New Woke vs. Classic Woke: An Opinion Piece

(Cuz it eats away at a fella's soul to write about nothing but prostate health and riboflavin.)

Confession time: I once killed a man by force-feeding him an old catcher’s mitt.

Oh yeah, I’m also woke.

Okay, okay, I never really killed a man by force-feeding him a catcher’s mitt. I was only trying to lessen the blow of my second confession. It’s kind of like that old “Mom’s on the roof but we can’t get her down” joke.

Yes, I’m woke, but hold off for a minute on unsubscribing from my Substack page or blocking my emails and wiping out your browser history so no one would ever know you visited this site. Never mind you had NakedCoeds.com in there; thatyou could live with if someone stumbled on it, but some woke bastard’s Substack page? Eff that.

Here’s the thing. My type of woke, what I call “Classic Woke,” ain’t what a lot of detractors think it is. No, my brand of woke has been bastardized. Transmogrified. Contorted into something unrecognizable and worthy of ridicule. Let’s call it “New Woke.”

The people who adopted this definition have painted all of us woke folk with this same, broad, wire brush, but they can almost be forgiven because it’s my belief they were merely the pawns of the mostly 18 to 22-year-old college girls on social media who set the whole thing in motion, them and the emo boys who serve as the Renfields to their Draculas.

But here’s the thing: Roughly 58% of Twitter, or X, members are under 35 and about 10% of them are responsible for 92% of the Tweets. So, based on those numbers, it seems a paltry few have had an incredibly disproportionate influence on society and its perception of wokeness.

Hell, based on the calculations I just performed with my crayon on my International House of Pancakes placemat, I figure there are probably about 15 college girls spread out between  places like Dubuque, Iowa (home of the fightin’ Spartans) and UC Santa Cruz (home of the fightin’ Banana Slugs) who are responsible for turning wokeness into something that sometimes deserves ridicule; they’re responsible for turning Classic Woke into New Woke, and the latter is a sour brew indeed.

Okay, I’m exaggerating about the low number of perpetrators. Slightly. Still, these social media virtue signalers have forced anyone over 30 to carefully parse their words lest the next sentence they spoke garner cries of racism, sexism, homophobia, or worse yet, get them fired or sent packing from their job because a joke or casual comment was met with woke umbrage.

Comedy isn’t dead yet, but my God has it gotten a kick in the balls. Insensitivity to pretty much anyone and anything is the bedrock of comedy, and I’m not so sure I want to live in a world where I can’t hear Gilbert Gottfried’s version of “The Aristocrats” joke.

The mostly young Tweeters, who are clearly suffering from the emotional equivalent of allodynia -- a condition where even a light touch causes excruciating pain -- have forced corporations to bend the knee. They forced comedians and movie producers and actors and musicians to bend the knee. It’s gotten so bad that even the Classic Woke people like me are perpetually agitated. Psychically speaking, it feels like our brains have a constant wedgie that no amount of shifting can dislodge.

These young social media influencers are also the ones that forced Hollywood to cast movies according to what seems like an inclusionary checklist, sometimes with incredibly silly results.

I watched a Christmas movie last year that featured Santa’s elves in Northern Finland and many were black, Indian, or Asian. Northern Finland! Where melanin is as scarce as…as…a black, Indian, or Asian elf!

And this type of shoehorning seems to be everywhere. It’s often unnecessary and it’s annoying.

As a person who loves to escape into the world of fiction, I like historic and visual accuracy. Idris Elba is a fine actor, but I wouldn’t want him to play General George Armstrong Custer in a new biopic from Universal Studios.

Likewise, I wouldn’t want Tom Cruise to play the Black Panther. I wouldn’t want Timothée Chalamet – despite those magnificent cheekbones -- to play Kunta Kinte in the remake of Roots. And I wouldn’t want Steve Buscemi to play Toranaga in the Shogun series. It would be too disconcerting, and done for no f’ing reason.

But a black woman as The Little Mermaid? Who gives a rat’s ass because the little mermaid isn’t exactly an iconic figure whose image and history are emblazoned in our consciousness. Of course, her statue in Copenhagen Harbor is black, so maybe having a black woman play her is “historically” accurate.

