What do you do about stuff like The New York Times "1619 Project" that wants to tell us that the purpose of the American Revolution was to continue slavery?
Do you fight it to the last man? Do you argue against it? Do you sneer at it and make jokes about it?
Because, clearly, the diversity and inclusion crowd at The New York Times are in the business of writing a new Narrative of America, a narrative of shame instead of the one we were taught, of glorious freedom and opportunity.
That is the whole point of the Gramscian March Through the Institutions, to refashion the religious, cultural, and political Narrative so that nothing remains of the old one except shame and despair.
And, you gotta say, the D and I marchers are having quite a bit of success, else why would we be writing about the white working class "dying of despair."
I had my own meeting with the March Through the Institutions over the weekend. I was thinking of contributing $500 to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is now closed for 2020 because Wu Flu.
I thought I would write a letter to the artistic director explaining how, even though I was contributing in the current emergency, I wanted the director to know that I felt that the current Diversity and Inclusion agenda at OSF was utter folly, but that I realized that the folly was industry-wide. For I had recently visited Stratford upon Avon, and the productions are identical to those at OSF in Oregon. Diversity in casting, and especially opposite genders in the second-tier parts. And black themed plays like August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle of plays.
So I looked up the OSF website to find the name of the artistic director to whom I would direct my letter. I found, of course, that I was too late. The current artistic director, since 2019, is Nakati Garrett, an African American and a "graduate of California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in directing."
So much for my contribution; so much for my letter. Why? Because I am a racist? No doubt. But also because I realized that there was no way that such a woman could understand my position, that the current culture of diversity and inclusion and full-on wokism is going to kill stage drama at Ashland and everywhere else it is practiced.
But, I thought, there is good cheer in this. Because, I thought, that the problem with the Gramscian March Through the Institutions is that, eventually the marchers are not up to the mark. The Ashland Shakespeare festival was started in 1935 by Angus Bowmer, a high-school teacher, a nobody, in the grand old American tradition of nobodies.
I mean: What business had this nobody doing Shakespeare out in the wilds of Oregon and trying to resurrect the same stage as the Globe Theatre in London. I mean, chaps, what business had a high-school teacher doing stuff like that? Good Lord, what is the world coming to?
When I first started going to Ashland in 1978 it had built an outdoor theater to reimagine the Globe Theatre, it was producing the best Shakespeare it could imagine, and Angus Bowmer had just died. That was before the Birth of Woke. But in recent years, as I went to Ashland with my daughter and her family, the tone has changed.
There was the Julius Caesar with Caesar as a corporate CEO and the Roman senators wearing artistical black like actors at a rehearsal. That is to completely misunderstand what the great Roman civil war was about.
There was Henry IV Part One with Harry Percy played by a woman in camo with a big fat butt. The most macho character in English drama with a fat girly butt?
On the other hand there was a stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love in 2017 that brought a rather dull movie to incandescent life on the live stage and that had the audience jumping to its feet in an enthusiastic standing ovation at the end.
And then we turn to The New York Times and its "1619 Project" run by African American Nikole Hannah-Jones. The problem with the project is that Hannah-Jones just doesn't have the horsepower for such a project. She is not a Gramscian Marching Through the Institutions. She is just a follower, a journalist that is good enough to staple together a conventional left-wing oppression narrative. But I doubt that the "1619 Project" will change America. More likely it will get adopted in public schools and help further their decline.
Now I was going to suggest to the artistic director at Ashland that they should commission a bunch of plays from George Eliot novels. Why? Because I have come to the realization that George Eliot's work amounts to a remarkable study of the different ways that women could live their lives, from Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, to Dorothea Brooke and Mary Garth in Middlemarch, to Romola and Tessa in Romola, to Gwendolen Harleth and Mirah Lapidoth in Daniel Deronda. What could be more relevant to today's women than to revive the thoughts of a woman who began as the daughter of a estate manager out in the countryside and ended as Britain's incandescent novelist that royalty wanted to meet and greet?
But, of course, I wouldn't expect a Nakati Garrett to have a clue about that, or ever to understand that, at this stage in the "liberation" of women, it might be a good idea to do a retrospective and take a look at what remarkable women like George Eliot were thinking in the middle of the 19th century.
See, I think that the conventional diversity and inclusion culture completely misses the point. The point is how do minorities and women, by hard work and deep thinking, find their place in the 21st century public square? The point is not how do we patronize and pat minorities and women on the head as Little Darlings of the white ruling class and teach them how to repeat the lessons in lefty hate and fear that they were carefully taught from year to year in their lefty schools and universities.
The proof to me that the lefty movement has gone about as far as it can go is that the current Woke culture can only advance itself by naked oppression and injustice; that the Obama deep-staters were reduced to spying on the opposition using the intelligence community, and nobbling Trump himself with specious investigations and harassment. That sort of thing, in my understanding, is the tactic of a failed revolution that just can't believe that the world hasn't turned up roses yet.
