Under its f-ing eye

This title refers of course to the brilliant novel from Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, which was recently adapted into a television series. It describes a futuristic society (but not that futuristic...) where the new masters of the land are hard core puritans and where women deemed as "lost" become surrogate mothers. I won't go into that much because I believe many people know the story, or if they don't, they should read the book. Shall I remind people what a book is? A good one? It's a work that has been created for quite a long time and that we, the public, read in a short-ish amount of time, a bit like a painting, hours and hours of work from the painter, that is seen and judged, and looked at for a few seconds, before we move on to another painting.

I'd like to remind people that because perhaps fewer and fewer people read books, fewer and fewer people get lost in front of a painting admiring it. The internet is a great place, but it is progressively but surely changing our brains. We get more and more interrupted by social media, it pings and pongs in our pockets, and lots of zombie-like people are walking dangerously on our streets, eyes dropped onto their miniscreens. Silence, it seems, is a rarity, most public spaces having music, apart from a few pubs and our public libraries. The art of being alone, of having a moment (Franzen wrote magic lines about smoking in his How to be alone series of essays) becomes a tough thing to get.

And the internet brought us justice, how many movements, how many twitter hashtags (and I have participated in a few) have allowed an awareness of issues that we all face? I have learned a lot, for example this great hashtag on French twitter, about turning the table on racism #SiLesNoirsParlaientCommeLesBlancs
 
Like many women, I participate in the #MeToo movement. I however, did not participate in the #balancetonporc (denounce your bastard, could be an accurate translation) movement as I thought it was too much and should I have the name of an aggressor I would use a more legal way to do something about it.

Anyway, like many online, here I would go, not necessarily knowing much about the subject, attacking this and that, because my friends were doing it as well.

I did notice, in the past, and especially since the Paris attack in the Bataclan, that there were "friends" on facebook who were quite harsh/cold and a bit critical about the huge media coverage. Some said, when bombs or attacks happened in developing countries, it would not be the same coverage. True, there is hardly any news when hundreds of Arabs or Blacks are getting killed. If say, one American, or French or UK national, had been killed in the same event, we would have heard about them.

But nevertheless, when your country is suffering and you are also very sad, it's not very nice to hear such things. After all, when 9/11 happened, I didn't do a Mary Beard saying that they "had it coming". Though I was very much thinking it. Instead, I was supportive to my American friends and even, if I recall it well, gave money to the firemen of New York (unless that was a scam and I helped a guy have a great time in Vegas, who knows? But I hope not).

I would however respect the points of view of facebook friends, and not make a fuss about it, no point in replying, I would simply, not look at their facebook updates anymore.

But with the #MeToo movement, something else happened. I felt it in my bones.
It started with Catherine Deneuve, participating in a petition, criticising the fact that the #MeToo / #balancetonporc was going too far. And indeed it does. That's when I saw many critics about Deneuve online, even though she apologised after, stating she had been misunderstood. I'm a big fan of Deneuve you see, and did not like to read all this garbage about her. And I really did appreciate her defence of Depardieu at a time when he was continuously mocked by the press.

And then I saw a post with Depardieu (another star I admire) criticising the over-reacting mood of today's world. And I really liked what he was saying (if it was him, that is) but I suddenly stopped myself from putting this on my facebook page, because I was too scared of what others would think, I was too scared that people would misunderstand, again.
 
Not a surprise that even Margaret Atwood, spoke about her concerns, relating to the #MeToo campaign: “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”

You have people, famous people who are great writers, artists, intellectuals, Germaine Greer for example, and then, one thing they say and everyone's criticising them. Greer is not doing anything illegal, she thinks that the #MeToo movement is"whingeing, that is her point of view and we should listen to what these people have to say. But here you go, you get good people being bullied online. For that, it seems, there is no justice to be done, and it is, somehow, a good thing, though I feel sorry about all this electronic rage. Much ado about nothing, electronic farts. 

That's why I really think there is an under its fucking eye above us. Not a big master race, but your social media "friends" this puritanical, judging crowd, the same that in medieval time would have laughed at you while you were attached to the village stocks, because you had eaten meat on a Friday, say. This an all being, all nice-thinking crowd, all judging.

Now a painting, in the UK, has been removed. Manchester art gallery takes off a nymphs painting 

When is it going to stop? Where is it going to end? An actor is erased from a film (All the Money in the World) Statues that are deemed a fuel for racism are being removed (all right, but think twice about the statue's replacement) at the risk of erasing history, some guests are no longer invited in universities as they are too challenging, people are fired over one tweet they wrote ten years ago.
Art is consumed in great haste with no time to think and reflect, and quite bloody simply ENJOY, continuously interrupted by updates online, by your pings and your pongs. We jump on the band wagon at the click of a mouse. What next?

History was not a great series of events done by lovely, politically correct people. The world is not a Walt Disney Princess' landscape. Justice must be done as much as possible, but one could seriously try not to give us this collective madness made of good-thinking-good-guys bordering on the puritanical bullshit. Don't they realise, these "good" people, that they are creating, slowly but surely a "Under his Eye" situation?



[I would like to apologise about the many swearwords used in this text, I blame this on the painter and friend Andris Wood, who did an absolute brilliant video yesterday speaking about the same subject, with more emphasis - and knowledge- of the painting that has been removed from the Manchester's collection. Having said that, it really fells good to bloody swear at times].