Pippin, A Post Sexual Revolution Musical

What do you do with the Broadway musical after the sexual revolution of the Sixties, now that it is assumed that kids get it on from a very early age -- as in: they are going to do it anyway -- and you can't have heroines as ingenues?

It's a problem, and maybe that's why the Broadway musical has gone into something of a decline since The Sound of Music that debuted on Broadway in 1959 and ran as a movie in 1965 when I was in college.

(And I remember that I studiously did not go to the movie. I was far too sophisticated for boy-meets-girl musicals back then.)

But yesterday we went to a performance of the revived Pippin road show here in Seattle. In case you didn't know the show puts notional scenes in the life of Pippin, the son of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, in the context of a circus. It breaks the "fourth wall" in the manner of Brecht, and its songs are unmemorable Seventies pop.

Since we can't have boy-meets-girl anymore, what do we do? Well, Pippin is a twenty-something lad who has just graduated from university in Padua (no wiving and thriving there for him). He doesn't know what he wants to do, but he wants it to do something "extraordinary."

In other words, to use my taxonomy, the musical Pippin character is a person of the creative self. He does not just propose to exist as a person of the subordinate self, as a client to some great patron. He does not want to live as a bourgeois responsible individual. He wants to "make a difference." He is, in other words, thoroughly modern.

But since he is the title role of a post-sexual-revolution musical he can't just meet a girl and fall in love. Oh no. Because nowadays people don't do that (do they?). No, they have relationships and then after "finding themselves" they, well who knows what they might do. They might get married. Or they might realize they are gay. Or, what with Rachel Dolezal and all, they might fake being black! They might even become a world-renowned creative artist (in your dreams).

In the end, of course, most of today's twentysomething people of the creative self, living in lofts and wearing artistical black, end up living conventional lives, and that is what Pippin does.

But first there must be sex, because you always have sex, I mean love, in musicals. In this case the Leading Player runs Pippin through a series of sexual experimentations, including one in a circus animal cage with some (human) circus animals.

I kept wondering, as I sat through these crudities, sitting next to a young woman who will be a sophomore in college this year, where is the "safe space?" Suppose this young woman got triggered by the burlesque tableaux on stage? Surely, the special snowflakes now attending college are not just triggered by, e.g., a conservative feminist showing up on campus and daring to speak non-liberal thoughts and ideas? Surely the players on stage should get affirmative permission from the audience before they potentially "trigger" then with scenes that some audience members might have experienced in some regretted sexual episode.

Well, no. No "safe spaces." Which reminds us, as if we need reminding, that the whole triggering and microaggression thing is nothing but left-liberal political bullying designed to name and shame anyone that doesn't think the right thoughts and recite the right catchphrases.

Anyway, eventually Pippin does meet his blonde ingenue, only she is a young widow with a son. And because he has mental health issues on account of he can't find anything "extraordinary" to do, she has to nurse him back to mental health.

I am not kidding.

After a year of this nursing Pippin does the fatherly thing by the young blonde widow's son when the son's duck "Otto" dies. Then they kiss. Then they immediately jump in the sack right there on stage.

I don't know about you, but I don't find this post-sexual revolution world all that compelling. And I don't think it makes for a very compelling musical.

Really, of course, the whole point of the old Broadway musical was to tell the story of the immigrant girl from the 1900 immigrant wave and the great question of her coming of age: whether she dares to "marry out" of her ethnic group.

You could say that the old Broadway certainly ended on a high note in The Sound of Music when a nobody governess from the local convent beats out the rich bitch for the love of the fabulously rich Georg von Trapp by winning the love of his children using old discarded curtains for play clothes and teaching them silly songs.

I think that the whole post sexual revolution thing will eventually collapse. Because it is a really bad deal for women. In my view the current "rape culture" hysteria shows that women are finally starting to push back on the sexual revolution. But since the "rape culture" pushback is led by clueless liberal post-bourgeois feminists that never thought an original thought in their lives it has completely lost the plot.

The current "rape culture" hysteria is saying that young women can't be trusted to make sensible decisions about sex. They must be supervised by wise and caring college administrators. But that is no different from the old days, when young women were sexually supervised by their fathers.

Er, no. Sorry I got that wrong. in the old days young women were really supervised by their mothers and other mature women. But that would ruin the feminist thing about the "patriarchy." And that would never do.

