Will mural opponents now sacrifice Wendell Berry to cancel culture?

I sat in my own sort of astonishment as I read Bill Turner’s recent attack on Wendell Berry in the Lexington Herald-Leader, wondering if Mr. Berry would be the next casualty of a bizarre tendency in American culture now to demonize anything we don’t immediately agree with. Mr. Turner once admired Mr. Berry, he says, but that all changed when he had the audacity to object to the University of Kentucky’s proposed removal of a painting that some students find offensive. While I personally couldn’t care less about the painting in question and whether or not it is removed, I do object to Mr. Turner’s description of Mr. Berry’s work as “superficial.”

If Mr. Berry is wrong about the painting in question, so be it—he has certainly earned the right to be now and then— but to tar and feather him as some kind of crypto-Confederate is ridiculous as well as dishonest and Mr. Turner, not to mention the fanatics cheering him on, ought to be ashamed of themselves. Though Mr. Turner never quite articulates exactly why the artwork should be removed, he implies that the advocates for its removal are somehow unquestionably righteous. Mr. Berry famously does not own or operate a computer, so how could he have known that any skepticism whatsoever concerning the motives and tactics of these modern day zealots is now grounds for termination?

Will those who have so often used Mr. Berry’s words, image, and reputation to hawk their coffee mugs, posters, events, and books step forward to defend him from this disgraceful assault on his character? I seriously doubt it. The silence of those in the Kentucky arts community that use Mr. Berry’s name to recruit students to their workshops and advance their own careers is deafening — but sadly predictable — as artists and intellectuals cower in fear of being targeted by the hysterical mob leading what amounts to a new Red Scare. If they choose not to speak out, their admiration for his work will turn out to be feigned and what is truly superficial. And I am sure Mr. Capilouto is only too happy to remove the painting —to be “on the right side of history” of course—as long as the questionable sources of some of the school’s funding and its new guiding philosophy as a corporate-industrial educational “experience” factory are not fundamentally challenged.

The intolerance and dogmatic narrow-mindedness of the new left reminds me of the Christian fundamentalism and culture of psychological repression that I grew up around in rural Western Kentucky. In fact, as the author John Gray argued in “Straw Dogs,” these crusades in the name of progress are actually a mutated form of Christianity in disguise. This reversion to patterns of ancient religion, wherein heretics such as Mr. Berry are sacrificed in an attempt to purify and bring about collective renewal, is clear enough to anyone familiar with the pathetic and pathological narcissists who have adopted “cancel culture” as their dominant form of entertainment. It remains to be seen if these witchburners will be so kind as to give Mr. Berry the benefit of first being flung into his beloved Kentucky River to see whether or not he floats before demanding his books be tossed into a campus bonfire.

Travis Kitchens is a writer from Livermore.

This story was originally published July 22, 2020 at 4:11 PM.