Not-So-Cancelled (or, Hey, We’re Still Talking About the Wrong Things)

In a semi-recent piece for The Nation, David Klion discussed what is by now no longer the “latest” bit of Internet “free speech” theater in response to the cancellation of a collection of Norman Mailer’s essays. I shouldn’t say “cancelled,” really. The publisher passed on publishing the book, which means it could very well be published somewhere else (even by Mailer’s estate), thereby making the meaning of a “cancellation” rather dubious at best. Can you really be “cancelled” in the lofty meaning that term has now taken (undeserved, really) when you’re both very much dead and your work is otherwise still available? I mean, the presumed offending work, “The White Negro,” is literally right there on the Internet. Google it if you must.[1]

What stands out about this latest bout of the same conversation we’ve been having for the last decade is how utterly banal it has become. It’s essentially the same handful of voices saying the same handful of things while critically missing both reality and actual issues happening over there that deserve a nuanced and stern response. I’m talking about the use of Internet mobs to destroy people’s lives, both by literally trying to ruin them over what are often extremely small offenses by blasting them for months or years on end in social media spaces (thereby making being there innately…