OK, Boomer...
“The problem I have with all of the “conservative” Christian angst against the cancel culture is that it has been conservative Christians who — especially beginning in the 1970s — were constantly leading the charge to “boycot” [sic] this or that product because said product was a sponsor of tv shows like Soap, or All in the Family, or anything else that the conservative Christians objected to. In other words, y’all are the prototype cancelers. It’s just more than a little disengenous [sic] that now that you’re feeling the heat from your own fire, you’re crying about it.”
The above quote was in response to my post called “Cancel Culture and the Cross.”
It amuses me for several reasons, and has given me fodder for writing more. So thank you, “Boomer Luther.”
I love how boomers are still living in the glory days of the 1960s and 70s, albeit Depends have replaced once ubiquitous bell bottoms, and Viagra has largely supplanted LSD. It is as though life reached its zenith at Woodstock, and boomers are still having flashbacks from the brown acid, even as their glory days of ruling the youth culture were to march on a few more years into the 1970s before sputtering and amounting to nothing. So much for the “Age of Aquarius”. Look at what Martin Boomer considers a cultural triumph: the subversive TV shows of five decades ago: “Soap” and “All in the Family.”
And this is why we say, “OK, boomer.”
“Soap”? I do remember the program, but barely. I was a child. It was back when the Left became enamored with deviant sexuality and having the sound of a toilet flushing on TV. So stunning. So brave. And really, “Martin Luther”? “Soap”? Does anybody under the age of 75 have any of these shows in his VHS collection? I guess that’s what they like to call “ground breaking.” Sigh.
OK, boomer.
And let’s talk about “All in the Family,” shall we? I actually watched this one as a kid. It was a celebration of degeneracy, anti-Christianism, and Marxism. It was the brainchild of Norman Lear, a political leftist and social revolutionary. The message of the show is personified by the Atheist and leftist character known by his nickname "Meathead”, played by fellow leftist revolutionary Rob Reiner. The villain of the series was Archie Bunker, who represents traditional American values (and of course is a conservative white Protestant). On the show, Bunker is a slack-jawed, mouth-breathing buffoon, and an irrational and stupid bigot, while, of course, the counter-cultural characters are all intelligent, suave, sophisticated and educated. They always come out ahead while Bunker looks like a fool. Yawn. And of course, Christianity is mocked while Marxism, sexual promiscuity and deviancy, and cultural degeneracy are celebrated. The free enterprise system is panned as well.
Watching reruns of the program from our perspective today shows the ham-handed agitprop cleverly using a laugh-track to cue and program the home audience as to whom they are supposed to identify with, and to get them mindlessly seal-clapping along at just the right time, like unto Pavlov’s slobbering dogs.
Interestingly, Lear and Reiner were old-school leftists in many ways, champions of the Declaration of Independence (which today has a so-called trigger warning for calling American Indians “savages” and not acknowledging black slaves). Lear and Meathead are advocates of free speech - at least when it suits them. I have yet to hear Norman Lear (who is still alive) or Rob “OK Boomer” Reiner utter a peep today about cancel culture and the assaults on free speech from their political allies. I guess that they’re fine with cancel culture as long as it goes from left to right.
Moreover, another fact that went down the Boomer Memory Hole is that “All in the Family” and its spinoff “The Jeffersons” included the use of the uncensored N-word. And yet, surprise of surprises, nobody is calling for Norman Lear and Meathead to apologize, to grovel, to be placed on the stools of repentance, or to be subjected to a “struggle session.” They have escaped "cancel culture.” It’s a free pass, because they’re confessors of the orthodox cultural faith: the unholy trinity of Atheism, Marxism, and Degeneracy, and as such, the Orwellian double-standard is a tenet of their creed.
As for refusing to patronize sponsors of such programs and making use of boycotts - that is not cancel culture. Everybody does this. If the local proprietor of a coffee shop called your mother an ugly name or made fun of your children, you’d simply opt to go somewhere else to caffeinate yourself. Why wouldn’t you? What kind of a cad would continue to put money in the coffers of someone who mocks his family? Maybe your other relatives and friends would opt out as well. This is just normal human behavior. If you are a police officer, and the local bakery decided to honor BLM, maybe you would decide to frequent someplace else. If your barber has Trump posters on the wall, and you voted for Joe Biden, maybe you would find a new barber - or not. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out: in a free market, the consumer is the captain of the economic ship. We all make choices based on our preferences.
