"The editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada’s magazine has resigned after complaints over an article he wrote in which he said he doesn’t believe in cultural appropriation."

I'm trying to figure out how lame this is and what's the lamest thing about it... that writers have a union, that the union has a magazine, that writers care what's in their union magazine, that a guy who edited a writers' union magazine put the teensiest edge into some damned opinion column and the rank-and-file writers — people presumably earnest about the interests of writers as employees — got him ousted from his job... or that picture of the editor, the downcast outcast.

But let's look at the details. In a column that was published in a special issue about "indigenous writing," Hal Niedzviecki wrote:

"In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities. I’d go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”

He went on to argue that Canadian literature remains “exhaustingly white and middle class” because writers are discouraged from writing about people and places they don’t know....

Apologizing "unequivocally" for Niedzviecki's column, The Writer’s Union of Canada said:

“The intention behind the magazine is to offer space for honest and challenging discussion and to be sincerely encouraging to all voices. The Union recognizes that intention is not enough, and that we failed in execution in this instance. We offer the magazine itself as a space to examine the pain this article has caused, and to take this conversation forward with honesty and respect,” the statement concluded.

Of course, "all voices" does not include the voice that says a writer can imagine and depict all sorts of characters and isn't confined to the old write-what-you-know advice. But the criticism of Niedzviecki doesn't seem to be about the crusty old advice. It's about getting out of the way so that the people who are in the know will have a better chance at gaining a readership. It's: You need to shut up so I can be heard.

That said, it was kind of awkward to stick that essay in a special issue devoted to writing by indigenous authors. I haven't seen the magazine, but it seems that one of the articles in it — by Alicia Elliott (an "indigenous Tuscarora author") — was about cultural appropriation. Niedzvieki edited her piece and then put his own opinion in the same issue, undercutting her.

Writers and cultural appropriation — we talked about this subject last September, when the writer Lionel Shriver gave a speech at Fiction and Identity Politics conference in Australia. She caught hell after saying things like:

Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.

Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesn’t belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. We wouldn’t have most of Graham Greene’s novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.

In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginal’s voice – though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.

"How did the left in the West come to embrace restriction, censorship and the imposition of an orthodoxy at least as tyrannical as the anti-Communist, pro-Christian conformism I grew up with?"

"Liberals have ominously relabeled themselves 'progressives,' forsaking a noun that had its roots in 'liber,' meaning free. To progress is merely to go forward, and you can go forward into a pit. Protecting freedom of speech involves protecting the voices of people with whom you may violently disagree. In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today."

Writes Lionel Shriver, in a NYT op-ed titled "Will the Left Survive the Millennials?" Obviously, Shriver isn't a millennial himself, since he seems to remember the Skokie case. He remembers it in a distorted fashion, which might suggest that he's quite old and his memory is failing, but he must be younger than I am, because I remember being in law school — I started in 1978— with students who were questioning whether they could support the ACLU anymore because it had defended the right of the Nazis to march not just "down Main Street," but through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood (one with many Holocaust survivors).

Now, I'll look up Lionel Shriver. Oh! She — she! — is only 6 years younger than me. She was 20 when the Skokie case came out in 1977. I guess it depends on the meaning of "youth." But how did she come to be named Lionel?

Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver on May 18, 1957, in Gastonia, North Carolina, to a deeply religious family (her father is a Presbyterian minister). At age 15, she informally changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she did not like the name she had been given, and as a tomboy felt that a conventionally male name fitted her better.

Okay with me. I'm a strong supporter of the freedom to be as masculine or feminine as you want while identifying as male or female.

Shriver writes novels, the most famous one seems to be "We Need to Talk About Kevin," and the new one is "The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047."

ADDED: After writing this, I saw that I had another Lionel Shriver tab open in my browser: "A Defence of Lionel Shriver: Identity Politicians Would Kill Literature if They Could."

To put it uncharitably, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a sensitive plant, had a tantrum during the keynote address by Lionel Shriver. Her ire was caused — or triggered, as the kids say — by what is a very conservative notion nowadays: writers of fiction can write about whatever they damn well please.

And here's that keynote address: "I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad."

The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats....

If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.

"The story of Trumbo is a reminder that efforts to control screen content had existed in the past and there's always the chance..."

"... that in some case the political winds will shift and some of those ideas will become popular again in the future," says Jeff Smith, a University of Wisconsin film professor, expressing great pride in The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, a huge archive which includes — among much else (as you'll see in this short video) — materials relating to Dalton Trumpo Trumbo and Hollywood's era of "blacklisting":



As you may have noticed, there's a new movie, "Trumbo," starring Bryan Cranston.

ADDED: The commenters enjoyed my "Trumpo" for "Trumbo" typo, above, which I've preserved with a strike-through. Meaning was striven for: "Maybe AA typo'd 'Trumpo' because she sees Donald Trump as a maligned avatar of truth that the establishment is trying to suppress."