RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/politicization-of-mass-culture

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin once labeled writers and other creative people “engineers of the soul.” In his passion to control what people saw and read, Stalin both coddled artists and enforced unanimity through the instruments of a police state. Today, fortunately, we don’t face such overt forms of cultural control, but the trends in American and to some extent European mass culture are beginning to look almost Stalinesque in their uniformity. This becomes painfully obvious during awards season, when the tastes and political exigencies of the entertainment industry frequently overpower any sense of popular preferences, or even artistic merit.

Our cultural climate has become depressingly monochromatic. Award ceremonies, once a largely nonpolitical experience, have become reflecting pools for preening progressive artistes. Those emceeing the awards must be as politically pure as possible—sorry, Kevin Hart—and those winning acclaim get the best press if, besides thanking their producers and agents, they take a shot at Donald Trump.

This dynamic is not exactly the byproduct of popular demand. In recent years, ratings for the Oscars have fallen to the lowest levels since the awards were televised, down from over 40 million to fewer than 30 million. The ratings decline tracks the fall in movie attendance, which has sunk to a 25-year low. We’re a long way from a time when awards nights were dominated by popular mainstream winners such as West Side Story, The Sound of Music, or even the original Lord of the Rings. The movie industry makes money now by producing sequels of movies based on comic books, with relentless action and violence but little character development.

As movies and television shows in both the United States and Britain today increasingly adopt the feminist, gay, and racial obsessions of their makers, they have written off a large portion of the less politically “woke” audience. Many of these shows, such as Britain’s venerable Doctor Who, have hemorrhaged viewers since taking on a more preachy, PC aspect. “It’s supposed to be entertainment,” one disgruntled viewer complained. Late-night television, now dominated by stridently anti-Trump comedians, also has seen ratings drop in recent years; no show has close to the number of viewers, let alone the iconic status, enjoyed by the late—and largely apolitical—Johnny Carson.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/transgender-birth-certificate-law-gender-identity-legal-concept-weak/

We’re only just beginning to understand the wider implications of a new law allowing New Yorkers to declare their chosen gender on their birth certificates.

Imagine that a man walks into a courtroom and swears to tell “my truth, the whole of my truth, and nothing but my truth, so help you all.” Imagine your incredulity as, for whatever reason, he gives an outlandishly false testimony. Imagine your dismay as the judge explains that all subsequent evidence and, especially, all cross examination, must support the man’s “truth,” and as he instructs the members of the jury that they, too, must affirm it.

“You be you. Live your truth. And know that New York City will have your back,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told a cheering crowd last year. He was referring to the introduction of a bill — since passed and signed into law — that allows New York City residents to change the sex on their birth certificate to M, F, or, if they like, the gender-neutral X, in order to conform their legal status to their “gender identity.”

Unlike sex, which is an objective and observable fact, “gender identity” — one’s sense of being male, female, or something else — is entirely subjective. It is a feeling. To say so is not to be dismissive or hurtful toward individuals who experience a disconnect between their birth sex and their sense of gender identity (i.e., “gender dysphoria”). It is merely to insist that the purpose of public records, such as birth certificates, is not to affirm or reflect our feelings — however strong or distressing they may be — but to document the truth, rather than your truth or my truth, for practical, legal purposes.

Moreover, that complicated, elusive, and multifaceted feelings now form the overarching theory of “gender identity” is not, as is commonly suggested in the New York Times, the result of some recent scientific advancement. The emphasis on subjectivity is a result of the shifting cultural and political paradigms of the 20th century that have influenced the field of psychology.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/10/nycs-new-nonbinary-birth-certificates-self-contradictory-harmful-mistake/

As of January 1, residents of New York City can change their birth certificates to legally indicate they believe they are not the male or female they were born. They can also legally declare they are neither male nor female, with a simple X.

For this change, one doesn’t need a note from a physician, psychiatrist, or any official, nor to have undergone any type of clothing, body, or hormonal change. To require any of these means the individual would have to submit to someone else’s expectation of what a male or female is, a serious gender theory no-no.

The entirely subjective declaration of the claimant is all a city clerk needs to amend this most fundamental of all legal documents. You simply say it’s so, and it is. The Associated Press, HuffPo, and other outlets reported that parents can indicate their newborn is neither male nor female, but this is not so. Michael Lanza, a spokesman for the NYC Department of Health, told the The Federalist the law only applies to adults. Youth of any age can claim male, female, or the “nonbinary” X with a parent or guardian’s attestation.

Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the new law, saying New Yorkers should tell their government who they are and “not the other way around.” It’s a cuddly sentiment, to be sure, but untrue. Suppose I told de Blasio and his department of health that I’m a teenage Laotian able-bodied paraplegic and member of his City Council. He would happily tell me what’s what and “not the other way around.” Even if I have a note from my parents.

But this is not the reason this law, and similar ones in other states, is madness. I don’t use that word rhetorically, combatively, morally or judgmentally. It’s wholly descriptive. So that there’s no misunderstanding, let me clarify what I mean in using the word madness: being in state of illusion, dementia, and instability, not only disconnected from, but being contrary to reality, all while pretending to be completely healthy.

Even though I’m a shameless religious conservative, let me step out on a limb and appeal to cold, calculated, orderly reason. Laws allowing citizens to change their birth certificates to either or no sex are completely contrary to reality, and here are some reasons why.

https://quillette.com/2018/12/30/the-avant-gardes-

Many adherents to the aesthetics of the avant-garde in tenured positions at American art schools and universities are still enthusiastic supporters of the ideas and strategies that won them the culture wars of the late twentieth century. They steadfastly cleave to the doctrinal ideas that brought them into their positions of power and authority and have entrenched themselves in defense of an exclusively Euro-centric cult of avant-garde art. But as Western culture has changed around them, they have been outflanked by sentiment and technology.

The foundations of the avant-garde were built upon the opposition of true and fake art. The avant-garde provided true, ethical art, while its opposite pole was fake, sentimental kitsch. The Frankfurt School writer Norbert Elias was first to identify sentiment as the enemy, followed by Herman Broch, who provided doctrinal writings describing kitsch as evil, and tying true art to the exposure of social reality. The young Marxist Clement Greenberg came to the game late, famously bringing their ideas to an American audience with avant-garde doctrines that despised kitsch and favored an elitist intellectualism. Regardless of the importance of emotion in human relationships, a fundamentalist rejection of sentiment in art coupled with an embrace of ethical confrontation became doctrinal to the avant-garde throughout the twentieth century.

Representational artists—painters and sculptors who make images of people who look like people and things that look like things—were their favorite targets, partly because this was the dominant art of the West’s Soviet enemies. The Soviets used representational Socialist Realism to propagandize their ideology, and made use of sentiment as a manipulative tool. American Communism had fallen into disarray after the Stalin / Hitler pact in 1939, and after the war revelations about Stalin’s gulags turned many communists anti-Soviet. The US government courted their allegiance, enthusiastic to present America as the open-armed home of free thought – even if that thought was opposed to the government – in contrast to the straight-jacket of totalitarian doctrine. This created the paradox of American Marxist avant-gardists being set against Soviet Socialist Realism. Offering avant-gardism as a liberating alternative to the constrictions of Communism was essential to America’s strategy for winning the cultural Cold War. If the enemy restricted and controlled art in the East, in the West artists were encouraged to provide political commentary and to transgress. The avant-garde was fresh, seductive, and appealing. If sentiment and representation were the tools of our lying enemies, we must offer the opposite—concept and abstraction.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/deconstructing-and-de-composing-the-politically-correct-songbook/

In a world where Baby, It’s Cold Outside is banned from the PC airwaves, the decidely un-woke Cole Porter’s lyrics need and get a radical update:
You’re the top,
You’re tidal power
You’re the top,
A trans-sex bridal shower …

The recent furore surrounding the lyrics of Baby, It’s Cold Outside caused me to revisit some classics from the Great American Songbook and I realised just how offensive and traumatising they might be to sensitive and coddled millennials … and that was before I even got to the lyrics.

Concern over Irving Berlin’s White Christmas needs no explaining. So too, George and Ira Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me and the Rodgers and Hammerstein favourite You’ll Never Walk Alone have ‘stalker!’ written all over them. Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You surely evokes domestic violence while Rodgers and Hart contributed disturbing titles like The Lady Is a Tramp (slut shaming) and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (gun violence). Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Ol’ Man River smacks of cultural appropriation , while Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg were clearly insulting the intelligence-challenged with If I Only Had a Brain. Perhaps most distressing of all is the gender-enforcing I Enjoy Being a Girl – Rodgers and Hammerstein again!

