Is it ‘ cancel culture,’ or just cheating?
In case you missed it, last week a famous horse trainer blamed his animal’s drug violation on “cancel culture.”
This would be Bob Baffert. I have lost a fair amount of money betting against Baffert’s horses. He’s really good. And there’s no question he wants to clean up his act. In fact, here’s what he said.
“We can always do better and that is my goal. Given what has transpired this year, I intend to do everything possible to ensure I receive no further medication complaints.”
The problem is that he said this last November after four bad drug tests in one of his barns over a stretch of six months. And then, despite his promise to do everything possible, his Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit tested positive for a regulated agent called betamethasone.
Baffert’s career is dotted with medication violations, at least 30 of them.
So he went on Fox News — where else? — and said, “We live in a different world now. This America is different. It was like a cancel culture kind of a thing so they’re reviewing it."
You’ve got to think that Lance Armstrong, Pete Rose, Lance Armstrong, Mark McGwire and a host of others are kicking themselves now. They could have blamed cancel culture when they were caught cheating. ( Hopefully, Medina Spirit isn’t kicking himself. That seems dangerous.)
And poor Tonya Harding. They canceled her.
Look, to the extent that cancel culture is a thing, I’m often not a big fan of it. But we need a definition.
Let’s start with what it is not. Cancel culture is not about ostracizing people whose proven misdeeds would have gotten them kicked to the curb in any era. We didn’t need cancel culture to deal with Harvey Weinstein. The existing norms of Western civilization are sufficient.
Cancel culture is about something more subtle. What if somebody said or wrote or — as is so often the case — tweeted something unpalatable?
In 2014, “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings tweeted “nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” He has apologized for that and other offensive tweets, but, yes, you have to wonder what sort of ( answer- filled) mind thinks something like that is not horrible, right out of the gate? And now Jennings is under consideration to be the host of his favorite game show.
Cancel culture would dictate that Jennings be essentially erased from culture. He doesn’t get the new job. Nobody books him for college lectures. Nobody interviews him about anything. He doesn’t get to come back for tournaments of champions.
Most of that stuff is not going to happen. There’s some kind of ineffable ratio that pits how big a deal you are against the severity of your offense. Jennings isn’t exactly a supernova, but he’s probably too big to cancel over some admittedly creepy tweets.
The same goes for J. K. Rowling, who can’t seem to shut up about transpersons. Her tweets have been very offensive to the LGBT community, although it might be unrealistic to expect sound social policy thinking from someone who also gets drawn into protracted arguments about whether wizards use toilets. ( Rowling’s recent ruling was that for centuries, wizards used magic to make their poop and pee disappear but that recently they’ve been stepping up to the porcelain. I’m not making this up.)
However, by some metrics, Rowling is the most successful literary writer of all time. Too big to cancel. She would have to do something much more horrible, like deny the reality of COVID and write a thinly veiled antisemitic rant.
Wait. Singer Van Morrison did both of those things recently, and he probably won’t be canceled. Morrison has been a hate- filled crackpot crying out against reasonable pandemic restrictions for the past year, and his recent song “They Own the Media” recycles toxic tropes historically directed at Jews.
He would be difficult to cancel. Too many people, including me, love too many of his songs. It’s almost as if certain people have tenure.
The wolves of cancel culture rarely bring down the biggest, strongest, healthiest caribou ( or horse). You have to be a little less famous. You have to be working for a liberal arts college or a publication that values its status among a certain kind of left- oriented consumer.
The Wall Street Journal recently ran an opinion piece marveling at the way Jordan Peterson — a notorious Canadian right- wing culture warrior — has escaped cancellation. This is absurd. The people who “run” cancel culture have always hated Jordan Peterson. You can’t lose standing you never had.
The sad part of cancel culture is the way it picks off less famous people of value. The New York Times and Slate, respectively, recently brought the cancel cudgel down on journalists Donald McNeil Jr. and Mike Pesca over the n- word — not because they called anybody the n- word or used the n- word in print but because they, as far as I can tell, engaged in discussions about the use of the word in which they either cited it or argued that there might be occasions where the word itself should be spelled out instead of attenuated.
I get that. Way back in the ’ 90s, there was a tendency to use “n- word” for the slur repeatedly uttered by Mark Fuhrman, an L. A. cop investigating the Simpson- Goldman murders. I always thought the biggest beneficiary of that policy was Fuhrman.
McNeil was terrific at his job. I know and like Pesca, whom I consider valuable partly because he’s so committed to hashing things out rather than reflexively saluting the flag everybody else around him salutes.
The problem with canceling people like them is that the rest of us don’t get a vote. If 10,000 of us said these guys were way too valuable to cancel because of a side issue that involved no apparent malign intentions, it wouldn’t matter. We’ve lost them and their work over a set of rules that aren’t even written down anywhere.
And Van Morrison just keeps chugging along. ( To be fair, Pesca is a really, really terrible singer.)
We need to have a very real, nuanced conversation about how to improve public discourse without washing out valuable voices. That conversation does not involve doped- up horses.