This is for you writers out there: if you’re not canceled, you’re no good.

The good Dr. Seuss is out, as is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; Adolf Hitler is still in, although I can’t say the same for William Shakespeare. Everyone who is anyone is getting canceled, so I was glad to see Captain Cook also gone, because Black Lives Matter said so, for his “invasion” of Australia. Never mind that Cook was the first to explore and map that beautiful continent and never sought violence; BLM insist he was a white supremacist who murdered loads of people. 

For any of you budding historians, do not ever let facts get in your way. Just write what you feel like writing. It’s the new truth. Especially if you post it on the internet. BLM says Cook invaded, so it must be so.

Actually, the good captain tried to make peace with the Māoris, and it has never been explained how one invades a continent with 50 men. Why didn’t someone tell General George S. Patton? He could have landed in Bremen with 50 men and ended the war in 1942. But what the hell, BLM is not expected to get everything right—or anything, for that matter. Australia and New Zealand are two of the most advanced and beautiful countries on earth. But if Cook had not explored them in the 18th century, I wonder whether they would not be more comparable today to, say, the Central African Republic, a country that remained undiscovered and unexplored by “white supremacists” like Cook, at least until late in the 19th century.

But I’m getting away from the subject, which is writing. The greatest of them all, my direct ancestor Homer, is getting kicked out of college curricula because his hero, Odysseus, told off women in a manner that is unacceptable today, hinting at times that Greek women back then were a bit thick in the head. But the cancellation I’m most surprised about is that of the Bard, whom some “woke” American English literature teachers have accused of promoting “misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir,” according to the New York Post. Bad Willy Shakespeare! No wonder so many people love him.

America at present is in a league of her own. If one comments, for example, on the size of a woman’s breasts, one is canceled and probably arrested. I don’t know if Shakespeare ever commented on women’s breasts, but he’s been canceled for his portrayal of Shylock as a bit money-minded, and of Othello as dark and a bit jealous. What really got Willy canceled was his portrayal of Romeo as some kind of hero, when clearly he suffers from “toxic masculinity.”

What intrigues me is why only Willy and Homer got cancelled among the oldies. What about those other awful Greeks, like Sophocles? He has Orestes kill his mother for what she did to his father. If that is not the result of toxic masculinity, I don’t know what is. It gets worse. Sophocles also created Oedipus and Jocasta and put them in the weirdest mother and son relationship possible. Mother and son made whoopee, then the son had second thoughts and blinded himself out of remorse, while his mother committed seppuku, (or the Greek version of it). And Sophocles invented them 2,500 years ago, when people really did nothing of the sort (because it was pre-Hollywood).

After exhaustive research, I think I’ve found the reason why old Sophocles is still in the books: the sexual mores he describes are relevant to our society today, at least for the criminal classes so glorified by Hollywood and the media. An Oedipus-Jocasta scenario is far more likely today than a Romeo-Juliet one. Especially among the drug culture that rules in the projects of large cities, and where 13-year-olds regularly give birth to babies whose fathers are as anonymous as those honored by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

With American life declining as I write, it’s not enough that poor young Americans are hardly literate at 18, they are now expected to uphold “woke” standards on their way to becoming total simpletons. If the feminazis have it their way, more writers will go down with the Bard. Mind you, to be canceled is to be recognized as very good, so my friend Norman Mailer has to be first in line. In Mailer’s novel An American Dream, the protagonist Stephen Rojack murders his wife and then shags the maid. The “woke” girls are up in arms, as well they should be.

Another friend, the novelist James Jones, has soldiers leering at women and particularly at an officer’s wife in From Here To Eternity. Still another buddy, Irwin Shaw, writes nicely about a German officer in his novel The Young Lions. Jones and Shaw have gotta go!

So there we have it, everyone’s cancelled except those who adhere to “woke” rules invented by half-wits, know-nothings, and morons. But there is hope: adding a digital layer to the brain’s limbic system and cortex might close the gap between those with “woke” intelligence and normal folk. Elon Musk is working on it, and for the moment he seems to be humanity’s only hope.