The hot new word on campuses is “triggering.” The current generation of special snowflakes wants to be excused from discussing violence and other terrible facts of life, lest such discussions “trigger” a recollection of their own personal traumas (real or imagined is anyone’s guess).
The issue of triggering got a little too literal at the University of Michigan recently when the campus canceled a screening of American Sniper. The film is unavoidably violent inasmuch as it tells the story of Chris Kyle, a sniper and hero of the war in Iraq. However, it was also the highest-grossing movie of 2014, meaning that a great many Americans saw it and were somehow able to get on with their lives.
The other objection was that it’s racist. “The movie American Sniper not only tolerates but promotes anti-Muslim . . . rhetoric and sympathizes with a mass killer. . . . Chris Kyle was a racist who took a disturbing stance on murdering Iraqi civilians,” according to an online petition. This depiction of Kyle is flatly inaccurate. Much of his service—and this is explicitly how it was portrayed in the film—was spent endeavoring to eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was torturing and killing other Muslims to further its terrorist goals.
As if to conclusively illustrate what an infantilizing atmosphere America’s universities are cultivating, the scheduled showing of American Sniper was replaced by a screening of Paddington. That movie, based on the popular children’s book series about a family that adopts a stuffed bear found abandoned in a train station, presumably required no trigger warnings. However, according to Tablet magazine, Paddington author Michael Bond was inspired to create the character because of the “Jewish evacuee children he remembered seeing in the train stations of London during the Kindertransport of the late 1930s.” Contemplating a generation of children whose parents were killed in the Holocaust could prove pretty damn triggering, to say nothing of the necessary and righteous violence dealt out by an earlier generation of Chris Kyles that put an end to the horror. Bond further says of his beloved creation, “Paddington stands up for things, he’s not afraid of going to the top and giving them a hard stare.” In that respect, at least, it turns out Paddington and American Sniper are not wholly dissimilar.
While this entire episode is embarrassing and depressing, it does have a happy ending. Shortly after it was announced that the American Sniper screening had been canceled, Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh tweeted: “Michigan Football will watch ‘American Sniper’! Proud of Chris Kyle and Proud to be an American and if that offends anybody then so be it!” A number of his players echoed the sentiment, and soon the American Sniper screening was back on.
Harbaugh should be applauded, but it’s a real indictment when the football program has to be the voice of reason in campus political debates.
