CANCEL CULTURE

You've seen the phrase, you know what it means. Every week someone previously beloved is  declared to be no longer worthy of our affection. Or every other day on rare slow weeks when Trump has not said/done anything especially idiotic to occupy our outrage (or defense mechanisms for anyone reading this who happens to be Team MAGA, but chances are that I've sufficiently alienated Trump fans with previous posts). On Twitter I typically need to scroll through a score of uninformative tweets until finally finding one that reveals what it is that a celebrity is being cancelled for. Not that these cancellations are unanimous of course. Sprinkled in with the condemnations are usually statements in defense of the famous person who has been put on cyber trial for some crime du jour. Depending on the seriousness of the matter at hand, being cancelled by the citizens of social media can have major real life repercussions. Jobs and/or endorsements are lost. Celebrities are demoted from B list to D list. Highly anticipated movie or album releases end up as flops. All because someone who was given the wonderful opportunity to say nothing at all on a subject and remain revered, instead chose to open their mouths and insert feet.

I've written here in the past about some noteworthy cancellations back when they didn't come at quite so fast and furious a pace. There was the time John Mayer said something real dumb, for example. Since then I've decided that Mayer is a genuine talent whose music I enjoy. Since I'm usually able to separate art from artist, I didn't proceed to remove John from my Spotify list of music listened to when I'm in the mood for something mellow. Another example is when Don Imus (who I wasn't a fan of and didn't grow to become one) insulted members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team. His career never recovered. Since then he has passed away. I won't dance on the man's grave. I think John Mayer was basically trying to be too clever for his own good and probably has some redeeming qualities to go along with his arrogance, but Imus isn't someone whose particular brand of hate I will miss.

If I tried to write a blog post about every one who did something to earn cancellation in 2020 I would have little time left over for anything else. There is a whole new category of celebrity now courtesy of YouTube and TikTok channels that have earned certain individuals millions of followers...and dollars. That means a whole bunch of new people who can do something on any given day to move from the internet's Nice List to the Naughty List. Many of these people I've never even heard of until the day they do something to get themselves cancelled. So rather than writing at length about each instance, I observe the blur of fumbling humanity and do my best to keep up...or to ignore. Depends on my mood. Once upon a time I proclaimed that the bar to be considered a celebrity had been lowered too much. Since then the bar has been discarded altogether and I no longer bother to complain about it.

As I see it there are two categories of behavior that get celebrities cancelled, and they are not on equal footing. The first category is saying something that fails the political correctness test, expression of opinion that insults or expresses intolerance towards a particular group of people. The second category is reprehensible action. Apologies may be expressed in both cases (some done so insincerely that a person earns an extra cancellation for their apology over what warranted the first one) but I'm far less likely to forgive somebody for doing something terrible than for saying something that ruffles my feathers. Words and Deeds do not each carry quite the same amount of weight on my scale. Mayer and Imus are examples of the first cancel category. In recent days J.K. Rowling has entered it. I have no idea what effect this will have on her book sales. But since she has already sold enough copies to become a billionaire, if she fails to sell any more Harry Potter tales her tax bracket is probably set in stone at this point. 

Examples of people who ALLEGEDLY fall into the second category include Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Chris Brown, and R. Kelly. For them, my rule about separating the art from the artist still applies. I cannot claim to have done a 100% boycott of any of these men regardless of the degree to which I believe they are guilty as hell. Does that mean I haven't actually cancelled them along with the rest of the internet? Does lack of true cancellation imply endorsement? Is endorsement enabling? I don't believe so, though I suppose it is a slippery slope. To cancel or not to cancel, that is the question. Does the answer even matter for those who somehow are cancel-proof? I'm certainly not the only one who still listens to music by R. Kelly or Chris Brown or Michael Jackson or a ton of other artists who ALLEGEDLY failed at some point to be upstanding citizens. I'm pretty sure people are still watching Woody Allen movies. Syndicated episodes of The Cosby Show were taken off the airwaves for a while (which punished a bunch of other actors from the show who did nothing wrong) but I believe it has since returned. Trump isn't the only one who improbably manages to weather every self conjured storm. Hell, O.J. Simpson joined Twitter well after being condemned by society and last time I checked (which was right before typing this sentence) he had over 942,000 followers on Twitter. Can someone with such an "achievement" legitimately be described as cancelled? Effective cancellation of superior athletes has been especially difficult for us to manage. Is this because we have such strong admiration for those with abilities that make them seem closer in nature to Superman than to the mundanity and erasability of Clark Kent? We may appreciate dispensing justice with juried verdicts of incarceration, but so too do we love a good rehabilitation and redemption story. DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK. Perhaps it's not just those we deeply love who can't be cancelled, but also those we really hate. Maybe the line between these two emotions is even thinner than we thought. 

True stars remain celestial well after their shine has largely diminished. But that doesn't mean our cancel privileges are entirely powerless. I'm confident that we can permanently get some of these big shot YouTubers up out of here when they mess up, because (please read the conclusion of this post to the beat of a Janet Jackson song) We Are A Part Of The Cancel Nation.

Short Story XIII

It may be true that not every virgin is destined to become a whore, but it also cannot be denied that every whore was once a virgin. The road in between is paved by circumstance.

My First Time

By Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Copyright by By Roy L. Pickering Jr.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I lost my head. Are you okay? Have I hurt you? Let me help you up. I’m so sorry.”

She looks up with eyes of ice. Her bloodied upper lip is already swelling, the bruise on her cheekbone starting to take form. Reflected in her horror stricken stare is the twin reflection of a monster, and that monster is me. But her eyes lie, for I am not the grotesque caricature that she is seeing. My rash act does not accurately portray the sort of man I am. I have never struck a woman before.