Lefty Fundamentalists in Britain

Right now the Labour Party in Britain is conducting a party leadership election and the leading candidate is hard left Jeremy Corbyn. He hits all the left notes including Palestinians and the IRA.

And one thing he wants to do is "renationalize" the railways.

The British railways were privatized back in 1994 during the time that John Major was Prime Minister. But in the wake of an accident just north of London due to faulty rails, the ownership of the track was returned to a nationalized corporation. Meanwhile passenger and freight services are delivered in a complicated crony capitalist system thus, from La Wik:

Ownership of the infrastructure including the larger stations passed to Railtrack, while track maintenance and renewal assets were sold to 13 companies across the network. Ownership of passenger trains passed to three rolling stock operating companies (ROSCOs) - the stock being leased out to passenger train operating companies (TOCs) awarded contracts through a new system of rail franchising overseen by the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising (OPRAF). Ownership and operation of freight trains passed to two companies - English, Welsh and Scottish Railway (EWS) and Freightliner, less than the originally intended six.

Yay! Earlier this week The Telegraph ran an come-on-fellahs article "A state-owned railway would be a costly mistake" that weakly pleaded that the Brits not renationalize the railways. OK, nothing much to see there. Except when you get to the comments. You see, 60 percent of Brits think the railways should be renationalized, and the comments tell you why.

Profits, The City, Foreigners, Things were great in the old days: You name it. People don't like private enterprise. They want the nice cozy government to take care of everything.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Black Swan guy, recently tweeted. "The free-market system has salient flaws and hidden benefits. All other systems have hidden flaws and salient benefits." Everyone is pissed off with the corporations that sell them amazing products and services. But they stubbornly defend the government health care and education systems that barely function.

OK, we know why people support the government systems that barely function. It's the free stuff.

I was reading the front matter for the upcoming volume three, Bourgeois Equality, of Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Era trilogy. And she's talking now about how the educated elite turned against capitalism following the failed revolutions of 1848. But the big point, that she makes over and over, is that the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has made the average person  between 30 times and 100 times richer. There has been nothing like this, ever.

McCloskey's insists that this was not due to "capital accumulation" (as in "capitalism") but from new ideas that transformed the production and delivery of products and services.

So let's rehearse the reasons why government is no good and making things and delivering services.

1. Socialism can't work because it can't compute prices.
2. The bureaucrat in the national government cannot know what a million producers and consumers know through the price system. Not even close.
3. Government does not come up with new ideas. In fact the whole purpose of government is to stop new ideas.

These notions are, or ought to be, settled science. Every child should be taught them in school as a matter of course. And yet, patently, the vast majority of people have no clue about this, no clue about the fundamentals about our amazing and unprecedented wealth and prosperity.

As you can see in the comments section of The Telegraph in Britain.

Expecting Too Much of the Beltway Republicans

I'm a little confused by the whole "cuckservative" meme, the idea that Beltway Republicans -- and their bribed neocons in the media -- have betrayed conservatives, Republicans, and the nation with their timid acquiescence to President Obama and the PC culture.

So therefore Donald Trump, who ain't afeered to tell it like it is.

I suppose that the angry Republican base, at this stage of the political cycle, has no target for our anger but our own politicians. And politics is about nothing if it is not about anger.

OK, let's think about politics as civil war by other means. The number one thing to remember about war is that you don't want to give battle unless you think you have a really good chance of winning. Otherwise you keep marching.

There are always hot-heads in any army that want to give battle, but the wise general usually denies their request, or sends them off to some inconsequential skirmish.

Anyway, what the hot-heads are really signalling is that they have the cojones to lead. As in Ted Cruz and his filibuster over Obamacare. As in Donald Trump going very un-PC. As in Scott Walker telling a union protester: "I am not intimidated by you."

(Really. What do those union protesters think they are doing? Scott Walker would probably pay to have his speeches disrupted by union thugs.)

The problem that Republicans have is that every time they stage a public confrontation with the Democrats the mainstream media lines up with the Democrats and make the Republicans look like the bad guys. As in government shutdowns. But, it turns out, the Republicans can do a lot of damage to the Democrats by operating below the radar. For instance, they can provoke a budget battle and cave on the headline issue while putting through tens of other issues. And they do. Because the public square only has the bandwidth for about one and a half issues at one time.

But it all happens below the radar.

And the other thing is that when you want to pass something big you don't want to do what the Obama Democrats have done and ram it down your opponents' throat. You want to stage a "bipartisan consensus" to make it look like everyone agrees with your reform. Otherwise you just gin up the opposition.

