To The Spanner Born

Sorry to break the silence (been busy with stuff that isn’t funny… nothing bad – more like ‘work’ (I hate that word!).)

I just read something that hit the nail on the head of how I’ve felt for a while. (Keep in mind, what I JUST read was originally written 5 months ago… I’m a slow readr.). Responding to the latent “Cancel Culture” and it’s attacks on everyone from Rocky and Bullwinkle to Dave Chappelle, “Childish Gambino” aka Donald Glover made (and then deleted) some posts on Twitter. The parts that struck me were:

“Saw people on here havin a discussion about how tired they were of reviewing boring stuff (tv & film),”

“We’re getting boring stuff and not even experimental mistakes(?) because people are afraid of getting cancelled,”

YES!

I wrote a piece that I never got published about the role of satire in the healthy development of a mind, a person AND a community. People need to feel safe enough to explore all of their thoughts – even the really stupid ones.

NO!

I’m not advocating that everyone acts on their first inclination towards violence or hatred.

BUT!

I don’t actually believe that a sane/competent person can have opinions for or against a subject without at least taking their thoughts right up to fulcrum where the fundamental issues reside and spin.

AND!

There are people who are eagerly wringing their hands with unimaginable delight at the idea that American society is in decay. The fact that everyone has the right to express an opinion has been weaponized and finally used to suppress those opinions. Those people are laughing because the saw it coming and think that they were able to deftly avoid the same problems by way of unifying thoughts and deeds.

AGAIN!

When we are eliminating hatred for people based on their color or religion or how they like to dance in public – that IS a good thing. But when we mandate that you can’t make fun of people for dancing in public – that is a terrible thing.

I learned my racial tolerance in a two-fold way: 1) I was raised in an extremely diverse city where from one year to the next there could be influxes of people from different parts of the world. On the playground we were not ‘black’ or ‘white’ – we were just children and as long as you didn’t condone dancing in public you could play kick-ball with us.

2) I had a home life that was guided by my parents who were keenly aware of the snide remarks that people made at them when they first arrived in America in 1955 (that’s not actually ‘that’ long ago if you think about it in the context of music… anyway.) My mother and father didn’t like being made fun of and I didn’t like that they felt ‘less than’ anyone else. When my first inclination was to return the favor and persecute OTHER people who were different, they stopped me. But they also SHOWED ME that making someone else feel bad isn’t going to make them or anyone else feel better in a lasting way. The only way forward was and still is to take people as they are.

There HAVE been situations where I simply didn’t like a person. But I didn’t decide to widen my circle out to target everyone who came from that same country or county. My angst began and ended on an individual level.

I’ve also poked fun at people who are very, very close to me because of their dancing and their sexual proclivities. But that was always only people that I knew extremely well and NEVER as a means of achieving some kind of weird dominance over a situation.

I’m circling round and round here…

What I want to say is that if you don’t like Dave Chappelle then I think you need to tell him that. I’m pretty sure he’s mature enough to understand that it is part of the social contract. But don’t cancel him. I happen to love his work. It makes me laugh most of the time. It makes me cringe some of the time. And occasionally (because I study the things that comics say) it makes me sad to listen to. His most recent monologue on “Saturday Night Live” was painful to listen to in parts because it was true. People with power exploit and exploit and exploit and deplete and then they dispose of. Dave Chappelle is simply fighting back by getting paid – let him get paid! Let him fight back! His words are not those of a role model… but his blue-print for ‘flipping the bird’ to the entire system IS something that we can adopt and use for our own means.

If we don’t have that ability to make fools of ourselves by saying stupid things or by busting out our best “Saturday Night Fever” moves at a wedding we can’t ever learn. The people with the power will simply point the cancel cannon at us and we’ll be gone. POOF! Back to my desk, jockey numbers on a spreadsheet, pretending I really give a crap about hedge funds.

(NO – I haven’t seen his latest special yet. I won’t watch it because I find it offensive.

Kidding!

Look at where I live; stuff like that is a slow grind to get hold of. And that slow grind is brought to you by the people with the power of the cancel cannon.)