Trump is Doing What He Was Elected To Do

In all the left-generated outrage about Charlottesville, let us not take our eyes off the ball.

Donald Trump was nominated to be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party because he did what national Republicans had been afraid to do. He took out after the politically correct, and said things you are not allowed to say on race and sex. For that even Ted Cruz, who was running as the bad boy of the Republican Party, attacked him.

Then Nominee Trump ran against the Hillary Clinton, who represents everything about the corrupt status-quo, and beat her by running up majorities in states that the Democrats assumed were safe for them, attracting votes from the nominally Democrat white working class and other deplorables.

Given how he ran for president, his response to Charlottesville was right down the middle, blaming both sides and saying that there are good people on both sides.

One thing he did not say: even Trump dared not say it. White nationalist and neo-Nazi and KKK groups are a minor problem, because they have no support from the intellectual elite. But a racist group like Black Lives Matter is a problem, because it gets fawning coverage from the mainstream media and the intellectual elite, not to mention funding from the like of George Soros's foundations. But you will notice that the president did not call out Black Lives Matter by name.

And then there is Antifa. You will note that our liberal friends used to write about "peaceful protesters." Then when activists started attacking Trump supporters they began to write about "mostly peaceful protesters." Now they write about violence on both sides. However, do not doubt that white supremacists and KKK and neo-Nazis are the worst things in the world.

It would be funny, if it weren't so sad. Liberals condemn loser white racism yet actually encourage black racism led by rich-kid blacks. And the rank-and-file liberals go along and nod their heads to the utter incoherence of the political catch-phrases that are ladled out by their leaders and thinkers.

Look, I get it. Politics is Division. The stock-in-trade of political activists is to find issues with which to divide people, because that is how you get votes and get elected. Wealth is a hardy perennial. Class had its day for about a century. Race is as good as anything. Hey, you can even exploit the eternal battle of the sexes. Nobody ever went wrong by attacking greedy bankers and oily moneylenders. And you can get a lot of mileage out of the charge of treason and collusion with the Russians.

The whole idea of social animals is that we do not use force against the people in our community. Thus politics is always a threat against the peace within the community as we enact threats and accusations against the Other in our community during the sham fight of an election or a "peaceful protest."

The big problem in our age is not the resentful remains of the Confederate South, or the yahoos that have learned that the way to get attention is to wave swastikas around. The big problem is the reactionary movement of the left that believes race and gender politics, dividing the races and sexes, is the way to bring on a paradise on earth. Hey, I thought that the whole idea of the nation was to get beyond tribalism.

And this after 200 years of the Great Enrichment, in which the culture of surrender to the will of the market and its upstart innovators rather than to feudal barons and ideological buccaneers has increased per-capita income by 3,000 percent for everyone.

Like I say. The great achievement of civilization is to wean young men away from their instinctive love  of threat displays and border warfare and channel their energy into plowing, and latterly into work for wages and the titanic battle for market share.

But when young thugs are battling in the streets for bragging rights about Confederate monuments then something is going wrong.

Yes, So Who Will Win in the Battle of Identity vs. Nation

So this week I read that Fox couldn't get Republicans to come on TV and support President Trump on Charlottesville. But I also read that Steve Bannon told a lefty journalist:

The Democrats … the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.

Meanwhile the Z-Man analyzes the globalists and their notion that when the migrants have migrated all over the world (i.e., into the West) that a global government would be staffed by the same folks that staff the UN: the "rich brats of the world’s political elite."

There also seems to be a suggestion out there that the left's attack on Confederate, and now Founders monuments, is part of some cunning plan from deep down in the liberal-Democratic nexus. The idea is that blacks believed that the Obama presidency would unload tons of loot on them, and it didn't happen. So now they are hopping mad and the Dems need to channel their rage into something.

Or it might lead blacks to give up on politics and start dying of despair, like the last lot that were betrayed by the progressive elite: the white working class.

But it does raise the question of which is better at winning the hearts and minds of the people: identity politics or nationalism?

Let the world note that the three great evil geniuses of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, all found the need to combine their millennial socialism with nationalism. For Hitler, it was National Socialism; for Stalin it was Socialism in one Country. And Mao stood at the Gate of the Forbidden City and apparently did not tell the Han people that "the Chinese People have stood up."

