“Cancel Culture,” or Why Nothing Gets Better

Sherman Alexie

In one of the weirder stories to emerge during this crisis, apparently novelist and poet Sherman Alexie has emerged from hibernation this weekend, failed to see his shadow, and gone on a media tour. If you’ve forgotten in the roughly three centuries we’ve lived through so far in 2020, it’s been slightly over two years since Alexie, author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, admitted a longstanding pattern of invidious sexual harassment.

Since then, Alexie remained quiet, an unusual pattern of reticence from somebody in his position: Bill Cosby went on tour while charges pended against him, and Louis CK resumed live performances only ten months after publishing a similar admission. Alexie’s willingness to keep quiet (while his books remain in print) was downright remarkable. Until this weekend, when his sudden re-emergence triggered an equally subdued social media response: outside Native American circles, it’s gone largely unnoticed.

We sometimes hear complaints, in fame circles, of “cancel culture,” where celebrities do something so horrific, their audience turns against them, forces them from public view, and submarines their careers. Events like Liam Neeson’s racist rampage, Kevin Spacey’s kiddie diddling, or Roseanne Barr’s doom tweets, are cited as famous people getting forcibly silenced by the politeness patrol. As though a towering, square-jawed Irishman threatening to kill random Black people was playful idle banter, simply misconstrued.

Except “cancel culture” appears remarkably bad at its job. Sherman Alexie’s book sales have slowed, certainly, but never stopped, and his return has elicited almost no response outside activist circles. Kevin Hart lost his Oscar gig, but suffered almost no other consequences. Louis CK remains out on tour, and though he has to protect his setlist religiously, he still draws large audiences to performances that have apparently become increasingly vulgar, violent, and laced with misogyny.

Possibly the king of “cancel culture” remains Mel Gibson. He has suffered public meltdowns, had racist rants captured on tape and distributed online, flipped tables on journalists, and generally behaved like somebody with no prefrontal cortex. Each time this happens, his career lags slightly. But he returns in force again each time. His fees have probably suffered, I’m not ambitious enough to check, but his IMDB page lists four completed movies scheduled for 2020 release.

Ricky Gervais, in yet another attempt
to court camera-friendly controversy

If cancel culture cannot even silence Hollywood’s biggest celebrity when he drunkenly shouts antisemitism directly into a microphone, what hope did it have of holding a literary novelist to account? And don’t talk about “separating the artist from the artwork.” As I’ve written before, if the artist is still alive and drawing residuals, the two aren’t separable. This is doubly true if media outlets draw the artist back into the mainstream, as with Sherman Alexie.

We mere mortals appear infinitely willing to extend forgiveness to famous people, to attribute them virtues they demonstrably don’t have. Perhaps the most famous manifestation of this is Ricky Gervais. It’s been years since any project he’s done has drawn large audiences; I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks his perennially vulgar setlist is funny. Yet his semi-permanent arrangements with Netflix and the Golden Globes keep him churning out content which nobody particularly enjoys.

Rereading the paragraph I’ve just written, I realize a contradiction: we mere mortals don’t extend Ricky Gervais infinite forgiveness. Netflix and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which conducts the Golden Globes) do. We mortals then extend these organizations that forgiveness. Sure, we reward them, and him, with ratings. But they know Gervais, and Gibson, and Alexie, will draw audiences, because they’re familiar. Ricky Gervais’ annual low-blow insult festival has become comfort watching for risk-averse audiences.

Sherman Alexie writes literary viewpoints on Native American life and issues, probably believing himself dangerous to America’s White hierarchy. Yet the film Smoke Signals, based on one of his short stories, was distributed by Miramax, then a Disney subsidiary. Disney, like most media conglomerates, is notoriously timid. They never would’ve green-lit such a production if it didn’t have guaranteed returns, which necessarily means a guaranteed large audience. Sherman Alexie reaches us already pre-approved by Disney.

Which means, no matter how awful Sherman Alexie, Louis CK, and Mel Gibson become, they’ll remain bankable properties. They already occupy places in America’s shared mental landscape, which makes them comfortable. We humans notoriously resist change, because changing ourselves rewires our brains, which is painful. We’d rather keep giving billboard space to an acknowledged sexual harasser than change our habits. And Sherman Alexie’s smiling, affable face will reappear, no matter how many sins he confesses.

