RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/portland_wokies_target_trees_for_racism.html

Ida B. Wells-Barnett High School in Portland, Oregon is currently delaying the adoption of a new mascot, a tree. In today’s hyperpolitical public education system, it seems that even trees are unable to avoid identity politics.

Students were excited to celebrate natural wonders. Unfortunately, the vote on this resolution was delayed because Portland Public Schools Board of Education Director, Michelle DePass has growing concerns that trees could possibly be seen as a symbol of lynchings from the past. She commented, “I’ve heard from a couple of community members now about the idea of using a tree — which, of course, I mean, personally, I love evergreens, I’m from Oregon — but using a tree that’s used to lynch people in our mascot, if there was any consideration as to the imagery there, that we’ve all seen from people hanging from trees and using this mascot.”

According to Ida Wells principal Filip Hristic, “Ida Wells has a very particular connection to Woodrow Wilson, which we thought was a wonderful counterpoint to the history that we were trying to both surface and and move away from. And it was somebody who stood strong and stood proud against what Woodrow Wilson and many others, like him have promoted.”

He went on to state, “And so we felt like she was a very appropriate choice for us in response to his legacy. And in choosing the mascot, as we looked around our community to see what is most prominent, what is most reflective of where we are, evergreen seemed like an obvious choice. The last thing I would want is to inadvertently cause harm, or to in any way be associated with what she devoted her life to fight against,” speaking of the school’s namesake.

Adding noncognitive, natural plants to the ever-growing list of “things considered racist” in modern society is a sign of the times. With critical-race theory being heralded and pushed by many leaders in power, this kind of inadvertent dilemma will not be an isolated incident.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/mar/30/bidens-woke-military/

There are two types of senior military leaders. One always seeks ways to maximize the lethality and readiness of the forces under his command. The other is so sunken in the political swamp that those concepts are nearly forgotten.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin unfortunately falls in the second category. He and President Biden are turning our military into a “woke” force.

Wokeness, an extreme version of political correctness, took root in the Pentagon during the Obama years. Two examples suffice. In 2014, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel mandated an “environmental roadmap” mandating deference to environmental concerns when making operational plans. In 2015, the Army issued regulations requiring that commanders balance mission requirements with the needs of breastfeeding mothers. Compromising readiness or operational needs to politics is a stupid move that can cost American lives.

The officers who were converted to that thinking during the Obama years are now the generals and admirals who are most susceptible to wokeness.

https://nypost.com/2021/03/30/if-the-woke-have-their-way-soon-we-wont-have-any-culture-to-speak-of/

Now they’ve come for sheet music — “they” being the woke lunatics, and sheet music being just that, musical notation, now deemed a horrible racist transgression at Oxford University (of all places).

This weekend, The Daily Mail reported that Oxford University was considering “scrapping sheet music” because it’s “too colonial” — guilty of “complicity in white supremacy.”

Sheet music? Do they seriously mean they want to get rid of musical notation itself? Notes drawn on a five-line staff to indicate pitch and duration?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music the universal language. Music alone, shorn of words, conveys something that can’t be paraphrased — and that is thus, by definition, incapable of political interpretation.

So how, one wonders, can it be complicit in white supremacy?

If we’re going to dispose of musical notation, then certainly we should also ban written language itself. Because if musical notation records sounds with no meaning beyond themselves, written language can be used to convey dangerous political ideas.

It only makes sense. 

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/03/classical-music-under-assault-in-academia.php

Oxford University reportedly is under pressure to stop, or at least curtail, the teaching of sheet music, musical notation, and even the classical music that was scored upon it. The rationale is that all of this is “too colonial,” and that Beethoven, Mozart, and music in general are “complicit in white supremacy.”

It’s not just students and BLM groups that are pushing this insanity. In fact, professors seem to be leading the charge. According to this report:

The proposals put forward by one faction of academics to address so-called “white hegemony” include rethinking the study of instructive ­musical symbols because it is a ­“colonialist representational system.”

Their document states teaching notation that has not “shaken off its connection to its colonial past” would be a “slap in the face” for some students. Music writing studies have been ­earmarked for rebranding to be more inclusive and diverse.

In addition:

[T]he rebel professors. . .believe skills such as learning piano or conducting orchestras, should no longer be compulsory. They allege the repertoire “structurally centres white European music”, which causes “students of ­colour great distress”.

Almost all of the professors behind this movement reportedly are White.

What do they propose to replace “sheet” and “classical” music courses with? Special topics According to this report:

These special topics would include “Introduction to Sociocultural and Historical Studies,” or “African and African Diasporic Musics,” “Global Musics,” and “Popular Musics.” So instead of studying the history of western music, which has been evolving and changing for thousands upon thousands of years, students will study what is happening in music right now.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/03/the-hymn-to-him/

As the gender storms rain down on Capital Hill and feminist rage spreads across the land, another Higgins has escaped the attention of our vigilant media: the phonetics professor in My Fair Lady (MFL) and that song. For some people, MFL is still jolly good fun: an Edwardian comedy of manners kept alive in the last half century by a few memorable songs, thanks to the 1964 American musical drama film, itself an adaptation from Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 Broadway and London stage musical.

Wouldn’t it be loverly if everyone felt that way about it? They certainly did in the 1960s. The 1964 film, with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins, was a critical and commercial success. The second-highest grossing film that year, it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director. The American Film Institute in 1998 named it the 91st greatest American film. It was ranked eighth in the AFI’s 2006 Greatest Movie Musicals list.

