Picking and Choosing Who to Cancel

Anyone looking for a definition of “woke” will find that the definition varies depending upon who you ask.  The term was originally coined by progressive Black Americans and used in racial justice movements in the early to mid-1900s.  To be “woke” politically in the Black community meant that someone was informed, educated and conscious of social injustice and racial inequality.

However, over time, the words “informed and educated” have been eliminated and woke has come to mean “…if there is any detectable inequality, someone other than the individual must be culpable, and whatever the inequality it absolutely cannot be is the result of chance, geography, individual differences, or accidents of birth; in other words, it must be beyond the individual’s control.  Consequently, this self-absorbed ideology advocates for the government to step in and “even things out” and redistribute according to what these self-anointed overseers of the culture feel it should be.

Sadly, during our recent lifetimes woke progressives have taken control of many if not most of the levers of social influence via a wide variety of institutional powers, i.e., the media, Hollywood,  professional sports, Silicon Valley, corporate boardrooms, and even Wall Street.  And when you’re “woke” there is no need to discuss the mundane, i.e., issues such as the national debt, the border, crime, inflation, the debacle in Afghanistan, etc.   Rather, woke ideology focuses on just two things – the victimhood of non-whites, preferably black, and January 6^th  which includes all the transgressions, both real and perceived committed by Donald Trump.

But as consequential as that is, the real problem with woke ideology is much more troubling.  Woke ideology does not comport with the U.S. Constitution, nor does it comport with the customs and traditions that have defined America since the Founding.  Woke culture isn’t committed to righting wrongs, but rather, like its cousins, fascism and communism, its primary concern is obtaining and wielding power against those with whom they disagree.

A One Off or Hypocrisy?

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the first predicate of woke ideology—the cancel culture and used the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville Virginia as an example.  Then, as Providence would have it, I learned of a statue of Pancho Villa located in a park right here in Tucson.

Now depending upon who you ask, Pancho Villa was either a hero or a terrorist.  Many Mexicans and Mexican American residents of Tucson feel he was a champion of the oppressed, and a hero of the 1910-1911 Mexican revolution that deposed an autocratic president.

However, critics of the statue point to the fact that Pancho Villa was really a terrorist who led the 1916 massacre in the New Mexico border town of Columbus leaving scores of innocent people dead.  Known as  the “Centaur from the North” he was a threat to life, property, and order on both sides of the U.S. Mexican border; and during his time, he was greatly feared.

By today’s standards, there is no question that Villa was a terrorist.  For example, on Jan. 8, 1916, eighteen U.S. businessmen were massacred by Villa’s men in a train robbery in northern Mexico.  But that was neither the first nor the last of Villa’s atrocities.  On another occasion he personally shot a priest who begged for clemency for his villagers; but the begging was all for naught because Villa’s men murdered many of the villagers anyway.  He was also known to use rape as a weapon.  And in one controversial event, it was reported that Villa herded the women in the village of Namiquipa, into animal pens where he had his men gang-rape them.

Villa’s atrocities were so egregious that U.S. general ‘Blackjack Pershing’ pursued him for months along the U.S, – Mexican border, but to no avail.  Fortunately, karma stepped in, and Villa was assassinated in 1923, but not before adding to his legend by playing himself in some early Hollywood movies.

Frankly, I could not care less about Pancho Villa, but I do wonder why his statue hasn’t been targeted by the woke crowd.  Obviously, I cannot speak to that directly, but I suspect that a Mexican terrorist doesn’t check the right boxes to merit his statue being melted down by the cancel culture.

Thought for the day:  If white supremacy is truly the all-powerful force woke ideologues make it out to be, why do so many other ethnic populations substantially outperform whites in America?”