Dumb ideas are defeated not by canceling the person who espouses them

Like many artists, Jason Aldean is a talented dope. But even dopes can laugh all the way to the bank when they discover a new and creative way of tapping into the great America outrage machine.

Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” contains lyrics that by themselves are largely unremarkable — it’s Merle Haggard’s "Okie from Muskogee" on PCP, more or less. But its accompanying video is chock full of race-baiting dog whistles, even though Rolling Stone magazine discovered that some of the riotous footage featured in the accompanying music video was of a 2012 student-led protest of tuition hikes in Montreal.

So don’t go trying to limit access to higher education in a small town.

Separating the signal from the noise, as Nate Silver put it, is always difficult in these situations. The message that small-town America does not share big-city values is not particularly news. So was Aldean really suggesting a return to the good old days of lynchings and white supremacy, or was he just trying to push every cultural button he could think of to boost sales?

And did those sales affirm real, deeply considered thoughts on race on the part of his fans, or were they just a reflexive way of tweaking their liberal antagonists? These days, it’s hard to say.

Things were clearer in 1989, when the photographer Robert Mapplethorp outraged conservative sensibilities with a taxpayer-funded exhibit featuring homoerotic and sadomasochistic themes.

Liberals defended this as artistic expression, as they did the work of Andres Serrano, who floated a crucifix in his own urine, for which he won the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition.

Mapplethorpe’s work trebled in price as a result of the controversy. Serrano pretended to be blindsided by the criticism: “I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it,” he said. “I've been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ."

If you say so. But his self defense felt about as flat and deflated as Aldeane’s protestation that he is not “pro-lynching.”

Yet in a free society we tolerate, or should, free artistic expression for the express reason that artists are free to “say” things that would not be tolerated in, well, a small town.

Aldean’s camp itself seemed to realize the degree to which it had stepped in it, self-censoring the video by removing footage of a Black Lives Matter march protesting the police brutalization of George Floyd.

It is less likely that Aldean saw the error of his ways in a social sense than he did in a financial sense: Country Music Television found the video too repulsive to air, giving Aldean a chance to play the well-worn conservative victim card:

“Cancel culture is a thing,” he told a concert crowd, according to Rolling Stone. “It’s something where if people don’t like what you say, they try and make sure they can cancel you, which means try to ruin your life, ruin everything.”

It remains a mystery how your life can be ruined by a runaway chart-topper, but that doesn’t mean Aldean is wrong. Consider how Sarah Comrie, a white 34-year-old physician assistant at Bellevue Hospital in New York, was deprived of her work and became the target of mass outrage after an ambiguous confrontation with a group of Black teens over an e-bike.

Or consider Creighton University men’s basketball coach Greg McDermott who was suspended for, after a tough loss, begging his players to stay the course and not “leave the plantation.”

Had he said what he probably meant, i.e., the old saw “leave the reservation,” who would have even noticed? Yet to one group of people, isn’t “reservation” just as offensive as “plantation” is to another?

You see how complicated it gets when you start policing contextless videos and parsing words.

The lengthy list of people conservatives have wanted to fire for perceived slights — from Anthony Fauci to Mr. Potato Head — must find it rich that Aldean is so concerned about cancel culture.

And the list of people and entities that the left has wanted to erase from our collective consciousness is just as long, and its intolerance is, for whatever reason, more likely to be tolerated.

Dumb ideas are defeated not by demanding the firing of the person who espouses them. They are defeated in civilized discourse, in education and at the ballot box. Social media has made this more difficult, but those who are outraged by what they see on Facebook should understand that their flush-faced reaction is what drives Facebook’s profits.

Differences of opinion are best settled, not in a drunken social media screed, but sitting face-to-face at a lunch counter. That’s really how we did it in a small town.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Jason Aldean's chart-topper latest culture war misdirection