A Letter On Letters
Never mind the Harper’s, here’s the Shockers
To All Who May Read This,
We the undersigned, we the individuals who make up the collective body that is The Shocker (not sure who gets to be the genitals) are aware of the ongoing debate on “Cancel Culture.” We think it’s good. We read the Harper’s Letter and decided that, despite all of their well-intentioned panic about the first amendment, there are simply some things that should be cancelled. Fuck the free and open landscape for debate and ideas. It sucks! Let’s close some shit up, narrow what can be discussed into what is actually cool and tight. You will surely be thanking us for jettisoning all of this garbage.
The following things are heretofore cancelled:
- Grilled cheese
- Widely-alleged sexual predator Jeffrey Eugenides
- Worrying about whether “canceled” has one L or two
- Harper’s magazine’s unpaid full-time internship program
- TV shows about a guy whose deal is he’s mean all the time, but also smart
- Zoos where you can’t touch the animals
- Mike Myers (gotta be something)
- Clear soups
- Geodes
- Christmas
- “Judeo-Christian” as both a term and concept
- Pens
- Protestants
- Palliteration
- Free Speech
- Wait no, not free speech
- Actually, maybe free speech
- Free screech
- Movies that are just about like, a policeman doing policeman stuff
- Your sainted mother
- Scary masks
- Elaborate pranks
- Diet Pepsi
- Diet Coke from a plastic bottle
- Wheel of Fortune
- Everybody in Europe.
- Magicians
- General whimsy
- Certain specific whimsys
- Watersports — just enjoy it with your regular body
- Anything too sensual
- On that note, definitely Sting
- Whoever booked Sting to play at halftime of the 2016 NBA All Star Game
- Sinkholes
- Skink holes (holes that are full of skinks—gross!)
- Boomerangs
- Australia
- Jokes about dingos eating babies
- Jokes about babies eating dingos
- Mothman
- Myrrhman
- Mermen
- Those baby dolls where they can pee themselves
- Franklin but not Bash
- Both Rizzoli AND Isles
- Private Equity
- Andrew Sullivan
- Stuff that somehow acts as a particle and a wave
- Saying “it’s chill”
- Goosebumps
- Close up magic
- Really far away magic that’s hard to see
- Anybody named Ghislane just to be careful
- Jesse Signal
- Jesse Singal
- Single Jesse
- Jesse Sinbad
- “Jessie’s Girl”
- Jessie’s girl
- Uncle Jesse from Full House
- A full house beating a straight
- Being straight
- Every Doctor Who episode where they go to the past
- British television in general
- Great Britain
- Two of the three sons on Home Improvement
- People who have strong opinions about Peter Gabriel’s Genesis vs. Phil Collins’ Genesis
- The book of Genesis
- Sega Genesis
- Sega Saturn
- Ghosts with attitude problems
- Being hot
- The Copyright Acts of 1998 AND 1976
- The Illinois-based pop-punk The Copyrights
- My roommate, who was far more hostile than he needed to be when I asked if I could have some watermelon
- Scooter the Muppet
- Mike Love
- Lost Love
- Your children, who if you are being honest, aren’t that big of a deal
- Franklin Pierce
- The man who gave me the finger on I-4 even though he was the one who cut me off
- Rent (the musical)
- Rent (the thing you pay to a landlord)
- Rent (past tense of “rend”)
- The phrase “living rent free in your head”
- The phrase “checkmate”
- The phrase “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t accept Wayne’s World quotes as legal tender”
- Tom Thibodeau
- Hank Hill
- The Bering Land Bridge theory of migration
- St. Paul
- Paul Blart
- Competitive eaters
- Greenwich, Connecticut
- Tunnels that have been painted on the sides of walls and that I keep running into at full speed
- Bigfoot, whose silence regarding coastal erosion is truly deafening
- Anyone who has ever defeated me at Super Smash Bros.
- The Crews Crews (a loose affiliation of collectives in support of Terry Crews)
- The Crews Crews Cruise (a themed cruise ship voyage organized by and for the aforementioned collectives)
- Barack Obama
- Tweeting a picture with the caption “presented without comment” or “presented without commentary”
- Gumball machines that dispense radioactive materials
- Herman Cain’s brother Herman Undertaker
- The very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings
- Zemblaphobes
- The troops
- Pundits and political operatives who use the language of liberation to support neoliberal ends
- Mark Emmert’s Blood Farms
- Pete & Chasten Buttigieg
- (in 25 years) Pete & Chasten’s son Latifundia Buttigieg
- The “Grimes Up” movement
- Muskers (buskers who sing the praises of Elon Musk)
- Spotify for treating artists like shit and also for not having Clipse’s “Road to Til the Casket Drops” mixtape
- Neera Tanden
- Neary, from Murphy
- Murphy Brown (she reportedly endorsed Amy Klobuchar)
- Amy Klobuchar
- Amy Klobuchar’s shitty staffers who can’t even procure a fucking fork
- The secretary Bobby Knight threw a potted plant at
- Just kidding. The secretary is cool, but Bobby Knight is canceled
- The movie Hoosiers
- The Blowfish but not Hootie
- Harry Potter
…if you are caught discussing, glorifying, or even thinking about any of the above shitty-ass Cancelled Items, I’m sorry, but you will be thrown to the merciless waves, and The Mob will come to put you in a cage where we have curated everything to be exclusively sweet and bitchin. We will use our power (literally thousands of followers on Twitter) to force you to be rad. The undersigneds of the Harper’s Letter may say that this all goes to prove their point, and yes, it does. Be afraid of the tweets. Each of them is literally more dangerous than an atomic bomb. Ours is an unforgiving, indiscrete power, in search of a cultural, intellectual, and moral homogeneity — and we will have it.
Officially — respectfully — smell ya later,
Karl-Anthony Scaramucci
Corbin Smith
Ryland Duncan
Emily Lever
Chris Alarie
Jeff Gannon
John Wilmes
Noam Chomsky
Jack Alfonso
Lynn Aloysius Belvedere
Alex Siquig
Katie Heindl
George Papadopoulos
Georgios Papagiannis
Ryan Murtha
Grimes
Micah Wimmer
Mark Macyk
Damon Agnos
Pete Buttigieg