The current mess over the Wu Flu epidemic, to me, exactly demonstrates the problem. The lefty Wokists think that the answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" is a government program run by credentialed experts like them. Not really, as the incompetence of the health bureaucracies and the incompetent pride of Democratic governors is trumpeting to the reverberate hills. Administrative government by credentialed experts cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth. It demands the One True Solution because that is the only way that an administrative hierarchy can work. But the One True Solution does not work. Alas, our lefty friends will not learn that lesson until they are confronted by the utter ruin of their hopes and conceits. They are, like all of us, humans.
Of course, the left's own devotion to Darwin ought to teach them otherwise. For "evolution" does not have a One True Solution. It proposes instead that the future belongs to those that adapt. But adapt to what and how? That is the point. Nobody knows in advance what is going to work and what will turn out to be a successful adaptation. So we are all victims in Nature's science experiments.
Instead the left is presently proposing a Green New Deal in which credentialed experts will completely redesign the economy just like the Bolsheviks tried and failed to do a century ago.
It's a hard thing to get your brain around: the idea that we humans here right now really don't know what is the best way forward and that this is the universal situation of all life since the Creation -- or whatever Creation myth replaces the current Big Bang theory.
Indeed, the latest theory I read about is that intelligent life is a recipe for disaster, because intelligent beings are more likely to blow themselves up. Better to be a dumb insect than a smart human, if you want your species to grow and prosper.
So be of good cheer. Every dynasty, every hegemony, eventually collapses because the scions of the revolution are not up to the level of the original revolutionaries. And the scions of the scions are even less capable. Lenin was a genius; Stalin was a monster; but Brezhnev was a doofus.
After you have finished Marching Through the Institutions, then what do you do? Well, the only thing that the marchers have ever understood is that then you beat up the plebs until they stop complaining.
Sorry chum. They tried that, and it doesn't work.
Do you fight it to the last man? Do you argue against it? Do you sneer at it and make jokes about it?
Because, clearly, the diversity and inclusion crowd at The New York Times are in the business of writing a new Narrative of America, a narrative of shame instead of the one we were taught, of glorious freedom and opportunity.
That is the whole point of the Gramscian March Through the Institutions, to refashion the religious, cultural, and political Narrative so that nothing remains of the old one except shame and despair.
And, you gotta say, the D and I marchers are having quite a bit of success, else why would we be writing about the white working class "dying of despair."
I had my own meeting with the March Through the Institutions over the weekend. I was thinking of contributing $500 to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is now closed for 2020 because Wu Flu.
I thought I would write a letter to the artistic director explaining how, even though I was contributing in the current emergency, I wanted the director to know that I felt that the current Diversity and Inclusion agenda at OSF was utter folly, but that I realized that the folly was industry-wide. For I had recently visited Stratford upon Avon, and the productions are identical to those at OSF in Oregon. Diversity in casting, and especially opposite genders in the second-tier parts. And black themed plays like August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle of plays.
So I looked up the OSF website to find the name of the artistic director to whom I would direct my letter. I found, of course, that I was too late. The current artistic director, since 2019, is Nakati Garrett, an African American and a "graduate of California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in directing."
So much for my contribution; so much for my letter. Why? Because I am a racist? No doubt. But also because I realized that there was no way that such a woman could understand my position, that the current culture of diversity and inclusion and full-on wokism is going to kill stage drama at Ashland and everywhere else it is practiced.
But, I thought, there is good cheer in this. Because, I thought, that the problem with the Gramscian March Through the Institutions is that, eventually the marchers are not up to the mark. The Ashland Shakespeare festival was started in 1935 by Angus Bowmer, a high-school teacher, a nobody, in the grand old American tradition of nobodies.
I mean: What business had this nobody doing Shakespeare out in the wilds of Oregon and trying to resurrect the same stage as the Globe Theatre in London. I mean, chaps, what business had a high-school teacher doing stuff like that? Good Lord, what is the world coming to?
When I first started going to Ashland in 1978 it had built an outdoor theater to reimagine the Globe Theatre, it was producing the best Shakespeare it could imagine, and Angus Bowmer had just died. That was before the Birth of Woke. But in recent years, as I went to Ashland with my daughter and her family, the tone has changed.
There was the Julius Caesar with Caesar as a corporate CEO and the Roman senators wearing artistical black like actors at a rehearsal. That is to completely misunderstand what the great Roman civil war was about.
There was Henry IV Part One with Harry Percy played by a woman in camo with a big fat butt. The most macho character in English drama with a fat girly butt?
On the other hand there was a stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love in 2017 that brought a rather dull movie to incandescent life on the live stage and that had the audience jumping to its feet in an enthusiastic standing ovation at the end.