MFL’s popularity, however, is on life-support. More and more folk are determined to see it as another example of the patriarchy in action. For them, Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, two older upper-class males exploit Eliza, a young Cockney Covent Garden flower-seller. They bet, for God’s sake, on whether stern elocution lessons and tuition in manners could change her into a  lady. With a Little Bit of Luck, it does, but how dare they try to improve her chances in life’s lottery!

MFL is all about transformation. Yet how many remember that both musicals, and a 1938 film, were based on a 1913 stage play, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; or that Shaw’s inspiration was an ancient Greek myth in book ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?  The Roman poet’s first sentence: “My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind.”  In this case, the dramatic shape depends on directors and actors, as much as on writers and copyright law.

Shaw spent more than two decades trying to rescue his play from chaps determined to romanticise it, as explained in this video. He must have fumed when he saw the 1938 Metro Goldwyn Mayer billboard: “He [Higgins] took a girl off the street and made a lady of her in an amazing experiment to trick society. A thrilling, wise, witty and romantic photo-play.” Yet it was his most popular and financially successful work.

The before and after photos of Eliza had this caption: “Any girl can do it. You need a guy and a trunkful of clothes!” A speech bubble has Wendy Hiller saying to Leslie Howard (below): “Swear at me … even black my eye … but when you’ve made a girl love you … don’t you dare ignore her!” It is probably on the syllabus of a coercive-control workshop.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/the-wussification-of-the-west/

The Dr. Seuss book-burning gave a guest on Tucker Carlson’s eponymous show the giggles: “It’s total distraction from the real issues,” claimed one Chadwick Moore. So wrong. 

Come to think of it, our much-loved TV host’s defense of the purged Dr. Seuss books fell short of freedom’s standards: “Dr. Seuss was not a racist” was the gist of it. 

But before deconstructing Tucker’s defeatist and defensive argument—here is the latest in the saga of Dr. Seuss and the wussification of the West, for lack of a better word. 

The New York Times reports that, “Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of their use of offensive imagery.” 

None other than Dr. Seuss Enterprises, “the business that oversees the estate of the children’s author and illustrator,” “had decided last year to end publication and licensing of” the following titles: 

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street 
If I Ran the Zoo 
McElligot’s Pool
On Beyond Zebra!
Scrambled Eggs Super!
The Cat’s Quizzer

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/woke-books-have-no-place-in-u-s-navy-training/

How will reading Ibram X. Kendi help us fight our enemies better?

From soft-drink companies instructing their employees to be less white, to the cancellation of children’s books that, until two minutes ago, were completely benign fixtures in the libraries of many, a powerful segment of the American public seems intent on sending every inch of public life careening over a cliff’s edge in the ill-begotten quest to please the most extreme elements of the Left. Over the past several weeks, it has become quite apparent that the United States Navy is no exception to the relentless onslaught of “woke” politicking.

On February 23, the chief of naval operations Admiral Michael Gilday released an updated version of the Navy’s Professional Reading Program. The program, a long-standing tradition that curates suggested readings for all members of the Navy, has a stated aim of educating and training the sailors that compose this branch of the Armed Forces. According to the Navy’s official website on this program, Admiral Gilday believes that in order to “outthink our competitors, we must study and apply lessons we’ve learned from the past.” He further holds that “one of the very best ways to do that is to foster an environment where every Sailor deepens their level of understanding and learning.” Many of the 48 books listed in the newly released reading checklist cover topics relevant to the Navy’s overall mission of becoming a more lethal fighting force: naval strategy, deep-dives into future world superpowers, leadership development, technology changes in the domain of warfighting, etc.

However, the checklist also included several books that are overtly political in nature, threatening what should be the apolitical nature of our nation’s fighting forces. As just one example, Ibram X. Kendi’s overly wrought screed How to Be an Antiracist somehow landed on the admiral’s book list. Writings in a similar vein appear on the list as well, including Jason Pierceson’s Sexual Minorities and Politics, as well as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. The inclusion of these books, especially given the hot-button topics they cover (and the controversial takes they provide) seems to place the Navy squarely into the realm of politics, which it has stridently attempted to avoid in the 200-plus years of its existence.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/14/conflating_criticism_and_cancellation_145396.html

Liberal democracy — grounded in the “inalienable” rights all human beings share — protects, and is protected by, free speech. Good laws alone, though, cannot keep speech free. Also necessary is a public culture that promotes an accurate understanding of free speech and fosters the virtues that undergird it. The breakdown in the United States of that public culture — particularly among the nation’s progressive elites — is of pressing concern.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” The Supreme Court interprets this provision to require a broad though not absolute prohibition on government regulation of expression. Even among liberal democracies, Americans enjoy an unusually extended sphere in which they can speak their minds. Expression is subject to a few specified legal limitations: these include incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, classified information, and slander and libel. This, however, leaves abundant room in which citizens can readily encounter unorthodox, dissenting, and, yes, deeply disagreeable opinions.

While government always poses a major threat to free speech, it never represents the sole danger. Today, apprehensions about Big Tech regulation – subtle and surreptitious as well as brazen and heavy-handed — of social network and consumer platforms command center stage. Meanwhile, old nemeses of free speech — inherited authority, social pressure, and public opinion — show little sign of abating.