Cancel culture run amok

A second wave statue story

©2013 Claudia Heidelberger used under a Creative Commons license

As work crews removed the controversial “Massa Tom” statue from in front of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, there were no demonstrations or other visible signs of protest against what some are calling yet another case, such as the recent removal of the Teddy Roosevelt statue in front of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, of “cancel culture run wild,” “political correctness gone mad,” “the Twitter mob run amok,” etc.

But a scant fifty miles away in the rust-belt, lunch-bucket town of Cartonville, Kentucky, ordinary working-class people who had been at Carl’s Diner all day because they were either in retirement,  chronically unemployed, or Republican Party officials who had been told a reporter who was unlikely to ask impertinent questions would be doing interviews, the statue was a major topic of discussion, particularly after an hour-long Fox News special about it ran on the diner’s TV.

Some lamented the offense to historical memory represented by the departure of the statue. “I don’t see how a young person learns history without statues,” said Humphry Clinker, 71, retired from Gemcorp, one of eleven local factories that had closed down in the past 20 years. “When I was a kid, history never clicked for me until they put a statue of Robert Taft in Centennial Park, then I started getting straight As.”

“My teacher had us make statues of the presidents out of Play-Doh,” said Emily Gherkin, 61, formerly a brass buffer at Trophy Warehouse, which was offshored in 2010. “Took all year and caused a cost overrun in the school district, and then we found the teacher was having an affair with the man who sold the Play-Doh. But it was worth it.”

Others thought complaints that the statue was racist were ill-founded. Erected in 1912 after the lynching of an African-American stable hand for being “mouthy,” the statue shows Thomas Jefferson seated on the prone figure of a smiling black woman modeled after Hattie McDaniel in Gone With The Wind, while a young person of color, grinning widely, plays the banjo nearby. The NAACP had complained about the statue for years.

“People are too sensitive these days,” said Joe “Grunt” Whiskin, 49, who had come in to celebrate his last day as a clerk at the local Walmart, which was closing down. The store had given him a $25 gift card as severance, which Carl’s Diner cashier Dot Hildegarde cashed for him.

“It’s not like you never see black people playing the banjo,” Whiskin continued. “And it’s obvious Jefferson and Aunt Jemima are just having fun with each other, the way friends do. People read too much into it. Like that inscription, ‘N.D.L.T.S.S.O.Y.A.I.C.’ — folks just assume it means ‘N-word, don’t let the sun set on your ass in Cincinnati.’ But there are all kinds of things it can mean. It could be the initials of a fraternal order the sculptor belonged to.” (The sculptor, Josiah “Coon-Killer” Rathward, was the Grand Wizard of the Licking County Ku Klux Klan.) “We used to think up things the letters could stand for, like try this: ‘Never did Louise Treutlein see such orange yolks as in Cincinnati.’ And another thing, it’s usually, ‘don’t let the sun set on your black ass.’”

“This cancel culture politically correct Twitter mob would never happen if Bill Welson were elected county sheriff,” said Will Belson, who described himself as a “non-partisan political consultant,” referring to a local Republican candidate. “We have to head this thing off now before America goes totally communist. Why, I hear now there’s a movement afoot to take down the ‘Darktown Strutters’ Ball’ frieze off the wall of what used to be the Rexall in Pineytown. Where will the madness end?”

“I don’t know why we can’t have a say in these things,” Belson continued as he collected signatures to get Welson on the ballot. “They say it belongs to the museum so it’s their call, but I used to see that statue every time I went by that museum, so I came to feel like it was mine. And isn’t that what America’s all about — if you feel like you have a right, it’s yours?”