But these were practical men, who would do anything to seize power and then keep it. The theoreticians of the left have always been opposed to the nation state, believing in a single paradise on Earth without boundaries and nations. And so they have always been working on undermining the notion and the fact of the nation by organizing people into sub-national groups: class, race, gender; or supranational groups like the UN and the EU.

On both cases, note that the same people will get to be the rulers.

My idea is that this war on the nation is the most foolish thing in the world, and I like to say that the world-be global ruling class took exactly the wrong lesson from all the nationalism and the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s.

My point is that, despite the stupid World War I, the inflations of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the suffering peoples of the west were successfully rallied to support and fight for their nations. The German workers, perhaps the most radicalized of any by the socialist wave, all rallied to Germany and fought for the Fatherland, twice. The British working class that had gone on a General Strike in the 1920s nevertheless rallied to Britain in World War II. In the US all  the divisions of the 1930s were healed and everyone rallied to fight for victory over the Nazis and the Japs. I have a 12-CD set of World War II songs put out by Tin Pan Alley, all singing the praises of the war.

Yet after World War II the global elite decided "never again." The people cannot be trusted not to be fascists, they decided, so we must step in and neutralize the fascist bug.

Actually, what the first half of the century proved was that, no matter how badly they were governed, and how badly the ruling class screwed up, the people could still be rallied and unified to support and fight for their nations.

It is clear from President Trump's actions, and from the words of Steve Bannon, that the president is trying to rally the people once again to the notion of nation. And that the rest of the ruling class is opposed to the idea.

Are Trump and Bannon right? Or is the rest of the ruling class? I don't know. All I know is that "nation" is a very powerful idea.

Maybe it is too powerful for some people, and that is why they want to knock it down.

Trump Puts a Stake in the Ground on Race

Whoever said that the mainstream media were good for nothing? Their lefty frenzy over the Saturday Charlottesville riot has forced President Trump to clarify his position on the race question.

On Saturday, President Trump issued a statement that blamed "many sides" for the riot. He then proceeded to stake out a position that we are all Americans etc.

But the liberals in the media didn't like that, and neither did the old GOP establishment, like Attorney General Sessions and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). What all  these people demanded was a condemnation of white racism. OK, so on Monday Trump gave it to them, and they didn't like it.

But then, on Tuesday, at a press conference in Trump Tower about his infrastructure initiatives, Trump made it clear that he blames both sides for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meanwhile Mitt Romney tweeted a condemnation of the white nationalists.

OK. So Trump didn't call out Black Lives Matter as black racists, and he didn't call out the Antifa as fascists by any other name. But he has made it perfectly clear where he stands. He stands in the middle and condemns racists and rioters of both the left and the right.

So let me return to Trump's remarks that I posted on Monday.

Above all else we must remember this truth: no matter our color, creed, religion, or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country, we love our God, we love our flag, we're proud of our country, we're proud of who we are. So we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we are doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen. 

My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens, but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other, and cherish our history and our future together. So important. We have to respect each other, ideally we have to love each other.

Do you see what the president (or Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon or whoever) is doing? He is doing the only thing that can stave off a ruinous white identity politics. He is saying: enough off all this division and hate; we are Americans; we are a nation. We must restore the bonds of trust and loyalty. We must cherish our history and our future together.

We must come back together as a nation.

And the extremists of both sides are to blame.

Frankly, if you are a racist, sexist homophobe like me you have been waiting 40 years for a Republican to have the guts to say this. But for 40 years Republicans and conservatives have been afraid, afraid of the accusation of racism and automatic conviction from which there is no appeal.

Now comes Trump, and he has made his position clear. He stands right in the middle, an American president for Americans. Can he succeed? Can he tempt the victims out of their identity ghettos, and get all of us to stand together on the glorious fruited plain of America and Americanism?

Nobody knows. But here are a couple of points.

First, Trump may be doing himself a favor by getting into a pissing match with the CEOs that have been resigning from his manufacturing council over the Charlottesville flap. If Trump has a weak spot, it is the suspicion that Trump, the billionaire, is probably in bed with the CEOs and the rest of the billionaires.

Second, Trump may be doing himself a favor with women. Women do not like street riots, any more than they understand hunting and the crunch of beef in football. Women do not settle their arguments with fists, their dirty work by naming and shaming. And women understand that when rioters are in the streets women are particularly vulnerable.