Of course today everything is up in the air. All we have are the egregious policies and naked illegalities of the Obama administration. How can we stand around and allow this to continue?

We stand around because we don't want to give battle and suffer a humiliating defeat.

There are, after all, two possible outcomes. One is that the Obama cramdowns will mostly stick, and become settled law. The other is that the next Republican administration will knock them all down and chart a new course for America.

My money goes on the idea that the Obama cramdowns will prove to be a strategic blunder that will set the stage for massive Republican reforms. That's based on my readings of the great political texts.

And don't forget that if the Republican base is pissed off the Democratic base must be just as pissed off. African-Americans were promised a new era, a Promised Land, with the election of the First Black President. Instead, nothing has changed. And I wonder what Hispanics are thinking right now.

And notice that while gentry liberals can put Bernie stickers on their Nissan Leafs, the Black Lives Matter is just a Soros AstroTurf outfit. Where is the actual candidate that is speaking to black frustrations? Hillary? Martin O'Malley? Elizabeth Warren? Please.

Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

The Worse the Better

Why doesn't everyone agree that capitalism is the biggest boon to humans ever and let it flourish? With a little law in there to punish frauds and thieves.

I mean, in the 200 years of the Great Enrichment per capita income in the areas under the sway of capitalist ideology has gone from $1-3 per day to $120 per day. That's inflation-corrected dollars. You can see this in a chart from lefty Vox.

Glenn Reynolds has a quick answer to this. Capitalism gets a bad press because capitalism has "insufficient opportunities for graft."

I like to be a little more sophisticated. We humans have survived down the ages partly by cooperating, doing things for other people. But we have also survived by loot and plunder, with the dawn raid, with buccaneering and freeloading.

Wilfred Thesiger tells how loot and plunder really do have a place in the human story in his travel book, Arabian Sands. In southern Arabia people live by grazing sheep and goats in a land where a particular patch of land may only get rain once in two years. So the trick to survival is to know where the rain just fell so you can get your flocks there when the grass sprouts and the desert grows green for a season.

But suppose you are just unlucky and your sheep all die of hunger. What then? Well, southern Arabia has a culture of raiding. So your last resort is to raid your luckier neighbor and take off with some of his animals. But the rules say that you don't touch the women and children.

Hey. It works.

But how much of that do we need in the modern economy where there is real abundance and nobody need go without?

Not much, but there are still plenty of people that like the adventurous life, and the thrill of the chase, not to mention the lamentation of the women. Many people, particularly the people that go into activism and politics, like to lord it over other people. Because.

We have intellectuals that want to look down on businessmen, as Whole Foods CEO John Mackey observes:

Intellectuals have always disdained commerce... So the intellectuals have always sided kind of with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kind of kept down.

We have an example of this in a recent New York Times article painting a lurid picture of life "Inside Amazon." Well, I dare say it is a "bruising workplace," even if an Amazonian like Nick Ciubotariu disagrees in a flood of corporate-speak. People go work at a place like Amazon because they want to be in a challenging group where only the best need apply. Think the corporate equivalent of Special Forces. If you don't like that sort of challenge then don't go work for Amazon.

And that's the miracle of capitalism. It takes ambitious aggressive guys like Nick Ciubotariu and puts him to work creating an amazing company that is revolutionizing retail. Just think: in former ages he might have been stealing cattle. Or marching across Europe. Or fomenting political revolution.

But there are always people that want to resort to force. Just now in America they are people like the gay marriage advocates that want to punish Christians that don't agree with their religious views on marriage.

Oh, of course, nearly everyone that supports gay marriage agrees that gays ought to be allowed to marry like everybody else. But Matt Barber reminds us that the core activists have another agenda: to "render marriage reality meaningless."

Masha Gessen, a lesbian journalist, activist and author, expressly admitted this fact in a 2012 interview with ABC Radio: “It’s a no-brainer that [homosexuals] should have the right to marry,” she said. “But I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. … [F]ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there – because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.”

So that's not going to end well.

Glenn Reynolds also likes to rehearse the tweet from Jon Gabriel: "The best part about the Obama era is all the racial healing."

Our progressive friends have had a pretty good run in the Obama era, because President Obama has encouraged his supporters to go for the gold. They haven't tried to build consensus; they've just pushed their cultural and political power to the max and rolled over their opponents.

