Exactly 1000 words on Cancel Culture. 

I want to start this with a few things that maybe everyone can agree on. Bear with me through that, if you can. If you are able to nod at these rhythmically, even better. 

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. I just made this up right now, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I like the way I phrased it, but maybe I should watch out for excessive comma use. More of that to come.
2. All of us have a set of things that we care about and a set that we’re like, “oh who fucking cares?” Maybe YOUR thing is that Yamaha DX7s are just too fucking heavy for the value they provide and must be made from the bones of serial killers. If so, I don’t disagree with you. We all love them for one fucking sound, really, that wirestrung patch. Do you really need an 800 pound brick that makes that sound? If you care about that very much, it won’t be just a political issue, something you hold against the very small and nearly ephemerally powerless American FM synthesis party. It will rise to a moral issue.
3. No person, no matter how awesome, or talented, or generally handsome they are, has a natural right to have fans support their work. Fans have a right, 100%, to say to an artist, "Fuck you and everything you stand for, Morrissey.” Or that person’s name, in the unlikely event that they are not Morrissey. 

Those three things, taken together, give us human beings a huge amount of personal power over the world. They seem, on the surface, slight, but I promise you they do. None of them involve guns or weapons of any kind. They don’t involve blowing things up or infiltrating and killing or throwing people off buildings or anything so seemingly final. 

But they are powerful, regardless. 

They are deeply powerful because they involve the decisions that we make and how we can lead through them.  

Every revolution in the history of the world has been manifest by a decision made public. When the citizens of Boston woke up and said “Hey, where’s the coffee,” and someone tried to hand them a cup of watered down tea, they made a decision. And changed the world. Ok, that is not even a little bit how that happened, but what they DID, do, is say, together, “we’re not buying it.” They destroyed a lot of property, something that makes me a bit sad, as a tea lover, but the big idea here is that standing up and saying “no” is what we do. 

When we have a moral objection. 

I’m not boycotting the terminator movies because Arnold Schwarzenegger is a republican. I think they are sane and reasonable films that detail the true facts about how we manage the hygiene of the timestream and we need to pay close attention. I don’t think that Arnold is engaged in behavior that I have substantive moral objection to. Even Kindergarten cop carries with it no real moral baggage. 

It’s a fine film. 

Here’s the thing, though. I bet anything that every single person reading this, as much as they liked Arnold, could imagine a situation where they would not feel good supporting an actor. In some alternate universe, I’m led to understand, The Terminator role was played by Kevin Spacey, who did a masterful job with the accent, I heard, but was still, all in all, in real life, a serial sexual harasser. 

That may well affect my film collection. And it may well affect yours, too. Sexual predator, pedophile, ephebophile, White supremacist, etc. Every one of us has chosen to not funnel money and support to some artist because we object to what they stand for. And we rarely do it, silently, without discussing it with other people, because we don’t want to make judgments like this in error. We want to do the right thing. We want to spend our money and our support the right way. 

And we want to see when someone changes.

Violent J, member of the Insane Clown Posse, most famous of all the clown posses, was recently memified for telling his daughter to tell people about his previous anti gay lyrical output, “Don't defend me. Say I was a fool then, but I'm not now.”

Fans don’t want to stop supporting someone. And when they give a reason to resume support, they DO. 

When people throw the phrase “Cancel Culture” around, they try to make it sound like someone unfairly passed a legal judgement that targeted them unfairly and is now unfairly doing some unfairly thing. Unfairly. Less than fair. 

The truth is that people have a right to say, “You crossed my moral line. I don’t support you.” and then spend their money elsewhere. You can call it cancelling or you can call it a boycott, or you can call it wisely planning your diminished entertainment budget. 

But you don’t get to whine and call it unfair. 

Right now, much of this difference in opinion is around a single issue. It’s about support for trans members of the community. And, yes, for many of us, that has risen to a moral issue, especially since our government has made it one. Those of us who want to see our little dark-ass community remain a place that can celebrate the participation of trans people are saying to the rest, “No, I’m not buying your record.” and we’re doing it loudly. 

And we will keep doing it. 

Because there is power in these decisions. The power to build something we believe in. And you can whinge about that if you want. 

But you can’t make it not true.