Too Cool for Jazz Hands

A friend of mine recently pointed out that, apparently, some people are put off by the jazz hands used in the consensus process. I was a little taken aback - I mean with everything wrong with this country and the world, there are people who are dismissive of the first real attempt to do anything about it in years by jazz hands?


I'm loathe to address the substance of the issue - since there really is no substance to the issue - but here it goes: Jazz hands, like clapping, is a way for a large group of people to communicate approval; however, jazz hands, unlike clapping, is silent and therefore, allows the speaker to continue speaking while getting feedback from the group. That's all. It's actually critical to the consensus process.

In one sense, such issues are really so trivial that they're not worth addressing. But, of course, we live in the era of hipsterdom, where mockery avoidance has taken on the status of a religious quest:

It was this same lack of ironic self-awareness (or rather, this absence of any sort of mockery-avoidance technology) that led my generation to pillory the hippies and progressives–that’s why we were South Park Republicans before we were Daily Show Democrats: because back then, standing for liberal values meant something, and that made you look lame. Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into mythology and all they stand for is “not as crazy or stupid as Republicans” is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this generation’s highest value....

I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been the Great Dream of my generation: to position ourselves in such a way that we’re beyond mockery. To not look stupid. That’s the biggest crime of all–looking stupid.

Also, I was struck by something Matt Taibbi said in a recent blog post about the ridiculously trivial grounds that were used - successfully! - to discredit 1960s protests:

The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the [OWS] movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

And, apparently, their jazz hands.

After some reflection on the fact that there are people who are dismissive of an intensely substantive protest movement on the basis of trivialities like jazz hands, what came to mind is people who dismiss Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the basis of its name. And believe me, there are such people. Here's the bottom line: If you dismiss OWS on the basis of jazz hands or BtVS on the basis of its name, it says nothing about OWS or BtVS, but it says all anyone needs to know about you.