RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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?