Try as I might, I could not find any evidence that a support group for those with the want to habitually boycott people/places/concepts exists. If there was a Boycotters’ Anonymous, however, its ranks would boggle even the most stable mind.
In the previous week’s news cycles, as many public temper tantrums on social media have shown, Netflix (no stranger to fairweather boycotters) and the Olympic Games were both up on the cancel culture block, with virtue signalers using them both to demonstrate their moral superiority.
In one corner, streaming giant Netflix, so pervasive that the corporation’s name has entered the status of verb in the common parlance, has a lot of folks crying foul over its chairman and co-founder Reed Hastings’s $7 million donation to a super PAC supporting the presidential bid of Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to an article in Variety, this contribution is the single largest donation made by Hastings, and the article notes how he and his wife have been long-time, big-money donors of the Democratic Party.
The number of memes out in the desert of critical thinking that is Facebook somehow conflating Netflix as a company with its co-founder’s political leanings is staggering. Folks who make politics, or their choice of candidate, a great deal of their identity, and also who apparently cannot tell the difference between a business entity and an individual, are calling for a mass boycott of Netflix.
None of this really means a hill of beans to me, personally, because I don’t use the platform, and never have, nor do I have $7 million to contribute to either the cult of Red or Blue (and if I did have seven million buck$, wasting it on someone’s presidential campaign would not be light years away from the things I’d do with said monies).
Twenty years ago, such ridiculousness would have been justly ridiculed in the public square, but nowadays, people take this kind of stuff serious, thus proving the oft-cited “Idiocracy” talking point as to the devolution of intelligence within politics and common discourse.
My guess is that if those same virtue-signaling keyboard warriors were to take serious stock of all the products and entertainments they consume, they’d be forced to live in a cultural vacuum if they actually believed their own nonsense.
I thought about this principle and took stock of my own laundry list of consumables to see what all I enjoy might be subject to the boycotters’ whims.
I looked over the spines of the albums in my record collection, and there’s quite a tale there. Steve Earle and Todd Snider are two folks who, politically, I don’t have much in common with at all, yet I think they’re two of the most brilliant songwriters to ever match melody and lyrics. I also spied albums by Led Zeppelin and Iggy and the Stooges, and it has been well-reported that in their druggy heydays, both Jimmy Page and Iggy Pop had dalliances with underaged groupies. Still, I think Led Zeppelin II and Raw Power are two of the greatest rock records ever made.
Orson Scott Card might be a homophobic bigot, yet Ender’s Game is a spectacularly well-written novel. As for one popular cancel culture target that I don’t consume (Chick Fil-A), I don’t patronize them because I think their food is trash, and not because the company contributes funds (or did) to anti-LGBTQ groups.
On the other boycott front, the Summer Olympic Games, held in Paris, would normally be a nice detour from the folderol of culture warring, but this is 2024, after all.
This year’s Olympics came complete with a Pineywoods hero, Thomas Walkup, who was a standout at SFASU, and has parlayed collegiate basketball stardom into European fame on the court, which placed him in the summer games for Greece’s team.
Now I haven’t watched any of the games, but you could be sheltering under a boulder and still have knowledge of the din of noise coming from culture warriors about a tableau put forth in the opening ceremonies, which saw a group of performers emulating a painting similar to DaVinci’s the Last Supper.
The scene featured a celebration of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and pleasure. Now I have nominal knowledge of art history, but even I know that the landmark style utilized for the Last Supper is an incredibly common trope in visual art, with the main subject centered, and surrounded by other characters, at a table. Some French history was even represented, with a Marie Antionette character holding her head.
Having read some of the ensuing commentaries about the supposed sacrilegious nature of the display and having seen the visual, there’s nothing there that lines up with DaVinci’s painting or anything regarding Christian history. There was, however, a time in America when the general public did not need university degrees in art history or need to take advanced courses in mythology in order to not have a pearl-clutching reaction to such a performance.
To me, it looked tacky and ridiculous, but nothing that would offend my sensibilities. What is offensive, however, are the countless blasphemous memes and bits of doggerel on social media I’ve encountered that put political candidates equal to our Lord, Jesus Christ. Holders of public office (or hopefuls) were never meant to be deified or turned into celebrities, but I digress.
Still, offensive as those sorts of things might be, I’m not one to rail against their creators or purveyors. Such displays, ridiculous as they are, are their protected expressions, after all.
As one very wise friend puts it, we live in the “United States of Amnesia,” and as such, the cancel culture hordes will soon be back to Netflixing and reminiscing about the Olympics, while railing against some other insidious evil within the marketplace of ideas.
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