White Americans and Mascot Culture

A version of the controversial logo, discontinued earlier this month

Land O’Lakes, the Minnesota-based agricultural cooperative that’s currently approaching its centennial of providing good-paying work to Great Plains dairy farmers, has officially discontinued its “Indian maiden” mascot. Nicknamed “Maiden Mia,” the character has adorned branded packaging in some form since 1928. Given that corporations don’t change logos lightly, because buyers invest emotional capital, I assume they gave this choice serious deliberation. Still, some customers have flipped their lids.

I find myself in a precarious position. I understand why critics disparage Maiden Mia, a cliché of long buckskin fringe and brightly colored beads. Like the “buffalo nickel” logo still displayed by the NFL’s Washington, D.C., franchise, Maiden Mia isn’t herself directly harmful to anybody, but she still normalizes broad stereotypes which reduce entire populations to a mere category. That is, she didn’t hurt anybody, but she numbed audiences to other, more palpable harms.

However, I also understand why butter-buying markets take umbrage at sudden changes. Even people who don’t embrace racism and stereotyping, nevertheless have the natural human tendency to prefer continuity. Corporations tie their names and identities to certain branded images, and when those images change, buyers often perceive the product itself as having changed, because the prior standard remains imprinted on our neurons. Changing buying habits means changing our brains.

Over twenty years ago, Naomi Klein described the ways logos become part of consumer culture’s shared heritage. She described people having, for instance, the Nike swoosh tattooed on their bodies—literally allowing themselves to be branded. Many logos and images remain technically copyrighted to corporations and institutions, like the Chevrolet cross, McDonalds’ “Golden Arches,” or Barack Obama’s campaign logo, have nevertheless become part of wider American culture.

This tendency to absorb corporations’ identities into our shared community is compounded by the fact that many White Americans, like me, are estranged from our ancestry. My grandmother, born on a Nebraska homestead, recounted a childhood experience: her schoolteacher assigned students to ask their parents about their ethnic heritage. Her parents responded: “You tell them you’re American, and that’s all that matters!” She had any pre-American ancestry basically whitewashed away.

Thousands of native women have gone missing but the only one some white Americans care about is the one on the Land-O-Lakes package. pic.twitter.com/IvjPaRnI6u

— Dr Strange PhD🔬😺🐾🌊 (@CeeEyes) April 26, 2020

Most of my heritage remains opaque to me. I know my ancestry is broadly Northern and Western European; to the best of my knowledge, I can’t claim the ultimate badge of White cultural smartness, because I have no known Black or Native American ancestry. But I can’t tell you much about where my ancestors came from. They crossed to America and abandoned their homelands, replacing their past identities with what W.E.B. DuBois called “the wage of whiteness.”

It bears noting that American culture conquers without regard for skin color. Our mythology elevates Native virtues, White homesteader work ethic, or African American folk culture, only after driving these peoples off their lands. In many ways, White Americans have been colonized as thoroughly as Black and Native Americans, if less visibly. The centralized hierarchy lionized our history only after dispossessing our ancestors. Basically, it’s easy to hero-worship the dead.

Without any heritage of our own, White Americans embrace a portmanteau culture. We eat Mexican food, pizza, and soul food; we listen to blues, Highland Flings, and hillbilly spirituals. To be American means living from a suitcase stuffed with multiple cultural heritages, some of which is probably our own. Black Americans had much of their heritage destroyed by the ravages of slavery, but White Americans abandoned ours on Ellis Island.

This leads to complications when dealing with brand-name ethnic stereotypes. I believe White Americans, when they embrace characters like Maiden Mia or Native American sports mascots, sincerely mean no offense. We embrace aspects of Native culture they find admirable, including warriors’ bravery and Plains Indians’ reverence for the land. We embrace this culture because, essentially, we have none of our own.

Therefore, I think White Americans ought to have access to this portmanteau culture, provided they’re willing to accept guidance and chastisement from the peoples we borrow from. The problem becomes most pointed when for-profit organizations, like ag cooperatives and the NFL, slap trademarks on cultures they’ve looted. When this happens, the heritage White people borrow stops being something other cultures share, and becomes something rapacious capitalists sell.

