It’s never enough: ‘Cancel Hamilton’ calls demand musical creators swear fealty to BLM AGAIN

Micah Curtis is a game and tech journalist from the US. Aside from writing for RT, he hosts the podcast Micah and The Hatman, and is an independent comic book writer. 

8 Jul, 2020 15:20

The musical ‘Hamilton’ is facing a new wave of criticism because of the slave owning past of the titular character. This is Black Lives Matter’s second strike against the creators, who didn’t bend the knee fast enough before.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The showrunners of the Tony Award winning musical ‘Hamilton’ have been criticized for (insert controversy here). It seems like Lin Manuel Miranda can’t catch a break, or the show in general. Recently, #CancelHamilton gained traction on social media, complaining about the show portraying a man who owned slaves in a positive light. This started as the show debuts on Disney Plus.

Barely over a month ago, the show creator swore fealty to Black Lives Matter, having been pressured into apologizing for the ‘moral failure’ – not because he didn’t speak up, but because he didn’t speak up quickly enough. To prove his commitment, he listed other current events that have not escaped a quick comment.

But get this: creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and producer Jeffrey Seller are progressives. But no sensible person needs to hear their comment on every single quasi-controversial thing – and definitely not forcing those comments out of them. The absolute majority of people just want to see a fun musical. Black Lives Matter, and by extension the salivating horde of woke Twitter, feel the need to have these progressive creators bend the knee on a regular basis.

The motivations of these “woke” groups isn’t any different than those calling for the Washington Redskins to change their name. More than likely it’s the same people. The first element to all of this is control. Forgive the armchair psychoanalysis, but this sort of behavior seems to be from people who are control freaks. Karens with a penchant to burn stuff, more or less. They don’t like the way that the world is, so it must change or else they will “cancel” it. These moves are made when someone finds a substantial level of success – so this flaring up again as ‘Hamilton’ hits a massive streaming service is no coincidence.

Beyond that, I would challenge these woke types to find a historical figure that didn’t have some sort of negative to them. Anyone familiar with biblical tales could easily recall “he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The show ‘Hamilton’ does treat Alexander Hamilton in a positive light. The HBO series ‘John Adams’ did the same for that founding father of America. The same can be said of many biopics or fictional stories about historical figures. Likely the creators feel the positives outweigh the negatives, or they simply want to portray a person like a character as opposed to a slobbering racist caricature.

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Ultimately, the woke have no appreciation for art. The show ‘Hamilton’ is exactly that. A piece of art performed by talented performers. They shouldn’t feel the need to swear quarterly fealty to anyone, left or right. And yet we have the extreme left feeling the need to once again pressure artists to do everything according to their ever shifting rules. Let’s be frank. Every call to “cancel” someone is a call to censor their art. Full stop. 

If there is any one thing to take solace in, the wokescolds likely will not be remembered as much more than a joke, whereas both Alexander Hamilton and the musical about him will be remembered for a long, long time.

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