This is a good podcast and fighting against the evil of "cancel culture" is a worthy cause. I just wanted to make a technical point: have you ever seen a totem pole? (If not, do a Google Image Search.) They are absolutely hierarchical! I mean, it's a vertical pole made out of a group of guys literally standing/sitting/perched one atop the other. I know of no better physical representation of the way social hierarchies function. The notion that we should "cancel" the phrase "low man on the totem pole" is preposterous.
Just before listening to your 12/8 episode, I'd finished reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. While reading it, I'd noticed the casual inclusion of the sexual relationship between protagonist YT - a 15-year old girl - and Raven, an extremely violent man in his 30s who is described as so huge that it doesn't seem he could balance on a Harley, and who has POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed on his forehead. After hearing your podcast episode, I checked out the ALA's banned books list and Snow Crash is not on it. Which makes me wonder Why? Snow Crash is definitely a book that teenagers and even younger kids have read. Yet books like The Things They Carried which are superlative books and have incredibly important and thoughtful messages about the human condition are targets of book-banning campaigns. What is it about a scifi book like Snow Crash that leads to it being "overlooked" by the book-banning warriors?
This is a good podcast and fighting against the evil of "cancel culture" is a worthy cause. I just wanted to make a technical point: have you ever seen a totem pole? (If not, do a Google Image Search.) They are absolutely hierarchical! I mean, it's a vertical pole made out of a group of guys literally standing/sitting/perched one atop the other. I know of no better physical representation of the way social hierarchies function. The notion that we should "cancel" the phrase "low man on the totem pole" is preposterous.
Just before listening to your 12/8 episode, I'd finished reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. While reading it, I'd noticed the casual inclusion of the sexual relationship between protagonist YT - a 15-year old girl - and Raven, an extremely violent man in his 30s who is described as so huge that it doesn't seem he could balance on a Harley, and who has POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed on his forehead. After hearing your podcast episode, I checked out the ALA's banned books list and Snow Crash is not on it. Which makes me wonder Why? Snow Crash is definitely a book that teenagers and even younger kids have read. Yet books like The Things They Carried which are superlative books and have incredibly important and thoughtful messages about the human condition are targets of book-banning campaigns. What is it about a scifi book like Snow Crash that leads to it being "overlooked" by the book-banning warriors?