a time may come when we realize that insects and plants have similarly complex emotions to humans, just in different ways. 

A day may well come when an outside species arrives on earth and treats us as we’ve treated one another and anyone we felt superior to. 

This isn’t me being flippant so much as me saying that we need to keep in mind, as we get on our soapboxes, that someone may be pointing their own finger at us and our deeds. 

I always stand up for HP Lovecraft for the sheer fact that none of us knew him or his heart. His failings in how he saw the world, women, people of color, and people from other countries has been examined ad nauseum. But even his letters are only PART of who he was. His true, secret heart, I’ll never know. I know he was a talented writer who seemed afraid of the world he didn’t understand and as such he wrote that way. It doesn’t absolve his bigotry but it’s my place to do that, nor is it yours. 

Ours is to either take his work as it is, or to disregard it. 

We can talk about whether he’s the idea figurehead for an award or not, and those sorts of things, but damning a man we never knew, who may have never had a chance to see past his own ignorance, isn’t one of the things we have a right to do. 

That’s up there with demanding the past answer for itself. 

Because SNOW WHITE used dwarves in its fairy tale doesn’t mean we need an apology or an answer about it, but it also doesn’t mean we need dwarves in a new adaptation. It’s an adaptation, it can be whatever it wants. If you want some imagined ‘pure’ version then take your pick but remember that unless your that tied to the original tale it’s all a matter of someone choosing how to portray it. Whether someone should portray a character of smaller height or not if they have to be made smaller digitally is another question, but that’s one that isn’t for me to decide. Especially when it comes down to someone getting work or not who may not have a lot of roles offered to them. 

We get so caught up on things that don’t matter. 

Oh, they changed the race of a fictional character. 

Oh, they changed their gender. 

Oh, they changed their sexual orientation. 

Unless these things affect the story, who cares, other than fanboys and bigots who never cared until they were told to or felt that there weren’t enough White people in art (!). 

We want so desperately to be offended that we look for it everywhere. Kids doom zoom through anything they can find so they can rush to their socials to say SEE, HERE, LOOK AT THIS! It’s like the kids that used to scan movies back in the day for nude scenes to share with friends. 

SEE! 

SOMEONE WAS RACIST IN THE PAST!

THIS BELOVED CLASSIC IS IGNORANT!

THIS PERSON WAS A BIGOT!

And none of that is to say I excuse any of it but we need to stop and ask WHY we want to bring attention to these things?

Is it to better discuss, examine, and reckon with these things or is it to bring attention to yourself and how wise and elevated you are?

I don’t excuse the pain I or anyone causes with their ignorance, nor the damage that images, words, or anything else can inflict. The thing is though that it’s not the job of every artist to project far into the future. I’d love to say we’re all wise, and open, and see the world with love but that’s not the case. 

We all have faults. 

We all have blind spots. 

We all have flaws. 

As such, we make flawed art.

And the thing is that times change. 

THANKFULLY!

You look back at certain eras and how they portrayed women, people of color, people of foreign descent, otherly abled people, the LGBTQIA+ community, and on and it’s heartbreaking. It is all part of the human quilt and all part of our history. 

The good and the bad. 

We can’t just cut out the bad, or what we warrant as bad, and pretend it isn’t there. 

We need to look at these things, talk about them, and talk about why they are wrong but also acknowledge that they are not always ALL wrong. We need to say that, yeah, that’s upsetting, but I can appreciate it as a work of art…OR NOT. And allow other people TO accept these things. 

It doesn’t make them bad people, but just people who take from that work what they do. 

Unless it’s making them racist or hateful, then let it be. 

As I have said over and over again, JK Rowling can be utterly ignorant when it comes to her view on trans women but it doesn’t mean the Potter series is trash. 

It just means you have to reckon whether you’re comfortable reading it or watching the films. If you’re not then that’s fine, but if someone else still consumes those things you have no right to shame them. 

So many of us feel like we’re suddenly culture vultures that get to gatekeep what others enjoy and that’s wrong. 

We need to be better and to respect one another, and our opinions and the nuances of those opinions. It’s swell to rant and rave to friends and to online circles about this or about that but once you make it about you, you’re wrong. 

There’s a point where the world isn’t bubble-wrapped and we’re going to be upset, offended, and outraged. That’s not great but just as someone has no right to dictate how we feel we can’t dictate how they feel either. 

And we can’t damn them for liking some book or movie or music. 

The past is the past. 

It informs the present but it doesn’t have to rule it. 

We need to remember that we are just travelers and there are people coming behind us with just as passionate opinions and feelings on what we feel is OK and ‘just’ today. 

I know I am not perfect, and looking at how I acted when I was younger is more than embarrassing, it’s shaming, but I learned and I grew and I hope to keep growing. 

All I can hope for. 

All any of us can hope for. 

The ability to outlive most of our misdeeds and to not have strangers dig up the corpses of our ignorance and mistakes and to put them on display without any context or understanding of those things or us, and then call for the world to judge us for them. 

There are monsters in this world and there are bigots but mostly, there are people learning and doing the best they can and failing a lot along the way. 

People just like me. 

People just like you. 

…c…