“That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad.” That comment is from a May 2017 essay by the writer Freddie deBoer, whose coining of “offense archaeology” looks prescient. Here are three reasons why:
First, as the Washington Post reports, “snippets of an old interview [John Wayne] did with Playboy magazine, in which he expressed racist and homophobic sentiments and railed against socialism, began circulating on Twitter. A tweet with portions of the interview sent Sunday night from a screenwriter in Tennessee went viral — and, with that, Wayne’s politics were news again.” Marion Mitchell Morrison, who went by the stage name John Wayne, was born 112 years ago, and he died 40 years ago.
Second, on Feb. 18, in Sarasota, Fla., someone vandalized a statue commemorating a well-known and widely loved image of the public reaction to news of Japan’s surrender — a picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square. (That soldier is this week’s obituary.) The woman in the image, Greta Zimmer Friedman, summarized it this way: “I was grabbed by a sailor, and it wasn’t that much of a kiss. It was more of a jubilant act that he didn’t have to go back, I found out later, he was so happy that he did not have to go back to the Pacific where they already had been through the war. And the reason he grabbed someone dressed like a nurse was that he just felt very grateful to nurses who took care of the wounded.”
But she also said: “It wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and kissed or grabbed.” Friedman sounds like a reasonable person put into a situation too personal and too long ago for me to speak about with any authority. And she’s gone now, dead in 2016. But, on the occasion of the death of the man in the photo who kissed her, a vandal in Sarasota did some offense archaeology, painting “#MeToo” on the 74-year-old image of Friedman. What started as a movement to allow victims to speak for themselves is now, apparently, a slogan to put words in the mouths of others.
Finally, as the sharp cultural critic and writer Bridget Phetasy pointed out, Nana Efua Mumford of the Washington Post wrote a story about the attack, which was almost certainly a hoax, on actor Jussie Smollett under the headline: “I Doubted Jussie Smollett. It Breaks My Heart That I Might Be Right.” Smollett, according to police, staged a hate crime by drawing on a lynching. To be heartbroken over being right is to be heartbroken a near-lynching didn’t happen.
One of many problems with “offense archaeology” is that it messes with our incentives. James Joyce wrote that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up,” summarizing what was once a definitive progressive attitude to the past. Today’s offense archaeologists agree it’s a nightmare. But they seem keen to return to it.
