If I Hear One More Lament about "Canceling" …

I had planned on writing another post on John 10 today, but the interminable fusillade of complaints over the past week by the incessant culture war grievance factory known as the Republican Party and its tethered right-wing infotainment complex over "cancel culture" made me change my mind. I can't take it any more. Hence, John 10 can wait.

It's no longer simply offensive politicians who, though still holding office and free to blare their nonsense to millions of folks on Fox, claim to being "canceled" by the nefarious and, one would surmise, all-powerful Left. Now, to listen to such towering intellects as Donald Trump, Jr., Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Beck, irreplaceable icons of Western Civilization like the Muppets, Mr. Potato Head, and even Dr. Seuss―horror of horrors !―are being sacrificed at the altar of "political correctness."

The mendacious Texas Senator Ted Cruz, of Cancun infamy, is representative of those expressing faux outrage at such developments. With regard to the putative "canceling" of the beloved Dr. Seuss, he tweeted this yesterday:

Of course, not one of these so-called "cancelings" is anything of the sort … which means that all such claims are either ignorant or disingenuous, made in bad faith (Kevin McCarthy, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz, I'm looking at you). For instance, the "canceling" of the Muppets consisted of Disney's adding disclaimers to 18 episodes because of potentially offensive content. Not one episode was removed from circulation. Likewise, all those getting a case of the vapors over Hasbro's rebranding of the Potato Head brand, bemoaning a supposed gender-neutral apocalypse, should note that it is the brand, not the Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head figures themselves, which is being rebranded in the interests of inclusivity.

Perhaps the most ridiculous "controversy" concerns the beloved Dr. Seuss, about which the aforementioned Cruz waxed so inelegantly and untruthfully in his tweet yesterday (and, gathering by my Facebook feed yesterday, has precipitated the most misdirected outrage among the "base"). Did Joe Biden―to anybody who's been around the past 50 years, think about that for a minute: Joe Biden!―or the Democrats "cancel" Dr. Seuss, as Cruz implied? Did they ban his books from being sold or force libraries to remove them from their collections? Of course not. Actually, it was Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Inc. who made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of 6 of the author's 36 children's books―none of them the famous ones like Cat in the Hat or Green Eggs and Ham that keep finding their way into horrified posts critical of the "canceling"―because, to quote the company, "These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong."

I would like to ask all these folks critical of this decision whether or not they have taken the time to look at the drawings in question. I have. And the portrayals of, for instance, Africans and Chinese are indeed demeaning and redolent of a white supremacy, or at least normalcy, that is, to be blunt, unacceptable in the de facto multicultural global environment in which we live in the 21st century.

The controversy reminds me of one which has swirled over the past decade concerning the Cleveland Indians' decision to abandon their longstanding Chief Wahoo logo from their caps and uniforms. Truth be told, in my earlier years I always liked the cartoonish insignia, blithely insensitive in my comfortable whiteness to its offensiveness to the people it represented. I have had to repent of that insensitivity, one precipitant of said change of heart being the following trenchant image:

(Image credit: Jesse Alkire)

Insensitive images, like insensitive words, hurt. And thus they should be avoided―"canceled," if you will―at all costs, no matter how venerable. To those who decry the decisions of Disney, Hasbro, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and all others who are rethinking and correcting their former practices and products, I would like to ask why they react so viscerally to such changes? Who is hurt by such corporate calculations? Washington Post columnist Philip Bump rightly noted in his column on Tuesday with regard to Dr. Seuss:

The answer, of course, is people who perceive criticism of the casual racism of the past as criticism of their own behavior or as a reminder of how the world around them is changing. It’s not that some Dr. Seuss books are being taken out of rotation. It’s that Seuss is a benchmark for a particular sort of American upbringing. Calling out Seuss’s — infrequent! — racist imagery is therefore an attack on that view of American identity.

To my Christian friends, do you not see how such matters as gender inequality and assumed white hegemony are inherently offensive, not to mention incompatible with genuine Christian faith? (If you still live as if it were 1955 and don't see these things when they appear right before your eyes, the lenses through which you read the world need to be changed.) Is being a "conservative" with a "traditional American" worldview an end in itself, more important than being good? Or, worse, if you do see these things, do you not care? Are patriarchalism and white supremacy hills you are willing to die for? If so, you need more than a change of cultural lenses.

One more thing. The current right wing assault on "cancel culture" is not simply ignorant and/or disingenuous. It is inherently hypocritical as well. For, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez pointed out a couple of weeks ago, "conservatives have a long and illustrious history of their own cancel culture." One is reminded of the delicious irony that at last weekend's CPAC conference in Orlando, the theme of which was "America Uncanceled," one scheduled speaker, the online commenter, Young Pharaoh, had to be canceled because of expressly anti-Semitic comments, such as the claims that "Judaism is a complete lie" and "made up for political gain." It seems such "conservatives," though they may have tolerated a Golden Calf, of sorts, in the gold fiberglass statue of Donald Trump that was made in China, at least had some standards. But demonstrating those minimal standards gave the lie to their constant whinging about "cancel culture." "Canceling" is fine, one supposes, so long as it doesn't hold them to account for their own characteristic transgressions. One also might ask Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Adam Kinzinger, and Jaime Herrera Beutler how efficient the G.O.P "cancel machine" has been the past month.

The same could be said of conservative Christian institutions as well. Ask yourself how long professors who espouse such things as the "New Perspective on Paul," egalitarianism/mutuality, a redemptive movement hermeneutic, or―even worse!―vote for a Democratic candidate will generally keep their jobs, no matter how rigorous their scholarship or orthodox their theological confession. This, of course, doesn't mean that standards are illegitimate. The problem is that the standards that typically exist are too often unexamined and tied to power dynamics that have no place in Christian community.

The one question all of us have to answer is this: What hills are we willing to die for? The hill of an unexamined traditional Americanism, with all its assumed gender and racial stereotypes, is not such a hill. Indeed, it is better to look at the hill called Golgotha where the Son of God died a slave's death on a Roman cross for you. What would following the crucified Lord entail, both for one's thoughts and deeds?