So I understand why many White Americans feel cheated by Maiden Mia’s retirement. Some piece of our portmanteau culture no longer exists. Yet she was never, really, ours, nor did she belong to the Native Americans whose culture she ransacked. She was something sold to us by corporations, which never necessarily had our best interests at heart.

Some Thoughts on the “Friend Zone”

Lancelot and Guinevere, as painted
by Florence Harrison

Let me start by saying the “friend zone” probably exists. I’ve known two women who agreed they’d stuck men in the proverbial friend zone: one who eventually realized her mistake, let him out, and they’re now happily married; the other who eventually realized her mistake, attempted to let him out, and discovered he’d moved on without her (and also he’d previously concealed significant jerkish tendencies). So yes, I believe the friend zone is likely real.

However, its vague, ad hoc definition causes significant problems. Invented in the 1990s on the sitcom Friends, which often reeked of unexamined prejudices, the term often gets applied, mostly by men, to women who don’t adjust their feelings to suit a dude’s whimsy. The term’s subjectivity gives it the potential for toxic application, providing emotional blackmail. It threatens men too, reinforcing the belief that we can’t open up to somebody without having sex with them.

So, if the “friend zone” is real, but naming it is potentially dangerous, how do we handle it? In this case, I’d suggest we examine the unexamined half. We usually consider the “friend zone” as when two people have a strong, reliable friendship, but one participant has unrequited romantic feelings. I suggest we start by considering what “romantic feelings” means. To do that, let’s return to the classic French Romances of the Twelfth Century CE.

No, you needn’t read them to understand my argument. I’ve only read a few, and though they have significant historical value, they’re tedious by today’s standards. Let’s instead entrust our opinions to esteemed critics who make their bones explaining classic literature to us numpties. Though I draw on several such critics, most of today’s commentary will come from C.S. Lewis, because his mix of literary acumen and Anglo-Catholic prudishness gives him a unique blended perspective.

Before the French troubadours, particularly Chrétien de Troyes, we didn’t have any definition of “love” as intense personal feeling. “Love,” according to Lewis, signified either the sense of dutiful devotion married couples and blood kin, or the agape of devout religion. Either people didn’t experience the swooping sensation we now consider “falling in love,” or they left no record. Whichever, couples certainly didn’t marry from an excess of feeling, and didn’t divorce from its absence.

C.S. Lewis

The French troubadours popularized the idea of love through their Romances, a term which literally means “stories in the Roman style.” These poets devised a system they named “courtly love,” a sense of devotion, not to one’s family or one’s people, but to a person, an individual supposedly possessed of virtues and goodness, to whom one devotes a store of feelings. This bestowal of feelings is the origin of what we’d call “falling in love.”

In these poems, the troubadours described what one did with one’s beloved. First, the feeling of love always proceeded from a man to a woman. Because the Romances foregrounded narratives of male valor, the woman consistently got reduced to that man’s mere recipient. A lady, for she must necessarily be well-born and courtly, might receive love from several men simultaneously, but she must never reciprocate. Because what one does with one’s beloved is, ultimately, nothing.

Yes, courtly love is always unrequited. Love, in this formulation, is the longing to be together; if this longing is ever fulfilled, the arc concludes, with nowhere further to go. Thus it’s impossible to love one’s wife. Perhaps the greatest exemplar of “courtly love” is the myth of Dante, who loved Beatrice. Except, by Dante’s own admission, they were only ever in a room together twice in their lives. There’s no evidence they ever spoke.

This matters. The great depth of feeling we call “love” longs for union with the beloved, and simultaneously must never achieve it, because achieving kills the feeling. The overwhelming depths of emotion which drove Sir Lancelot to feats of heroism and poetry depended on him loving Guinevere, but only at great remove. The feeling of frustration men experience when love remains unconsummated wasn’t an error, it was the purpose. Love existed to remain forever incomplete.

Therefore, I suggest, the “friend zone” isn’t a sign that something’s gone wrong in the system. Movies and TV shows which show loving couples coming together have changed the myth to suggest that love exists to bring people together. Yet for medieval Franks, who invented “Romance,” incomplete love was a goal. The “friend zone” was a destination. Imagine how much art and valor we could create, if we recaptured this old, stately sense of “love.”

