Before I was cancelled
Like many of my neighbors, I consumed the paper from cover to cover. In addition to local news, I learned who was dying, who was getting married, which bands were coming to KC, which movies were showing, which cultural events were unfolding, which teams were playing and how well, and what the weather portended. At work, I had KCUR, the local NPR station, on in the background just about all day. If I didn’t watch much KCPT, the local PBS station, it was because of the station’s snootiness, not its politics. In the same vein, I watched TV news just about every night, local and national.
As I got to know the town better, I started writing the occasional article for The Star, and I almost took on a regular column. I appeared routinely on KCUR and produced a half-historical dozen documentaries for KCPT. The Star reviewed my books, and I became something of a regular on KCPT’s Week in Review. Politically, I have not changed since those days of happy “coexistence.” Hell, I manned the right half of a left-right talk radio show on KMBZ for five years in the mid-1990s without having a single door shut in my face, not even those at UMKC, where my wife was a professor.
Although I never did anything to cancel myself—no racial joke told on a hot mic, no groped intern, no self-pleasuring Zoom chat—I and people like me found ourselves being slowly cancelled. The trend started before the turn of the century, took a pause for 9-11, and accelerated during the years when Donald Trump was just another guy with a reality TV show.
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