We’ve achieved a full orbit in “We need to shut up, Pt. 2.”
The mayor of London — the frigging mayor of London — has written an op-ed defending private citizen-made-public lightning rod Matt Taylor in the Shirtgate affair, the most unnecessary controversy in probably a couple of weeks. Taylor, a space scientist, was widely chastised for wearing a tacky button-down shirt the day his mission’s craft landed on a comet last week, which prompted him to issue a teary apology.
Don’t fool yourself: In the Internet age, the bottom of the barrel is the final frontier.
“I watched that clip of Dr Taylor’s apology – at the moment of his supreme professional triumph – and I felt the red mist come down. It was like something from the show trials of Stalin, or from the sobbing testimony of the enemies of Kim Il-sung, before they were taken away and shot,” London Mayor Boris Johnson wrote in The Telegraph. “It was like a scene from Mao’s cultural revolution when weeping intellectuals were forced to confess their crimes against the people.”
Johnson went on to decry the “unrelenting tweetstorm of abuse,” the “hurtling dustcloud of hate” to which Taylor, an Englishman, was subjected. This was all over a garment that resembled a particularly gaudy Ed Hardy shirt. Female cartoons, perhaps pin-up models or scantily clad femme fatales, adorned it.
“What are we all – a bunch of Islamist maniacs who think any representation of the human form is an offence against God?” Johnson continued. “This is the 21st century, for goodness’ sake. And if you ask yourself why so few have come to the defence of the scientist, the answer is that no one dares.”
I will. Around the last time it was cold this year, January, a professional football player named Richard Sherman made a clutch play in a critical playoff game and shouted into a microphone about it during a postgame interview. The result of Sherman doing this was a hurtling dustcloud of hate in its own right, with detractors caring enough to publicly call him a thug and threaten the cancellation of season tickets, and defenders writing articles attacking the critics, and the public culture forum entertaining an argument over the loudly spoken, G-rated trash talk of an athlete on national television. Looking back and then considering Mr. Taylor’s present situation, it is not so unbelievable that this occurred.
Sherman “highlighted our societal best,” I wrote: “that we care deeply about irrelevant crap.” So it is today. To the instigators of these inconsequential and forgotten skirmishes, free speech is no longer a right. It is a duty-bound obligation. Nothing can escape comment. Anything is liable to be heard as cannonfire, even the loud shirt that a scientist wore during an interview, a scientist who is not Bill Nye or Neil Degrasse Tyson or some other media type, but a person, Matt Taylor, who helped land a spacecraft on a comet traveling as fast as 84,000 miles per hour and may have worn some odd tops while doing it.
“I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing” — and “holding back progress,” if you read the URL of one headline. Such is the awesome scope of First Amendment protection that foul garbage like this is permitted to stink, and others are able to come along and clean it up.
Some people spend their time building robots that land on comets. Other people spend their time demanding those people change their shirts.
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) November 15, 2014
I hope these moments of temporary outrage are cathartic for the people who create them; that raining digital hellfire on a private citizen, which is an ethical matter for another time, is fulfilling, triumphant, noble, just, worthwhile, and lasting. It’d be a crying shame if they and individuals like Taylor both emerged as losers. Somebody’s gotta win.