But Muh Freedumz!!!

Me, wearing a mask before it was mandatory

Well, friends, it’s finally happened: somebody at work has been formally diagnosed with COVID-19. This is actually my jobsite’s second confirmed case, but the first that involves a worker who spent a protracted amount of time indoors, working in close proximity to others. His official paperwork says he was asymptomatic until this past weekend; but one witness confirms this employee was coughing and sneezing, in public, all last week.

Watching the news recently, it’s become clear how widespread willful blindness has become. Celebrities and politicians think we should reopen the economy. Several governors, including mine, are refusing to issue shelter-in-place orders, believing their states are somehow immune to consequences. Construction somehow remains an “essential job,” even though Grand Island, where over half of my co-workers commute from, has become the COVID capital of Nebraska.

Most important, individuals remain aggressively blind to community responsibilities. I’ve been voluntarily wearing a face mask at work for two weeks, but I was the only one for some time. Others kidded me for it. When the general contractor strenuously recommended masks, my co-workers dismissed it, complaining that it fogs their safety glasses. I was the only one covering his face, until the company made masks mandatory… on Wednesday.

This means the co-worker who coughed on everyone all last week exposed literally everyone except me to COVID. That’s seventeen guys, most with families and children. And, even knowing they’ve all been exposed, these guys continue finding ways to subvert the safeties. Even after the company made masks mandatory, and after we learned COVID existed inside the building, I watched co-workers standing around, jawing, with their masks on their chins.

I keep hearing claims about freedom and liberty ballyhooed to justify this willful disregard. My co-workers think safety precautions are an undue imposition upon their work conditions. I hear “religious freedom” tossed around to justify reopening churches ahead of schedule, even though, as I’ve written before, church is one of the leading vectors of infection. Freedom, freedom, the drumbeat goes. I have the freedom to ignore precautions whenever I want!

This really feels like a profoundly deficient definition of freedom. It limits freedom entirely to individual desires, with complete disregard for others. It’s my personal freedom to buy and sell, to gather with friends, to behave as though nothing has changed. It certainly isn’t others’ freedom to not die of a preventable contagion. This definition of freedom is entirely egocentric, individual, and narcissistic. It’s the freedom of a psychopath.

Dr. Phil claimed, Thursday on Fox news, that COVID deaths are negligible compared to swimming pool drownings, fatal car crashes, and smoking deaths. Although his numbers are demonstrably specious, they reflect common talking points among the freedom-and-liberty crowd. If there’s something worse already out there, these nincompoops cry, we shouldn’t do anything about the problem at hand. Why, oh, why, aren’t we addressing these problems?

Except, of course, that we are addressing these problems. We require liability insurance and lifeguards at swimming pools. We have rigorous traffic laws, and police assigned to enforce them, and people who chronically flout these laws get their driving privileges revoked. The ATF recently adjusted America’s mandatory minimum smoking age to 21, and the number of places you can legally smoke continues to dwindle in the United States.

This weekend, “protestors” angered at continued safety orders decided to barricade severa state capitals, in an organized effort informally titled “Operation Gridlock.” As protests go, it was sloppy, ill-informed, and driven by mutual outrage without much sense of what it would accomplish. The protestors demanded a lifting of mandatory safety precautions, while ignoring basic social safeties. One telling Denver placard reportedly read “Your ‘health’ does not supercede my right.”

Such a narrow, self-centered definition of “rights” goes hand-in-glove with a distrust for experts and science. “I don’t trust the CDC,” one of my co-workers said on Friday, while not wearing a mask. Scan any news about the story, and you’ll find a noisy minority who believes that epidemiology is a massive conspiracy to impinge upon individual freedoms. This sounds especially ignorant after an infected individual already coughed on everybody.

Thankfully, these organized heel-draggers remain a minority; over four-fifths of Americans believe continued action remains necessary and beneficial. But my anecdotal experience suggests the attitude of passive resistance is most concentrated among workers most likely to suffer if the pandemic continues. Workers resisting protective measures even after exposure are actively dangerous. And their definition of “freedom” is the freedom to die uselessly and without meaningful reward.

