Thomas Becket and Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says

For those of you with the good sense not to pay any attention to Andrew Sullivan as he goes not at all gentle into that good night of pissy irrelevance, let me catch you up.

Some time ago, as his dorm-room-bong-hit Conservatism dissolved under the solvent of the brutalism of Donald Trump and the complete collapse of the Right, Mr. Sullivan began casting wildly about for something else to be mad at Liberals about.  

He and a ragged band of other fossilized remnants of a bygone age decided that campus speech codes and "cancel culture" were the new Greatest Tyrannies Ever Imposed Upon The Mind Of Men.

That went on and on and is still the subject of pretty much nonstop whining on the snobbier Conservative outlets so I guess cancel culture isn't as cancel-y as we were led to believe.  But apparently allowing anyone to lay any proofreading marks on his golden prose was too much for Mr. Sullivan, who one day packed up his quills and foolscap and left his wingnut welfare writing gig at New York Magazine, leaving a series of short notes about how it was an amicable parting.  

Mr. Sullivan then used his severance check to buy himself a a much bigger version of the same ol' hobby horse.  And brothers and sisters, he has been riding that thing into the ground ever since. 

Just read that. No surprise there either. But when does The New Yorker ever surprise any more? Just woke doctrine.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 28, 2020

Will no one listen to the pain of the fragile privileged Conservative gay Catholic Tory white guy who wants to write about phrenology and campus speech codes? Will no one heed his warning that critical race theory is one million times worse than, y'know, actual racism. Will no one rescue the bitter crank whose rustic opinions on cancel culture have been cruelly confined to SubStack.  And Twitter.  And frequent appearances on the Bill Maher show.  And guest-writing gigs at places like The New York Times Review of Books where he is 100% free to wedge his "woke doctrine" twaddle into whatever he is actually hired to write about.  

There is no mention of the radicalizing woke left — which has played a key part in radicalizing the right in recent years and for good reason. 

Because according to Mr. Sullivan, the "radical Left" is always to blame for whatever fascist excesses the Right manifests on any given day.  

So on this 850th anniversary of the murder of Thomas Becket, perhaps it's a good time to remind ourselves what an actual cancel culture looks like -- 

On December 1, 1170, Becket, having spent some six years in exile, returns to a Palm-Sunday style entry: people line the roads, throwing their cloaks before him and hailing him. But Becket's enemies among clerics and court officials are numerous—and for good reason. He adamantly refuses to back down on his demand for independent power for the church. And more than that, he excommunicates all those who sided with the king. Henry is enraged. From his sickbed he moans a message, which his closest aides understood as, Who will rid me of that troublesome priest? 

Before dawn on his fatal last day, Becket arises, officiates at the Mass, and confesses his sins. There is a sense of foreboding as he warns those close to him to flee. In the late, cold afternoon of December 29, 1170, four knights enter the cathedral during the vesper service and attack Becket as he is proceeding to the high altar. It is a grisly scene. According to an eyewitness, "The crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood, white with brain, and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral."

-- versus the "flouncing off to a different media platform because one is mildly inconvenienced by an editor" version cancel culture which so horrifies Mr. Sullivan. 

The dull truth is, Mr. Sullivan's obsession with a chimeric "woke doctrine" it nothing more than the flipside of Mr. Sullivan's Pineapple Ice Cream Conservatism which some disreputable Liberal blogger wasted a lot of time and adjectives writing about a long time ago:

Mr. Sullivan's Conservatism is identical to Mr. [David] Brooks' Moderation in that their respective ideological systems amount to little more than what is convenient and enjoyable for each man to believe at any given moment.

If Mr. Sullivan suddenly developed a taste for pineapple ice cream, within a week he would be penning columns about how "Liking Pineapple Ice Cream" is a cardinal Conservative value because of something something Edmund Burke. If he got sick on bad Thai food, we would suddenly see a spate of columns discussing bad Thai food and how it is something that only extreme Christianists or Left Liberal would ever put in their mouths.

He is, at best, a flighty dilettante with a wealth patron and does not have the slightest fucking clue about how his adopted country works...

 The dull truth is, Conservatism cannot function without vile Liberal conspiracies to bitch about.  

And where no actual vile Liberal conspiracies exist, Conservatives up and down the spectrum from Tucker Carlson to Andrew Sullivan will always be on hand to conjure some out of thin air.

No Half Measures