So. There’s this chap. White. Expensively dressed. Currently touring Australia with a performance style we could call “Racist Pantomime”. He’s a chap whose name you’ve probably heard. As publishing this chap’s much-published name again is likely to give him small pleasure, we will resist. We will know him for our purposes today as, um, Ovaltine Phony. (With no contempt intended for delicious powdered drinks.)
Following this, we will then consider believing this chap is not the true problem.
There are those good people who disagree about the problem Mr Phony poses. They declare his true name; they say we must draw attention to his racism, sexism and alleged attachment to Nazism. Further, they say we must protest his appearances within our borders. This foul vaudevillian, they urge, must be silenced.
Sure. A world without the sound of Phony would be a little more musical. The noise he emits is always unpleasant, frequently hateful and, at times, potentially unlawful. It has been reported that Phony pulls the names and personal details of individuals during performance from his shiny conjurer’s hat. Even in the unlikely case you believe that Phony has some useful wisdom to bring, you are also unlikely to endorse this trick. Blameless people—often transpeople—whose one offence to Phony is that they continue to exist must not endure such cruelty.
Those who urge us to protest My Little Phony say that they are not enemies of free speech. Again, sure. Protest is an act of free speech. If it happens that some who protest or object to Phony are powerful people, we cannot conclude that all the people who protest him are powerful. Some of them are ticked off everyday people who feel affronted or endangered by his rot, and the expression of this is “free speech”. You’re not against free speech simply by the act of objecting to someone else’s. You’re just freely annoyed.
It’s possible that there are more people protesting For and Against Phony outside his Australian Hate dates than there are people in attendance inside. Some commentators have said that this is a drain on police resources. Which is possibly true, but also a consequence of the “free speech” we largely agree is ideal. Unfortunately, you and I don’t get to say, “this is worth protesting, but that certainly isn’t”. If I had my way, we’d all be protesting the NT “emergency response”, the power of the banks and skinny jeans. As I am yet to be crowned queen of all speech, people protest freely what they will.
As much as I dislike Phony, and the intellectual and ethical deficiency of a white West that can mistake his cruelty for courage or wit, I cannot be moved to protest him. While I affirm the right of Phony protest, whether for or against, I do not consider myself “part of the problem” for staying at home. When I ignore him, or refuse to write his name, I do so because I don’t believe that he is the most significant part of the problem.
Phony is to the “problem” as a symptom is to a disease. It is my view that silencing him is akin to avoiding a true diagnosis. Last year, I had a touch of skin cancer, which I covered with makeup for some months. “Helen! You don’t conquer the illness by banishing the sign of it,” said Dr Faiza, a bossy but excellent dermatologist.
Let’s say protesters put an end to Phony’s tour. I might commend their success in the short-term, and I’d quietly admire their success. I also fear that two things would then occur.
First, those attracted to Phony’s phony claims of being “silenced”—and this false underdog tactic is one many disagreeably loud people prefer—will be amplified by his few supporters. “We are being silenced by the powerful,” they will say, and they’ll believe it. And cynical people who have made careers through the claim that they, too, are being silenced will make another loud noise…and, three more months of Phony. A guy who has so little to say, other than that he is being “silenced”, all would tire of in any case.
Second, and most fatally, we fail to diagnose. What is the source of this Phony? What conditions allow him to emerge as a mildly popular figure? What can Phony tell us about the true ugliness of our Western present?
If we dispose of this unfortunate specimen and do not pause to take him to the lab, we overlook the cause of him. Phony is, in my view, awful. I’m just not convinced that he is “the problem”, but a small sign of a mutant illness we must study, then cure for good.
