Month: March 2021

CANCEL CULTURE: AN ADVENTURE IN MEANINGLESSNESS

Cancel culture has become the most insipid and meaningless term in our political lexicon. It needs to be, uhm, canceled. Posthaste.  

There was a time not too long ago, when cancel culture enjoyed a fairly specific meaning. Someone, typically a public figure, would say or do something offensive, usually of a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic or homophobic nature. (Think Roseanne Barr, Liam Neeson, Kanye West and J.K. Rowling.) Social media messages took out after them, calling for their contracts to be canceled and for consumers to stay forever clear of them. 

Although product boycotts and campaigns have been around longer than any of us, the concept of cancel culture, amped up by social media, emerged a couple of decades ago. Its roots, according to a Vox analysis, ironically stem from a misogynistic line in a 1991 film, New Jack City. In one scene, the protagonist’s girlfriend reacts to his relentless violence through a sobbing stream of tears. He immediately dumps her with this retort, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.”  

From those humble beginnings, emerged an etymological metamorphosis that left cancel culture meaning, well, almost anything.  Republicans said impeachment was all about canceling Trump. Trump said impeachment was all about canceling his supporters. Democrats said Trump’s election fraud con was all about canceling Joe Biden’s 81 million votes. 

Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney was accused by fellow Republicans of falling into line with “leftist cancel culture” for her vote to impeach Trump.  The former president’s loyalists staged an unsuccessful coup to remove her from a key House leadership position. Cheney’s supporters labeled the move, “totally GOP cancel culture.”

It gets worse. Republicans on Capitol Hill spent the past two weeks in a cancel culture meltdown over Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. They are still ranting about what they see as a far-left liberal conspiracy to remove racist drawings from children’s books, and to transition Mr. Potato Head into a gender-neutral toy. In both cases, the minimal tweaking involved was the work of corporate entities in the finest tradition of the free market system that Republicans once worshiped.  

Then there is Jenny Cudd, a 36-year-old florist from Midland, Texas. After forcing her way into the Capitol on January 6, Jenny did a Facebook live stream to announce that she and her fellow rioters had just broken down a door to get into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.  She was indicted last week on five charges related to that incursion. Her reaction:  “This is 100 percent cancel culture,” she said. “(They) are trying to cancel me because I stood up for what it is that I believe in.” Jenny, of course, is free to believe to her heart’s content in obstruction of Congress, trespassing and breaking and entering. If she engages in such activity, however, she is subject to arrest. That’s not cancelation culture; that’s law enforcement.

Freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, insisted that she too was a victim of cancel culture when the Democratic majority in the House, along with 11 GOP members, voted to strip her of committee assignments. This rare sanction was in response to Greene’s social media support for the lollapalooza of political cancelations, namely the murder of Speaker Pelosi and other prominent Democratic lawmakers. Far from being canceled, Greene continues to serve in Congress and spews forth inanities on a daily basis.

Lest you think this propensity to attribute every bump in the road to cancel culture is an inside-the-beltway affliction, take a look at New York’s embattled Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.  At last count, nine women, including former and current members of his staff, have accused him of sexual harassment or inappropriate touching. The state’s attorney general released a report showing that his administration had underreported the number of COVID deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.  An impeachment inquiry is underway and most of the state’s Democratic leaders have called for the governor’s resignation.  Cuomo’s response?  “This is cancel culture,” he said. “People know the difference between . . . bowing to cancel culture, and the truth. I’m not going to resign.”

It’s amazing the amount of work demanded from these two words.  At once, “cancel culture” must depict a presidential impeachment, a book publisher’s marketing plan, a Capitol rioter’s criminal defense, and the deletion of Mr. Potato Head’s honorific. On top of all that multitasking, the phrase is now being asked to save the political career of a governor credibly accused of serious wrongdoing. 

Linguists have a term for such overworking of a phrase. “Semantic bleaching,” according to University of Pennsylvania professor Nicole Holliday “. . . refers to the process where words don’t have the meaning they had before. (Through overuse) they come to mean nothing or something that is purely pragmatic, but not really laden with meaning.”

Oddly, this bleaching has removed all traces of red and blue from cancel culture, making it a bipartisan adventure in meaninglessness.  There may not be another force in the universe capable of creating a bond of unity between the likes of Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo in the way cancel culture has.

During their COVID war of words last year, Cuomo said Trump had been “dismissed as a clown” and was now “trying to act like a king,” adding, “The best thing he ever did for New York City was leave.”  For his part, Trump called Cuomo “a bully thug. . .who heads probably the worst-run state in the country.”

Yet, when the ill political winds blew their way, these two warring sons of Queens reached for the life raft of cancel culture. They both boasted of being men of the people, and thumbed their noses at the forces that were out to cancel them.  Said Cuomo last week, off a script Trump could have written: “I’m not part of the political club. And you know what? I’m proud of it.”

Here’s a modest proposal in the interest of national unity: We toss another cup of bleach into the semantic wash, and let Trump and Cuomo cancel each other out, both forever removed from the public stage.  And henceforth, we use the word “cancel” only in connection with an appointment, reservation or engagement. 

