RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/28/our-preening-pop-culture

It was the greatest decade in American pop culture history; from new wave to hair metal; from gritty TV to family TV; from Manic Monday to Black Monday; and from Live Aid to dead “Aid”; from John Hughes and the Brat pack—to the epidemic of crack. Magic and Bird. Spielberg and Stone. It was the decade that saw the fall of a wall and the preacher man fall.

From Jim Bakker to Jimmy Swaggart, it was a confusing time to be a young lad in a decade filled with contrast and confusion. The media pummeled these very public figures as well, I guess, they should have been. They espoused to be something they weren’t and made millions of dollars in the process. These were the teachers and preachers of the evangelical movement weren’t they? I mean they were on television, they had millions screaming “Amen.” They made the culture laws; they broke their own culture laws, and they set the Republican Party back a generation.

How could any child of the 1980s watching this hypocrisy—watching men of the cloth paying women to take off theirs—ever support this? No, it wasn’t the “greed” that killed the party. Heck, Alex P. Keaton and Gordon Gekko, said to be the embodiment of the capitalist Antichrist, were the only ones sprinkling the real “holy water.” How could any kid get it? These were religious people espousing to be something they weren’t telling us we would go to hell with our sin while hiring prostitutes at the local inn. How could a child, an early teen, not lump evangelicals in with the whole party?

People espousing to be something they are not, preaching on behalf of laws they don’t follow, people who want guns confiscated but who want to be protected with them. People who preach the gospel of climate change, yet own the biggest carbon footprints. People who call for the jailing of non-believers, yet it is they themselves, and their very actions that are being put on trial. Their own Twitter words are being used against them in the court of public opinion, and potentially a court of law. They are proselytizing open-mindedness even as they are closed off to any idea not their own; giving a constant stream of sermons from the pulpit they call Movies and Television.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiddler-on-the-roof-review-a-richer-deeper-interpretation-1531865223

“Fidler afn Dakh.” Sounds crazy, no? But at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, that is what is presented: “Fiddler on the Roof,” a classic American musical, entirely performed in a language now rarely heard (Yiddish), neither spoken by its director (the Broadway veteran Joel Grey ) nor by most of the cast (which includes some players from the most recent Broadway production).

Yet the result is thrilling: It is almost as if “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964) were being restored to some primal form. And though Russian and English translations are projected on sides of the stage, they are often unnecessary. When Tevye—the dairyman who regularly argues with God and quotes Scripture—dreams of being a wealthy man and sings “Ven ikh bin a Rotshild,” can anyone doubt the meaning? In fact, so virtuosic is Steven Skybell in that role that he often needs no language at all for us to feel his character swerve from ironic mockery to righteous anger to heartbreak.

The sense of restoration partly arises because “Fiddler” is loosely based on stories by the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem ; the language’s culture, intonation and imagery leave traces throughout the musical. This ancestral influence can even be personal: Mr. Grey is but a generation removed from Yiddish performance culture (his father was the musician and comic Mickey Katz ).

The main force here is the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, which has been reviving Yiddish theatrical and musical traditions under the artistic direction of Zalmen Mlotek. Mr. Mlotek’s taut yet supple conducting of a reduced 12-member orchestra reaches back to the klezmeric spirit and devotional melody that the musical often alludes to, making the results seem more authentic while inspiring Staś Kmieć ‘s homage to the original’s choreography.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/07/deplorables.html

In my July 7th column, “The Democrats’ Declare a Fatwa on America,” I contend that, for all practical purposes, the Democrats have declared war, not just on Donald Trump, but also on the U.S. Just as jihadists assert that their purpose is to impose Sharia on the country, the Democrats wish to impose Progressivism on the country. America is “deplorable,” and Trump is the most deplorable American of all.

All you have to do is examine closely the tenacious psychosis of the Dems, the MSM, and of most of the cultural “elite” to realize that yes, the Deep State and the Dems and their allies have declared war on this country. I keep remembering of the opening scenes of the wholly fictional “Mozart,” or “Amadeus,” which opens in a mad house in Austria, when a priest visits Amtonio Salieri for his confession. I reviewed the film in 2010: The ad goes, “Everything you’ve heard about Mozart it true.” But. it isn’t.

I had the same experience with “Lawrence of Arabia,” a magnicent film I once admired until I educated myself on the history of the Middle East during WWI and learned that I had been bamboozled by David Lean. Or perhaps he had been bamboozled by his advisors. AboutAmadeus:

Deport the Deplorables is a slogan of popular culture, found on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and internet postings. But now the mini-industry of deplorable/deportable sloganeering has made its way into more elite circles.

With just three words, the phrase “deport the deplorables” sends two popular messages: one, get rid of undesirable American citizens who voted for Donald Trump and who were properly written off in 2016 as deplorables by Hillary Clinton. And, two, by implication, don’t deport the illegal aliens who broke U.S. immigration law. Or put more succinctly, foreign nationals who crash our borders are innately superior people to citizens of the working- and middle-classes who voted for Trump.

A bipartisan disdain exists for the middle and working classes, whether periodically politically manifested as the old blue-dog Democrats, Perot voters, Reagan Democrats, Tea Party activists, or Trump supporters. On the Left, they were derided as the clingers of rural Pennsylvania whom Obama blamed for his 2008 primary loss to Hillary Clinton in that state and who never appreciated his genius: “And it’s not surprising, then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The clingers, however, were also once the great white hope, whom 2008 presidential candidate Clinton (playing “Annie Oakley” in Obama’s words) explained were crucial to Democratic hopes: “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . . There’s a pattern emerging here . . . . These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that.”

