Shall We Cancel Brooklyn? - Edward Renehan

Shall We Cancel Brooklyn? - Edward Renehan

With the recent cancellation of early environmentalist, National Park lobbyist, and Sierra Club founder John Muir (for consorting with men who became adherents to the eugenics movement long after Muir was dead), it seems to me we’ve just about run out of people to cancel. The cupboard is bare. The cancellation of the benign and highly philanthropic J.K. Rowling (for offending the Gender Police) should have warned us that we were already perilously close to the last in our list of potential targets – this after wading through so many more deserving and obvious candidates such as Walt Disney (who despised Jews and generally disliked any Black who was not Uncle Remus singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” in Song of the South).

But our modern brand of cancel culture is rather lame, don’t you think? So far as I can tell, J.K. Rowling’s lucrative brand still generates money with more regularity than Donald Trump throws hissy fits. (And that’s good because the numerous charities Rowling so generously supports need the dough. Plus, she’s obviously just a damn nice person.)

So, here’s my question: What do we actually do in this wimpish cancel culture of ours? Nothing much. We remove statues that aren’t WOKE, sending Theodore Roosevelt from Manhattan to the North Dakota Badlands, where he always preferred to be anyway. We change the names of college dormitories, removing Robert E. Lee and replacing him with Sojourner Truth, thereby confusing scores of elderly alumni as, grasping their walkers, they limp around campus on Homecoming Weekend.

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We blacklist celebrities who have already made their fortunes, banishing them to their mansions. We rebrand baseball teams. We stop playing old Al Jolson recordings and new Eric Clapton recordings. We “decolonize” college reading lists by throwing Joseph Conrad under the bus. (“The horror!” as Kurtz, from Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness would say – this reiterated, of course, by Marlon Brando in the knock-off film Apocalypse Now.). We refuse to attend performances in concert halls endowed by Robber Barons who died for their sins in ancient days, long before Freeman Gosden (Amos) ever even met Charles Cornell (Andy). And we retract honorary degrees that were never of any value to begin with.

This is all pretty soft stuff, don’t you think?

We must just be lazy to exhibit such tame reactions to the much-cited past centuries of colonization, white supremacy, patriarchal domination, genocide, sexual harassment, and capitalist exploitation.

Perhaps we should take a lesson from our ancestors, who really knew how to cancel things.

Henry VIII canceled Thomas Cromwell in 1540, by beheading.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great-grandfather, a rather ferocious and self-righteous Bible-thumping judge, canceled a whole flock of “witches” in Salem in 1692-1693, hanging them high on Gallows Hill.

Europeans were all too efficient in largely canceling Native Americans – even though the Sioux were at least able to cancel Custer rather firmly at Little Big Horn while simultaneously creating what has proved to be a terrific tourist attraction. (By the way, I hear the Atlanta Braves are currently under pressure to change their name to the 7th Cavalry.)

Russian revolutionaries took out the Tsar and his whole family while, not far away, some drunk Bolshevik named Boris likely practiced juggling with the royal Faberge eggs.

But in our own lethargic 21st century, where shall our sleepy and uninspired urge to cancel go next, now that we’ve got so few human or institutional culprits remaining? Ironically, it is the current president of the board of John Muir’s Sierra Club, Ramón Cruz, who shows us the way. Cruz is canceling place names. According to a recent interview in the New York Times, Cruz refuses to call his neighborhood by its modern moniker: Brooklyn.

Manhattan was long ago the home of the Lenape People – who famously sold the island to Peter Stuyvesant – while Brooklyn was home to the Canarsee Tribe, who didn’t sell to anyone. “So, when I introduce myself, I usually say [I live] in the greater Lenape territory in the unceded land of the Canarsee people.”

And he wonders why he never gets any mail.

 

Edward Renehan is the author of more than 25 books. He lives in Wickford and fully expects to be canceled on account of this piece. But he doesn’t care because he’ll still get to keep all his money. His personal website is https://edwardrenehan.com.