The thing about limited government and the rule of law is that it is designed to stop that sort of thing, because the abuse of power builds rage and resentment in the people on the receiving end.

For a conservative like me there is a Leninist quality to the Obama overreach: the worse the better. The American people need to really see that they don't like what Obama and the Obamis have done to America, so we can build a movement of reform.

But how do you roll back the oppressions and the injustices of the Obamis without making yet another "community" angry?

I don't know. Because the whole point of the left is to exploit anger and blow it up into a political movement.

Can You Blame Women for Pushing Back Against Hookups?

All good conservatives are opposed to the college campaign against "rape culture." Inspired by a "Dear Colleague" letter from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the nation's college campi have now become a due-process-free zone as college administrators harass college men for failing to observe the new liberal rules of "yes means yes" where sexual relations are concerned.

But then I read this click-bait article in Vanity Fair, "Tinder and the Dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse" by Justin Bishop, about young millennial professionals hooking up in New York City using Tinder and similar social media tools.

It is, as they say, a meat market out there, and the girls don't like it.

Now it is my experience with women that when they don't like something they "share" with their friends and then they get angry about it, and then they find manipulative ways of getting back at the source of the anger.

Call me sexist if you like.

It is clear from Justin Bishop's article that Tinder and the other hookup apps play directly into the male lust for the hunt. And it seems that girls have to play along, because. Well, because women always play along.

But then the girls go back to their apartments and their dorms and their sororities, whatever, and they talk and text with their friends. Or they run into an activist from the Womens Studies department.

And this gives the angry young girl, whether a "Jackie", a Mattress Girl, or just a nobody Jane Doe, a way to do something about the nameless anger she is feeling on account of being treated like a piece of meat.

And really, who can blame her? All young women carry within them the very fount of human life, the most precious thing that humans possess. And yet these days young women are treated like sexual prey, courtesy of smartphones and smartphone apps, and are led to believe that unless they submit to this oppression they won't ever get a man. Or be popular. Or something.

Now a sensible person would say that maybe the recreational sex meme of the sexual revolution is a big part of the problem. Sex is serious, dead serious, and the rituals and culture around sex lies at the very center of any human culture. You mess with sex and you mess with the very center of human existence.

A sensible person would say that if you throw off all the rules around sex that the ensuing chaos will demand new rules. And it is telling that the new rules now being enforced on campus essentially say that a young woman cannot be considered a responsible actor where sex is concerned. She must be protected by older and wiser people and shielded from the consequences of imprudence or a desire to be nice. Which is exactly what the old rules under the evil old patriarchy said.

So maybe every human society ends up with some sort of culture of female innocence and modesty. Because in every human society young unmated women and women with children really do need protection from male predation.

Ya think?

Reagan Democrats and Trump Democrats and the End of Free Stuff

In the fall of 1979, writes Jeffrey Lord, nobody took Ronald Reagan seriously. “The American people are not going to elect a seventy-year-old, right-wing, ex-movie actor to be president.” said Carter chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan.

But in November 1980 Ronald Reagan won the presidency by nearly 10 points over Jimmy Carter even though liberal Republican John Anderson ran as an independent. How did Reagan win? With the "Reagan Democrats." They were "Blue collar, working class, largely Catholic and ethnic" that had voted 20 years earlier for Jack Kennedy.

The Reagan Democrats were pissed off. And why? Because all the free-stuff promises the Democrats had been using to buy their votes for the previous 50 years were crumbling into dust Stagflation, they called it. So they were angry. So they voted for the Eevil Republicans.

Jeffrey Lord cites a poll showing Donald Trump doing well in Iowa.

But as in 1980 with Reagan, it doesn’t take much imagination to think that Trump’s overwhelming lead in categories like those with less than a college education or those earning less than $50,000 bodes well for his ability to win Democratic votes in considerable numbers.

 In other words there's a good chance that a lot of Democrats are really pissed off this election cycle. So there's a good chance they will vote for the Eevil Republican.

It makes sense, because it's hard to see the genuine Republican base -- national security conservatives, economic conservatives, and social conservatives -- getting excited about Trump.

But really, what did those Trump Democrats think would happen when Obama went ahead with a job-throttling Obamacare, a job-throttling payoff to state and local governments with the stimulus, a job-throttling Dodd-Frank regulation of the banks, and a job-killing green energy agenda?

