By Erielle Davidson
Wednesday, October 02, 2019
I used to find the expression “kill your heroes”
valuable. Too often, we idolize individuals, assigning them some sort of
unimpeachable aura. So to “kill your heroes” meant to recognize that your
heroes were human, flaws and all. William Faulkner was an alcoholic. Alexander
Pushkin opted to duel over his wife and died in the process. Ernest Hemingway
was a serial cheater.
The endgame of this metaphorical killing was never
destruction. If anything, it was to stave off the inevitable crashing
disappointment you might otherwise experience had you not prepared yourself
emotionally for your idols’ imperfections. This killing was ironically a
humanizing one—it made you realize that your heroes were far more like you than
you initially anticipated.
Iowan Carson King was catapulted to social media heroism
after his stunt to raise beer money ended up generating a wild amount of funds
beyond anything the 24-year-old could have foreseen. He opted to donate these
funds to a local hospital instead of keeping for himself. King recently
announced on a local radio station in Iowa that he had reached nearly $3
million in donated funds, a third of which consisted of donations sent directly
to his Venmo and the rest a result of a matching campaign by Anheuser-Busch and
Venmo.
After King’s fund reached its first million, the Des
Moines Register did a profile on King that included two vulgar tweets King had
penned as a 16-year-old quoting comedian Daniel Tosh. The author of the
Register article, Aaron Calvin, received significant backlash, with people
eventually digging up vulgar tweets Calvin had written. In a swift act of
retribution, Calvin was fired from the Des Moines Register.
The Carson King saga reveals the excesses of the cancel
culture spawned by rabid social justice warriors. What began as a fastidious
practice among leftists seeking to root out the “evil” among us through digging
up old tweets has now turned into an entire cabbage industry of “canceling”
people’s careers.
The process itself is rather simple—one self-anointed
“warrior” exposes someone for something he or she said (or did) years ago and
then proceeds to incite masses of people to join in the public shaming. The
desired outcome is the forceful removal of the individual from the public
sphere of acceptability, and generally, the systematic scourging process works.
There are certain individuals whose behavior is egregious
enough that canceling is surely justified (for instance, Kevin Spacey). There
are others, like Woody Allen, who perhaps should be subjected to the wrath of
cancel culture but have managed to evade its clutches. But then there is
another category of individuals who have fallen victim to the screeching of
social justice warriors and unjustifiably so. Those are the Taylor Swifts and
Dave Chapelles of cancel culture. And now Carson King.
The mob attempted to cancel Taylor for not saying
enough about politics while attacking Chapelle for saying too much about
politics. From this swivel, it becomes abundantly clear that it’s not about
promoting political discussion—it’s about conditioning cultural icons to
regurgitate leftism and then threatening the destruction of their careers if
they do not. Indeed, from this vantage point, it becomes clear that cancel culture
is the culmination of the left’s ownership of the cultural complex.
But what happens when cancel culture attacks the
“normals” among us, the non-famous who happen to be thrown into the spotlight?
Apparently, the public fights back—King’s donations only increased after
Calvin’s quasi-hit piece.
Perhaps this phenomenon is because the evisceration of
King at the hands of a local newspaper for two tweets he wrote as a 16-year-old
strikes fear in the general public, who may begin to wonder if they too wrote
something vulgar and objectionable as teenagers that would repulse them now.
Perhaps it’s evidence of society growing tired of the constant cycle of outrage
that rarely seems appropriately tempered to the alleged offense.
For all intents and purposes, King’s dramatic success
despite being trapped in the jaws of cancel culture represents a revenge of the
normals. Leftists may be able to “cancel” Hollywood figures—the stereotypical
heroes—by scraping together the appropriate amount of “dirt” on a given star,
but it seems that this approach has less purchase on non-celebrities,
especially when they’re backed by their communities. Indeed, among many, the
reaction to King’s tweets was initially disgust, followed by appreciation for
his transformation into someone who would never pen those tweets.
There’s a certain kryptonite for cancel culture, and it’s
the public’s capacity to humanize. In attempting to “cancel” a local hero via
exposing vulgar tweets he wrote at age 16, social justice warriors invited the public
to humanize him. Although King’s tweets are in no way excusable, the public
appreciated the chance to witness the personal growth evinced in his very
public apology.
Therefore, in attempting to “cancel” King, it seems
cancel culture “killed” him instead. And sometimes, as with Faulkner and
Hemingway, it’s okay to kill your heroes. And sometimes, they resurrect
themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment