RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/whiteness-meaningless-catch-all-progressive-epithet/

‘Whiteness’ is not a helpful shorthand.

Some years ago, a friend of mine who was employed by a state indoctrination center (all right, a public school) was made to participate in a faculty-development exercise whose ideological preoccupations are by now familiar. Facing each other in a circle, the assembled teachers were directed to take a step backward whenever they could claim one of the “advantages” read from an administrator’s list. Born in the United States? Take a step. Raised in a two-parent home? Step again. Fortunate enough to attend college? Step once more. Perhaps because my friend was forced to back nearly out of the building, he intuited quickly enough the activity’s message. His middle-class life was no longer to be understood as a product of his (and his parents’) diligence and sacrifice but as something undeserved, ugly, even oppressive.

My friend, reasonably enough, was horrified. But now I wonder if the era when that exercise took place should be regarded as the good old days.

One of the retrospective charms of the millennium’s first decade is the fact that the various privileges identified by my friend’s principal hadn’t yet cohered (at least outside academic circles) into the rhetorical catch-all of “whiteness.” Conversations about inequality could still be had — indeed, sometimes they were even useful — but the Left remained sweetly unaware of its ability to evoke a whole host of disparities with a mere sneering reference (“white people”) to 60 percent of the population. A single cultural turning point is impossible to mark, but one could do worse than to point to the progressive beatification of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose contributions to public discourse are perhaps best summed up by his absurd remark to Evanston Township High School students that “when you’re white in this country, you’re taught that everything belongs to you.”

That such a claim is unfalsifiable using any tools currently in vogue — any tools, that is, except reason and observation — is only part of its appeal. The remainder derives from its usefulness as intellectual shorthand: It allows the speaker to substitute a threatening abstraction (“Boo! Whiteness!”) for an actual discussion of the hugely complicated inequalities that obtain in American society.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/leonard-bernstein-theres-place/

The first US conductor/composer to conquer Europe and the man who made ‘West Side Story’ the remarkable and enduring achievement it is, his passing prompted friend and fellow composer Ned Rorem to observe how ‘Lenny led four lives in one, so he was not 72, but 288’.

A century ago today, the most famous, the most influential, the most versatile, the most restless, the most extraordinary American musician of the twentieth century was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Louis Bernstein was soon to astound his Ukrainian Jewish parents, Jenny Resnick, and Samuel Bernstein, a Talmudic scholar and supplier of barber and beauty products. In 1927, Samuel acquired the only local licence to sell the Frederics Permanent Wave machine for curling hair. Of course, he hoped his eldest son would follow him into the family firm.

When Louis was ten, his Aunt Clara, enmeshed in divorce proceedings, sent her upright piano to his parents’ house for storage. He apparently took one look at the instrument, hit the keys and then proclaimed, “Ma, I want lessons.” By his early teens, the prodigy had mastered it. He staged operettas with friends; he performed as a jazz pianist; he played light classics on the radio. This medium, and especially its successor, television, brought to America and the world Leonard (Lenny), as he officially became at 16, after his grandmother’s death.

He received a B.A. in music from Harvard in 1939, then studied conducting with Fritz Reiner at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute. Reiner apparently gave Bernstein the only A he ever awarded. In the summers of 1940 and 1941, he was a student of Serge Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Koussevitzky became a close friend when Bernstein joined in 1942 as his assistant. He would succeed him as head of conducting at Tanglewood in 1951 and returned there to conduct his last concert in 1990.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/move-over-vagina-make-room-for-trans-inclusive-front-hole/

In the “not enough mind bleach in the world to blot out what I just read” category of the week, Healthline has decided that the word “vagina” is too triggering for trans people and so they will now use the term “front hole” in their sex education materials. No, really. Please keep in mind that these are the same people who for years have told us that toddlers need anatomically correct vocabularies in order to be properly aware of body parts, lest they become victims of sexual abuse.

But now, we are going to stop calling a vagina a vagina and call it a “front hole.” One wonders how the “Front Hole Monologue” ticket sales will go. Costume manufacturers everywhere are updating their protest gear to “Front Hole Costumes” and “Front Hole Hats,” and woke bakers everywhere are working on new “Front Hole Cupcakes” to sell at the next #Resist extravaganza.

In case you were wondering, Healthline went into great, confusing detail about why such a LGBTQWTF-sensitive sex education guide is needed. The enlightened staff at Healthline say that the scientifically accurate old sex ed guides “unnecessarily gender body parts as being ‘male parts’ and ‘female parts’ and refer to ‘sex with women’ or ‘sex with men,’ excluding those who identify as nonbinary.” Don’t ask me what “nonbinary” is. I still can’t tell you even after studying these people for the last several years. But they’re not finished yet!

And as a result, the notion that a penis is exclusively a male body part and a vulva is exclusively a female body part is inaccurate. By using the word “parts” to talk about genitals and using medical terms for anatomy without attaching a gender to it, we become much more able to effectively discuss safe sex in a way that’s clear and inclusive.

Clear? CLEAR? BAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!

https://www.city-journal.org/html/gender-construct-16117.html

A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. Among the relevant findings:

Two-thirds of all Alzheimer’s patients are female;

Seventy-five percent of people with autoimmune disorders are female;

Females are less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease;

Adult females have twice the rate of depression as adult males;

Females have outbreaks of genital herpes at higher rates than males;

Male and female brains respond differently to early childhood neglect, with males losing gray matter in areas governing impulse control and females losing gray matter in areas governing emotion;

Women are more likely to abuse alcohol after trauma;

Males and females smoke for different reasons and have correspondingly different success rates with the nicotine patch;

The X and Y sex chromosomes, whose pairing determines a person’s sex, influence how the other 23 chromosomes in each cell read the genetic instructions contained in DNA.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/pearl-jam-briefly-relevant-again-with-concert-poster-depicting-trumps-dead-body/

Remember Pearl Jam? They were a popular rock band back in the 1990s, and apparently they’re still kicking around. They’re currently on tour (which is terrific, good for them). And this week, after many years out of the spotlight, the geriatric grungesters have managed to make news again. But alas, it has nothing to do with their music.

