DEADLIER CANCEL CULTURE THAN TONI-SHOPPEE BROUHAHA

 

          I came face to face with cancel culture situations long ago. Sort of.

One busy morning, I dropped in a crowded fast-food restaurant, and placed an order for breakfast. Sitting at my table for nearly half an hour, I refreshed my memory on the fast food appealing marketing pitch: burgers sit only for 15 minutes; chicken nuggets, 20 minutes; then, thrown out; drive-thru food served in 5 minutes.

Fed up waiting, I called out a staff, showed my order slip, and said I wanted to see the manager. Looking into it, his reflex facial reaction hinted at some screw-up. He took off and came back right away with the manager holding the counter clerk’s slip of my order. It turned out the clerk dropped my order slip on the floor as shown by a footwear smudge on the slip.

In less than no time, my order landed on my table. Having lost my appetite, I told the manager to serve my meal instead to a small kid outside the restaurant looking through the glass wall. I watched a staff handed my order with mixed feelings – not pleased about what had happened, but pleased enough about what to happen – a surprised small kid getting an unexpected gift.

On that day I cancelled the fast-food restaurant branch on my preference list.

PERSONAL CANCELLATION

 One cool evening, my family and I went in a nice diner to taste a variety of seafood dishes set amid a quiet and lovely ambiance of the place. Looking at the sumptuous spread on the table, I figured something special was missing – the “kinilaw” – a Filipino ceviche dish consisting of cubed raw fish marinated in vinegar along with spices.

I heaved a sigh of relief when I caught sight of a waiter with a plate of our ordered “kinilaw” closing in our corner. Getting past our table, the waiter, to my surprise, served the “kinilaw” on the nearby table of newly-arrived guests – VIPs as far as I knew. All at once, I asked for our order slip and found out our “kinilaw” was crossed out without our advice.  Beyond a shadow of a doubt, our “kinilaw,” a mouth-watering appetizer, ended up as a welcome curtsy for the diner’s VIP guests.

That evening I cancelled the diner on our preference list.

Only “sort of” was I engaged in cancel culture in the above situations because, strictly speaking, my actions fell short of the following Merriam-Webster’s definition of cancel culture:

“The practice or tendency of engaging in mass cancelling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure.”

My actions as ways of expressing disapproval were personal – the cancellation buck stopped with me and my family. By contrast, cancel culture, maybe personally sparked off, lead to mass cancellation – to exert social pressure – as showcased by the following Filipino-American family experience.

MASS CANCELLATION

Celebrating an aunt’s birthday at a restaurant, the Chan family was insulted and harassed by a man with racist language. The expletive-filled video Chan posted on social media, according to The Los Angeles Times, showed the man cursing and gesturing with his middle finger at the family: “Go back to whatever…Asian country you’re from …Trump’s gonna … you.”

The video went viral among country singer Kelly Clarkson and her millions of viewers. In the end, the man resigned as CEO of a California tech company and lamented, “My comments towards the family involved were racist, hurtful, and deeply inappropriate.”

So far so good for cancel culture for the above incident. But, by and large, the bottom line for cancel culture is a toss-up between the two opposing sides.

The Pew Research Center, asking the U.S. public what they think and feel about the very meaning of cancel culture, found a deeply divided nation: where some see calls for accountability, others see censorship and punishment.

 The clinching statement in The New York Times article “The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture” is illuminating:

“It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures – high-level politicians, corporate titans – let alone institutions.”

For Toni Gonzaga and Shoppee, such a statement may take the sting out of the cancel culture. But for Pinoys as a whole, there is a deadlier cancel culture than the Toni-Shoppee brouhaha has put before the public.

At this point, let me ask this seeming off-topic question: Have you seen the Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1980s movie “Predator”?

In that movie, the protagonist is the elite paramilitary rescue team on a mission to save hostages in a jungle. The antagonist is a Predator, a humanoid equipped with a high-tech chameleon-like camouflaging device that can bend light -- creating the illusion of invisibility.

PREDATOR-LIKE CANCEL CULTURE

The deadlier cancel culture I’m referring to is like the Predator – it has created the illusion of invisibility – none of us Pinoys seems to be aware of its operation in our present political landscape. Let me expound.

“The concept of cancelling someone was created by communities of people [without] much power to begin with … without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement…” (Aja Romano, “The Second Wave of Cancel Culture,” Vox)

The above is the typical cancel culture concept. Here’s the predator-kind of cancel culture concept according to the Vox article:

“The concept may have become A WEAPON FOR PEOPLE IN POWER [emphasis mine] to use against those it was intended to help.”

To illustrate, let’s take these three samples (as in "Ingat baka ma-de Lima ka") from Randy David’s Inquirer unflinching column:

“Who would have thought that Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, after five years of leading the country’s highest court, could be removed from her position by “quo warranto” – a legal action that questions a person’s authority to exercise or occupy a public office?

“Who would have thought that a sitting senator, Leila de Lima, Mr. Duterte’s fiercest critic, could be arrested and detained without bail, for conspiracy to trade in illegal drugs – on the basis of testimonies of convicted drug criminals?

“But, nothing perhaps can equal the absurdity of reopening the rebellion and coup d’etat charges against Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, another outspoken critic of Mr. Duterte, on the ground that the amnesty he received, which had prompted the dropping of these charges, was void ab initio.”

Truth be told, in the realm of cancel culture, the trio above has been cancelled by the political weaponization of the law.

There are more. ABS-CBN franchise renewal was denied which virtually cancelled the people’s access to the largest media company in the country. Lately, there’s a brazen attempt in cancelling a judge for dismissing a government petition seeking to proscribe CPP-NPA-NDF as terrorists.

And it is in full swing: ranging from a silly attempt by the trolls’ countless numbers in cancelling the Nobel Prize Committee due to Maria Reesa’s award, to cancelling the life of the broadcaster Percival Mabasa, consequently, cancelling his freedom of expression – his right to say what he thinks, to share information, and to demand for a better life for Filipinos.

WALL OF REMEMBRANCE

The predator-like cancel culture poses in the U.S. as a handwriting on the wall: “People with too much power might use it for bad ends.” Here and now, it is adding names to the list on our nation’s Wall of Remembrance.

In the movie, Schwarzenegger equalized the “invisible” Predator’s red-tagging device (Sounds familiar, huh? A Predator sees in infrared.) by covering himself with “mud” to hide his heat-emitting body. As I write this article, I still have to find a fitting metaphor for such “mud” to equalize the predator-like cancel culture which our nation has endured.

          Could that “mud,” as equalizer, stand for Death (or our consciousness of it as deterrence) being the so-called the “great equalizer” of human beings? Well, the Bible affirms such essence and reminds us of our mortality: “We are made from earth, and we return to earth.” (Ecclesiastes 3:20)

We know Who knows all the answers to the questions on when, where, what, how, and why of every human death.

Head still photo courtesy of istockphotodotcom