Origingally pulished on Facebook in 2015.
My mind just drew an interesting mental parallel between the Lovecraftian protagonist exposed to some cosmic terror so vast that it drives him mad, and the crusader who claims to have injured by exposure to offensive language in fiction, or depictions of gay people on movies or television.
The sanity of the poor Lovecraftian protagonist shatters because his skull is not large enough to accommodate the vast implications of, let’s say, a giant guy with bat wings and an octopus for a head.
Put any fondness you might have for Lovecraft aside and think about how LAME that is, by today’s standards.
We have lived to see Bart Simpson *skateboard* off Cthulhu.
You can buy a Cthulhu plushie toy.
The *sight* of Cthulhu is no longer terrifying to us.
The crusader claims that his skull is not large enough to avoid injury from the use of language or the depiction of human beings who may off-screen engage in practices counter to his religious beliefs, even if those practices are not actually shown in the dramatic presentation in question; i.e. Mitch and Cam on MODERN FAMILY, who bicker like the old married couple they now are, but are also never actually shown in bed. (Or for that matter doing anything beyond the sweetly romantic; you will, for instance, never see a funny episode driven by Cam’s trip to the store to buy lube.) Still, their existence implies great horrors, and so the crusader feels the wound created when an alien premise tries to fit into an aperture too small for it. (Speaking of lube.)
This is not just about depictions of gay people; it is about anything the crusader considers shocking.
The crusader does not want to be exposed to alien thoughts, alien cultures, alien religions, alien premises, alien vocabulary, even in implication, because just the exposure, itself, is a wound; therefore, such things must be removed from the culture at large, to protect any who share his own personal lack of elasticity.
It’s a cry that the crusader’s rigidity needs to apply to the rest of us.
I suspect that the crusader is doomed, though, because the more any mind is stretched to accommodate new premises, the more welcoming it becomes to new premises after that.
Hollywood used to cut out any scenes involving black people who weren’t toadying servants from movies intended to be shown in the deep south. The very *sight* of them was considered more than many white audiences could handle. The race problem in the United States is far from resolved, but by God you can sure go see a Denzel Washington movie at the mall in the most regressive white enclave in Alabama. And if it misses your local multiplex, you can sure buy the DVD. The culture’s mind got stretched, by that little bit. As a result, THE DEFIANT ONES and IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, which were once considered hard-hitting and shocking, are now merely very good movies, because the stories work. Skulls and the minds inside them became more elastic, more accepting of premises they were once too small too accommodate. Which is why the crusader, the one who looks at the mild antics of MODERN FAMILY and screams, “They’re shoving their lifestyle down our throats!”, the one who objects when he finds some mild questioning of religion in a work of fiction, is arguing only to retain his own paralysis in the face of changing data …which renders him more and more irrelevant, and sickened by changing times, as the world evolves around him.
Or to put it another way: a Lovecraftian protagonist might gibber in insanity at the very first glimpse of a giant octopus man, and I suppose many of the fantasy-adverse would have the same reaction….but I suspect that those of us who have spent much of our lives watching STAR TREK and reading Heinlein and Stephen King and Harlan Ellison and whatnot would just say, “Oh. Look. A giant octopus man. That’s *interesting.* Here I am, not going insane. I can deal with this. Now, tell me more.”
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