After 1949, couldn’t those shut out publish in Galaxy and F&SF?
True that, but it’s goes beyond the Huxtables. Cosby’s persona permeated everything he did: Picture Pages, Fat Albert, Kids Say the Darnedest Things TV specials, stand up specials and albums, He was a dad brand unto himself.
There was that ONE time he played a character whose evil approached that of Cosby’s own.
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Cancel culture is destructive and autolytic. Each time you toss someone down the memory hole you need to go a little further for the next one. The standard for acceptability ratchets up a little more, and since the easily attacked targets are either safely dead or potential allies - it’s harder to go after actual enemies who might fight back - you eventually end up with, well, pretty much nobody who is acceptable except a carefully curated set of people whose faults are contextualized out of existence.
It’s like the French Revolution or the Cultural Revolution or the Night of the Long Knives. The Beast thrashes about demanding to be fed. Sooner or later it turns on the people who let it loose. I notice that Robert Silverberg is currently on the chopping block. Stan Lee was declared “problematic” about a year ago. Pretty sure we’ll see mandatory denunciation of Malcolm X and James Tiptree before too long. Eventually the Painfully Woke will denounce Mr. Rogers leaving the field to the right wing assholes who don’t care what we think of them.
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So Louis CK getting heckled on stage for whipping his dick out and beating it is just like the Cultural Revolution, which saw the beating and murder of a good number of people… good to know.
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It’s not about forgetting flawed people or erasing their accomplishments. It’s about remembering them for who they really were rather than willfully overlooking their serious flaws just because they happened to have qualities that you liked.
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Yeah, but… isn’t the tragedy of Louis CK or Harvey Weinstein not being incredibly powerful in our culture the REAL tragedy here! I mean, so what Weinstein raped a few women! Who cares! Women get raped all the time! But good old Harv, well, he greenlit some movies we all like, so him having to face a trial for rape and being shouted down at a bar is just pretty much the same as those infamous struggle sessions where all the neighbors of an accused showed up to beat and yell at the accused! It’s Harv just like that nameless man that stood down a tank? Except for not being massacred by his government, or arrested and beaten by the secret police without due process, or having what’s happening to him covered up… otherwise, it’s just the freaking same. /s
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Beat that strawman a little harder, why don’t you?
The way it works, the way it always works, is that you have to keep denouncing and erasing. And to do that you have to keep looking for more and more impurity. We’ve already seen it escalate to the point where minor personal disagreements become a reason to shun or where the act of defending oneself is considered proof of the accusation. And once there is any fault the person’s entire life and work must be forever condemned.
A Marion Zimmer Bradley who committed child sexual abuse or Larry Correia who made terroristic threats and tried to SWAT people becomes no different than someone who once said something bad or, as happened here recently, a bookstore employee who tried to keep the fire lanes open.
What strawman? You literally just compared “cancel culture” to the Cultural Revolution. Literally.
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Comparing people suffering consequences for their own shitty behavior isn’t anywhere NEAR the magnitude a crime as the ones you listed, where hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions, died, often for not having done anything wrong, legally or morally. Same can not be said for Campbell, who actively kept certain from having access to an audience because of their gender or race… or Louis CK, who whipped his dick out after “asking” women who worked for him… or Harvey Weinstein, who literally raped people…
No one is erasing shit here. We’re acknowledging facts, instead of covering them up.
That’s a slippery slope, as we all know. Holding people who are shitty to others accountable inevitably leads to the gulags! Everyone knows that… in fact, that’s how the Great Purge started! Feminists demanding that sexual harassers get fired from their jobs… Stalin took his ideas directly from people who did not want to get raped!!! /s
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And eventually you can’t name a living woman painter, or First Nations fashion designer, or black cowboy, or…
Oh wait. You’re not talking about erasure, you’re talking about additional material being added to white male creators’ encyclopaedia entries, and people publicly saying less-than-nice things about them.
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And that’s without even considering presentism. Things we recoil from now were normative in other times and places. And in a hundred years or so attitudes which we consider praiseworthy and humane will give our descendants the creeping horrors. Fairness demands that we denounce ourselves in advance and burn all of our works to save future generations the trouble.
And then there are the ones who trust the opinion of someone who survived fascism and didn’t want it to happen again.
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There is nothing that says we can’t understand and judge the past. Yes, women had far less rights in the past, including being the denied bodily autonomy - that is a historical fact that can be verified through documentation. And women in the modern era fought against that in numerous. Just because that was a fact does not mean we have to say that it was okay, because “they did not know better” because the fact of an organized movement for greater rights among women is proof that many DID know better and were working to correct it.
In this case, when Campbell was editing Astounding/Analog, civil rights was an ongoing part of the landscape. People KNEW better then, and some advocated for better, too. He did not. He advocated for its opposite. That is something that we SHOULD talk about as fans of sci-fi and fantasy, because it actively shaped the industry and the type of literature that was available to readers.
No. It demands that we see ourselves in our historical present, reflected against the past, and seek to create a better world for those that come after. That does include making sure that women, LBGQT+ people, and people of all races, religions, ethnicities are fully included citizens, with the same rights and responsibilities as straight white, cisgender Christian men. Pointing out that Campbell (among others) actively participated in keeping some ideas or some people out of the science fiction community should be a lesson for us to do better, to work for inclusion of all. Because the future should be inclusive…
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That’s not what’s happening here at all. If anything, Campbell is being re-memorialised for what he was by his own words: a fascist (and at a time when fascism was known to be a bad thing). Acknowledging that fact, and taking his name off an award because of it, is nothing close to the Cultural Revolution. This decision is so far up on the slippery slope you’re trying to set up that it’s still on level ground.
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Excellent essay. Does not seem to map to Campbell.
But if we get rid of all the missing stairs, then all that will be left is slippery slopes.
/s
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Also, the only REAL oppression is class oppression, so really talk of race, gender, sexuality, etc only distract from the REAL struggle… /s
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