In the first week of April, 2012, the UI College Republicans again held their annual “Conservative Coming Out Week,” encouraging young conservatives to be “open and honest” about their opinions in the overwhelmingly liberal Iowa City. And, predictably, there was again the annual backlash from many people generally and the LGBT community specifically—decrying their mockery by using words like offensive, demeaning,and insulting.
Now while it’s understandable to respond this way, it’s also very easy. And it’s even easier to just say "Fuck You," as UI anthropology professor Ellen Lewin did via email in 2011.
But what these knee-jerk criticisms overlook is that there’s already a perfectly good name for groups of snarky non-conformists who proudly distinguish themselves via irony. We call these people hipsters.
And while the conventional hipster might “rebel” against the “mainstream” by ironically sporting a Justin Bieber t-shirt or drinking the working man’s PBR, the UI College Republicans rebel by ironically adopting the “coming out” rhetoric of the LGBT community, which is of course a major presence within the city’s liberal “mainstream” they’re trying to set themselves apart from.
(It’s tempting here to speculate that Friday’s full moon ushered in the completion of this hipster transformation by driving swarms of young conservatives to loiter outside typical hipster haunts like the Deadwood or Ragstock, suddenly overcome by the strange urge for vintage shoelaces or off-brand beers, but I will not speculate on this. That would be unfair.)
The primary difference between the UICR hipsters and conventional hipsters is that the UICR hipsters are cowards.
A conventional hipster will recognize and take ownership of their use of irony, while the UICR seems committed to insisting, as their President John Twillman said last week, that they “are in no way mocking anyone or anything,” and that they’re “just trying to be open and honest with people.” It’s unnecessary here to point out, for instance, that one of their scheduled events includes an “Animal Rights BBQ” or to refer to the opening line of their mass e-mail to the UI student body: “Conservatives in Iowa City: It is time to come out of the closet!” (a much more obvious mockery of the LGBT community) to realize that Tillman’s statement is at best insincere and at worst moronic.
Alas, all one needed to do to get a sense of how the UICR really feels about it was to walk by their info-stand last week and have a gander at the gaggle of *expletive*-eating grins occasionally creeping across volunteers’ faces as they sneeringly replied to passing remarks about their insensitivity with the age-old irrelevancy It’s our First Amendment right to say this stuff!
I’ll put aside the fact that the appropriate human response to “You’re being offensive” is not “The law says I can,” and say that if there’s anything to mount in their defense, it’s that I truly don’t think their intention was to be simply offensive. I think their intention was to be provocative.
They want to use the resulting attention to do just what they claimed: to encourage more young conservatives to be open and honest about their views.
But you have to wonder: what kind of people does this cavalier brand of mockery really attract? Who is turned on by this? Is it the sincere, judicious political mind who carefully and civilly articulates their views? Does it attract anyone with even the barest amount of sympathy for those whom “coming out” is a life-defining and often physically dangerous endeavor? Who, or what, exactly, are they encouraging?
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