One of the new fashionable phrases has become “cancel culture,” the idea that ideas, institutions, and people of the present as well of the past must be overturned and dethroned from legitimacy and acceptance in society, so as to expunge the injustices, cruelties, and insensitivities existing in current life and lingering over from history.
The question is: what exactly is the culture in America that is to be cancelled?
Elements of the “cancel culture” mindset and movement have been seen in the tearing down of statues, demands for removing from buildings and other monuments the names and imageries of various people, and the ostracizing of certain individuals, living or dead, who are accused of and condemned for racist, sexist, and other politically incorrect words or deeds at any time during their life.
White racists of the past used to say that “one drop of black blood” disqualified any person from having status as a member of the “superior” white race, and, instead, relegated you to the lower category of being an inferior being. Now we see another variation on the same type of theme: One word or deed, no matter how innocent or innocuous, no matter how long ago or in the context of an earlier less “enlightened” time, and no matter how much of a “higher consciousness” you have had ever since, or how publicly apologetic you may be for that “sin’” of the past, none of this can save you from banishment, seemingly for all time, from good “woke” society.
You are cast out to the nether regions of human existence. Erased from the record of humankind. And all because everything “American,” past and present, should be seen as the essence of all things evil and immoral. Because what the country has stood for and done represents the worst in human history.
Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – July 13, 2020.
