Or is it just good that I live in fly-over land? I hadn’t heard of this before, but apparently those who transgress against the moral strictures of the woke community can be canceled, which I think means that no one in the woke community will pay attention to you, admit to your existence, help you in your hour of need, nor ever forgive you for any old clumsy mistake that offended the woke community. It sounds quite, ah, brutal.
Sarah Lazarus has decided to make fun of it, and quite effectively, at McSweeney’s:
Bernard Dubois, a retired physics teacher and WWII veteran, was canceled peacefully in his sleep at the age of 96 while mumbling aloud during a very racist dream. He joins his canceled wife Esther Marie Dubois, 95, who last Thanksgiving expressed a strong opinion about vegans.
But it gets better:
On Wednesday, three-day-old Lily Hobbes became the youngest person ever to be canceled, when her father read to her from Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming and she immediately started crying.
But I appreciated the irony of the canceling of an ACLU attorney; the whole thing is worth a read. Andrew Sullivan wonders, in the third part of his weekly tri-partite diary:
I really wonder if we are on the verge of a new orthodoxy in which cancellation will forever be a brutal weapon to enforce woke behavior and discourse. Or whether, in a few years from now, we will look upon this era of woke leftism as one of those moral-panic outbreaks that temporarily make people completely mad.
It will be a temporary moral panic, although proponents of canceling will be around for a couple of decades. The leaders will be too addicted to their position and self-importance to easily give up this implement of coercion.
But as the woke community becomes fractured by the cancellation of followers for obscure and ridiculous offenses, it’ll begin shrinking. People will look at what they’ve built and ask if it satisfies the requirements of common-sense. So long as the outside world looks worse than the woke community, they’ll stick with it, but once the teeter-totter tilts the other way, off they’ll go, looking for a better way.
Speaking as an agnostic, I really appreciated Sullivan’s point concerning redemption in the various Christian sects. Given that we’re not perfect beings, the ability to recognize our own errors and correct them is a critical part of any community. While Sullivan admits the woke community supports redemption, it sounds quite severe and, almost as importantly, very subjective. At least with most of the Christians, you ask for forgiveness from God, and you – and most everyone else – assume you get it.