Kevin D. Williamson puts the question squarely in a piece on the China meltdown. He talks about how the Ex-Im Bank lent money for top employees of China's biggest bank to fly executive jets built by a company owned by Goldman Sachs.

The way the game works is that

Money is lent on concessionary terms to make transactions happen for politically favored businesses and investors on the theory that the resulting economic activity will be worth the costs.

As in student loans and Chinese apartment blocks and 100% mortgage loans to sub-prime borrowers and solar power and wind turbines and solar roof collectors and farm subsidies and so on.

The point is that eventually any market distortion is going to bite someone in the butt. Hard. And it is not rocket science.

There isn’t any way around this: If you distort markets, you will, eventually, discover that everybody has taken out second mortgages on their Chinese ghost-town vacation condos to invest in tulip bulbs.

And then everybody gets really pissed off and demands that the government Do Something.

When it was the Doing Something that caused the problem in the first place.

Hey, people, this is not that hard. Everything the government does, everything, is a distortion of the economy and will damage people and their livelihoods. Especially when the music stops and it turns out that their aren't enough chairs to go around. 

Opt Me Out, Baby!

OK, you tell me. How do we get out of the vicious circle of the modern administrative state. We are all pissed off by intrusive bossy government. But hands off my Medicare! That's the way the world-wide Trump phenomenon works.

We talk about African Americans trapped on the liberal plantation, but what about the rest of us?

The truth is that we are all trapped in subordination to the administrative state, because we are all forced to pay for the benefits in our payroll taxes whether we like it or not, and then we all demand that we get our payoff.

Which means that we are all chained to The Man. We are trapped by the System.

Mencius Moldbug of the Dark Enlightenment has some uncomfortable words about this.

First, the King's law is that either a human being is a free, taxpaying yeoman, or a ward. A ward is any dependent - anyone not responsible to provide for his or her support. The general principle of wardship is that every ward must have a patron, who is responsible for supporting the ward, authorized to direct and discipline the ward, and liable for the ward's offenses. This is not my idea - it is straight out of Roman law.

Note how in the administrative state the patron/ward relationship has got all messed up. The patrons, Poo-Bahs of the administrative state, make the rest us pay for their wards, but they don't properly "direct and discipline" their wards. They tell the rest of us that we are "liable for the ward's offenses" because racism, or injustice, or something.

You can see the problem. These days we are all wards, because we are all, every one of us, dependent on the state. We depend of free education for our kids. And free education has made education so expensive that most ordinary middle-class people can't imagine finding the money for private school. Tied to the payroll taxes of Social Security we don't have any money left over for saving for retirement (or any other purpose) so we are grateful for the security of that government check when we hit our 60s. We can't imagine doing without it. And so on.

So we can't get started in the quest to get free of the fetters of the liberal administrative state because we can't imagine bearing the expense of freedom.

The solution is staring us right in the face. We have to have the courage to demand the right to "opt out." Mothers are already doing this with home-schooling. They look at what the government school does to their children and they can't allow it to continue. So they take their kids out of school and teach them at home. These mothers find, of course, that children are programmed to grow up and learn the things they need to become responsible adults. Home-schooled children turn in better test results and as for being "socialized," well since they have been around adults all their lives instead of bullies and mean girls at school, they have been socialized to operate in the adult world, not the Lord of the Flies world of the government school.

Now we need to extend the "opt out" concept to Social Security and Unemployment and Workers Comp. on the model that I am a free person and I have the right to provide for myself and for my family without the government forcing me to do it the "Navy way" like they forced John Wayne in The Fighting Seabees.

But isn't that kinda selfish? Yes, it is. And if you look at politics you find that everyone, from the noblest ruling-class scion down to the most helpless teenaged single mother, wants the government to give money or power to them, and screw everybody else.

Never mind selfish: would it work? Well, it would certainly work. Just as home-schoolers have found that children naturally want to grow up to independence, we know that adult humans naturally want to save against a rainy day. It takes government education to make children hate learning and it takes government payroll taxes to get adults to stop saving from their wages.

No, the real point is: How many people would actually buy into the "opt out" concept and demand to fund their own rainy-day fund and their own retirement? Are there enough people to make this into a winning political issue?

That is the question. The only way to find out is to try.

Because the alternative, to live life as a dependent ward, means that you live under the authority of a patron. And the patron gets to tell you when it is time to work, when it is time to eat, when it is time to go home.

Just like Verdi's father insists, far too late, in The Life of Verdi. "I am the father, and I decide when it is time to go."