But the basic point is that Trump has done what no other Republican has dared to do. He has plunged his hand into the radioactive bath of race. Time will tell whether he will live to tell the tale.

The Left's Syllabus of Errors: Postmodernism

A typical critique of postmodernism from the right is that it flies in the face of "logic, reason, and objective truth." The idea that everything is relative, a "narrative," is offensive to those of us that adhere to traditional ideas of politics and culture.

On the contrary, the postmodernists are exactly right that there is no objective truth, and that everything is a narrative, and usually a narrative for power.

Presumably ever since mankind began to be self-conscious we have searched for the truth and the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And in every religion, every culture, every philosophy, every political program, we think we have found it.

But our present astonishing civilization is built on the realization, that began, let us say, with Descartes, that "we don't know." Descartes thought he had solved the problem with "I think, therefore I am." But he didn't.

To me, the central insight is that of Kant, who argued -- using reason and logic -- that we cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only sense impressions. When you "see" an object out there, according to post-Kantian theory, you are interpreting in your brain the response of the rods and cones in your eyes that were irritated by lots of quanta of electromagnetic radiation, photons that were transmitted from the surface of the object and then processed and concentrated by the lens in your eye. So what is really real in all that?

Probably there is something really real out there, but my interpretation of Kant is that we should be really careful before we announce that, here, finally, is the final word on that object out there. In my view the whole success of modern science from relativity -- hey, space and time are relative -- to quantum mechanics -- hey, the basic unit of the universe is a probability -- is based on the narrative that we are not observing things-in-themselves but only sense impressions processed by our brains.

On this view, relativity is a "narrative," but it is a really good narrative, and if you believe it is true you can launch GPS satellites into orbit that let you use a map app on your smartphone and get where you want to go.

On this view, capitalism is also a "narrative," and a really good narrative. Following the narrative we humans have increased per-capita income by 30 times, 3,000 percent, in the 200 years of the Great Enrichment. There has been nothing like it, ever.

On this view, socialism is a "narrative," and a really bad one. Following its narrative socialist leaders have plunged their peoples again and again into poverty, famine, and death. See the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and now Venezuela.

In other words, everyone has a narrative. The question is, does it work? Here's Shakespeare's Harry
Hotspur.

GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Now, the narrative of the postmodernists is that under the rule of the patriarchy white males have accumulated "white privilege" that has harmed and marginalized everyone else, from white women to "people of color" to LGBT sexual minorities. The postmodernists offer a range of government policies that they argue will rectify the marginalization and injustice suffered by these victims of the patriarchy. One of their central policies is to us government power to rectify "under-representation." It is argued, for instance, that white and Asian men are over-represented in Silicon Valley tech companies, and that the tech companies should make a special effort to hire women and non-Asian minorities to redress the balance.

The narrative of the postmodernists is that the fact that some 80 percent of tech company employees are white or Asian men is an injustice, and that government force should be used to redress it. But what about a counter-narrative? There are, you might argue, a lot of innocent reasons why white and Asian men might dominate tech employment, but you are not allowed to raise those questions, as the defenestration of Google employee James Damore demonstrated.

So, on the one hand we have a narrative that says, in effect, that we should let the white and Asian male nerds do their thing in Tech-land and not get too exercised about the gender and race statistics, although certainly it would be nice for all walks of life to participate in the tech experience, and there is plenty of room to disagree.

On the other hand we have a narrative that says that any gender or racial imbalance in the workplace is an injustice that must be rectified by government power and you are not allowed to disagree.

Since all narratives are relative and a narrative for power, you figure out which narrative you would like to live under.

So what does this all mean?

In my view, it all makes sense if you regard the left as a reactionary movement that believes that political power and government force are the means to create a just and peaceful world. This used to be true before the industrial revolution when food was life and the only way to survive in the world was to find land on which you could grow food and defend your land against all comers.

Today, all that has changed. Today it doesn't matter who owns the food-growing land. All that matters is that food is available to buy and sell on the market. All that matters is that everything is available to buy and sell on the market, because then there is no need to use force.

But if the world doesn't need so much political power and force, what happens to people that are interested in power? Perfectly simple. They start looking in dark corners for occasions where force is the only answer. Back in the 19th century Marx decided that force was the only answer to the inevitable immiseration of the workers under capitalism. But in fact the workers thrived under capitalism. Then came the Frankfurt School and postmodernism and decided that women and blacks and colonized peoples were horribly exploited and marginalized. So the white patriarchs gave women the vote and got out of imperialism, and gave civil rights to blacks and other racial and sexual minorities. So what's the problem?