What we are seeing today is far more sinister. It is destructive to societal cohesion and liberty. We’re seeing threats and intimidation, doxing, and people surrounding homes and calling for violence. We’re seeing deplatforming and those with power controlling the narrative. We’re seeing free speech taken away on college campuses - even those that are government property, where the First Amendment is supposed to be the law of the land. We’re seeing the Orwellian Memory Hole and the active use of Soviet-style propaganda in academia, government, and the workplace. We’re seeing states, here and around the world, seeking to use the force of law to censor and enforce compliance.
So where is the outrage from Lear and Meathead? And of course, they say nothing about any of this inhumane use of compulsion. Boomers, who used to put “Question Authority” stickers on their bumpers, have become like Rolf from “The Sound of Music,” using whatever authoritarian means they can muster to quash dissent and to adopt Archie Bunker’s frequent command to his wife: “Stifle.” Meathead has now become Archie. The hoary-headed hippies now want respect as “elder statesmen” - when their old mantra “Never trust anyone over thirty” has come full circle, as their old revolutionary progressivism has led to a dismissal of any claims that they might have had as leaders. We all see their double-standard and their hypocrisy, and they are well-beyond their own spoilage date.
“Soap” came to an end in 1981. “All in the Family” fizzled out in 1979. The 1980s led the country in a different direction, one that sought value in continuity and tradition, one that valued free markets precisely because it helps everyone: especially the poor and minorities. Ironically, one of the spinoffs of “All in the Family” was “The Jeffersons,” a sitcom featuring a black family that was upwardly mobile thanks to the free-enterprise system that Norman Lear and Meathead tried so hard to denigrate and destroy.
By the end of the 1980s, we saw Marxism for what it really was: corrupt oppression. We saw the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe reject Norman Lear and Meathead and turn again to tradition, religion, and advocacy of markets that were mocked in the ridiculous character of Archie Bunker. We saw the Gulag camps emptied. We saw churches spring up. We saw the Berlin Wall tumble, as people were once again free to travel, to trade, and to worship. We saw Norman Lear and Meathead’s Utopia crumble, even as Neil Young cashed in by singing “Rockin’ in the Free World” in 1989, making a lot of money celebrating the triumph of Archie Bunker’s values and the fall of World Meatheadism.
Of course, the leftist counter-culture has always been “Socialism for Thee, but Free Enterprise for Me.” Multimillionaire John Lennon sang the Communist paean “Imagine” - “Imagine no possessions” while driving a Rolls Royce and living a life as opulent as any conservative politician or huckster TV preacher. Gazillionaire George Harrison sat in the lotus position singing about the superiority of the spiritual to the material, all the while living in mansions and singing a protest song that could accurately be titled “Taxation is Theft.” So much for all the “fair share” rhetoric from the Left. Then again, Lear and Meathead aren’t exactly living hand to mouth in a commune either.
But the real target isn’t merely free enterprise or bourgeois culture: it’s really Christianity itself. To Hollywood, traditional values, conservatism, and conformity to the reality of natural law is all represented by the cross, and it is loathsome to our self-proclaimed and anointed elites. The cultural revolutionaries sew chaos, and we Christians are foolish not to recognize it and instead to participate in it, allowing ourselves to sink generationally into the quicksand one inch at a time, selling out our children and grandchildren with each and every guffaw we join ourselves to on the phony laugh-track.
We don’t need to control the behavior of others. Rather we need to opt out, refuse to comply, turn off the TV, stay away from the movies designed to subvert our own children, and spend our money in our own communities and among our own people. It is they, not we, who are the people of the Gulag and the Guillotine. The Gospel is spread peacefully and voluntarily by the Word, not by threats and cancellation, not by fear and intimidation.
We offer the world a different kind of cancellation: the cancellation of the debt of sin, which ultimately cancels death.