By Morf Morford
Tacoma Daily Index
In February, Mr. Potato Head was ungendered.
In early March, several classic Dr. Suess books have been withdrawn from publication because of their depiction of racial minorities.
There’s nothing new about “cancel culture” – especially when it comes to public figures and books.
From Cassius Clay to Huckleberry Finn to Bill Cosby, attitudes and values change constantly.
Every generation and cultural shift filters through the art, music literature and business practices of previous eras and picks what it likes (which is usually not much) and criticizes or demonizes what it doesn’t approve of.
In contrast to the grandstanding of a few politicians and public figures, this is a familiar, and predictable process. This is how civilization works.
It’s not always painless – in fact it is almost always painful – even destructive.
Attitudes about everything from public school programs to hiring practices to movies and every aspect of pop culture and fashion changes continually – if not seasonally.
Back when I was teaching and a trend or belief would emerge, I would ask my students to consider when we had seen this before.
Even college level students had a memory of how we had seen this same scene – with different actors and settings – at least once, maybe even many times.
Back in the 1990s “tacky” parties were popular. The theme was to wear clothes (or even eat food and play music) from the previous era. The more repulsive and flagrant, the better.
In the 1990s it was easy – the 1970s were an abundant fountain of bad taste from white (or vertical striped) bell-bottoms (and white patent leather shoes) to off-colored kitchen appliances to plastic everything.
For the most part, the exuberant and near-fluorescent color sensibilities and mechanistic disc-beat of the 1970s has (thankfully) sifted into history – though its emergence is something like a serendipitous discovery for those who did not have to live through it.
Several years ago I was at a thrift store with my then late teen-age daughter.
She was looking through the women’s dresses.
As I was standing by, she pulled out a ghastly ankle-length velour (remember velour?) dress. It was black and luminescent orange.
We both had to involuntarily shield our eyes from the garish assault on our senses.
In glee, she almost screamed “This is SO UGLY! I have to buy it!”
She did. And it probably still hangs in a closet or in a bag somewhere in my house.
But that’s how culture works; one generation’s fashion statement is the next generation’s joke until it is the following generation’s revelation and then either discarded or valued, even enshrined by another generation.
Things that we say or eat or wear or believe, or listen to or even encode into our legal systems or business practices are appalling and embarrassing to the next generation.
We might use terms like “vintage” or “retro” to define some things (like cars or music) but terms like that only emphasize the distinction between “then” and ‘now”.
We are very deliberate about those terms – we are just dabbling in the past, we aren’t living in it.
We might even obsess about a certain era of cars or music or art, but we all know that we would not want to live back then.
Ever see a favorite movie from your childhood, one you had cherished memories of? And when you watched it years, even decades later, were horrified at how tacky, if not stupid and insulting it was?
Or see photographs of your parents – or yourself – from decades past and marvel at the horrible and ridiculous clothes you wore in public. And that hair! Remember that “big hair” phase of the 1980s? I certainly hope we never have a “big hair” revival!
Members of the “boomer” generation might remember candy cigarettes, BB guns and smoking in every movie and TV show (even those marketed to children like The Flintstones) and guns everywhere.
It’s a wonder any of that generation survived – and didn’t shoot our eyes out.
But most of those cultural assumptions and habits, from smoking cigarettes to drinking cheap beer have become borderline anathema.
Now we have craft beer, artisan coffee and vegan options.
Will those be the punchlines for jokes of the next generation?
Of course.
Will the next phase mock Adele, Taylor Swift and the Kardashians?
Yep.
“Cancel culture” has become just another talking point for politicians with nothing else to say.
Remember the “Back to the Future” movies? One of the biggest fears of the characters was being “trapped” in the wrong era.
But we can only be “trapped” in an era where we don’t belong. We aren’t “trapped” in now.
We, like every generation, define ourselves by our difference from previous generations.
Of course attitudes and tastes, and even laws, change.
Marijuana, for example, legal a hundred years ago, legally restricted, if not demonized, in the 1930s, (for largely racial reasons) essentially ignored in the 1940 and ‘50s, emerged as a cultural drug of choice for some (and demonized by others) in the 1960s and finally (though nothing is “final” when it comes to culture) fully legalized in most states and several entire nations from Canada to Portugal.
“Cancel culture” is what we as humans do, at least in our culture, but most eras have the common decency to not add a two-dollar term to their own ignorance and condescension.
And some cultures, in Asia and across Africa for example, actually venerate the cultures achievements of previous eras and generations.
Their monuments and legends, from pyramids and ancient ruins still stir awe in us. But they too were abandoned and overgrown by time and desert sands (or by jungle along the Amazon).
So yes, “Cancel culture” or progress by another name, strikes again.
Until, as an old song (sung by Peter Allen in the musical tribute film All That Jazz in 1979) put it, “everything that is old, is new again.”
Our current fashion sense and more than a few of our laws and assumptions about everything from voting to health care will strike future generations as jarring and anachronistic as a “Whites only” sign in front of a restaurant or gas station.
That’s just how it works.