Imagine what that enormous reduction in toxic masculinity levels would do for our culture! 

POLITICIANS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS; THEY NEED TO STOP

Comparing Ted Cruz to a vampire  is out; comparing Hilary Clinton to the anti-Christ is in. Saying that Susan Collins is ignorant is out; saying that Rachel Maddow looks like Justin Bieber and should wear a necklace is in. Calling Mitch McConnell Lord Voldemort is out; calling Mitt Romney a pompous ass is in. Yes indeed, the hierarchy of vituperation has been reordered by those mavens of interpersonal communication known as the United States Senate.

Those outs came from Neera Tanden, the vanquished Biden nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget. The ins were from the mouths and Twitter fingers of, in the first two instances, Trump cabinet nominees confirmed by the Senate and, in the “pompous ass” example, from Trump himself, without a modicum of senatorial concern over decorum. 

All of those phrases exemplify disparagement through invective.  Such quips among like-minded folks may help reduce stress and win laughs. Viewed more widely, however, most linguists and conflict resolution experts will tell you that they are not conducive to crafting agreement among various factions (here, here and here).

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the Tanden confirmation battle totally evaded a serious – and long overdue – discussion about the role of civil discourse in governance. Instead, we got a Don Rickles cage fight over whose insults were the worst. 

Conservatives insisted that Tanden’s abrasive tweets disqualified her for the job because she insulted so many congressional leaders. Liberals trotted out a database of Trump’s 10,000 insults, along with impertinent slams from the former president’s cabinet nominees blessed by the Senate.  

Although she may well have been less offensive than her Republican counterparts, Tanden lost her confirmation battle over the slings and arrows of a churlish Twitter feed. In terms of distributive justice, the outcome was less than fair.  Others have said far worse and suffered no penalty.  

Yet, the saddest part of this whole episode is that it ended without any discussion, or even recognition, of the rampant degradation of political speech.  When our leaders routinely go for the jugular and deny or demean the humanity of partisan adversaries, they set the stage for the rest of the country.  That’s why, according to recent polling, 93 percent of respondents think incivility is a problem, and 68 percent see it as a crisis.  

The problem reaches far beyond the beltway.  A Democratic state legislator in New York tweeted this to a Republican staffer during the week before Christmas:  “Kill yourself.”  A  Republican official in Kansas took out over an American Indian running for Congress with this Facebook post: “Your radical socialist kick boxing lesbian Indian will be sent back packing to the reservation.”  

Then there is this tweet, from a Democrat running for Congress in North Carolina: “Screw they go low, we go high bullshit. When (GOP) extremists go low, we stomp their scrawny pasty necks with our heels and once you hear the sound of a crisp snap you grind you heel hard and twist it slowly side to side for good measure. He needs to know who whupped his ass.”

Apologists for this kind of toxic invective by political leaders are quick to note that the tradition dates back to the early days of the republic.  Thomas Jefferson reportedly called John Adams a “repulsive pedant” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character.”  Adams supposedly called Jefferson “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” However, without social media or cable television, Jefferson and Adams could hack away at each other all day without the rest of the country knowing about it. Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, a diabolical insult needs to be heard in order to do damage. 

And that is precisely what is happening now. Incivility, according to numerous studies, is contagious (here, here and here). Many otherwise genteel folks hear and read the gushing vitriol of their leaders, and then slowly amp up their own tone and volume when talking about politics.  Suddenly Thanksgiving dinner turns into a verbal Battle of the Bulge.  

Even more insidious, however, is that vitriolic political rhetoric is seen by many experts as a serious threat to our democracy.  Jeremy Frimer is a University of Winnipeg professor who studies the weaponization of incivility in politics.  Here’s what he wrote: “Incivility can create a sense that subjugating the rights of a political party is both justified and necessary, and thus leads to democratic collapse.”

Think back on the political messages floating around this past year.  How many times have Republican leaders used the term “socialist” to describe Democrats?  How many times have Democratic leaders used the term “racist” to describe Republicans?  In our world of endless metrics, it is remarkable nobody kept track.  Yet, a pollster tried to measure the impact of those pitches.  The result?  Eight of ten Republicans believe the Democratic party has been taken over by socialists, while 8 in 10 Democrats believe the GOP has been taken over by racists.  Add to that a “stolen election”, one imaginary and the other attempted-but-real, and you will have the perfect case study of how incivility can take us to the brink of insurrection.  

That’s why one-third of Americans who identify as Democrat or Republican believe that violence could be justified to advance their parties’ objectives.  That’s why our Capitol is currently surrounded by National Guard troops and razor wire-topped fencing.

I have no doubt that Neera Tanden would have made an excellent OMB director. Her apologies for the mean tweets were sincere and unqualified, (an object lesson for Andrew Cuomo). Pardon my wishful thinking, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if this whole sad episode turned into one of those infrequent aha moments? There are, of course, far better reasons for our leaders to lay off the name-calling. But if losing out on a Cabinet-level position gets some pols to dial it back a bit, so be it. Whatever it takes. Inertia is a potent force, but we Americans have changed directions many times in our history.  It’s time to do it again.

Before it’s too late.