Ted Johnson, Variety:

Republicans seeking to unseat Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana) in one of this year’s most contentious Senate races are trying to tie his campaign to a Pearl Jam poster. It features an image [of] President Trump’s dead body, and was used in the promotion of an Aug. 13 concert that helped raise money for Tester’s campaign…

Tester’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment from Variety, but a spokesman told The Washington Post that they did not have input on the poster’s design.

“We never saw the poster before the show, and we don’t like it,” spokesman Chris Meagher said. “And we don’t condone violence of any kind. Period.”

Here’s the poster:

And here’s the part that’s got people up in arms:

Looks like that’s supposed to be Trump’s skeleton. See the red tie and thatch of combed-over hair? That is #edgyAF.

Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament has put out a defiant statement about it:

“The role of the artist is to make people think and feel, and the current administration has us thinking and feeling,” Ament said in the statement. “I was the sole conceptualist of this poster, and I welcome all interpretations and discourse.”

Now, I’m a free speech kinda guy, so I don’t have a problem with this. If you don’t like a politician and you want to depict bad things happening to him, or you want to otherwise criticize him, go right ahead. Make a faux documentary about George W. Bush being assassinated. Write a novel about people plotting to kill him. Make a comic book about a superhero murdering him. When you get tired of going after Dubya, do a photo collage of a chimpanzee crapping on John McCain’s head, or hang Sarah Palin in effigy, or hold up a bloody mannequin head that looks like Trump, or otherwise lash out at whichever Republican is making you angry today. You have the right to do that because this is the United States of America.

But I also can’t help but recall some of the other times people criticized the president, and it was reported as if it were the end of the world. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/05/go-visit-the-frontiers-you

Tom Wolfe the novelist arrived as modern fiction was going bankrupt. Modernism, the revolution in the arts that took place in the early decades of the 20th century, had delivered all it had to deliver, and was in fact sometimes leaving empty boxes on the curb. The age of iconoclastic landmarks like Ulysses, Metamorphosis, The Magic Mountain, To the Lighthouse, was long past and some of them, such as Ulysses, were looking a little shopworn. The promise of a revolutionary breakthrough in consciousness, of aesthetic transformation and transcendence of life, man, society, was long past, and far from being fulfilled. The image of the writer and artist as sacred figure, the prophet or shaman who led to the depths of experience beyond the ordinary, was growing faint.

Postmodernism had set in, beginning sometime after the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, bringing in a host of experimental forms–absurdism, fabulism, minimalism, magical realism, metafiction–as Wolfe would detail in his literary manifesto, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” two years after he had made his fictional debut with the rollicking Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), about race, class, and sex-riven New York City in the 1980s. With such as Gaddis, Pynchon, Doctorow, DeLillo, Beattie, Coover, Carver, Hawkes, Barth, reading had become something of a chore–dry, sullen minimalist works with very little payoff, or maybe big books trying very hard but giving no particular reason to plow through them. (I can read it, a friend said to me of one 800-page number, but why? Truth to tell, though, some of these books did become cult classics, especially with younger men.)

Poetry too, had long gone from the expansive, soul-shattering visions of the likes of T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and William Butler Yeats, who took on important themes and managed to make their own peculiar angle of vision large enough for others to enter. Later poets turned increasingly inward to explorations of the self and subjective experience. We went from hearing vigor in language and haunting lines to increasingly hermetic utterances that escaped any kind of recall. (A reading by John Ashbery that I attended almost finished poetry for me.)

In the other arts too, we were long past the exciting forays of the early modern period—Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Brancusi. Art lovers were left trying to squeeze rapture out of such specimens as Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” Richard Serra’s gigantic, rusty “Tilted Arc,” and Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” consisting of large dinner plates delicately painted to represent the private parts of famous women, reverently displayed around a large dining room table. As for music, the Stravinskys and Coplands were no more, and one was always wary of having some frightful contemporary piece sprung on one, usually before the intermission at a concert, with the possibility of escape foreclosed.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/sjws-insist-disabled-is-an-identity-call-those-who-disagree-ableist/

When physicist Stephen Hawking died of ALS earlier this year, the BBC published a timeline of his life. Even in the face of his “debilitating illness,” the timeline explained, he was “one of science’s great popularisers.” The article lauded his ability to train his mind “to work in a new way,” which allowed him to escape “the limits of his disability.” These ought not to be controversial statements. But to “ableism” activists, these comments (and comments like them) are a terrible affront to the “disabled community.”

“Other media inaccurately described Hawking as being ‘confined to a wheelchair,’ even though wheelchairs allow many disabled users to be mobile, independent and active members of their communities,” writes Wendy Lu at Everyday Feminism “That same week, actress Gal Gadot was blasted for tweeting that Hawking was now ‘free from physical constraints.'”

Disability, it turns out, is not something to be lived with, overcome, or worked around, it’s an identity, and it must be celebrated.

The definition of “ableism” actually has nothing to do with the celebration of disability. It is simply the term for “discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities” — which I think we can all agree is something we should strive to avoid. (I mean, I’m not sure we need a whole “ism” for it. It probably falls under the category of, say, being respectful, kind, and polite to others. But we all know the SJWs love a good “ism.”) So if, for example, Sam has a stutter and orders a cup of coffee at Starbucks, he should have a reasonable expectation of not receiving a cup with “SSSAM” written on it (something that actually happened earlier this month).

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.