And then we turn to The New York Times and its "1619 Project" run by African American Nikole Hannah-Jones. The problem with the project is that Hannah-Jones just doesn't have the horsepower for such a project. She is not a Gramscian Marching Through the Institutions. She is just a follower, a journalist that is good enough to staple together a conventional left-wing oppression narrative. But I doubt that the "1619 Project" will change America. More likely it will get adopted in public schools and help further their decline.
Now I was going to suggest to the artistic director at Ashland that they should commission a bunch of plays from George Eliot novels. Why? Because I have come to the realization that George Eliot's work amounts to a remarkable study of the different ways that women could live their lives, from Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, to Dorothea Brooke and Mary Garth in Middlemarch, to Romola and Tessa in Romola, to Gwendolen Harleth and Mirah Lapidoth in Daniel Deronda. What could be more relevant to today's women than to revive the thoughts of a woman who began as the daughter of a estate manager out in the countryside and ended as Britain's incandescent novelist that royalty wanted to meet and greet?
But, of course, I wouldn't expect a Nakati Garrett to have a clue about that, or ever to understand that, at this stage in the "liberation" of women, it might be a good idea to do a retrospective and take a look at what remarkable women like George Eliot were thinking in the middle of the 19th century.
See, I think that the conventional diversity and inclusion culture completely misses the point. The point is how do minorities and women, by hard work and deep thinking, find their place in the 21st century public square? The point is not how do we patronize and pat minorities and women on the head as Little Darlings of the white ruling class and teach them how to repeat the lessons in lefty hate and fear that they were carefully taught from year to year in their lefty schools and universities.
The proof to me that the lefty movement has gone about as far as it can go is that the current Woke culture can only advance itself by naked oppression and injustice; that the Obama deep-staters were reduced to spying on the opposition using the intelligence community, and nobbling Trump himself with specious investigations and harassment. That sort of thing, in my understanding, is the tactic of a failed revolution that just can't believe that the world hasn't turned up roses yet.
The current mess over the Wu Flu epidemic, to me, exactly demonstrates the problem. The lefty Wokists think that the answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" is a government program run by credentialed experts like them. Not really, as the incompetence of the health bureaucracies and the incompetent pride of Democratic governors is trumpeting to the reverberate hills. Administrative government by credentialed experts cannot work because it does not have the bandwidth. It demands the One True Solution because that is the only way that an administrative hierarchy can work. But the One True Solution does not work. Alas, our lefty friends will not learn that lesson until they are confronted by the utter ruin of their hopes and conceits. They are, like all of us, humans.
Of course, the left's own devotion to Darwin ought to teach them otherwise. For "evolution" does not have a One True Solution. It proposes instead that the future belongs to those that adapt. But adapt to what and how? That is the point. Nobody knows in advance what is going to work and what will turn out to be a successful adaptation. So we are all victims in Nature's science experiments.
Instead the left is presently proposing a Green New Deal in which credentialed experts will completely redesign the economy just like the Bolsheviks tried and failed to do a century ago.
It's a hard thing to get your brain around: the idea that we humans here right now really don't know what is the best way forward and that this is the universal situation of all life since the Creation -- or whatever Creation myth replaces the current Big Bang theory.
Indeed, the latest theory I read about is that intelligent life is a recipe for disaster, because intelligent beings are more likely to blow themselves up. Better to be a dumb insect than a smart human, if you want your species to grow and prosper.
So be of good cheer. Every dynasty, every hegemony, eventually collapses because the scions of the revolution are not up to the level of the original revolutionaries. And the scions of the scions are even less capable. Lenin was a genius; Stalin was a monster; but Brezhnev was a doofus.
After you have finished Marching Through the Institutions, then what do you do? Well, the only thing that the marchers have ever understood is that then you beat up the plebs until they stop complaining.
Sorry chum. They tried that, and it doesn't work.
I want to thank Dr Emu a very powerful spell caster who help me to bring my husband back to me, few month ago i have a serious problem with my husband, to the extend that he left the house, and he started dating another woman and he stayed with the woman, i tried all i can to bring him back, but all my effort was useless until the day my friend came to my house and i told her every thing that had happened between me and my husband, then she told me of a powerful spell caster who help her when she was in the same problem I then contact Dr Emu and told him every thing and he told me not to worry my self again that my husband will come back to me after he has cast a spell on him, i thought it was a joke, after he had finish casting the spell, he told me that he had just finish casting the spell, to my greatest surprise within 48 hours, my husband really came back begging me to forgive him, if you need his help you can contact him with via email: Emutemple@gmail.com or add him up on his whatsapp +2347012841542 is willing to help any body that need his help.
ReplyDeleteFor more details about Dr Emu visit his Website: http://emutemple.website2.me/