Dr. Potato le Pew's Cancel Culture Extravaganza

A cross-marketed Potato Head family, based on the Toy Story franchise

“Cancel Culture” is the new “Politically Correct”: an insignificant, half-joking leftist meme which fuddy-duddies have blown way out of proportion. Under ideal circumstances, I would consider both buzzwords frustrating annoyances by petty people who want to generate controversy where none exists. I haven’t written about it previously, because I consider it a gadfly issue: annoying, but harmless. But things changed this week.

When members of the House of Representatives used their allotted floor time, a resource so finite that it’s allocated in the Constitution, to inveigh against recent changes in Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. During a time of national crisis unmatched since World War II, with pending bills regarding COVID relief and the January 6th insurgency, elected Republicans preferred to waste taxpayer-funded time bellyaching about reading primers and plastic toys.

Smarter writers have already bled ink explaining these accusations have no foundation. I care more about which objects have become emblems of hard-right outrage. These wastrels consume our limited time and attention on books written for preschool children struggling with rudimentary phonics, and a toy potato labeled “Age 2+.” They’ve literally redirected the national discourse to complain about products targeted at kids just learning how to understand words and faces.

Two explanations readily avail themselves. First, maybe top-level Republicans are operating at a level of rudimentary object-impermanence that makes Dr. Seuss illustrations and Mr. Potato Head face-recognition exercises necessary—or maybe they assume their voting base operates at that level. I’d rather not entertain this argument, because it feels like name-calling, and will only poison the well. But it needs acknowledged.

A second, more likely explanation arose this week, when Fox News and its acolytes spotted another supposed victim of “Cancel Culture”: Looney Tunes. With the revelation that lecherous skunk Pepé le Pew was written out of the Space Jam sequel, right-wingers latched onto another supposedly hatcheted figure of their past. This comes eight months after the brouhaha over a mooted Looney Tunes relaunch that disarms Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam.

Do people understand that Pepé le Pew is the villain of his story?

Watching elected officials soil themselves over anthropomorphic potatoes, pre-K primers, and Looney Tunes, I put it together: these numbskulls are trying to protect their childhoods. They see things they loved as grade-schoolers, possibly the last time their lives felt stable and unwavering, and they panic. Because their lives seem volatile enough, without their treasured memories being attacked as “problematic.” They believe they’re defending their own past selves.

Back in 1980, Professor Thomas Goodnight identified the overarching presumptions of Left and Right in American politics. Where “liberals” (an often misused term) perceive change as inevitable, and want to manage it, conservatives see all change as decline. I've written about this before. Conservatives believe, incorrectly, that the changes they see happening are new, and want to halt them, before they destabilize the homogenous world they think they grew up in.

I have trouble accepting the argument that Pepé le Pew normalizes sexual assault, or that Elmer Fudd normalizes guns. These characters’ entire role is premised on them being too stupid to understand themselves and their circumstances. Pepé receives repeated, glaring indications that his intended wants no part of him, and apparently never sees them. And I don’t recall Elmer Fudd’s blunderbuss ever hurting anyone but himself.

Notwithstanding my disbelief regarding the logic, we face a problem: this isn’t censorship. No official body made a preemptive decision to make Republicans’ childhood toys go away. Three private corporations made self-interested decisions on how to utilize their own properties, in ways to maximize their profits. Isn’t that what we’ve been told capitalism is? Would they really hijack private property to protect their… their… whatever they’re trying to protect?

Yes, apparently, they would.

Thinking about it, I realized, despite their Cold War-influenced rhetoric, capitalism isn’t a First Principle for conservatives. Fundamentally, they like capitalism, not for itself, but because it’s what they know. Capitalism comes second to their first love, continuity. Ultimately, their fear of racial justice, economic reform, and “Cancel Culture” boils down to distrust of change. They don’t want justice, they want continuity. And they’ll sacrifice everything else to get it.

Sudden, market-driven change has grown-ass men clutching their blankies and calling for their mamas. Because change terrifies them, or at least, they assume change terrifies their voters. I can’t entirely blame them; change always produces unanticipated consequences, and nobody knows where they’ll end up on the other side. But we’re watching what happens when people resist change:

They can’t save the already broken system. The system will just break them.