I wrote this poem a few years ago, called 'Context'. I think I already put it on the blog alongside some others, and I'm posting it again, since everyone from Nick Cave to Noam Chomsky's been talking about "Cancel culture".
The whole thing's a bollocks, really, and I come down on the side of no line.
Probably, on balance of balances, I'd say that the most important thing is that people consider the consequences of saying horrible and stupid things, but very clearly, there is an extremely self-righteous nuance-free element out there who could just see a bit more nuance.
Anyway, I wrote about context, I've just rounded it off by repeating the first two lines in the first two lines.
Just a quick note - the penultimate word of the second line and of the last line, I could have chosen the word "woke" but chose not to, because I'm just not going to be someone who castigates wokeness. Perhaps the thing suffers for it, because "folk age", which I've used, is a personal notion of mine which makes little sense to anyone else. Well, there we go.
CONTEXT
Context is the casualty of the constant “Oh, humanity!”s
from the council formed by Pharisees in the folk age.
Concepts like cold sanity fade to heated faux humility
in the cloth-eared cloistered malady of bespoke rage.
Constrained by their fallacies come a thousand fraught
apologies
from a hundred caught-out Socrates in the courtroom.
Consecrated effigies made for bonfires of false vanity
feed the hungry, maddened Manichees’ lost proportion.
Concern turns to calumny just as fast as last week’s
amnesty
on poor broken, panicked Salomes fades to nowhere.
Content cast out casually makes a martyr far more rapidly
than the lately feted banishee can manoeuvre.
Context is the casualty of the constant “oh, humanity”s
of the council of the Pharisees in this broke age.
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