Cancel Culture

by Madeline Fry | November 04, 2019 03:49 PM

The problem with discussions of "cancel culture" is that no one really knows what cancel culture is.

To those who see it as a growing problem, cancel culture develops when an otherwise acceptable person gets blacklisted, usually for a politically incorrect comment or an old tweet. It is the modern, nonviolent version of the political purge.

To critics of the concept, "cancel culture" is just a trending term for "consequences."

One thing that separates a culture of canceling from a culture of consequences is this: With consequences, people can appreciate the distinction between the errors someone regrets and the errors the person persists in committing, unrepentant. Consequences are traditionally tempered by forgiveness. Not so in cancel culture — and those who argue that cancel culture isn't a real thing are either clueless or pretend to be clueless about this distinction.

Aaron Calvin, a journalist, is part of this clueless school. He caused a local celebrity to get blacklisted by bringing up the man's old tweets from when he was a sophomore in high school. The man, 24-year-old Carson King, had turned a jocular plea for beer money into a fundraiser for a children's hospital, raising $11,000 for charity and earning a matched donation, as well as a year's supply of Busch Light.

When Calvin wrote a profile on King for the Des Moines Register, he shoehorned into the piece a note about a couple of racist tweets from King's high school days. When Calvin mentioned the tweets to King, who has since deleted them, King said that they made him "sick" and clearly expressed contrition. These tweets were clearly not reflective of who King was or the work he was doing. Yet Calvin included them anyway.

King lost his sponsorship from Anheuser-Busch InBev as a result, and the story exploded nationally. Some people did some sleuthing of their own and discovered that Calvin, too, had a "problematic" Twitter past. The Des Moines Register fired Calvin for his old tweets. Now that the dust has settled, he would like to rewrite the narrative.

Rather than express remorse for what happened to King, Calvin blew past the irony of a cancel-culture scold getting canceled himself. In an article published by the Columbia Journalism Review on Monday, Calvin wrote, “I still don’t believe in the boogeyman of cancel culture. I was not ‘canceled’; Gannett chose to fire me. That’s an important distinction.”

It's a rather silly comment, as one could, theoretically, say the same of every other victim of cancel culture.

Kevin Hart wasn’t “canceled.” The Academy Awards chose to rescind his opportunity to host the Oscars.

Sarah Silverman wasn’t “canceled.” Moviemakers just told her she could no longer star in an upcoming film.

Fiction writer Kosoko Jackson wasn’t “canceled.” He just chose not to publish his book after a Twitter mob attacked it.

Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn wasn’t “canceled.” Disney just fired him over tweets for which he had already apologized.

And so on. Calvin now has to argue that he wasn't canceled, though, because otherwise he'd have to acknowledge the damage he did to King and accept the poetic justice of his own cancellation.

“There was never any attempt to 'cancel' Carson King,” Calvin wrote, just before acknowledging that there was an attempt to cancel King: “Anheuser-Busch withdrew its association with King and its donation of a year’s worth of beer.” Other, less vindictive members of his community rallied around King to protect him. From this, Calvin concludes that no damage was really done, and that he himself, Calvin, is the real victim.

“I believe I was scapegoated by a corporation trying to preserve its bottom line,” he wrote.

It's impressive how many lines in this article could also apply to King and would perhaps better apply to him.

In the end, Calvin's apologia is a humorous exercise in evading self-awareness and misunderstanding social trends. King and Calvin both got "canceled." Even if they turn out all right in the end, that doesn't mean they didn't suffer from a vindictive culture that should be eradicated, which prefers the destruction of the contrite over forgiveness.

“I wish Gannett would have taken into further consideration how I’d represented myself as an employee,” Calvin lamented. “But rather than trust the character I’d established in the newsroom and work with me to help address the anger, misunderstanding, and misinformation in the community, they vindicated bad-faith attacks and allowed disingenuous arguments to influence their decisions.”

Again, that's cancel culture in a nutshell: A bloodthirsty mob chooses a victim, public perception defeats that person's actual intentions or sincere apologies, and the poor scapegoat is driven away. It's impressive, albeit in a depressing way, that Calvin can somehow manage to write this, yet not comprehend his own role in harming someone else with "bad-faith attacks" and "disingenuous arguments."