Word of the Week: ‘Cancel’ again

There’s a creepily rotating cast of villains who serve as the Emmanuel Goldstein to keep the collective adrenaline pumping among adherents of what used to be called “PC.” Joe Rogan was enemy No. 1 just a few months ago, but I never hear about it at all now. There’s Chappelle today, of course, but also the world’s richest climate change-fighting entrepreneur Elon Musk, the world’s most successful children’s book author J.K. Rowling, and even former President Barack Obama. (The latter caught some left-wing flack in 2019 for saying: “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re politically woke and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly.”) Briefly, it was New York Times writer Lara Bazelon, and once, it was even The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood. The list goes on.

Maybe having everyone creative and useful outside your purity bubble isn’t a sign that you are pure — it’s just a sign that you are impractical and lame. Shouldn’t somebody inside this political tendency notice that it is not terribly productive for advancing any ideological goal and just puts globally successful politicians and entertainers and writers and athletes and so on in the role of enemy?

Chappelle, in particular, is an odd person to consider as an enemy of progressives, being a black radical as well as the most individual and surprising voice in American public life. He’s also someone who, if anyone were to be censored, you’d think would be censored for different reasons. In 2003’s Season One of his breakout Comedy Central Chappelle’s Show, the host says (in a very funny bit in which his thoughts as a young black man are sung by a pretty white girl) that “crack was invented and distributed to intentionally harm the black community. AIDS was, too.”

This claim is Russian disinformation. Former Stasi officer Gunter Bohnsack revealed an active measures disinformation campaign called Operation DENVER, also known as Operation INFEKTION, in the 1980s. Using the English-language press in India, far-left groups, and American black radicals sympathetic to conspiratorial claims about American intelligence services, this false claim was invented and spread by the Russian government. However, right now, at a moment when American liberals claim to care deeply about countering Russian active measures disinformation and about conspiracy theories on disease outbreaks, there’s no attempt to take down that episode (nor should there be). Rather, what gets people organizing to shut Chappelle up is that he makes jokes about transgender people and generally that he can’t be easily classified politically in a world where shallow identity politics trumps economics and foreign policy and everything else in deciding who gets put in which box.

When First Avenue canceled Chappelle’s performance, the media commentary was therefore written not so much as an exercise in argument or description, but as a declaration of power and loyalty — a battle cry meant to intimidate. Take this from the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump: “By now, any venue engaging in such a cancellation will be aware of what is likely to follow: the decision being cast as a ‘cancellation,’ a term used pejoratively to criticize incidents in which individuals or groups face repercussions for things they have said or done.” (Bold mine.) Apparently, the real problem with cancellation is that it will be called “cancellation,” you see. Cancellations are neutral, whereas “cancellations” are not. Or vice versa. Get it? No? Fair enough. Who can keep track?

But it doesn’t matter; the important thing is to be in the right group. Forget that this is a venue that … canceled and that you just said so in those words. You should decry people calling it “cancellation.” Just make sure not to use unfashionable vocabulary, since the principles don’t matter and reality doesn’t matter — only words matter. Bump disgustedly explains that in the coverage of the incident, it was “the expected voices, mostly on the political right” who were upset about what First Avenue did. Well, all right, if that’s who is upset about the attempted censorship of the obviously left-wing, beloved, black comedian, then that is who is correct here. “Right-wing” is not a synonym for incorrect. Just because almost everything in the Washington Post’s opinion section is pigswill doesn’t mean I dismiss the other 1% of it out of hand. There is a very culture-war sense of the word cancellation, with a very particular etymology. If we are going to have a stupid fight about it, we might as well have the stupid fight intelligently. So here goes, everything you never wanted to know about the term cancellation but were too busy touching grass to ask:

The culture-war sense of a “cancellation” or “being canceled” comes from the TV industry sense, like a show being canceled for being too unpopular and getting yanked off the air by executives, no longer granted the right to be seen in public. Season Four, Episode 22 of The Simpsons is called “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” for example. How did people who aren’t Hollywood types start using it? It made its way into the culture war with 2014’s “slacktivist” campaign to “#CancelColbert,” led by Suey Park.

It may be hard to remember now, since Colbert is about as edgy a political comedian as the funny pages in Pravda making fun of the Soviet premier, but there was a time when his satirical Comedy Central character was willing to take comedic risks and make jokes whose purpose was to communicate something other than “remember to vote D in November.” In particular, he was making fun of the then-name of the Washington football team, the Redskins, a team that was at that moment trying to buy goodwill by spending money on Native American charities named after the mascot. To mock this gesture as beside the point, Colbert tweeted as follows: “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”

Park heard these words but missed the point, and #CancelColbert was born. It became a central narrative on social media, what Inverse magazine remembers as one that “for a hot minute split the Internet into warring camps — roughly ‘show some respect’ vs. ‘lighten up.’” The New Yorker wrote about “The Campaign to Cancel Colbert.” Every outlet did. Trollishly, Colbert himself played off the cancellation campaign to add to his own notoriety and screw around.

And that is the allusion of “cancel culture” and “cancellation” and “cancel” in current online and culture-war usage: a stupid and moralizing person with poor reading comprehension missing the point because one spends too much time on the internet falsely accusing people of racism and trying to get them fired. OK, Phillip Bump? Think back. It is only in the years since 2014 that hating comedy and thinking people who disagree with you should be prevented from speaking became the social price of admission to normative American liberalism. In prestige journalism, it wasn’t very long ago that the “expected voices” on the center Left loved and defended free speech in both the abstract and the difficult, wrenching concrete. But they flipped. Now the far Left and the center Right are the less prudish ones, and you are a bluestocking and a censor. I hope that clears things up.