Notable: The Odd Couple, Cancel Culture, And Me
New events! An audio bonus! And an essay.
First, I’m excited to have classes on the books. And a reading.
For Keep St. Pete Lit, I’ll be teaching three one-class sessions. The first up is Overcoming Writer’s Block. These will be on Zoom, so all can attend!
A topic near and dear to my heart—persisting in our creative endeavors against the odds. In this interactive session, we’ll look at how to change our relationship with blocks to our creative flow so we keep writing and creating more. Suitable for all levels, fiction and nonfiction.
Live and in person, Wordier Than Thou’s monthly literary open mic event will feature me reading from my forthcoming book, Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Overcoming the Wellness Revolution.
The Odd Couple, Cancel Culture, And Me
Not long ago, I attended a live indoor theater event for the first time in two years. A lover of live theater — no two performances are ever the same — I overcame my objection to reheated productions that fail the Bechdel test and bought tickets to The Odd Couple.
First staged in 1965, the plot revolves around two newly single straight men who move in together. Given that this thing is so widely-produced and lauded, I was shocked that it managed to be more sexist than I’d feared. This particular production, which didn’t change a word of dialog, featured characters toting face masks and counted a lesbian among the poker-playing buddies.
Surely, thought I, the contrast was purposeful. A way of saying, Hello! This staple of American theater is super problematic. But nothing in the subsequent reviews or interviews suggested this was the intent. So I started writing this piece.
That was six months ago.
I didn’t stop thinking about the issue. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since July of 2020 when a group of high profile thought leaders came together and signed the “Harper’s Letter,” calling for an end to the cancellation of expression (and people and ideas) that fell outside a narrow political spectrum.
Signed by 153 people, including writers, journalists, psychologists, musicians, hell, even Gary Kasparov signed—the note decries the “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
The aim was to “preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.”
While all that sounds terribly reasonable—demonizing disagreement is bad for democracy—it was hard not to notice that they were speaking from positions of power within the very organizations they were railing against. Who were they trying to convince of their argument?
That same month, a response piece in Objective Journalism (signed by 160 journalists and writers) showed that, for all the pearl-clutching in the original epistle, the cries of wrongful censure that supposedly drove the need for this letter were inaccurate portrayals. At least incomplete.
While it’s true that some people who signed the Harper’s Letter have had to scramble to stay relevant, that’s not unusual. “Lifetime professions” are a relic; even doctors and lawyers must remain abreast of the latest case knowledge. Hasn’t everybody had to update their skills to be viable on the job market?
Not that the issues raised should be dismissed. It’s more than a matter of people in power not liking their comeuppance. The Black school security guard in Madison, WI—fired for telling a student not to direct the n-word at him— could not be labeled a high-profile power broker, yet he was canceled and lost real wages. (Mercifully, in the wake of national furor, he was rehired.)
There must be a way to show more sensitivity and still be sensible.
Veering back to the now of it all, I don’t believe that opinion pieces like the Harper’s Letter change hearts and minds so much as affirm existing confirmation bias. Stories, however, are another matter. When we see the world from other people’s perspectives, we open to the universal truths of the human condition. I also believe that stories can shock us to our senses. Like when I watched The Odd Couple. I was so offended by that show I sent up a prayer of gratitude for all the cancellations that will prevent such anti-feminist fare from getting bank-rolled today. Well, fingers crossed.
So it was an enormous disappointment to see that—in an op-ed* calling for an end to “policing and limiting culture”—the New York Times editor Pamela Paul fell into the same trap as the Harper’s Letter; she began from the notion that any curtailment on writers is automatically problematic. Talk about limits of the human imagination (one of the bombastic phrases she used to describe the coming doomsday).
Her missive is not about free speech, rather, the freedom to say what one wants. But is it really so wrong to expect authors to consider the people they’re representing? Is there an actual problem? Or is this just a lament?
Notably, her argument rested on defining a threat. What I found truly remarkable about the group she defined was how neatly it matched another group identified in the paper that same week—Tucker Carlson’s infamous them.
According to Paul:
[M]any of those who wish to regulate our culture — docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.
According to Carlson:
‘They’ include Democratic (and some Republican) officials, members of the media, Big Tech executives, academics, sports and Hollywood stars, and others.
From the three-part series, How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable
Change is hard, and messy. But just because we have a platform to complain about it, doesn’t mean we should. This kind of “othering” results in distrust of the media, cries of “fake” news. I want to strive to do better, to be unafraid to tell my story yet aware of the responsibility of doing so. This obligation weighed heavily while writing my memoir about life in Qatar, American Lady Creature, and I feel it again now, while writing about my experiences in India. Yet this is my lived experience, and had I not brushed with other cultures, I might not have seen the limits of my point of view. The trick, I believe, is to be willing to be changed. And to allow that same grace to others.
Now for that story! I was digging into the archives and found a story from a show I did in NYC when American Lady Creature first came out. It’s from the book, about that time my hairdresser in Qatar wanted to give me the tip. More than just the tip, actually. Have a listen here.
Strong and vital read - thanks so very much! Carrie B