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Notes -
So there's a musical on Broadway, called Suffs, about the Women's Suffrage Movement in the US in the 1910s. It won a couple Tony's last month (https://playbill.com/article/shaina-taub-wins-best-original-score-at-2024-tony-awards-for-suffs). Alas, even the stage is not immune from impromptu protests, as a far-left group of demonstrators interrupted the show and unfurled a banner for approximately 20 seconds before being escorted out. (https://apnews.com/article/suffs-disrupted-broadway-whitewash-05c6df87a220c253b66807f312948a80).
The group's website (https://www.cancelsuffs.com) alleges that the show is whitewashing the history of the suffrage movement. They point out two historical main characters Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt excluded Black women from the NWP and believe white supremacy would be strengthened by the movement. They also bring up Woodrow Wilson's efforts to segregate the federal government and his screening of The Birth of a Nation while the suffrage movement was still ongoing. They also suggest that the 19th Amendment opened the door to women-centered factions of the KKK.
Has anyone here seen the musical? What are everyone's thoughts about the depiction of controversial historical events as entertainment? Is there any merit to this far-left group's position?
But not for too many generations after that, alas.
I'm reminded of the statue of Ulysses S. Grant being pulled down and can only conclude that, if social progress continues to operate as it has, eventually the progressives of today will be swept into the same historical bin as their adversaries. Give it a century and "CancelSuffs" themselves will have their moral improvement over the suffragettes judged insignificant.
One might ask whether one could or should be okay with that state of affairs, but I think even if one is, it's going too fast. Being so quick to tear down societal heroes (I do think a century for this is quick) is to live in a perpetual revolutionary terror, where instead of building a new and stable and hopefully improved status quo, the heroes of yesterday get guillotined tomorrow. Try to shorten the moral arc of history too much by bending it too sharply and it may spiral out of control.
You don't need to wait a century, we're doing it live. Canceling the Cancellers is half of Cancel Culture's schtick - there's a top level post on Neil Gaiman getting MeTooed in this very thread, for example.
A few years ago I would have pushed back, as the capricious nature of the mob somehow felt like it was an advantage for the movement, but these days it does feel like they're running out of mana, so here's hoping for the spiraling out of control.
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