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New Yorker: Parkland Anti-Gun Activist Is Like Joan Of Arc

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  April 06, 2018 6:15 PM

There is no doubt that Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, and David Hogg, are engaged and trying to get their peers to be just as energized to strip gun rights in America. This is America. Pushing for the repeal the Second Amendment and other forms of gun control that will undoubtedly lead to gun confiscation is your run-of-the-mill liberal view on the subject. Yet, let’s not kid ourselves that Gonzalez, for example, is a Joan of Arc figure. She’s getting involved in the political process. That’s fine. It should be encouraged (even if she’s wrong), but “Joan of Arc,” really? That’s apparently what some think after the March for Our Lives rally in Washington D.C. last month (via New Yorker):

…lifting her eyes and staring into the distance before her, González stood in silence. Inhaling and exhaling deeply—the microphone caught the susurration, like waves lapping a shoreline—González’s face was stoic, tragic. Her expression shifted only minutely, but each shift—her nostrils flaring, or her eyelids batting tightly closed—registered vast emotion. Tears rolled down her cheeks; she did not wipe them away.

[…]

In its restraint, its symbolism, and its palpable emotion, González’s silence was a remarkable piece of political expression. Her appearance also offered an uncanny echo of one of the most indelible performances in the history of cinema: that of Renée Maria Falconetti, who starred in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic silent film from 1928, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” Based upon the transcript of Joan of Arc’s trial, in 1431, Dreyer’s film shows Joan as an otherworldly young woman—she is nineteen, to the best of her limited knowledge—who, in the face of a barrage of questioning by hostile, older, powerful clerics, is simultaneously self-contained and brimming over with emotion.

[…]

González has said she cut her hair short because longer hair gave her headaches and made her neck hot, not because she was aiming to embody a cinematic interpretation of one of the heroines of history. But the parallel is striking, because González, with her fervor and her charisma, has already been claimed as this moment’s Maid of Orléans. “Getting serious Joan of Arc vibes from Emma Gonzalez,” Summer Brennan, the author, tweeted a couple of weeks ago; Victoria Aveyard, the author of the “Red Queen” series of Y.A. novels, told the Cut the same thing.

[…]

In the iconography of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Joan has authority not because she is wise but because she is innocent. She has the privileged knowledge of the inspired, not the earned knowledge of the experienced. The young people of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have already experienced more than their elders would wish upon them; their innocence is lost. Yet, like all young people, they’ve retained faith in their generation’s unique ability to challenge and rectify the failures of their elders.

Okay—I honestly don’t know if this is suppose to be serious? Joan of Arc I still can’t wrap my head around this. A Christian saint taking on the English occupation of France, fighting for her country’s freedom is akin to an anti-gun activist who is trying to strip our rights away. Whether it’s intentional or not—the Parkland Three’s—Kasky, Hogg, and Gonzalez—agenda will lead to the end of gun rights in America. Also, can we cut the crap about innocence being lost? School shootings are not a new event. Schools are safer than they were in the 1990s. Mass shootings are rare; school shootings are even rarer. These kids are not prophets. They’re not the next era of politics. They’re the same old and tired anti-gun campaigns in the past except that the Left has weaponized high schoolers to push their agenda. With Tide pod and hot stove challenges, let’s cool it with this notion that these kids are latest saints in American politics. Most of their peers are snorting condoms and less than half, when asked, are supportive of new gun laws.

It’s another example of liberals having no sense of history. Case in point, Lin Manuel Miranda was described as one of the most influential figures in American history. No. He’s famous. He’s talented. And he’s earned his much deserved success. Miranda being in the same class as Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—are we on bath salts?

Oh, yeah--and there was this correction from the original post: