I Was Drawn To The Question: Has Cancel Culture Finally Run Its Race…
I wonder if you too are sick to death of B grade American actors who have spent much of their lives sleeping their way to the middle lecturing us on general morality as they perceive it. Or racist gangs of hooligans under the guise of # black lives matter, marauding through the streets of our cities smashing windows, looting innocent merchants, and setting fire to cars to justify their miserable existence, and selfish causes.
I know that I am. And the prospect of these minority bullies losing their credibility and influence on a terrified community all bodes well for me and the future of our community at large. This was the true essence of what prompted me to consider the prospect that we will examine in this article.
In a piece first published in the LAD Bible, John Cleese was interviewed. The headline screamed:
John Cleese says Life of Brian stage production won’t cut iconic scene due to so called modern sensitivities.
He’s known more these days for his outspoken views on cancel culture, but it’s Cleese’s birthday today, so we’re revisiting this tale from earlier in the year when he spoke about the Life of Brian musical.
That’s coming out next year, and – true to his word – Cleese is keen for the original work to remain as the Monty Python team intended it.
The acclaimed comedian took to Twitter – now X, of course – back in May to shut down rumours about the iconic ‘Loretta’ scene.
The scene in the 1979 film shows the character of Stan – portrayed by Eric Idle – telling his fellow revolutionaries that he now wants to be a woman and demands to be called ‘Loretta’ as he wants to have children.
To the disgust of his peers, they tell him he can’t have babies as he doesn’t have a ‘womb’.
“I want to be a woman… It’s my right as a man,” the character says in the scene.
“I want to have babies… It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them,” before adding: “Don’t you oppress me!”
It was originally reported that after a read-through, production decided that the scene would be cut from the stage version.
However, Cleese has rejected this.
“A few days ago, I spoke to an audience outside London. I told them I was adapting the Life of Brian so that we could do it as a stage show (NOT a musical),” he wrote at the time.
“I said that we’d had a table reading of the latest draft in NYC a year ago and that all the actors – several of them Tony winners – had advised me strongly to cut the Loretta scene.
“I have, of course, no intention of doing so.”
He responded to a fan who questioned why the rumour was being spread and said: “That was what was so surprising.
“These were absolutely top-class Broadway performers, and they were adamant that we would not get away with doing the scene in NYC!
“I asked them, ‘Are Python fans not going to come because we’re doing a scene, they’ve been laughing at for 40 years?'”
The 83-year-old has been a fierce critic of political correctness, citing that it’s had a ‘disastrous’ impact on comedy.
Speaking at the FreedomFest conference in July of 2022, Cleese claimed that comedians have a harder time being funny now for fear that they’ll be ‘cancelled’.
“A lot of comedians now are sitting there and when they think of something, they say something like, ‘Can I get away with it? I don’t think so. So and so got into trouble, and he said that, oh, she said that.’ You see what I mean? And that’s the death of creativity,” he said.
“So, I would say at the moment, this is a difficult time, particularly for young comedians, but you see, my audience is much older, and they’re simply not interested in most of the woke attitudes.
“I mean, they just think that you should try and be kind to people and that’s no need to complicate it, you know?”
Cancel Culture: An Open Letter Fuels the Argument.
In an open letter published by Harper’s, signed by luminaries including Margaret Atwood and Wynton Marsalis, argued for openness to “opposing views.” The debate began immediately.
The turning point seemed to be with the killing of George Floyd it brought an intense moment of racial reckoning to the United States. As protests spread across the country, they have been accompanied by open letters calling for — and promising — change at white-dominated institutions across the arts and academia.
On the following Tuesday, a different type of letter appeared online. Titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” and signed by 153 prominent artists and intellectuals, it began with an acknowledgment of “powerful protests for racial and social justice” before pivoting to a warning against an “intolerant climate” engulfing the culture.
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter declared, citing “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
“We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other,” it continues. “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.”
The letter, which was published by Harper’s Magazine and also appear in several leading international publications, it serves to fuel the debate that has been going on privately in newsrooms, universities and publishing houses that have been navigating demands for diversity and inclusion, while also asking which demands — and the social media dynamics that propel them — go too far.
And on social media, the reaction was swift, with some heaping ridicule on the letter’s signatories — who include cultural luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Bill T. Jones and Wynton Marsalis, along with journalists and academics — for thin-skinnedness, privilege and, as one person put it, fear of loss of “relevance.”
The debate over diversity, free expression and the limits of acceptable opinion is a long-burning one. But the letter, which was spearheaded by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, began taking shape about a month before, as part of a long-running conversation about these issues with a small group of writers including the historian David Greenberg, the writer Mark Lilla and the journalists Robert Worth and George Packer.
Mr. Williams, a columnist for Harper’s and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, said that initially, there was concern over timing.
“We didn’t want to be seen as reacting to the protests we believe are in response to egregious abuses by the police,” he said. “But for some time, there’s been a mood all of us have been quite concerned with.”
