john wayne and the perils of certainty

"When forming our literary, cinematic, and artistic canons, it’s important to remember that if you want a canon of saints, you’ll end up with a canon of zero. Rather than recoil from an artist’s grotesqueries and let them destroy otherwise interesting and nuanced work, or rather than hold an artist at arm’s length and pretend there’s an impenetrable wall that separates creator and creation, embracing the bramble of imperfections and idiosyncrasies of an artist tends to make the work prick with even more strangeness and complexity, mystery and negative capability. Not only is an artistic canon of saints untenable, but it’s undesirable.

By canceling and deplatforming artists, even when we feel morally and historically justified to do so, aren’t we in some way mirroring Wayne at his worst? As a vocal supporter of the Hollywood Blacklist, Wayne too at times fought for other artists to be silenced because of their beliefs and deeds. These actions may not be alike in degree, but aren’t they at least alike in kind? I possess neither the moral authority nor the ideological certainty necessary to feel comfortable determining who gets to have a platform and what ideas should be out of bounds—and I’m wary of anyone who claims they do. I concede that may be my failing."

Here.