Among the many terrible potential impacts of cancelation on a person, one of them is death.
I'm leaving soon to head towards Arcata, California, for David Cobb's memorial. That's just one of the reasons I'm thinking about him lately even more than I was immediately after he died, on September 7th.
Everything I wrote that day in my remembrance of David that I sent out to my email list the next day was true, except for the part about how he died. Very soon after that post went out, I found out the truth -- or found out that when I had heard David had died of a broken heart, that didn't mean he had had a heart attack. That was my inaccurate interpretation of the phrase.
David died by suicide.
Apologies to anyone that would rather not focus on the way he died. I don't by any means want to take away from all he did in life, or all he meant in life to so many of us, by doing so.
But I think it's important, particularly because, as I've learned from David's friends and comrades since his death, David was contending in his life not only with the rise of fascism in the USA and horror at watching everything going to hell in that sense, but with being a canceled person.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm saying two plus two equals four here. I'm certain there are many factors that drive such actions in most cases.
But when I learned about these circumstances I knew I had to say more, because of the complex nature of the phenomenon of cancelation, of being a canceled person, and because of my very intimate familiarity with the whole thing.
I speak, unfortunately, as a fellow canceled person, which is, no doubt, something that gives me particular insight into what was happening with David in the months prior to his death.
When people tell me how David couldn't attempt to do any kind of public-facing organizing in Humboldt County anymore without having to try to work through the clouds of suspicion about every aspect of who he was, effectively rendering him inert, at least locally in certain circles, I understand what they're talking about, because I know other people in the same situation, and I am one of them.
One of the most maddening aspects of being a canceled person is constantly having to contend with the reality that most people don't know what that means, or if they do, they don't believe it's real. The wild thing about being canceled is you can be canceled without anyone else noticing, unless they happen to be trying to promote a public event or other project that involves you. Most other people can pretty much go on for years without ever being confronted by this reality.
People who are regular readers of my essays or listeners to my songs or podcasts are already very familiar with the phenomenon of cancelation, cancelation campaigning, and the extreme forms of identity politics that feed into it. They have heard the episode of the Fucking Canceled podcast which featured me -- a podcast, by the way, which I highly recommend as a resource for understanding various aspects of the kind of mentality that gives rise to the cancelation mindset. (Also check out Bebe Montoya on Instagram for lots more wisdom on the subject.)
David Cobb was in a position that has become all too familiar to me and to so many other wonderful people in this world -- but particularly in this country, with a particular emphasis in parts of the west coast. As with so many others among the best organizers I've known, David was facing all kinds of forms of vilification coming from people on what we would consider the political left, broadly speaking.
I don't know the details, and haven't sought them out, because they're always the same.
David was one of the most eloquent and educated supporters of women, people of color, and the queer community you'll ever meet, as well as being a warrior for the working class generally. But we can be certain the cloud of suspicion that surrounded him in certain circles was related to some aspect of gender, sexuality or race, because it always is. These are the divides that are weaponized most often, along with accusations of Jew-hatred, for others like me.
What happens so often are things like a group somewhere discovers you as a potential good speaker or performer and wants to organize an event with you, but then when they start promoting the idea publicly, they discover the cloud of suspicion that surrounds you, since certain people -- or in my case, often paid trolls -- will see your name come up, and they'll chime in to raise that cloud, making some reference to something you supposedly said or did that was bad, which means you're someone who should not be affiliated with in any way. Then the invitation will be rescinded, or the gig canceled.
I was going to be on a podcast with a prominent podcaster in Portland recently, but then the host discovered the cloud, and rescinded the invitation. I was going to play at a protest in a Portland suburb in a few weeks, but then the invitation was mysteriously rescinded. I've lost count of how many times this has happened in recent years -- and it's something that pretty much never used to happen. Now it's commonplace, for me, and for so many others. I can name many names, dates, and places, but I won't bother getting that deep in the weeds here now.
What happens more often than invitations getting rescinded or events canceled, is invitations not being made in the first place. I'm sure David would have been familiar with all of these sorts of things, because he was a canceled person, and this is what it's like to be canceled.
The canceled people in my life have responded in many different ways to their circumstances.
In the case of the hosts of Fucking Canceled or people like Bebe Montoya, they made it one of their main missions in life to expose this destructive mentality for what it is, and to promote notions like solidarity, inclusivity, and understanding instead.
Others have responded by leaving the country, or moving from particularly cancelation-prone environments like Portland, Oregon to other cities or towns less compromised by what the hosts of Fucking Canceled call the Nexus.
Others have left the professions that they were in when they experienced their cancellations, whether they had been college professors, touring musicians, or organizers. Generally, this move meant bowing out of the fray, as far as the left goes, and doing more solitary sorts of things with their lives. It always meant experiencing real trauma, alienation, and depression to one degree or another.
Do a little research online and you'll easily find dozens of examples of other documented cases of people who had been victims of cancelation campaigns, which ended in the suicides of the canceled.
Cancelation campaigning is not a new phenomenon. The phenomenon of being exiled or purged or rejected from a group or social circle has long been known to be one of the most traumatic experiences a member of a group or a society can have. There's been a lot written about this over the centuries.
What is new is social media, and the hegemonic control of our communications by a handful of predatory mega-corporations that systematically reinforce the worst of these sorts of behaviors, and systematically profit off of them. They like the conflict -- it's good for business in all kinds of ways.
The FBI, of course, loves the conflict, it should be noted. It has been the main purpose of the FBI, since the bureau's inception, according to their own propaganda, to neutralize the left in the US. The social media algorithms seem to have succeeded in doing their job for them. Add to that whatever they're actually doing outside of social media, and you've got a real hot mess.
When I look at David Cobb's effort in recent years to become a host of a YouTube program/podcast, it makes me wonder if part of his motivation for doing an online project like that was a response to being so hampered in his organizing efforts locally in the real world. And when I see how most of the episodes got fewer than a thousand views each, I wonder if he felt deflated by that. I know I would have.
So many of the canceled American organizers I know, like most people from the US, have never spent much time outside of the country. I don't know how much international travel David did. But especially for people who don't travel much internationally, the phenomenon of being canceled can be that much more intense, because it can feel like you're just completely canceled everywhere, when really, unlike within the Nexus, most people in most of the world don't believe what they read on social media -- if they even have an account on one of those American platforms at all.
I find leaving the US and going pretty much anywhere else can be so liberating, because I can feel viscerally how the cloud of suspicion that surrounds me has been somehow lifted by crossing that border or that ocean, and going to places where this kind of paranoid, self-absorbed, identitarian mindset is much less prevalent.
I wonder if David ever was able to have that experience in recent years -- to find out that maybe all he needed to do was leave the country, rather than leaving the planet. Or maybe he did know that, but such a move was too much for him to contemplate. It's too late now to ask him. But I hope it's not too late for some other canceled person who might be reading this, who may be feeling so hopeless that they are thinking about following David's example.
We all need to follow David's example when it comes to his belief in solidarity, inclusivity, and mutual understanding. We need to create a society -- and a social movement -- that completely embraces these concepts, and rejects cancelation campaigning, trolling, and exclusion that masquerades as safety or accountability or whatever other nonsense it's pretending to be.
Let's create that movement for David, and hope that no other brilliant organizers among us feel the need to end their lives so prematurely.