He said there wasn’t one particular incident that provoked the letter. But he did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory.
Such incidents, Mr. Williams said, both fuelled and echoed what he called the far greater and more dangerous “illiberalism” of the former President Trump.
“Donald Trump was the Canceler in Chief,” he said. “But the correction of Trump’s abuses cannot become an overcorrection that stifles the principles we believe in.”
Mr. Williams said the letter was very much a crowdsourced effort, with about 20 people contributing language. Then it was circulated more broadly for signatures, in what he describes as a process that was both “organic” and aimed at getting a group that was maximally diverse politically, racially, and otherwise.
“We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sitting around writing this letter,” Mr. Williams, who is African-American, said. “It includes plenty of Black thinkers, Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, people who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.”
“We believe these are values that are widespread and shared, and we wanted the list to reflect that,” he said.
Signatories include the leftist Noam Chomsky and the neoconservative Francis Fukuyama. There are also figures associated with the traditional defense of free speech, including Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as some outspoken critics of political correctness on campuses, including the linguist Steven Pinker and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
The signers also include some figures who have lost positions amid controversies, including Ian Buruma, the former editor of the New York Review of Books, and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard Law School professor who left his position as faculty dean of an undergraduate residence amid protests over his legal defence of Harvey Weinstein.
There are also some leading Black intellectuals, including the historian Nell Irvin Painter, the poets Reginald Dwayne Betts and Gregory Pardlo, and the linguist John McWhorter. And there are a number of journalists, including several opinion columnists for The New York Times.
Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former dean of Columbia Journalism School, said that he rarely signs letters, but thought this one was important.
“What concerns me is a sense that a lot of people out there seem to think open argument over everything is an unhealthy thing,” he said. “I’ve spent my whole life having vigorous arguments with people I disagree with, and don’t want to think we are moving out of this world.”
The principle of open argument, he added, becomes especially important outside liberal-leaning enclaves, “where people don’t have the option of shutting down these supposedly completely unacceptable views.”
Mr. Pardlo said that as somebody who has felt the “chilling effect” of being the only person of colour in predominantly white institutions, he hoped the letter would spark conversation about those “chilling forces, no matter where they come from.”
He said he was surprised by some of the blowback to the letter.
“It seems some of the conversation has turned to who the signatories are more than the content of the letter,” he said.
There was particularly strong blowback over the inclusion of J.K. Rowling, who has come under fierce criticism over a series of comments widely seen as anti-transgender.
Emily VanDerWerff, a critic at large at Vox who is transgender, posted on Twitter a letter she said she had sent to her editors, criticising the fact that the Vox writer Matthew Yglesias had signed the letter, which she said was also signed by “several prominent anti-trans voices” — but noted that she was not calling for Mr. Yglesias to be fired or reprimanded.
Doing so “would only solidify, in his own mind, the belief that he is being martyred,” she wrote.
Mr. Yglesias declined to comment except to say that he has long admired Ms. VanDerWerff’s work and continued to “respect her enormously.”
Amid the intense criticism, some signatories appeared to back away from the letter. On Tuesday evening, the historian Kerri K. Greenidge tweeted “I do not endorse this @Harpers letter,” and said she was in touch with the magazine about a retraction. (Giulia Melucci, a spokeswoman for Harper’s, said the magazine had fact-checked all signatures and that Dr. Greenidge had signed off. But she said the magazine is “respectfully removing her name.”)
Another person who signed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in an effort to stay out of the growing storm, said she did not know who all the other signatories were when she agreed to participate, and if she had, she may not have signed. She also said that the letter, which was about internet shaming, among other things, was now being used to shame people on the internet.
But Mr. Betts, the director of the Million Books Project, a new effort aimed at getting book collections to more than 1,000 prisons, was unfazed by the variety of signers.
“I’m rolling with people I wouldn’t normally be in a room with,” he said. “But you need to concede that what’s in the letter is worthy of some thought.”
He said that as someone who had spent more than eight years in prison for a carjacking committed when he was a teenager, he was given pause by what he called the unforgiving nature of the current moment. “It’s antithetical to my notion of how we need to deal with problems in society,” he said.
He cited in particular the case of James Bennet, who resigned as the editorial page editor of The New York Times following an outcry over an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, and cases of authors of young adult literature withdrawing books in the face of criticism over cultural appropriation.
“You can criticize what people say, you can argue about platforms,” Mr. Betts said. “But it seems like some of the excesses of the moment are leading people to be silenced in a new way.”
Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, declined to comment.
Mr. Williams said he was trying to think through how outrage over Mr. Floyd’s death had become so intertwined with calls for change “at organizations that don’t have much to do with the situation George Floyd found himself in.”
But to him, he said, the cause of the letter is clear: “It’s a defense of people being able to speak and think freely without fear of punishment or retribution, of the right to disagree and not fear for your employment.”