“Don’t look at me like that, baby. You know I love you. You’re everything to me.”

Hidden behind my firmest convictions and the ingrained code of conduct that I live by without reflection, I suppose there are primitive instincts that can take over in times of extreme duress. There are parts of everyone’s personality that remain invisible to the most introspective view, at the ready to emerge when called upon.

“I’ll never do anything like that again, you must believe me. You shocked me with what you said. It hurt me so bad to hear those words, it was like I needed to lash out to protect myself. In a perverted way, I did what I did out of self-defense. It felt as if my heart was going to shatter and I would drop dead right on this spot unless I did something to make the pain go away. For one split second, the only way I could think of to stop hurting was by hurting you.”

How can I explain to her what is incomprehensible to myself? Love can become hate in the blink of an eye, can turn back into love again twice as swiftly. Claire is my world, which means she holds the power to remove the ground from beneath my feet and send me spiraling through a dark, and cold, and empty universe.

“Please give me another chance. We’ve been together five years. Five great years. You know me better than anyone. You know that the last thing I would want to do is hurt you. Let me make this up to you, baby. I want to make things right between us. I want to get things back to the way they used to be. Don’t you want that too?”

“Yes, Michael. That is what I want. I never wanted to hurt you either.”

With these words said, Claire extends her right hand so I can help her to her feet, which is what I do. Then I draw her lithe body into my embrace, stroking her hair in a soothing manner that I hope will quell the slight trembling I feel as she presses the unbeaten side of her face against my chest. My downward gaze finds a single crimson droplet on the white shag carpet. It serves as a billboard decrying the damage wrought by my hands. I try to remain in the moment, to think only of my love for Claire, to focus solely on my desire to hold her like this forever. But my brain persists in reminding me that forever is a myth, and my memory stubbornly replays what she had just said to me, words that ignited the surprisingly short fuse of my rage.

“Michael, I don’t know how to tell you this other than to just spit it out. Nothing will soften the impact or help it make sense. I’m not expecting forgiveness or understanding. I simply cannot live with this guilt on my conscience any longer. So I’m going to tell the truth because that’s what you deserve, and whatever the repercussions are, I’ll have to live with them.”

She took a deep breath between her introduction of the awful topic that was to come and its delivery. Her set up led me to expect the worst, yet I was unable to imagine that the worst would be as bad as it turned out to be.

“I’ve been having an affair with a married man for the past eight months. He said he was going to leave his wife, and once he did, I was going to leave you. A week ago he told me that his wife was pregnant and he could no longer promise that he would be leaving her any time soon, although he didn't want to end things with me either. I told him that without a real chance of a commitment from him, I had to break it off. Then I thought long and hard about you and me, about whether I should still leave you. And that's when I realized how much I love you. Even though I haven’t been happy with our relationship, for the first time in a long while I believe that I can be. It’s going to take work. I’m going to need to share my feelings with you instead of bottling them up inside. I’m going to have to stop thinking you'll be a mind reader, because as much as you want me to be happy, you don’t always know what it will take. I don’t even know what I’m expecting or hoping for most of the time, so how can I expect you to figure it out for me?”

I had been made completely numb from the initial portion of Claire’s confession. Only now were her words starting to fully register. It was as if I was a paraplegic who was beginning to feel the first tingle of sensation after years spent as a living mannequin. My skin felt too tight for my body. The beating in my chest threatened to burst through the fragile enclosure of my heart. The deafening roar and incapacitating ache in my head nearly brought me to my knees.

“I know it can be great between us because that’s how it used to be. But first I need to lay all of my cards on the table. So that’s what I’m doing now. If you can love me even after learning of my betrayal, I know I would be a fool to want to be with anyone else. I’m not sure that came out how I meant it to. I didn’t rehearse any of this, although I knew it would be difficult to say. But it isn’t hard to say that I love you, Michael. I hope you can still find it in your heart to love me.”

Claire may have intended to ramble for a while longer. But she didn’t get the opportunity, for that was when I struck her. When she didn’t fall immediately to the floor as expected, I struck her again. Then I looked down at what I had done and regret put a stranglehold on indignation.

Now I’m holding her in my arms, reassuring her that everything will work out for the best. I do not doubt that she wants us to begin anew, that her love for me remains unbroken in spite of her efforts to cast it aside. When I declare that I love her now more than ever, half of me believes what I say to be sincere. The other half suspects that it’s a sad joke. Underneath both halves is realization that what Claire has done to me once, she will be capable of repeating. And I will be capable of paying her back in the same barbaric fashion.

I am consumed by self-pity over learning that she was unfaithful to me, and worse, that it was because of her unhappiness. Everything I knew turns out to have been an illusion. How can I be certain of anything? I don’t know. But I must try to trust again or else there is no point to hanging on to what we have, for it will already be dead. I am also filled with fear, afraid of fully transforming into this man I never knew I was capable of being. It does not matter how briefly or the provocation. The image of Frankenstein’s monster was found in my mirror, and although it was gone when I closed and then re-opened my eyes, it can return at any time.

Not too long ago I was a virgin to domestic violence, to indulging the dark underbelly of my nature. It may be true that not every virgin is destined to become a whore, but it also cannot be denied that every whore was once a virgin. The road in between is paved by circumstance.

x x x x x

Afterword: Someone once said to me: "I stayed for 5 years in a mentally/emotionally turned physically abusive relationship. I was in a daze. I was so focused on proving him how amazIng I was so that he wouldn't want to hurt me anymore. There's a myriad of reasons women stay. If you understood, you would have victim mentality in some shape that makes you susceptible to abuse."

I have no response to this that would not sound trite. But I now more fully understand that one of my jobs as a father is to make absolutely certain that a "victim mentality" has no opportunity to take root in my daughter's psyche.

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