The problem is that some people still believe, after all the evidence of the last 200 years, that force is the answer. On my narrative, they are dead wrong.

My narrative is that, while government force and political power are still needed, because there are still people that worship power and want to dominate other men, there is only a very narrow area where political power and government force are beneficial. That's because in the market system, anyone suffering under exploitation and marginalization can quit and go down the street and get a job somewhere else.

And Marx's basic prophecy turned out to be wrong. He thought that the new industrial era would replace the lord's domination of the peasantry with the bourgeoisie's domination of the workers. But he was wrong, and for a curious reason. It turned out that the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power. It was more interested in building businesses in transportation, energy, electricity, manufacturing, computers, and the internet. Hey, let's go to Mars, say the billionaires.

But some people are still interested in power, and they worship it. Instead of the bourgeoisie bidding for political power we got a New Class of educated youth that wanted power and that developed a narrative to justify it.

I would say that wherever this New Class has obtained power it has rained misery and division upon ordinary people, because of one simple fact. We humans are social animals, and we thrive by minimizing the need for force. The whole point of social animals is reducing the need for force. Any narrative that wants to increase the use of force is going against the fundamental proposition of social animals, to reduce the use of force among "us."

Let us tell a story.

In the story of humanity, initially hunter-gatherers, the range of social cooperation was small, just an extended family. Every male was involved in defending the territory by force and the result was that 500 people per 100,000 died a violent death each year. But then humans invented agriculture. Now the size of the territory was much bigger and only marcher lords and their retainers were needed to defend the territory. A lot more people could engage in the social cooperation of growing food and building temples and pyramids and cathedrals. The annual violent death rate dropped to 50 people per 100,000 population. But then humans invented manufacturing and global trade and steam transportation and on and on. Now only a small professional army was needed to defend the borders, and a navy to patrol the sea lanes, and nearly everyone could work in the market system in peace. The annual violent death rate dropped to 5 people per 100,000 population. Oh, and the per capita income grew by 30 times in 200 years.

On this narrative the progressive left is a vile and evil band of troublemakers, picking at the few remaining scabs of injustice in a society that is otherwise astonishingly just and peaceful.

It is up to us to rise up and send them packing.

With White Identity Politics, What Becomes of White Liberals?

A basic prediction of the alt-right is that, at some point, despite all the naming and shaming, whites in America will have to organize politically according to the rules of identity politics.

From the point of view of American whites, and especially white males, the identity politics of blacks, Hispanics, women and LGBT is reaching the point where, unless we organize politically as white males, we will be thrown under the bus.

In that process, people like me, that really don't like to identify by race, will be forced to join the white party, or perish in the wilderness.

But what about white liberals?

Up to now, white liberals have presented themselves as Homeric gods -- way above the earthly realms of humans -- dispensing divine justice, according to their whims or their deeply felt sense of justice.

But liberals have been teaching the world for 50 years about white privilege and the male gaze. Where does that leave male white liberals when whites are forced into white identity politics.

There have been some murmurings that the minorities in the Democrat Party are getting restive under the tutelage of white leaders. What is it that makes Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer so special? What makes them think they can represent the traditionally marginalized victims of white privilege in the future? According to current liberal doctrine it is monstrous for men to write about women and whites to write about blacks. How can any man presume to know about the female experience, or a white presume to understand the black experience?

Well, if that applies to writers of fiction then it has to apply to politicians. So how can Chuck Schumer, a white straight man, presume to speak for the voters in his Democratic Party that are overwhelmingly female, non-white, and LGBT.

At the moment, as indicated by Rebels of Google dumping to Breitbart, elite white males do pretty well at Google, because Google recruits from top Ivy League universities and finds a lot of elite white males. Then it recruits at lesser institutions to fill up the quotas with females and minorities. On this view elite white liberals are doing pretty well. And the Rebels say that to succeed as an ordinary middle-class white male you have to be really good.

Yeah and what about the unbearable whiteness of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google? Shouldn't they give way to real and genuine underrepresentated minorities. And I do not mean Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who according to reports is a Brahmin, the top caste in India that has been top caste for thousands of years. How about an untouchable next time, Larry and Sergey?