But, as in the case of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, it’s the lyrics that will have some listeners retreating to their nearest safe space. Who knew that what has long been revered as the canon of influential popular American songs of the first half of the 20th century is nothing more than sexist, racist, patriarchal propaganda? Consider these shocking sexist examples:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-national-gallery-of-identity-politics-11545179349

‘Every thing is what it is and not another thing,” observed the 18th-century British philosopher Joseph Butler. If that seems obvious, you haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in the culture. Once upon a time (and it wasn’t that long ago), universities were what they claimed to be, institutions dedicated to the preservation and transmission of civilization’s highest values. Now they are bastions of political correctness, “intersectionality” and identity politics.

Something similar can be said of art museums. Although barely 200 years old as an institution, the art museum until recently existed primarily to preserve and nurture a love of art. Today, many art museums serve as fronts in battles that have little or nothing to do with art: entertainment, yes; snobbery and money, of course; and politics, politics, politics.

The latest example of this trend is particularly egregious because it involves one of America’s premier institutions, the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Established and endowed by Andrew Mellon in 1937, the National Gallery quickly became one of the nation’s two or three most exquisite art museums. In terms of the breadth, depth and excellence of its collection, its only real rival is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And because of its place in the nation’s capital (and its claim on the taxpayer’s purse—about $140 million of its $190 million budget comes from the U.S. Treasury), the National Gallery occupies a singular place in the metabolism of America’s cultural life.

Obituarists looking to write the epitaph of the American art museum could do worse than ponder the elevation of Kaywin Feldman, currently director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, to take the helm of the National Gallery in March when Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director since 1993, retires.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-jihad-against-baby-its-cold-outside-11545090565

The #MeToo movement has caught up with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The 1940s fugue between a woman, who has dropped by a man’s home but says she wants to leave, and the man, who persuades her to stay, has become a Christmas-season staple. But “to some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape,” as one recent news story puts it. Some radio stations have yielded to the demand that they banish it from the airwaves.

That demand rings a bell. In the 1940s, an Egyptian writer and Education Ministry employee harshly criticized the government under King Farouk as insufficiently Islamic. That writer, Sayyid Qutb, was rewarded with a traveling fellowship, apparently to get him out of the country.

Qutb arrived at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in 1948. He didn’t much like it. “I stayed there six months and never did I see a person or a family actually enjoying themselves,” he wrote. Even gardening drew his contempt: “There is nothing behind this activity in the way of beauty or artistic taste. It is the machinery of organization and arrangement, devoid of spirituality and aesthetic enjoyment.”

https://www.steynonline.com/9074/baby-it-cold-in-the-far-east-without-a-sheep

Things you can no longer say:

I was in the big city earlier this week, and so saw for the first time in ages a physical copy of The New York Times. It contained an interview with James Dyson, the brilliant re-inventor of vacuum cleaners and much else. The Times felt obliged to preface Sir James’ words with a health warning for the easily triggered:

In this interview, Mr. Dyson expressed antiquated and at times offensive views on “racial differences” and Japanese culture. He also referred to growth markets in Asia as the “Far East.”

He used the term “Far East”!!! What the hell was he thinking?????? Good thing he has no plans to run for public office or host a cable show. The old British Foreign Office joke about the “Near East” (which is more generally referred to as the Middle East) is that they call it the Near East because it’s always nearer than you think. But start referring to the Far East and the instant vaporization of your entire career is a lot nearer than you think.

“Far East” is, I suppose, literally Eurocentric. But then so is “Midwest”. Perhaps the Times now finds any point of view or perspective “offensive”. Perhaps it is time to ban such “antiquated” concepts as north, south, east and west – and indeed the very compass. The abolition of instruments of navigation would seem a necessary condition for the future we’re sailing to.

~In American schools, they take the “separation of church and state” so seriously they ban candy canes, reindeer and red-and-green color combinations. By contrast, in Scotland the state schools still perform nativity plays before Christmas, and little Alfie Cox found himself cast as a shepherd. So his mum ordered the excited five-year-old a costume from Amazon, and was delighted upon its arrival to find that Jeff Bezos had been generous enough to throw in a free blow-up sheep:

But the mom of two was puzzled when a teacher told Alfie to take the sheep home — until she blew it up and found it had a huge hole in its bottom as well as red lips and eyelashes.

Cox, 46, found the exact same sheep was on sale as a “stag night bonkin’ sheep” and is now devising a way to steal it away from unaware Alfie.

Is Jeff Bezos sending free blow-up sheep to all Amazon’s customers this Christmas? Or only five-year-old Scottish boys?

On the other hand, perhaps Jennifer Sinclair, the principal at Elkhorn Elementary School in Nebraska so worried about “cultural sensitivity” that she bans reindeer, might find it more inclusive simply to mandate the reindeer has to have red lips and “a huge hole in its bottom”.