Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: March 04, 2021 10:37AM
A lot of purposeful misreading going on here, but I'll leave that aside.
Historical Note:
To "cancel" something or someone, in the recent usage, arose, as far as I can see, from "black twitter", at least that is where I first came across it three or four years ago. It was the word used by left wing activists that right wingers properly picked up to create "cancel culture" as a term for criticism.
But the right wing has long been associated with what we today call "cancel culture", with a long, infamous track record of elaborately funded and boosted campaigns to "cancel", or censor aspects of our culture. No need to go as far back as the the attempted cancelling of James Joyce, DH. Lawrence, Henry Miller, or the famous trial over Ginsberg's poem "Howl". The 80s, the time when I became politically conscious, was rife with right wing attempts to practice cancel culture.
LA Times, 1989:
"It has been, say Krug and other censorship experts, a confluence of moralistic social ferment driven by values dictated by fundamentalist Christianity and a not-unrelated conservative political agenda that demands that government get off of the backs of the citizenry but at the same time require conformity with stricter and more subjective moral standards.
"The trends monitored by Krug have affected primarily the visual arts and literature. However, government censorship dominated broadcasting in the 1980s, too. A long-dormant Federal Communications Commission, spurred to life by religious lobbies such as the American Family Assn. and Morality in Media, began cracking down on radio and television programs that the commission found indecent."
But on a hopeful note, Americans at the time didn't put up with it:
"But as the decade comes to an end, Krug sees a curious result. While there is no question, she says, that the number of censorship incidents has increased and continues to grow, a strengthening of the will to resist appears to have developed, too. After all, while fundamentalists attempted to completely suppress the film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” the picture was released and found perhaps a greater audience than it might have if the censorship campaign had not been mounted."
But, as the 90s were about to begin, the article ends on a caution:
"'By 1989, groups that were using censorship became much more effective. The targets were everything from great literature--'Of Mice and Men,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ to sex-education curricula.'
"The way Kropp figures the equation, the ‘80s are ending with ample cause for alarm still recognizable. 'The climate seems to be--and has over the decade become--much more hospitable to censorship,' he said. 'It’s not such a bad word any more, and, very frequently and more and more, becoming a very useful political tool.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-25-ca-781-story.htmlToday's left-wing is now avowedly and shamelessly pro-censorship. They learned well how to make cancel culture into a "very useful political tool." The ACLU has even turned against it's old principles and have jumped whole-heartedly on board.
Now, to what personally pisses you off is none of my concern, it is irrelevant to the OP. Whether it's 80s rap lyrics, Piss-Christ or the images of Robert Mapplethorpe, on the right hand, or a handful of Dr. Seuss books on the left hand, I don't care. Both sides use the exact same arguments to justify their call and approval of censorship, of cancelling, of ridding the culture of that which they find offensive.
The bottom line is this idea of ridding our culture of that which offends. Culture is often offensive. I personally find 90% of Netflix egregiously offensive to every aesthetic instinct in my body and mind, on a myriad of grounds. But so what? Cancel Netflix? Well I did. Cancel it for everybody else because of my taking offence? Hardly.
Whether it's values "dictated by fundamentalist Christianity", as it was in the 80s, or values dictated by Wokism, for lack of a better term, today, I'm not on board. The answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. And everybody gets to talk about what they think is bad speech, whether they are woke or not, fundamentalist or not.
And to those that applaud the current fashion for woke censorship, don't be surprised if tides change again and that which you agree with, that which you find necessary, gets censored; except this time, unlike in the 80s, you will have no principles to fall back on, since you take up the exact, same cudgel to pound upon what you found offensive.
Human