What happens to elite white males when identity politics takes over everything and elite white males are the only white males left un-conquered?

As I write in my latest American Thinker piece, there is only one workable alternative on offer to the war of all against all implied in the racist and tribal practice of identity politics. And that is nationalism.

In this, as in many things, our liberal friends have got the wrong end of the stick.

The correct judgment for the elite to make at the end of World War II was not to decide "never again" will we allow the ghost of nationalism to rise from Hitler's grave. It should have been to realize how remarkable it was, after the mess of World War I and the elite failures of the 1920s in Germany and in the US in the wake of the 1929 Crash, that ordinary people still stayed loyal to the completely artificial and cooked-up idea of nation, and did not revert to their more natural tribal and kindred instincts.

And yet the bottom line of elite politics for the last 50 or so years is to encourage tribalism and racism in their little darlings, the women, the blacks, the Hispanics, and more. It worked so long as they could name and shame middle-class whites into silence.

But of course, this elite politics was and is profoundly unjust. Nothing remarkable about this: that's what always happens when a ruling class rules and the inheritors of their dynasty exhibit a certain conceit for being, as they say, born on third base and thinking they hit a triple.

So last Saturday, after the Charlottesville riot, President Trump invoked our common identity as Americans.

Above all else we must remember this truth: no matter our color, creed, religion, or political party, we are all Americans first. We love our country, we love our God, we love our flag, we're proud of our country, we're proud of who we are. So we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we are doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.

My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens, but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other, and cherish our history an our future together. So important. We have to respect each other, ideally we have to love each other.

In liberal-land this is called a weak stance against racism.

I'd call it a strong statement in favor of the only idea that is going to stop the United States crumbling into dust.

And it is the last best hope of elite white male liberals. Only nationalism can save them from the humiliation of have to join the white party in the identity politics of all against all.

The Damore Case: What Do Liberals Want

The Damore case, of the 28-year-old nerd-head that got mad after a diversity training session at Google, has entered a new phase.

Yes, the new critics say, Damore had a point, but he is naive. He really doesn't get the bigger picture.

One of them, Nicole Gelinas, from the Manhattan Institute says that "the contents of his memo are nothing to celebrate; He said nothing that hasn’t already been said, in tiresome fashion, for decades." And his memo has made Google's job, to "manage the people who make up its business... harder."

Then there is Megan McArdle, who writes that, after working in IT for years with the guys she decided one day at a Monday morning meeting that "fundamentally, these are not my people." It was after her account of a doomed romance and a Saturday concert had been met with dead silence and a guy's account of spending the weekend building a fiber network in his basement. So then she segues into "Sexism is a process" and working in tech is going to be pretty rough for women unless "some pretty heroic efforts are made to counteract all that free-floating testosterone.¨

All of which is fine. But the point is whether the government should be in there with its mailed fist nailing down the details of managing people in every workplace. It is one thing to fine and imprison people for not hiring and promoting women and minorities. It is another thing to bully them into making life comfortable for the pets of liberal activists.

Government is force. Is government force the right tool to manage and regulate corporate cultures? Must the tech industry be made to be comfortable for well-born women, or else? Or does that amount to treating well-born women like children?

Now, I do not doubt that one of the most important things in the world right now is that well-born and well-educated women should all get to feel comfortable in the workplace and able to discuss their relationships in Monday morning meetings, and that the Goolag should be able to force its corporate culture on its employees to protect its $90 billion in the bank.

But let us get down to the nitty gritty. And that means Charles Murray and his Coming Apart. Right now, things are pretty copacetic for the top 25 percent of whites in America, of which well-born women at Google are probably in the One Percent. They have great careers and merger marriages, and the divorce rate is down. But things are not so great for the 40 percent in the middle, where the jobs are not so great and the marriages don't always last. And things are really grim for the bottom 30 percent where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

Now, I declare before all the world that I don't think that any of the well-born women and diversity hires at Google have a leg to stand on when we are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the bottom 75 percent find a more secure life.

And no. Raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and doing single-payer health care and saving the planet from climate change and moving to gender-neutral bathrooms, and all the rest of the progressive liberal rubbish, ain't gonna do it.

The fact is that liberals are totally obsessed with fluffing the pillows in their own liberal Bubble World where things are already pretty comfy. And if you look at the things that liberals say they want, the one thing that comes through is that liberals do not have a clue about what other people want, nor do they care, unless you are a liberal pet and sit up and beg for a doggy treat on command.

