Aging Capriciously

I woke up (No! I mean really woke up, like after you go to sleep) and thought of the cancellations that I would have to make today.  My calendar had several items that I needed to cancel.  I had several products on my Alexa shopping list that I had to cancel.  I had to cancel a meeting with a friend.  My day starts off with one cancel after another.

It seems that I cannot go through life anymore without having to cancel something.  Everywhere I look there are cancel buttons.  My microwave has a cancel button on it.  My cellphone bids me to cancel numerous phone calls that are not in my contact list.  My oven wants me to cancel after I am done roasting the chicken.  My computer invites me to accept or cancel a software download.  My former business partner texts me once again to cancel a meeting that we had scheduled.  My wife comes in to cancel something we had talked about doing tonight.

I am surrounded, inundated, besieged by cancel requests.  The Republican lamebrains such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz repeatedly scream “cancel culture, cancel culture, cancel culture!”  I have not witnessed as much animosity towards a phenomenon since the zeitgeist of Political Correctness (PC).

You may remember a few years ago, the concept of PC first appeared.  Its emergence seemed to be a response to certain people who felt denigrated by titles or language used in American culture.  For instance, African Americans did not like to be called niggers.  Feminist women resented being called frigid bitchs.  LGBTQ people resented being called fags, dykes, freaks, and homos.  Undocumented immigrants resented being called illegal aliens.  And of course, devout Muslims resented being called Islamo terrorists.  The people who felt that their right to insult, abuse and demean others had been challenged, quickly coined the term PC to label efforts that might better have been labeled as “cultural civility and sensitivity.”

The same people (I would give you ten to one odds) are now appalled at the fact that some Americans want to silence their insults.  This desire to silence hostile and often lying rhetoric has given rise to the term “Cancel Culture.”  Basically, those who believe that we are living in a “Cancel Culture” feel that the rest of us have no right to truth, honesty, and dignity.  They of course have the right to say or do any preposterous thing they want to and the rest of us are expected to accept it.  Let me give you a few examples:

• Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene screams that the recent vaccination push Is more like Jim Crow–Era segregation than the Holocaust. Before it was more like the Holocaust.  She flips flops easily.
• Representative Jim Jordan yells that “The wave of cancel culture spreading the nation is a fundamental threat to free speech rights in the United States.” He insists that the “Cancel Culture” silenced Trump’s lies by denying Trump access to Twitter and Facebook.  Jordan pushes the “Stolen Election” lie in which he swears that Biden did not win the election.  Jordan will swear to anything if it defends Trump.

I could go on and on with hundreds of examples of “Cancel Culture”, but I think it is obvious that something as Sherlock Holmes said is “afoot.”  My personal theory is that Republicans have discovered how powerful euphemisms can be as a tool to ridicule the opposition.  Nasty labels, pejorative names, insulting sobriquets have become all the rage in the Republican Party.  When you add the political stunts, clown shows and imbecilic performance acts that Republicans now use routinely, you have every reason to wonder what is going to become of American Democracy.  Two examples illustrate Republican circus acts:

• Jim Inhofe throws a snowball on the Senate floor in an effort to disprove what he sees as alarmist conclusions about man-made climate change.

• Republican Lauren Boebert declares that “I will carry my firearm in DC and in Congress,” she says in a video, which has been viewed over two million times.

The Republicans will counter that the Democrats also pull political stunts such as the recent effort by Democrats in Texas to block a voter suppression bill by leaving the State Senate and flying off to Washington, D.C.  However, there was a purpose to this move by the Democrats which was to deny the Republicans the quorum they needed to pass a bill designed to destroy what little is left of our democracy.

In looking at the examples of Inhofe and Boebert above, it is clear that these stunts are done for their own aggrandizement.  The single purpose of most of the theatrics done by Republicans today tend to be to deny reality or to push agendas that do not serve the overall good of the nation.  The Republican Party has become a party of clowns and Madison Avenue shysters.

If there is a historical reckoning (assuming the human race survives), it will look back on this era in American politics as the beginning of the death of democracy in America.  We will not be the first country where democracy was tried and subsequently succumbed to the forces of authoritarianism and fanaticism.

Go to go now.  If I say too much, some stalwart Republican lawyer may try to sue me.  Of course, that would not count as “Cancel Culture.”