Cancel culture

The saddest, strangest thing about the ongoing saga of Chrissy Teigen is that Teigen herself doesn’t seem to realize what sort of saga it is. The swimsuit model-turned-influencer evidently believes she’s on a hero’s journey — the tragic sort, yes, but a hero nonetheless. The arc is familiar: from hubris to hamartia, peripeteia to anagnorisis. First the pride, then the fall, then, eventually, redemption and a rise from the ashes. But is the tale of Chrissy Teigen that kind of story? Teigen, a key figure in so many online draggings over the years, should know better.

If you've spent any time in the land of online controversies this week, you may have heard that Ellie Kemper, the effervescent star of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is in some scandalous trouble. ‘Oh great, Ellie Kemper is yet another rich white celebrity with a racist past,’ reads a headline at the AV Club, while Page Six crows, ‘Ellie Kemper once crowned queen at ball allegedly linked to white supremacy.’ The outrage stemmed from photos of the 41-year-old actress as a teenage debutante in 1999, when she participated in a debutante ball in her hometown of St Louis, Missouri — an event rendered automatically suspect to a certain subset of internet users given its location in a city below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Headed to the hospital recently for a rather unpleasant surgical procedure, I figured I’d bring a book to pass the down time. I was about to grab Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy, the novel I’d been reading about a nearly 20th-century Catholic postulant who may or may not have seen a vision of Christ and suffered stigmata on her hands and feet. But the thought of nurses and order-lies glancing at the title, thinking ‘pervert’ and perhaps surmising that my demise really wouldn’t be all that great a loss for human-kind dissuaded me. Instead I brought along the Buffalo News sports section. I told a Kentucky woman about this titular discretion.

Cancel culture, I’m sure you’ve heard, is everywhere. Not a day goes by without some sorry sap being caught out for tweeting The Wrong Take, wearing The Wrong Clothes, using The Wrong Word. It’s not just a cottage industry: the entire digital media ecosystem is predicated on cancellation: pick your target, call them out, watch them burn and reap the rewards. Does it have to be this way? What if we didn’t all get mad — we got even instead? What if everyone was equipped with the same tools as the online witchfinders general who police popular discourse? Almost everyone has been on the internet long enough to have something on there that could hurt them. If everyone was canceled, perhaps no one would be? Let’s call it the Cockburn guide to mutually assured cancellation.

Discerning cancellation connoisseurs so far have overlooked one of the most problematic boy bands of the 20th century — and it's time to change that. The American disco group the Village People features a cast of empenised individuals donning costumes that glorify toxically masculine tropes of the time: a police officer, a cowboy, a construction worker, a sailor, a biker and, bizarrely, a Native American (more on that later). This mono-gendered depiction of the local proletariat is laughably outdated. While some might say the only thing lesbians are actually good at is running nonprofits, today we know that Sappho’s daughters are just as good as men, probably better, at chasing down perps, roping steer and erecting skyscrapers. But let’s look at the music.

Dr Seuss books are getting canceled and I couldn’t be more envious. Earlier this month, the Seuss estate announced that it would discontinue publication of six of the author’s beloved children’s books after consulting with shrieking activists. The reason was that some of their illustrations depict blacks and Asians in offensive and outdated ways. From there, the flimsy dominoes of corporate America began to fall: eBay banished the titles from its online store; Universal Orlando announced it was ‘evaluating’ the theme park’s Seuss Landing area. All this is bad news for one of America’s most imperishable literary icons. Still...have you seen those book sales? In the first week of March, the top 10 children’s books on Amazon were all by Seuss, as were 23 of the top 30.