Likewise, I see no reason why a straight man couldn’t play a gay man in a movie, against the likely protestations of the New Woke folk. Like Jon Lovitz said, “Acting!” (broad flourish with his hand).

I get it that Hollywood was particularly insensitive about this in the distant past and not so-distant-past. It was plain wrong that in all those Westerns in the 50’s, 60’s, and probably even the 70’s, white men mostly played the part of Indians. And John Wayne playing Genghis Khan in “The Conquerors?” Take me now, Jesus.

I also get that it’s insensitive to call your football team the Washington Redskins and I applaud the name change, but New Woke is generally an overcorrection to the problems of racism, sexism, and homophobia. When you force-feed it down everyone’s throats, it sticks there like a giant frog swallowed by an overambitious Gila monster. Worse, it’s sometime laughable.

Oh! And let’s not forget “cultural appropriation.” In my world, it’s a compliment when you adopt parts of someone else’s culture. I’m Finnish, so if people want to start drinking pints of vodka while being slowly cooked in a sauna and then collapsing naked and unconscious into a snow drift, it would mean you really like my culture, you really like it.

Along the same lines, I see no reason why a non-Hispanic person should get figuratively tarred and feathered for writing a novel about the life of immigrants, as Jeanine Cummins did in writing American Dirt.

Okay, I’ve teased you long enough. Here’s my definition of Classic Woke:

A socially evolved state of mind that objects to discrimination against people based on their race, religion, or sexual preference. Further, it objects to the exploitation of resources and the environment.

Not giving someone a job because they’re a black, gay member of the Latvian Orthodox Church? That doesn’t cut it. Overestimating the demand for Wolverine collectible popcorn buckets and dumping the excess into the ocean? That’s plain wrong. Razing the Amazon to build the World’s largest pickleball megaplex? Not right, either.

Now, is being against any of those injustices an affront to Amurrican values? I don’t think so. In fact, I’m pretty sure Jesus, Lao Tse, the Buddha, and any other paragons of virtue would all heartily agree with my definition of woke, high-five each other, and then go over to Jesus’ house for a rousing game of Crazy Eights and some wine-soaked figs.

See? I make religious joke! Ha! Being Classic Woke doesn’t preclude jokes, doesn’t preclude makin’ whoopie, doesn’t preclude occasionally political in-correctness.

Watch me say something inappropriate:

BOOBS!

Yes, we can be immature and exhibit a little benign objectification and none of us grow a tumor in response.

None of this is to say that some of the politicians who were ensorcelled by the New Woke people were big fans of Classic Woke. Take the governor of a certain Southern state, for instance, who brags about making it an “anti-woke”. What he’s saying to anyone with analytical skills is that he’s racist or at least racist leaning; doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the environment; and he’s anti-LGBQT. Further, he bans books that contain even a scintilla of wokeness in their pages.

People like him think wokeness is responsible for all the evils in society, but that’s not even worthy of a response. Suffice it to say Jesus would put them in a headlock and bounce their heads off the turnbuckle in what would likely be the world’s most lucrative pay-per-view event.

These politicians and their like-minded constituents also think that Classic Wokeness is unmasculine, downright wussy. Quite likely the people who believe that are practitioners of performative masculinity, i.e., the adoption of traits considered to be masculine to achieve acceptance in society.

Examples of this include being physically strong, not admitting pain, having dulled emotions, being “me first,” preferring violence to negotiation, “talking tough,” and having a profession not generally associated with women (operating a punch press instead of being a nurse).

Classic Woke defies those ridiculous tropes. Instead, it has its roots in biological masculinity, which puts males (and like-minded females) in the role of the defender of the weak, the oppressed, and the victims of discrimination. That is the very essence of wokeness, or at least Classic Wokeness.

But I understand that New Woke represents a pendulum swing, an opposite and forceful course correction – perhaps, I regretfully say, a necessary course correction -- to a lot of performative masculinity that’s plagued Western culture for the last several decades.

However, the pendulum will most assuredly swing back, hopefully to the middle where it will remain. Like New Coke, New Woke will be deemed a lesson-filled experiment and Classic Woke will be the drink of the day.

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