“The brown-headed cowbird is an obligate brood parasite.” That’s the one thing I remember from “The Biology of Birds,” a class I selected to meet my undergraduate science requirement because it sounded easy and didn’t have a lab or require group work.
For those of you who may have been too busy taking actual science courses to learn what that phrase means, obligate brood parasites are the kind of birds that, because they can’t build nests of their own, lay their eggs in nests other birds have built, birds whose offspring are generally smaller and take longer to incubate. The parasitic bird hatches first, causing the host mother to cease incubating her actual offspring to tend to the imposter. Other times, the parasitic mother will destroy the host eggs after she lays her own, ending any competition from the get-go. Either way, the result is the same: an organism that can’t create something itself coopts another organism’s creation to further its own survival.
Culturally speaking, I worry that my generation of westerners has become a collection of obligate brood parasites. Like every generation before us, we want to see our values survive. Like our ancestors, we want to influence the world and leave our imprint on society. But unlike those earlier generations, we seem to have lost the ability to accomplish those goals by creating, building, inventing, and imagining. Rather, to better the world as we see fit, we employ the far more parasitic approach of seizing the nest someone else built and refashioning it to our liking.
Listen to the Internet cowbirds crowing for the nest builders to give them what they desire instead of just producing it themselves.
Feminists in the James Bond nest are insisting that they be given a female 007 while those who have infested the Ghostbusters nest scream “Misogynists!” and push the host hatchlings out of the tree the second they complain that the all-lady reboot with lazy jokes and “Scooby Doo: Monsters Unleashed”-looking ghosts sullies the beloved film of their youth.
Likewise, among LGBT advocates who want to see media for adolescents and children manifest acceptance of gay characters, we see something similar. Recently, some Twitter users plopped into Disney’s nest and demanded that the creators of “Frozen’s” first non-romantically entangled princess be given a girlfriend, while others parachuted into the Marvel nest and demanded that Captain America be liberated from his shackles of heteronormativity and be given a boyfriend.
Leftism Doesn’t Build Things
On the surface, all of this is rather confusing. After all, until recently,
if an Indian musician thought the works of Mozart didn’t reflect his culture, he didn’t start a “Give the Symphony a Sitar” hashtag campaign. Rather, he created his own compositions so that those who shared his culture, experiences, tastes, and values wouldn’t be left out. So if feminists want a super spy or a fighter of phantasmal forces to call their own, why don’t they, via novels or film or television or comics, create them instead of coopting Bond and the Ghostbusters? Likewise, if LGBT advocates believe the world will be better off with more lesbian princesses and out-and-proud superheroes, why don’t they produce this material themselves?
The answer, I think, is fairly simple.
During the feminist and civil rights movements, leftism (however vaguely that may be defined) didn’t build things. It changed things built by someone else. America, it perceived, had great potential, but was hamstrung by the bigotry and moral failings of its founders, bigotry and moral failings passed down to those currently controlling the governmental, societal, and cultural strings.
Leftists took control of those strings and, at least in their minds, succeeded at bettering everyone, and those who came of age in subsequent decades essentially came to believe that the most virtuous way to stamp out bigotry and discrimination was not to build something new but to overtake pre-existing institutions and fix what the builders did wrong. Quite simply, my generation doesn’t know how to create because we never bothered learning how, being taught from the cradle that honing our parasitic skills was a better use of our time.
This is why the average young adult who needs GPS to find anything beyond three blocks around his apartment can’t make it through Columbus Day without proclaiming his moral superiority over the Italian explorer—because, in his mind, embracing diversity and checking his white privilege on American soil is a greater accomplishment than discovering American soil. It’s also why your average high school student who can’t write a thesis statement feels not an ounce of inferiority when comparing herself to Thomas Jefferson. After all, writing the Declaration of Independence is a fine accomplishment, but it’s nothing compared to picking the racist twigs out of the Founding Fathers’ nest by shouting “slave rapist” every time his name is invoked.
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The rise of cultural parasites (Read 1012 times)
