Editor’s note: Another one of the pieces lost in the restore.
Exactly what is “cancel culture?”
You might be surprised to learn the answer. I know I was.
Pick one of these three choices:
— banning display of the Confederate flag
— removing Al Franken from the U.S. Senate
— ending the telling of ethnic jokes
Well?
According to Dictionary.com:
“Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Al Franken.
I’m pretty sure no one ever got cancelled faster for doing less than the former senator from Minnesota, The above photo was from the USO tour Franken and others took in 2006 to Iraq. It was three years before he became a senator, and numerous people who were on the trip said it wasn’t as bad as it looked, but Franken essentially … well … got canceled.
And he was a very good senator. In fact, in 2017 people were talking him up as a good candidate to run against Donald Trump in 202o.
Jimmy Fallon got hit too, although he seems to have survived it. Fallon’s sin was wearing blackface in a skit on Saturday Night Live years before he had the Tonight Show. J.K. Rowling was canceled for being “transphobic, by among others, Hermione and Ron.
Whatever happened to “I’m sorry and I won’t do it again?” Or perhaps, “I didn’t know. I was wrong and I’ll never do it again.”
My friend Mitch felt “woke” because he started calling gay men “homos” instead of “queers.”
Hey, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
Sure, we still have bigotry and sexual harassment, but digging back into people’s past and finding things they did years and years ago just isn’t right.
Even in the case of criminal acts, there is only one crime — murder — for which there is no statute of limitation. Everything else goes away, sooner or later.
It simply isn’t fair to practice zero tolerance — a dumb idea as it is — for things that happened a generation ago, weren’t meant to be mean and weren’t even bothersome to the person they were aimed at. Fallon was playing Chris Rock in a 2000 sketch on SNL, and Rock said he didn’t personally have any problem with it.
There really is a difference between guys like Franken and Fallon and guys like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby.
Of course folks on the far right have twisted the term “cancel culture” into something it was never meant to be. They say taking down Confederate statues and changing the names of military bases is cancel culture. It just isn’t true, except in very rare cases.
When they tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, they were canceling a culture that had been imposed on them by a tyrant. It’s just not the same as taking down statues of Confederate generals who were at war with the United States.
Many of those statues — and many of the Confederate flags people flew — weren’t even up before the 1950s, when Southern states were fighting to preserve their great heritage of Jim Crow laws.
And when people like Marjorie Taylor Greene whine about “cancel culture,” mostly they’re talking about their right to incite people against their political adversaries. It has been argued for many years whether freedom of speech only refers to political speech, and while I don’t tend to agree with that, I have always thought it was a mistake to include blatant lies as protected speech.
I got two separate 30-day sentences in Facebook Jail for what was called hate speech. In both instances, they were for something I had posted seven years earlier.
Before you think I was too hateful, in both cases I was posted about how religious fundamentalism was one of the world’s biggest problems. I referred to fundies in the three Abrahamic religions as Muzzies, Jujubes and the Jebus Folk. When I look at it now, I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t come up with something better, but I don’t see anything hateful there.
I’m sorry to have to say this, but to me, cancel culture can basically be summed up in one three-word phrase I hate.
Holier than thou.
Maybe someday we’ll get past that, but I’m not holding my breath.