The World of Standardless Standards

A month or so ago, a friend who blogs (who doesn't 😄) said that he had been been given one of those anonymous chides from the internet monitors of his platform that there were episodes of his blog (and not new entries) that went against their "community standards", or had "sensitive content".

And then about a week ago, it happened to me. Well, actually, it happened to my late father, because it was one of his semi-autobiographical stories that I put on this site in 2017! that was flagged as follows and of which I was notified in January 2023:

Sensitive Content Warning

This post may contain sensitive content. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about our content policies, please visit the Blogger Community Guildelines.

I UNDERSTAND AND I WISH TO CONTINUE I do not wish to Continue

It was clearly urgent that this happen now, after five years. 

The story was "Giulia". It was the tale of a young WWII serviceman, stationed in Italy, specifically, Florence, during that late conflagration of the 1940s (do they teach WWII in school now) and of the young woman with whom he lived for a time. I couldn't remember much of it, so I re-read it, giving myself a statistical hit for the who reads the thing meter, and I printed it out to give it a good once over to see what exactly was the problem. It is a dark story in some ways, but less dark than what passes for entertainment without restriction today. For example, I offer a recent entry on national television--the Satanic Grammys. Viewer discretion, you think?  In any case, in "Giulia", the narrator goes to a theatre during the war, in an American uniform, with few of the other attendees so attired. He is seated next to a beautiful girl. The performance proceeds. Then the Master of Ceremonies speaks vehemently against the Allies and the Italian girls who agreed to be bedded by them. It gets ugly, and the girl urges the young man to leave, fearing for his life, and for hers, which he cannot comprehend. They had merely been seated next to one another.

After that, they began a relationship, and her history, including being of Jewish ancestry, having been previously married, and having spent time with a "black shirt" one of Mussolini's military thugs of the time, with a changed identity, her life had been a sad one. But the narrator of the tale, in some part, perhaps large part, a true one, enjoyed her company as well as her enthusiasm for the Art of Florence, and together they lived. He would discover that her sadness was enhanced by the cocaine addiction she had acquired along the way. He was innocent to the depths of human misery before he came to War. She knew, and he knew that their time was short, as he would get orders one day to leave. And so he did, in 1945, leaving while she slept. 

Was it the mention of Mussolini that caused a red flag? The fact that he was executed along with his mistress--a reality that the fictional girl in the story resonated with because she too had been the mistress of various men? Was it the use of a slightly salacious word--hardly one that would rise to the level of a simple rap song or anything on any streaming service, or some video game? Was it the mention of cocaine? Are the impressionable of today (like there are any) unaware of its existence, and of addiction? Was it about the fact these two lived together?  Well, pretty much half or more of the population today does that. Was it the reference that one of the girl's lovers had "taken her", a disguised, benign phrase for a violent act that even Captain Rhett Butler did to Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 movie "Gone with the Wind" a film which itself gets censored all over the place? Was it the mention of anti-semitism? You can go on You Tube and see anything about that from the same period, with the evil gore documented fully. You can see virtually anything on You Tube, unless it goes against some view that has been denominated "misinformation". 

I did ask the censor in reply to their e-mail to me, but I do not recall getting a response. I agree it is a sensitive context.  Is it a mature story? Yes. But no more or less than a multitude of things that do not have discretionary "Buttons". And no more or less than a society which has denominated all sorts of things good, which are in fact objectively evil, as out there for all to see. Boys and Girls and Children of all Ages! Well, are we allowed to say "boys and girls"? In some places, no. And that's the problem. 

The standards for what is seen, what is written, what goes against community standards, what is sensitive, and what is done are no longer in any sense objective, deriving from long standing principles of philosophy and theology, of natural law, of the laws of nature scientifically speaking. Standards are the gut reaction of whoever has power and whoever has power shifts as do the things which the powerful consider valid. I would understand and even agree to a discretionary button on this story if this society and its leaders, the important, the famous, the known and unknown, had even a modicum of consistency that was driven by an IDEAL, of what we in Catholic circles (also getting the discretionary button in a sense), The Good, the Beautiful and the True. There are two standards for everything, but they are not what is good and what is bad or evil. It is about what someone feels and can enforce no matter what anyone else believes, and what they do not. X and Y engage in the precise behavior. But only X is brought on the carpet because X has the wrong ideas, the wrong thoughts as pronounced by the ones who have the bull horn. The bull horn now is the media, the government and the university, all of them oozing their way into religion so that the secular and the religious are indistinguishable. 

The standard is no standard. Or, I suppose the standard is "Because I say so" and who says so isn't your mother or dad, but some faceless administrator in a permanent job no one voted for, or can speak to, and with no clear guideline as to when something is valid or invalid, except the undependable gut reaction. 

I can't do anything about the standardless bearers who have put a button on a wonderfully written tale. My dad wasn't famous like Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut, or JD Salinger, whose Catcher in the Rye, with the applicable curse words I read in my Catholic High School, but surely his carefully worded story doesn't violate any community guideline in that universe. Unless one applies the moveable standards without that precious equity that I keep hearing about that has nothing really to do with any meaningful equality. 

Well, it's a really good story, and I'm hoping that the button that suggest "discretion" will be a draw to something which was well written and sad and real--because it was semi-autobiographical. My father did live with a young woman in Florence for two years. She had been with a "black shirt'. She did have a cocaine addiction. And he understood and felt her sadness for 50 years after he had to leave her behind in a little apartment in Florence. This is history, writ large and personal. 

And compared to what's out there, that is not denominated "sensitive", it's tame stuff. If this were sixty or seventy years ago, when the there were indexes of immoral movies and books, I'd say, yeah, put on a discretionary button. But until we have a consensus as a society once again as to what can and cannot be written and spoken without restriction, this just is random application of a rule without consistency.

The good news is that I corrected some typos in the original rendition of the story. So thanks to the reviewers.