Lori Falce: The history of cancel culture

The pyramids have stood for thousands of years, proclaiming the ability of Egyptian pharaohs like Khufu and Khafre to orchestrate projects of literally monumental scale.

They tell us that there are deeds that are bigger than a person and that while a person’s life is short, history can have a long memory.

But those wily ancient Egyptians have another lesson for us. It comes from the hidden pharaohs.

A thousand years after Khufu’s reign, Hatshepsut was queen of the Nile. When her husband died, she donned a fake beard and picked up the crook and scepter of office and ruled over Egypt for her two-year-old stepson. She did not do so as queen. She assumed the title of pharaoh — the only woman to take on that rule.

But after her death, Hatshepsut’s monuments were defaced and her name largely disappeared from the records of the time. Her mummy was discovered in 1903. It took close to a century to figure out exactly who she was and where she fit into history.

The same thing happened four pharaohs later. Akhenaten tried to move the polytheistic culture to worship of one god. After his death, opponents revised history with a chisel.

That all takes cancel culture to extremes, but its the kind of thing that should ring a bell with us. Governors and senators, football coaches and quarterbacks, actors and singers, writers and influencers, dead presidents and generals have all fallen to what might be modern society’s worst crime — the failure to live up to expectations.

We absolutely should hold people — especially those in positions of authority — to standards we can respect. We should demand that our political leaders operate with ethics and morality. We should encourage our cultural role models to model behavior that is worthy of their roles.

But too often, there is a line crossed. The boundary between moral outrage and mob mentality is hair-thin.

And perhaps it is most obvious when we judge yesterday’s actions by today’s knowledge.

We should remember that it didn’t take long for one Egyptian to erase another and for that to happen again just a few pyramids down the road. What we excise from today’s culture can be visited on us again in short order.

Maybe we are better off not crumbling our history but highlighting its truth. Acknowledge the admirable importance of a leader like George Washington but stop expecting him to live up to that cherry tree fable. Tell the truth about Andrew Jackson as both a decisive general and a man whose actions brutalized Native Americans.

Because not being honest about either side of that coin defaces our history, leaving us a legacy that is as false as Hatshepsut’s beard.