Didn’t you know? Hashtags and publicity stunts are “changing the world” for the better? Thank God the Huffington Post is here to remind liberals of all the good they do – or would do, if empty gestures and moral preening actually accomplished something. Hash tags, silly street theater, bumper-sticker profundity, spewing cooked statistics and hypersensitivity to “micro-aggressions" – they’re all in the modern liberal toolbox.
And now, HuffPo writer Nina Bahadur wants to add cartoons to that mix in her piece, “How Women are Changing the World, Shown in Gorgeous Illustrations.” Cartoonish pictures about cartoonish gestures. How post-modern.
Bahadur’s article features several drawings by Peruvian artist María María Acha-Kutscher of recent liberal social demonstrations and complaints, from “Hands up, don’t shoot,” “slut-shaming” and America’s phony “campus rape epidemic.” Bahdur gushed, “Acha-Kutscher wants to make women’s participation in social movements more visible – and her gorgeous illustrations do just that.”
Really? Women’s participation in social movements isn’t already covered, if not hyped by the media? Because I’m pretty sure the feminist movement’s involvement in calling out campus rape, international women’s rights, abortion “rights” even school dress codes has been covered at length by the media, even receiving multiple shout-outs and endorsements by the White House.
And it doesn’t matter whether the causes or incidents the artist sites have any grounding in truth – Michael Brown never had his hands up in the fatal altercation with a Ferguson police officer. The woman carrying a mattress around Columbia University as “performance art,” to protest the University’s failure to expel a student she claims raped her? Turns out, she had a consensual sexual relationship with the student, and a university investigation couldn’t find cause for expulsion. But the presumption of innocence pales compared to an important gesture. And has an image ever screamed “ineffectual” like the first lady of the world’s remaining superpower showing her pouty face while holding a card reading #BringBackOurGirls?
But you know, celebrating each other for creating hashtags on Twitter and causing public disturbances to get covered by the evening news – it makes liberals feel good. And that’s change they can believe in.
