You didn’t think I was going to tell readers to go fuck themselves and then move on, did you? I mean, that’s a pretty big matzah ball hanging out there, and not exactly effective blogging technique. Besides, I’m no hypocrite.
So I get ticked off when someone cancels plans with me at the last minute. Is that my ego talking? Very likely. Any negative emotion is the ego talking, because the ego never shuts the hell up. But is it also because I value my time, and don’t like having it squandered?
For sure.
But here’s the thing, and there’s really no way of getting around it:
Just because I’m offended, doesn’t mean I’m right.
Being offended is my choice, my responsibility. I could easily just blow it off. I could forgive that person immediately, chalking her insensitivity up to the fact that she lacks effective time management. Maybe she just doesn’t want to reveal the real reason she has to cancel, and it’s none of my damn business anyway. Maybe if I wasn’t so petty, I would approach my friend and engage in civil and mature discussion about how I feel..
But I choose not to. Rather, I shut down and choose to believe what I want to believe- that this person doesn’t value me, my time or our friendship. I don’t let her speak for herself, I just put up walls. It’s easier than discourse and it makes me feel holier-than-thou. So who is the real problem here?
I am. Because I am Cancel-Culture Cancelling Cancelers.
Bummer.
But can anything or anyone actually ever be cancelled? Just because I get angry and refuse to make active plans with someone who has cancelled on me in the past, does that mean that person stops canceling on others? Does that person shape up and improve, because I have made her see the error of her ways? If I text and email every single person I know and warn them about this canceller, do other people stop making plans with her?
Hell no. You know why? Because no one gives a shit about how I feel about cancellers. Maybe it doesn’t bother them. Maybe they’re cancellers, too. Maybe they don’t think getting cancelled is something to get all riled up about, because life is too short for such nonsense. Maybe they would tell me that it’s not worth ruining my day or a friendship over.
And they’d be right.
I’ll use another example. Let’s look at Babar the Elephant, the series of children’s books written by Jean De Brunhoff in the mid-20th century. Plot line: Babar is a baby elephant whose mother gets killed by a hunter, so he goes to the big city to get civilized, inevitably returning to the jungle to share his superior knowledge. I loved these books growing up, as anything unrelated to pachyderms has always been and will always be, for me, irrelephant.
(Ineffective puns aside),
In October of 2020, an argument was made that Babar books were actually an allegory for French colonialism in Africa. I mean, Babar returns to the jungle walking on two legs- of course the quadrupedal elephants think he should be king- after all, he is a civilized biped, and they are primitives! He is wearing a snazzy green suit, and they are unclothed! He has a personality and language, and they are gray, naked, mindless peasants! The book openly suggests that wouldn’t it be wonderful if every little orphaned elephant had a rich old white benefactress to clothe him and expose him to fine culture?
(This argument gets very complex, so please access the link below if you would like to read into it further. This post is not about implied racism in children’s books, although the subject is worth the conversation. Brunhoff died when he was only 37, so when his son continued to publish his father’s books, he admitted in 1991 that his father’s physical depictions of African Americans, while accurate as far as the people Jean met when he traveled, could be construed as racial caricatures. But it was how the African Americans physically looked when his father met them, and he meant no disrespect. Since then, the book Babar’s Travels has been reissued with a “racially sensitive” version).
Groups formed to enact vengeance on Babar, as groups do. Attempts were made to cancel Babar in the UK. Babar was taken out of libraries, schools and children’s bedrooms, to keep UK youth from seeing that pesky, uppity green-suited elephant. And we all know how effective it is to keep images and words and concepts (deemed “harmful” by thin-skinned intellectuals) away from our children. Works every time.
NOT.
Show me someone that believes in extinguishing ideas and words as a way to govern societal minds and I’ll show you someone who is sniffing elephant-book glue. Cancel Culture is dangerous, but more than that, it is collective stupidity. When easily-influenced people think and gather in groups, the capacity for good judgement can be severely reduced.
Sociological examples are ubiquitous. Read Lord of the Flies. Look up the Stanford Prison Experiment. Read the essay “Thresholds of Violence” by Malcolm Gladwell or his books, Outliers or Tipping Point. Groups “kill.” And as psychologist Solomon Asch said long ago:
If a majority of people embrace a manifestly false and idiotic theory, others will go along with it merely because of the power of conformity.
Take ten people, plop them down in a room with a pile of Babar books, and ask them to work together on the issue of French colonialism in the books. In another room, ask ten people to work on the same project, but ask each member to work alone. When they emerge, gather up the reports.
You will find that the proposals of the second group are richer and more plentiful- the ideas are provocative and varied, offering several different viewpoints. And the report from the first group?
One opinion. One idea. One viewpoint. And in one fell swoop, Babar is elephant toast.
Sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
Have a great weekend, because guess what? It ain’t cancelled.
https://www.ranker.com/list/dark-symbolism-in-babar/katia-kleyman