Somewhat Less Than Tenacious
I'm not mad, just disappointed
Let’s get the hypocrisy out of the way first. Yes, if you are a right-wing type who has railed against cancel culture, proclaimed yourself a champion of free speech, and bemoaned the inability of modern snowflakes to take a joke, and you either demanded consequences for Kyle Gass’s Trump assassination quip, or approved of the fallout, then you are a big fat hypocrite and you should be ashamed.
And yes, additionally, if you are a left-wing type who has claimed cancel culture doesn’t exist or is just “consequences”, demanded that people lose jobs or have their lives ruined because they’ve said offensive things, expressed distasteful opinions, or made tasteless jokes, and you are now howling angrily about the injustice of Kyle Gass suffering for his Trump assassination quip, then you are also a big fat hypocrite and you should be ashamed.
But frankly there’s way too much focus on hypocrisy nowadays. It’s fun to point out that someone’s being a hypocrite, but it’s not much of an argument. If you identify an inconsistency between two of a person’s statements, then you’ve established that one or both of those statements must be wrong, but you haven’t established what’s right. Pointing out hypocrisy in another while being unwilling to state which side of their double standard you agree with is a hack move.
So, what is right in the Tenacious D kerfuffle? I think it is this:
Kyle made an off the cuff joke at a concert and big fucking deal.
Obviously, just as a lot of people were certain to love the joke, a lot of people were bound to dislike it too, and they have every right to dislike it, but they have no right to demand punishment for the guy who said it. Because it was just a joke, and it was just words, and it was just one guy, and if you think actual consequences should flow from it you are just being a nasty little dick.
People like Senator James Babet, demanding his deportation, so concerned that he is threatening the life of a presidential candidate that he will not be satisfied until Gass is sent back to America to threaten the candidate’s life on his own turf? People screaming that it was dangerous, that it was an incitement to violence, that it was the statement of a vile radical leftist homicidal maniac that all decent people are rightly sickened by? Fuckwits, every one of them, and they can go suck it.
Bear in mind that Kyle Gass is a comedian and musician. He’s not a politician, he’s not a diplomat, he’s not the leader of a religion calling his followers to shed blood in the name of their lord. He’s an entertainer who said a slightly bad-taste thing once. I cannot stress this enough: big fucking whoop.
It’s not surprising to me that his agent dropped him, because it is never surprising to me when agents are cowardly fucks. You can’t expect a business to do anything but follow the dictates of their own commercial interests, and in cases like this businesspeople usually sniff the wind and decide that their commercial interests lie in being cowardly fucks. It’s hard to blame them for this, it’s just their nature. An agent will be a cowardly fuck for the same reason as the scorpion stung the frog. But even if you understand, it’s important to note that the frog is still dead and the agent is still a cowardly fuck.
And as to Jack Black…well. I mean, purely on an artistic level he should’ve stuck up for his partner and said, hey, we’re entertainers doing a show, he made a dumb joke and you’re all being idiots. He shouldn’t have apologised and he shouldn’t have grovelled to the moralising mob. But he’s far from the first to do so, and he’ll not be the last. The number of artists I respect who have disappointed me by bending the knee to pearl-clutchers is large and always growing.
But beyond those considerations…isn’t this your friend, Jack? Is it not your buddy of decades? Shouldn't you be taking his side not just as a fellow creative standing firm for free speech (though that would be more than enough on its own), but as a friend standing firm for a guy you love, who’s been by your side making music and making people laugh for so many years? Shouldn’t you be acting a little more…human?
He is acting human, of course, which is why despite my great disappointment in him, I’m not feeling the desire to wave the pitchfork and join the Jack Black Haters Club1. He’s acting from the very human emotion of fear, of panic, of overwhelming terror that this one stupid moment at a concert is going to rip away everything he’s worked so hard for. Jack Black is doing the wrong thing because, like most people, he knows what can happen to people who do the right thing in the face of a mob, and desperately wants to avoid that. I get it. Hell, Kyle made a public apology too, because he’s acting from the same fear. And he got hung out to dry anyway, because you never really satiate the outrage maw. So I feel sorry for them both, and I understand why Jack is doing what he’s doing, and I’m not going to boycott Kung Fu Panda or disavow School of Rock because of it.
But it was wrong. and it’s sad, and I wish Jack Black had this once been as gutsy as all us fans like to imagine he is.
And as for the “I never liked this person’s work, and now that they have done something in a personal capacity that I find unpleasant, I feel fully justified in my subjective aesthetic taste and will boast about how perceptive I’ve been” crowd…miss me with that, fuckfaces.