The whole Google flap shows that liberals are just like every late-stage ruling class. They are totally obsessed with their tiny aristocratic world and its competitive social events, its liberal equivalents of Royal Ascot, and the one thing they are sure about is that they are better than other people are, publicans and sinners.

I Do Remember the Curve of Hotspur's Butt

Hey kids! Yesterday I went to a performance of Henry IV Part One at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, in which the notorious marcher lord Harry Percy was played by a woman. As was his/her relative the poisonous Earl of Worcester, and Sir Richard Vernon.

In other words, the rebel alliance were all played by women! Hello liberal woman director Lileana Blain-Cruz. You really don't get women as marcher lords raging about everything and damning everyone to hell and back again while they work up a head of rebellion. Not in the real world. Women don't operate that way, which anyone would know unless their education had been confined to sex-denialism at an Ivy League university.

Women get their way in the world by manipulating the current system, as in manipulating tech companies like Google into hiring more women software engineers. They rarely get their way in the world by overturning the system or working at a tech startup. It's the science, baby.

But the bigger problem is that it really doesn't make sense to cast a woman into a role where she is having a knife fight with a man. And it really doesn't make sense to cast a woman into a role where the most notable thing about her is the snug fit of her camo pants. And it really doesn't make the point when the said woman, cast in a role as a quarrelsome troublemaking marcher lord, gets killed and dragged off stage by the coward Falstaff. You see, m'lady, men are expendable, so it doesn't matter if the Percys lose a son or two. But the death of every woman is a debit against posterity. Because the most notable thing about women is that they bear children, and men do not.

And again, why do we have two or three babes in skimpy white-trash low-cut bar-girl getups with a Dolly Parton lookalike Mistress Quickly? Isn't that, like, sexist? Isn't it, like, propagating vile liberal race and gender stereotypes? Shouldn't there, like, be a black rent-boy at the Boar's Head Tavern, just to make it diverse and inclusive? Whatever.

Of course, why would we expect a liberal woman with a double-barrel surname and an Ivy League MFA degree to have the least clue about high politics and aristocratic warfare in the late Middle Ages? Where would she learn such stuff? What masters degrees would be out there? What intern opportunities? What grant prospects? Imagine the microaggressions and unsafe spaces she would encounter in the process!

Never mind. Because after two clueless productions from two clueless directors with Ivy League MFA degrees that mangled two great cultural monuments of western culture into silly putty we got to see, here at Ashland, a numinous performance of The Odyssey, adapted and produced by Mary Zimmerman.

It may truly be said that Zimmerman lived up to the OSF's Mission Statement to produce "illuminating interpretations" on its stages.

Really, it wasn't more than ten minutes into The Odyssey that I turned and said "now we're talking."

Of course, The Odyssey is a corker of a story, with the universal themes of loss and the heartbreak of separation and the emotion supercharge of reunion. But then The Merry Wives of Windsor is a magnificent romp, and Henry IV Part One is a magnificent disquisition on ambition and betrayal and coming-of-age and I know not what.

The point is that the usual idiots can wreck a cultural icon as well as any man in Illyria.  To make the cultural icon come alive and move and illuminate the hearts and minds of the audience takes something more.

And my feeling is that the liberal rage for diversity and inclusion is not just going to vandalize the great monuments of western culture. It is going to end up by ruining liberalism itself. Let us take our text from Eric Hoffer:

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

I think that our liberal friends have got right through the movement stage, have burned through most of the business stage, and are deep in the racket stage. And really, when you are in the racket stage you are  just a bunch of gang-bangers with more testosterone than sense.

As in: three of the plays I have watched here at Ashland over the past three days have been directed by women and minorities with Ivy League MFA degrees.

Does not that smell like a bit of a racket? As in the interview policy of Google with softball interviews for Ivy Leaguers and diversity hires. Only the three directors here at Ashland are minority/women and Ivy Leaguers.

Mary Zimmerman is the daughter of a physics professor and a comparative literature professor. And she went to Northwestern. So strictly speaking, she is not an Ivy Leaguer, although with two professor parents it does count as two strikes against her.

But maybe that Northwestern bit makes a difference. Or maybe it is that Mary Zimmerman has found a way to break out of the liberal bubble and speak to us all.