Herding Poets, Playwrights, and Psychologists

How DEI is dividing the West into the sane and insane

If 2024 is about anything, it’s about staying sane despite those who are not clinically but culturally insane. Which includes all those deluded people who earnestly believe that they are saving the world by forcing it to adopt the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) rules. God help you if you fail to submit—the entire game is at bottom about submission. And only the brave stand up to it. May we all be brave as well as sane this year.

This was pretty much the main message that Bill Maher was beaming out in his first show of 2024. While I get tired of his anti-Trump tirades, this Sanity idea has legs, as they say in the movie business.

Because at the same time, Jordan Peterson and the bureaucratic minions running the Ontario Board of Psychologists have joined in an epic battle. The DEI driven drivel of this case is about the minions ‘educating’ Peterson in the errors of his thinking. In a legal suit that should not be happening in a sane world, Peterson is now the spearpoint of cultural sanity. He has warned them that if he actually does what they want, that is submit to their ‘education’, it will be done in the blast furnace of global social media and that they ‘might come to rue the day they decided to shut me up’.

Millions of people will be watching this battle, and the outcome is already visible: the bureaucrats will ‘win’ in their silo, but the rest of the world will side with Peterson and deride his persecutors. Peterson doesn’t need to play by their rules; he is famous as well as wealthy, unlike the rest of us who are neither. And that is why this is a fraught moment in the West. It concerns all of us and the outcome is not trivial nor is it just about JP: it is fundamentally about preserving our inalienable right to think what we want. And express it as we see fit. Yes, it’s about free-thinking vs wrongthink. And the people who embody that tradition are the people who play with language, the poets, psychologists and playwrights among us.

As I was writing this, a new Unherd interview with David Mamet, one of the best American playwrights, aired. He has been thoroughly blacklisted by the same DEI cult that is attacking Peterson. But I would argue he has better words. He is, after all, a Jewish dramatist and as such, a master storyteller who will not submit to intellectual bullies. He makes fun of them, an old Jewish tradition. He and Peterson should get together; they would love each other, as intellectual relatives and emotional brothers in arms.

And so we come to the Poets, once regarded with a mixture of awe, curiosity, and incomprehension. As far as I can tell, we now ignore them altogether. There’s currently nobody to take up the creative crown of the great Leonard Cohen, who embodied Poet Prophet and Bard in one. Even in his pop songs, his language is loaded and some of the things he said were not just mysterious but upsetting as well. Cohen wasn’t writing to make you feel ‘safe’, he was writing and singing to wake you up.

But that was then. Today, we no longer create such troubling/exciting/enraging figures. Instead, we get what Cohen referred to as ‘the lousy little poets’ in his 1992 album The Future, which seems to have arrived as he predicted it would:

There'll be the breaking of the ancient Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms, there'll be fires on the road
And the white man dancing
You'll see your woman hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets coming round
Trying to sound like Charlie Manson

Yeah the white man dancing

Try reading that to an outfit consisting of official poets that live off the good graces of institutions, government agencies and universities. I accidentally came across just such an organization here in fusty old Victoria, The Planet Earth Poetry people (PEPP). Some of their members I have met or heard of; most are women, and all are published and have garnered official awards of various kinds. They are what you might call the ‘successful poets’ if you define success as being read by other poets and having an actual publisher.

I am not one of them; whatever I write is on Substack, free and read by ordinary non poets as far as I can tell. Thank you, dear unpretentious readers of my unofficial poetry. When I came across their website and considered attending one of their meetings at a local bookstore, I didn’t know that they subscribe to the Woke mantra of safety and civility above all. DEI, in short. Then I read their page on mutual respect, which opens like this:

MUTUAL RESPECT POLICY OF PLANET EARTH POETRY READING SOCIETY

Objective
Planet Earth Poetry Reading Society (“PEP”) strives to create and maintain a safe environment in which people are treated with dignity, decency, kindness and respect. The environment of PEP should be characterized by mutual trust and the absence of intimidation, oppression and exploitation. Discrimination or harassment of any kind will not be tolerated, including at “in person” events and virtual events, in online communication, and on social media.

Poems can encompass a range of experiences and powerful emotions. However, poems and any other forms of communication that discriminate or harass will not be tolerated.

If you have the stomach for it, you can read the entire lugubrious document here:

: http://planetearthpoetry.com/mutual-respect-policy

Like all Wokery, these are good intentions gone bad, achieving the opposite of what they intended. Reading this ‘policy’ makes me feel both oppressed, anxious, and intimidated. I already feel attacked and the whole tenor of the document strikes me as anything but ‘kind’. They clearly don’t trust their members to behave like proper humans or why would they feel the need for such a deplorable piece of shite?

I won’t be attending any meeting of theirs because I might just accidentally be unkind or say things that are ‘unsafe’. For instance, OMG, I think that we’re heading for WW3 and what are we going to say about that? I might just be perceived as harassing someone because I question their opinion on those nice caring folk known as Hamas. And BTW, who decides what is and isn’t harassment? Don’t these people, poets all, know that words are like eels, slippery, slimy, and open to interpretation and above all, context?

Nor can I imagine any of the great dead poets nor some of the still alive ones being part of a group whose primary issue is creating a ‘safe space’. Would Goethe, Shakespeare, Cristina Rosetti, Blake, or Morgenstern have joined this august gathering? Or Cohen, for that matter? I sincerely doubt it. And if they had, they wouldn’t have lasted for longer than a few minutes.  Because they knew that safety has no place in poetry, nor in any creative enterprise.

Creativity is by definition ‘unsafe’ because it upsets the status quo. It forces you to look at life through a different lens, one you’re not accustomed to and may find uncomfortable. There is a long history of artistic groups that formed to defy those comfortably enthroned in the artistic pantheon. Think of The Salon de Refuses, or the Bloomsbury club. They would have laughed at the concept of ‘safe spaces’. But in this age of turbulent decline, western creatives have embraced this BS. Instead of questioning, arguing, and demolishing sacred cows, they’ve created a whole herd of new ones all ploughing the safety furrow. Instead of daring to question, to create, to laugh or indeed, be subversive, these ‘poets’ are cleaving to the safe and predictable. That’s where the funding is, after all. These ideas are government funded and sanctioned and PEP knows that and exemplifies ‘whose bread I eat, whose dance I dance’.

Shame on them. If the poets among us can’t stand up to the forces of mental bullying, oppression and government overreach, who can? This epic battle for Sanity in the West is now joined and it will define our future, nothing less. And we all have to pick a side. Which one is yours?