SELF-CANCELLATION, DE-PLATFORMING, AND CENSORSHIP

A TAXONOMY OF CANCEL CULTURE

- NICK GILLESPIE

IN AN AGE of cancel culture, it’s perhaps fitting that the death of a free-speech hero would receive little fanfare. So when the poet, publisher, and provocateur Lawrence Ferlinghetti shuffled off this mortal coil in February at the grand old age of 101, there were dutiful obituaries in The New York Times and elsewhere but the respects were hardly commensurate with the debt owed the man. By publishing Allen Ginsberg’s funk-filled poem Howl in 1956, Ferlinghetti risked jail and financial ruin—and did as much as any single individual to end not just government censorship but a stultifyingly repressive American intellectual culture. When Ferlinghetti was hauled into court, legitimate U.S. publishers wouldn’t touch books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer for fear of being charged with obscenity. He helped create the period of increasingly free and open expression that moral scolds, increasingly in the name of progressive visions of “anti-racism,” are challenging today.

The obits reported that Ferlinghetti, who skippered a submarine chaser during World War II and returned from service an ardent pacifist, died of interstitial lung disease. But on a mythopoetic level, I prefer to think that he gave up the ghost because he knew his brand of free expression was no longer welcome in the country for which he fought so bravely in wartime and peacetime. “I am signaling you through the flames,” he wrote in “Poetry as Insurgent Art,” one of his later works. “You can conquer the conquerors with words.” Not if words themselves are the problem.