RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-man-they-couldnt-cancel-11619806528?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The term “cancel culture,” like “political correctness” before it, is a comical expression for an ugly cultural pathology. To be canceled—an older, closely related term is “blacklisted”—is to have your public persona or influence assailed, typically by a sizable mob, for some real or perceived offense against progressive orthodoxy, whatever that orthodoxy may hold at the moment. For that to happen, you must possess some form of authority in the first place: an academic post, a political office, a role in the entertainment industry, employment with a “mainstream” media organization, a voice as an intellectual or imaginative writer.

But the targets of cancellation, having derived their legitimacy from consensus left-liberal culture, are typically not very good at defending themselves, or even understanding what happened to them. Often they apologize, despite having said or done nothing wrong, which only emboldens the cancelers. Or they fall back on pieties about free speech and the marketplace of ideas, as if their tormentors still believed in those principles.

One target of cancellation who is able to speak intelligently about it is Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto clinical psychologist, YouTube lecturer, and author of “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” (2018) and “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life,” published in March.

If you’re an ordinary curious person, Mr. Peterson won’t strike you as a likely target for moral outrage. He brings together a dizzying array of texts and traditions—Jungian psychoanalysis, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Frederick Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and much else—to formulate basic lessons, or “rules,” about how humans might overcome their natural tendency to lassitude and savagery. His books, podcasts and lectures are impressively argued, frequently insightful and occasionally abrasive presentations of various principles of wise living.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/07/wealthy-and-woke/

Ed Bastian makes $17 million a year as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer. 

Bastian just blasted Georgia’s new voting law. He thinks it is racist to require the same sort of ID to vote that Delta requires for its passengers to check-in.  

Yet most Americans believe voting is a more sacred act than flying Delta and, moreover, may have noticed that Delta has all sorts of partnerships with a systemically racist China. So polls show Americans approve of voter IDs.  

Bastian fears the woke mob more than the majority of Georgia residents who support the law. Apparently, his theory is that the greater numbers of average folks won’t threaten his multimillion-dollar perch as much as fewer but more powerful left-wing elites. 

The most privileged CEOs of corporate America—those who sell us everything from soft drinks and sneakers, to professional sports and social media—now jabber to America about its racism, sexism, and assorted sins. 

The rules of cynical CEO censure are transparent. 

First, the corporation never harangues unless it feels it has more to lose—whether by boycotts, protests, or bad publicity—than it stands to gain in staying neutral and silent. 

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

At the 78th Golden Globe Awards ceremony in 2020, host Ricky Gervais savagely roasted Hollywood’s woke hypocrisy.  The British actor-comedian said this was the last time he would be hosting the show, so he would fire away with some nothing-to-lose sarcasm.  He joked about Felicity Huffman — who got a 14-day jail term plus a fine and community service for bribing an SAT proctor to boost her daughter’s scores — designing the license plate of the limo that ferried him to the gala; about sex offenders Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein; and about Hollywood’s protracted, politicized acceptance speeches.  The reactions of many in the audience — including actor Tom Hanks’s priceless display of restrained apoplexy and discomfiture — were later meme-ified across the internet.

But what was really important was that Gervais drove home points about Hollywood’s sham wokeness, a sickening obsession that threatens to deep-six entertainment.  Apple, Amazon, Disney — he spared none: “Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China.  Well, you say you’re woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable.  Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?”  And he punctured many an inflated ego, saying, “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use your platform to make a political speech.  You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything.  You know nothing about the real world.”

Indeed.  Ruled by the messages of leftists and social justice warriors, whose beliefs have long informed the culture of political correctness, Hollywood — like the community of political insiders designated “the swamp” — is out of touch with the American public and with reality.

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.