Don't Let Them Call You a “Hero”

There’s a moment, early in the movie Captain America: the First Avenger, where Dr. Erskine asks, “Do you want to kill Nazis?” Steve Rogers replies: “I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from.” This statement of principle gets the underweight, asthmatic Rogers bumped from 4-F status to active duty. Erskine apparently likes that Rogers has principles, and doesn’t seek glory.

I’ve wondered what, in current society, makes people receptive to superhero movies. Certainly cinematic technology has become advanced enough to make these movies possible, in ways that make Richard Donner, director of 1978’s Superman, drool. And the sense that we citizens are somehow powerless against overwhelming, arbitrary villains, has become pointed since the 2008 financial services collapse. But something in recent rhetoric has changed my mind.

“Hero” language has attached itself to Americans deemed “essential workers” during this crisis. Journalists have dubbed grocery store employees COVID-19’s Unsung Heroes. Political cartoons show the Avengers and the Justice League welcoming nurses into the ranks. Where once you had to die in combat, or at least serve during wartime, to be yclept “heroic,” now you need only have a job exempt from shelter-in-place orders, and suddenly, you’re a superhero.

Except the recent spate of superhero movies, especially the MCU, have repeatedly emphasized that heroes don’t want anything. Steve Rogers becomes Captain America because he believes fighting Nazis is simply right. Thor dies for his friends and is resurrected as a hero; he even has Jesus’ hairstyle. Probably the greediest MCU protagonist, Tony Stark, becomes Iron Man because he wants to repudiate his former war-profiteering career.

Comparing drive-thru employees who brave getting coughed on by anonymous strangers, to the Avengers, certainly seems noble. COVID-19 is certainly as arbitrary as a Chitauri invasion. But these workers aren’t selflessly putting themselves on the line to combat massive, world-destroying evil. These workers are mostly low-paid, not unionized, and keep working in pandemic conditions because they need the paycheck. A paycheck which Captain America, as I recall, doesn’t receive.

Superheroes not only don’t expect rewards for doing right, they actively expect destruction. In The First Avenger, Steve Rogers jumps on a grenade to save his unit, discovering only later that it’s a dummy. In Avengers: Endgame, Tony Stark wears the Infinity Gauntlet, knowing that doing so will destroy him. It isn’t enough that heroes do what’s right; they must accept the constant imminence of death to become truly heroic.

Consider the culmination of The First Avenger. Rogers, now fully Captain America, has a promised date with Peggy Carter, but Red Skull has weapons trained on Manhattan. Rogers could, reasonably, refuse the suicide mission. He has a life awaiting him, and beating Red Skull will mean certain destruction, since nobody else can fly his airship. But Rogers negates himself, even unto death, because saving humanity means more than personal fulfillment.

When media figures compare grocery checkers to superheroes, they purportedly mean cashiers, and other “essential workers,” do important work that keeps human civilization chugging productively during adverse times. But, in classic dog-whistle fashion, they have a second-tier meaning: heroes don’t ask for rewards. They’re tacitly telling cashiers, burger flippers, janitors, construction workers, delivery drivers, and nurses: any future demands you make on our economy are null and void in advance.

These people do difficult jobs under adverse circumstances, even under ideal conditions. Stocking grocery shelves on third shift is arduous, mind-numbing, and often causes back strain. Janitors often have to deal with whatever their higher-ups considered too disgusting to touch themselves. I left burger flipping after two days when I realized how common third-degree burns were among the kitchen staff. And all these jobs pay really, really poorly.

Powerful people have worked hard to prevent low-wage workers, like our “essential workers,” from unionizing, demanding better pay, and getting medical protection. But now, watching these workers get compared to superheroes, I realize we’ve participated in a propaganda campaign so subtle, it’s taken a pandemic to unveil it. Disney, which owns Marvel, has peddled the idea that heroes shouldn’t ask for basic protections. They’ve weaponized the word “hero.”

Some critics, including superhero writers, may say I’m inserting political messages which the artists didn’t necessarily intend. Certainly, I don’t think most writers did this consciously. But if I’ve learned anything from watching politics and pop culture, it’s that whenever the mass media starts calling ordinary people “heroes,” they’re calling you to die. They do it in war, and now, they’re doing it in pandemic.