Victoria Cohen does not like the American reimagining the Holmes Canon in it’s elementary. She wrote a review, in which she used this joke.
“Lucy Liu [told] the Times, ‘It was a very big deal for me to play an Asian-American in Charlie’s Angels; Watson’s ethnicity is also a big deal’, as if someone had bet her £100 that she couldn’t cause at least three Conan Doyle fans to suffer a pulmonary embolism.
“Personally, I’d like to press Liu’s face into a bowl of cold pea soup for that statement. It’s not just her failure to distinguish between creating a new character and mangling a beloved old one (Tread softly! You tread on my dreams!), but the triumphant tone over such an appalling and offensive racial change. Let me be clear: I rather like the idea of an Asian Watson, but American? God save us all.”
Indeed. She has captured in two paragraphs the preciousness of the politically correct. Holmes is Victorian. He can be re-imagined… I enjoy the English modern version with its’ subtext that Holmes and Watson are gay, but the Septics tend to lose the very spirit of the canon in their adaptation. Their Holmes, like their remaking of the Office, loses the spirit of the original.
But Cohen was accused of being racist. Of causing offense.
This deeply offends me. As a wonderful English Blogger (whose blog, trickcyling for beginners, is still missed) said that if you do not enjoy having people tell you to ‘Piss off ‘you have no business in my trade. I expect to be offended, and I take quiet pleasure when the next proposed customer calls me a ‘fat arrogant white bastard…’ for he can at least put some effort in personalising his wish to avoid the institutionalised coercive care psychiatric units specialize in.
Coren tries to protest she was misunderstood, the joke was Anti-American. Well the politically correct chose to instead tweet that she was one. And that she broke Section 5… where any speech can get you arrested
As someone who remembers from childhood the timid, furtive voices of east European cousins on the phone – those few who had survived the concentration camps – who dared not speak freely from behind the Iron Curtain because they feared being tapped and followed, I am extremely offended by the suggestion that my own beautiful British society should become a police state, in which rudeness to these authority figures is punished by incarceration. But do I think the caller should be jailed for offending me? No, I think there should be no such thing as a speech crime. However foul a thing you want to say, you can say it freely as far as I’m concerned. And I’m including the skinheads who shouted “Yid” at me during my grandfather’s funeral.
Yet, even if you believe that offensive remarks should be proscribed by law, what about remarks that are misunderstood as offensive? It’s nigh impossible to speak without any risk of misinterpretation, especially when mobs are out there looking to be outraged.You don’t have to support the campaign to reform Section 5. But one day, your teasing dig in a colleague’s leaving card will be taken the wrong way; or your mobile phone comment will be misheard by passers-by in a crowded street; and then they will come for you
There should be no hate speech laws. There should be no blasphemy laws. The libel laws should be rewritten so you have to show direct financial damage.
The correct response to bad speech is more speech. If you do not like the gratuitous insult I threw in, then the comments are open for as many Sheep jokes you can tell about Kiwi men. Words will not kill you.
But if you have hate speech laws… the speech that is needed to stop damage, to end a disastrous policy… may not be given. And all will suffer. To protect some sensitive soul’s feelings.