Christian Invitation vs Wokester Threats
Woke Stroke
If you consider yourself one of the "woke", be advised: the following quotes may raise your blood pressure.
A Gallery of Inoculations
Yet unlike Christianity, which is premised upon an invitation to believe, wokeism operates in threats and coercion. We don’t hear the gracious, welcoming words of Christ: “Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me.” Rather, we are warned that failure to believe and dutifully articulate the commandments of wokeism will result in social or economic marginalization. Even pious acknowledgement of our sins may be insufficient, as was the case for Sue Schafer, a liberal and Democrat who foolishly wore blackface to a 2018 Halloween party, and was demonized by the Washington Post two years later, eventually losing her job.
Christian faith is defined by love and gratuitous gift that is followed by inner spiritual transformation. Identity politics deals in fear, victimhood, and vengeance that requires outward, superficial conformity. Christian faith directs its adherents ultimately to a person. Identitarianism directs its followers’ attention to impersonal structures and a set of transient, unstable principles lacking objectivity. The Christian’s act of faith is rewarded with a transcendent spiritual reality that broadens his horizons. The woke believer’s vision is progressively narrowed as he seeks ever-new power structures to dismantle and microaggressions to identify.
Though the brilliant Benedict XVI did not exactly forecast the dimensions and texture of the woke dictatorship, he did warn of an impending coercive authoritarianism. In A Turning Point for Europe? he writes: “Either [relativism] becomes nihilism or else it expands positivism into the power that dominates everything.”
(R)eferencing some composers by their last names is a product only of their near universal fame, and the fact that musicians themselves are well aware of who these people are. When asked to play, say, Rachmaninoff, the first violinist doesn’t jump up and ask, “Do you mean Sergei?” When Mozart’s 40th is referenced, the piccolo person doesn’t raise his hand to inquire, “Wolfgang Amadeus?” (He knows there are other Mozarts, but when people say “Mozart,” they always mean the Mozart. Likewise with Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s that Bach; it’s always that Bach.
The three greats are known by their last names not for sex or race reasons, but because they are the mountain peaks of musical and artistic excellence. It is the same with Einstein and Newton, who are sovereign in their domain and universally spoken of by their surnames alone — and not because of some white privilege plot.
Orwell famously wrote about certain things that were so stupid only an intellectual could believe them. As a corollary to that fine observation, let me posit that there are some things so ridiculous, so petty, so odd and intellectually barren that they can only exist inside the borders of Wokestan. And among those silly things, moaning about using great composers last names only, and seeing in the practice some tincture of “white supremacy,” is not even an idea, but a feeble cartoon of pseudo-thought.
Wokesters of the world wake up. You have nothing to lose but strange jargon and very odd ideas.
Real humor depends upon irking the dour, the censorious and the po-faced. Lemon-sucking puritans were sadly scarce for most of the last century. And so we were living in a mirth-deprived world.
But the long prudery drought is over.
Thanks to a New Piety — ‘wokeness’ as it’s called — we have many more bluenoses, calamity howlers and vinegar-pusses to upset. Japes at Tartuffian cant can begin anew. Twenty-first-century thought-leaders have returned to a straitlaced piousness, not only in opinion but even in grammar. The woke are claiming offense at such terms as ‘mankind’ and grappling with English as if the language were a professional wrestling villain attempting to pin ‘womynkind’ to the mat. (...)
To be woke is to maintain a state of mind where you are constantly and acutely alert to social injustice and permanently on the lookout for more social injustice to be alert to. Or what I would call a good reason to take a nap.
Which you’d think would be acceptable since being woke doesn’t actually entail doing anything. But, thankfully for the jester, hypocrisy never sleeps. If you’re woke you must stay ‘conscious’, in order to continually ‘communicate’ how vigilant you are about toxic masculinity, how mindful you’re becoming about cultural appropriation and so forth ad infinitum.
Being woke is a parody of being Born Again(.)
Mr Obama said that calling people out on social media did not bring about change, and that change was complex.
"Woke" is described as being alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice, along with being aware of what's going on in the community.
Mr Obama told the audience: "I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people.
"If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because 'Man did you see how woke I was? I called you out!'"
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Even a disciple of Alinsky such as former President Obama recognizes the problem of woke ideology and the self righteousness of those who embrace it.
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