Fixing the heart!

Denny Carter wrote a couple days ago: If you "reject the message that some people should be at the top of the hierarchies of oppression, and others are meant to be at the bottom of that hierarchy, and that’s just the way it is," then your heart is "not in need of fixing in this way." Let's not be "ignoring people’s agency;" let's not be "treating them like empty, thoughtless vessels that can be infiltrated and propagandized and ultimately tricked into adopting a worldview in which some humans are more equal than others."

This discussion is from David Lynch Knew Our Hearts Needed Fixing, Denny Carter, Jan 17, 2025.

It's a perennial topic:

"I wrote in March 2023 about the eternal stream of bad faith necessary for the American right to believe in the myth of “wokeness” and to craft policies that extinguish the various forms of woke in American culture."

How about this, Carter suggests: "See the things that have made your heart so hideous and so horrible and, consequently, so very weak, and fix it before it’s too late."

"Maybe it’s always been that simple, to grab those with hate and fear in their hearts and minds and to tell them to stop it, stop being assholes, stop treating as subhuman those who do not look or speak or think like you. Your heart is blackened, poisoned, corrupted. Lynch’s instruction was direct: Recognize the corruption of your heart, become conscious of it, and fix the fucking thing. Gordon Cole did not dance around the cultural and political leanings and influences of those who might have made jokes at the expense of a transgender colleague. He did not ignore their petty hatred and discrimination against someone who may have challenged their bedrock views of sex and gender, or excuse those views because they did not know better."

We could keep it simple.

"I could have simply listened to David Lynch. Or more precisely, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole. It was Cole, played by the inimitable Lynch over three seasons of Twin Peaks, who cut right through the bullshit with which I have covered myself over these past couple years.

In a 2015 exchange with FBI Chief of Staff Denise Bryan, a trans woman who had risen through the Bureau’s ranks since last we saw her in the early 1990s, Cole (Lynch) reminds Bryan (played by David Duchovny) that he had stepped up in her defense when others in the FBI had mocked her transition. Cole is trying to darndest to extract information from Bryan in what is proving to be the culmination of a 25-year cold case when he delivers the line..."