RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/seth-simons-comedy-cop-

Stand-up comedians used to have a simple rule: no subject is off-limits if the joke is funny. It was a good rule, and it made for some great comedy. The rise of the woke left represents an existential threat to that rule, and to good comedy generally. When it comes to comedy, indeed, the mantra, increasingly, is that any gag that might conceivably offend anyone, especially someone belonging to what the woke left considers a victim group, should simply not be tolerated – period. To an alarming extent, this comedy-killing mentality has been institutionalized at outfits like Netflix and Comedy Central, at some comedy clubs, and in the mainstream media generally. So it is that the comics who are most honored in such circles are dreary scolds like the Tasmanian lesbian Hannah Gadsby, whose acts are light on actual humor and heavy on identity politics. You don’t hear a lot of laughter from these people’s audiences, but you hear plenty of applause – the audience’s way of indicating approval of the comic’s values.

In this toxic atmosphere, comedians who still adhere to the no-subject-off-limits rule are rare, and the best ones – my own list would include Dave Attell, Nick DiPaolo, Jim Norton, and Doug Stanhope – seem increasingly precious. Thanks to them, at least some comedy shows are free-speech oases, keeping First Amendment values alive in the face of aggressive leftist humorlessness. But since the leftist instinct is always to censor opponents, not debate them, these top-drawer comics are an endangered species – booed by PC audiences, banned by timid club owners, and given short shrift by TV executives who are all too ready to sign up the unfunny likes of Amy Schumer, Samantha Bee, or Patton Oswalt, whose “comedy” consist salmost entirely of virtue signaling.

As if the situation weren’t bad enough, certain individuals have appointed themselves as comedy police.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/and-then-they-came-for-on-beyond

Last week I learned that the copy of Dr. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra that I and my daughters have so enjoyed for years is now officially a collector’s item. The Seuss estate has decided to no longer publish it and five other Seuss books because of their racist imagery.

I get that we might not want to be showing kids some of the images in the other books, where the only black people depicted are exotic, subservient “natives,” or the only East Asian is a Chinese person who “eats with sticks” in To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.

However, I was at first perplexed as to just what was now offensive in On Beyond Zebra and had to page through it carefully. I assume that the problem is with one, or perhaps two, pictures in it that could be interpreted as “Orientalist.”

Here – and frankly, perhaps in this response to pictures in the other books as well – I can’t help seeing something more about gesture and virtue signalling than about genuine concern for shaping young minds.

* * *

Like most of the now discontinued books, Zebra is not one of the better-known Seuss titles, but it has always been one of my favorites and has long been a staple at reading time in my home. It proposes an extra twenty “letters” of the alphabet, each shown as “spelling” the name of some classically Seussian weird animal or object. The book is a wordfest, and an utter delight to read. I have especially enjoyed watching my older daughter. gradually learn to read out the passages themselves:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/05/we-didnt-start-this-culture-war/

Kermit the Frog. Mr Potato Head. Dr Seuss. The culture war becomes more infantile by the day. Quite literally. The big talking points of the past few weeks have focused almost exclusively on children’s TV shows, toys and authors.

First Disney Plus slapped a warning label on The Muppets Show, due to the ‘negative depictions and / or mistreatment of people or cultures’ it apparently features, acknowledging the ‘harmful impacts’ these puppets have inflicted on generations of youngsters.

Then there was the de-gendering of Mr Potato Head. Hasbro announced that the beloved toy brand would drop the honorific, so as to make it more gender inclusive (while still keeping the Mr and Mrs Potato Head characters).

Then they came for Dr Seuss, as it were. Joe Biden conspicuously removed any mention of the beloved author from his proclamation on Read Across America Day this week, which was up until now also known as Dr Seuss Day. A Virginia school district also instructed its teachers to ‘not connect Read Across America Day with Dr Seuss’. Most strikingly, the Seuss estate said it would cease publishing six of the more ‘problematic’ titles.

This followed a years-long campaign on the part of some academics to repose Seuss as a racist, due to the old stereotypical depictions in some of his books (ignoring the fact that while his work reflects some of the prejudices of his time, he also satirised racism, fascism and nationalism).