The “new” Hillary of 2016 demonized this same group as irredeemable and deplorable:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic [sic], you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up . . . Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

A post-election Hillary intensified her deplorable campaign tropes and grew even angrier at the Trump base: “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/solzhenitsyn_40_years_later.html

In June 1978 Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address at Harvard entitled “A World Split Apart.” It was a speech devoted to the emergence of “different worlds,” including our own Western society. On one side of the divide is a freedom diverted to unbridled passion with the accumulation of material riches to be valued above all else. Man is the center in this equation as there isn’t any power above him resulting in a moral poverty searching for meaning.

In days after this speech, the Fourth Estate accused Solzhenitsyn of “losing his balance,” of representing a “mind split apart.” He thought one can say what one thinks in the USA, but democracy expects to be admired. The press argued “the giant does not love us.”

Was Solzhenitsyn right? He did use positive signs in the heartland. “Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small town, and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing this speech.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/05/preposterous-put-united-states-10-dangerous-countries-women/

The Thomson Reuters Foundation recently published a contrived poll of 550 experts in women’s studies about the most “dangerous” countries for women, and the result seems to suggest facts no matter so long as whatever is said fits the prescribed narrative. The United States astonishingly made the top ten “most dangerous countries in the world for women” in the survey, and was tied for third with Syria in terms of sexual assault and rape.

To claim that the United States would make the list of top ten most dangerous countries for women is beyond disingenuous; its outrageous. There are more than ten war zones in the world right now (Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, the Congo, Myanmar, Mali, Afghanistan, Somalia, Ukraine, Nigeria, Yemen, and Iraq). In these war zones, women are regularly and routinely raped, murdered, and enslaved.

Syria alone has claimed almost half a million lives. The Islamic State gained international infamy for routinely enslaving women and using them as sex slaves. Yemen, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Egypt, Somalia, and Iraq are also plagued by similarly brutal insurgencies. In Yemen, more than seven million starve to death as a civil war rages on. In Libya, militias run migrant camps and auction off women and children at slave markets they have created. The Congolese government is accused of using rape as a terror weapon on its own population. Government soldiers were ordered to rape mothers and daughters on top of the bodies of their husbands.

Beyond the brutal war zones and hotspots, violence and oppression are still horrifically imposed on the world’s women. In the Middle East and several other countries, women are restricted to second-class citizens. These countries sentence women to death for adultery and apostacy. Honor killings are widespread across the Gulf States and South Asia. In many Mideast and North African countries, a man can escape penalty for rape by marrying the victim. Dozens of nations from North Africa to the Philippines, which wasn’t mentioned, also hold that same loophole. In Egypt, a country the list fails to mention, the government is disappearing tens of thousands of men and women. Its police force is using rape to torture its kidnapped victims.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/nazi-comparisons-dumb-down-history/If everything is like the Nazis, then the Nazis of history are no different from an ICE officer, a White House staffer, or . . . you and me.

If you vote for Trump then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump,
are standing at the border like Nazis, going: “You here, you here.”
— Donny Deutsche, MSNBC commentator

Former CIA director Michael Hayden recently tweeted a picture of a Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with his commentary: “Other governments have separated mothers from children.” The suggestion was that industrialized death on an unprecedented scale was somehow similar to the temporary detention of children once their parents have been detained for violating federal law.

Actor Peter Fonda recently advised the following about Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller: “Don’t let the pedophile Stephen Goebbels Miller near those girls separated from their parents.” Comedian Kathy Griffin has asserted that the Trump administration is “quite pro-Nazi.”

Fonda perhaps lacks the subtlety of a Bill Kristol, who implies rather than sledgehammers the Nazi comparisons. When Michael Anton, a writer whose articles often appeared in The Weekly Standard, went to work for the Trump administration, Kristol reduced Anton to the status of an infamous Nazi lawyer: “Carl Schmitt to Mike Anton: First time tragedy, second time farce.”

Sounds slick, but Anton was working for an elected government in general and in particular for a National Security Council under Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster that was trying to reestablish U.S. deterrence. Stranger still, it is hard to understand how Carl Schmitt’s Nazi-party membership and advocacy (begun formally as early as 1933) were in any sense “tragic” rather than vile. And if the subordinate is supposedly Carl Schmitt, what then would Kristol call his boss, the iconic McMaster? Goebbels? Heydrich?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/solzhenitsyn_40_years_later.html
Herbert London is president of the London Center for Policy Research

In June 1978 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered the commencement address at Harvard titled “A World Split Apart.” It was a speech devoted to the emergence of “different worlds,” including our own Western society. On one side of the divide is a freedom diverted to unbridled passion with the accumulation of material riches to be valued above all else. Man is the center in this equation, as there isn’t any power above him, resulting in a moral poverty searching for meaning.

In days after this speech, the Fourth Estate accused Solzhenitsyn of “losing his balance,” of representing a “mind split apart.” He thought one could say what one thinks in the USA, but democracy expects to be admired. The press argued “the giant does not love us.”

Was Solzhenitsyn right? He did use positive signs in the heartland. “Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small town, and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing this speech.”

Now we have the luxury of examining the address forty years later. As I see it, Solzhenitsyn was “cautious” based on the way cultural conditions have unfolded over these four decades. The U.S. is preoccupied with material goals, a condition that has reached full efflorescence from the rationalist humanist tradition. The Higher Power to which Solzhenitsyn refers is in serial descent, having gone from more than 90 percent of the populace embracing God to about 70 percent, with the trend line in descent well established.