RUTHFULLY YOURS

A veteran teacher at Luther Burbank High School, the biggest high school in Sacramento, Calif., is proposing that high-school teachers stop teaching Shakespeare because he’s just some old white guy who died a long time ago so what could he know about anything.

In a piece published in the Washington Post, Dana Dusbiber explains that we should “leave Shakespeare out of the English curriculum entirely” because she “[does] not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach [her] students about the human condition.”

“What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” she writes.

Just because she’s an uninspiring figure doesn’t mean she can’t win.

That calculation clearly underlay Hillary Clinton’s Roosevelt Island speech over the weekend. She hardly tried to inspire: Both the writing and the delivery were pedestrian, at best. What she did instead was outline liberal policies and celebrate the liberal coalition. The theory seems to be that those policies are sufficiently popular, and that coalition sufficiently large, that together they can bring her victory no matter how meager her political talent or how suspect her character.

The policies she listed are, in the main, destructive ones. There is little evidence that the federal government can improve children’s futures through universal preschool. A big increase in the minimum wage is likely to suppress job growth. Discrimination by employers is not the major cause of the pay gap between men and women, and thus policing that discrimination more will not do much to shrink the gap. Mandatory paid leave may worsen employment prospects for women. Further weakening immigration enforcement will inflame social tensions while cutting the wages of the working poor. Judging from the premium hikes insurers are requesting, maintaining Obamacare probably means watching its already unsatisfactory outcomes get worse.

Her campaign relaunch repudiates everything Bill Clinton did as president.

If anyone thought Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was going to mean a replay of the 1990s, we were wrong. Instead, the campaign she relaunched on Saturday is much more of a return to the 1930s. The woman who, as First Lady, reputedly communed with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt now seeks to transform herself into the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt.

Of course, at a time when Rachel Dolezal can “identify” as black, Hillary Clinton is perfectly free to see herself as the new FDR. But in doing so, she not only delivers an economic platform designed to please people who think President Obama is too right wing, she also repudiates just about everything that Bill Clinton did as president.

“If you don’t like the Pope’s message, feel free to ignore it.” Why stir up anti-Catholic sentiment? rsk

There’s a lot of fuss being made in some conservative quarters about Pope Francis’s forthcoming encyclical about “man-made climate change.” Let’s stipulate at the outset that “climate change” is a lot of hooey that conceptually survives not the slightest bit of rational scrutiny and that the “global warming” industry is mostly a scam to enrich a few Leftists and bring down the West economically while helping Madre Gaia not one whit. So what?

Pope Francis will call for an ethical and economic revolution to prevent catastrophic climate change and growing inequality in a letter to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics on Thursday. In an unprecedented encyclical on the subject of the environment, the pontiff is expected to argue that humanity’s exploitation of the planet’s resources has crossed the Earth’s natural boundaries, and that the world faces ruin without a revolution in hearts and minds. The much-anticipated message, which will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops, will be published online in five languages on Thursday and is expected to be the most radical statement yet from the outspoken pontiff. However, it is certain to anger sections of Republican opinion in America by endorsing the warnings of climate scientists and admonishing rich elites, say cardinals and scientists who have advised the Vatican.

Here’s my advice: ignore it. Yes, it plays into the nutty fears in some precincts that the pope is a crypto-Latin-American Marxist liberation theologist (he’s actually just another Italian, who happens to have been born in Argentina, a demographically European country) who hates capitalism and is suspiciously nice to Muslims. News flash: the pope is Catholic. Which is to say he is concerned with the spirit, not the flesh; with the betterment of all mankind, not just Catholics; that he takes Church teaching seriously and that — surprise! — the first Jesuit pope follows consciously in the footsteps of his namesake and fellow Italian, St. Francis of Assisi. The quintessential rich kid who gave it all away and lived a life of extreme simplicity among God’s creatures is, in fact, the patron saint of the environment:

If you can’t choose your race, you can’t choose your gender either.

We new media professionals surf a choppy sea of social whim. Whatever people talk about, we write about. It’s supply and demand. That said, there are certain stories which I resist chiming in on no matter how big they get, stories which I find either distasteful or ludicrous.

The story of Rachel Dolezal stands as an example. The drama surrounding her masquerade as a black woman strikes me as tabloid garbage, warranting a sidebar mention at best, and then only for laughs.

Unfortunately, my attempt to avoid the story has run up against this piece at Reason, in which editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie attempts to draw a distinction between Dolezal’s transracialism (yes, spell check, that’s a word now) and Caitlyn Jenner’s transsexualism. He writes:

I offer another chronicle, a 14-hour tour of the skeleton I once knew as California.

8:00 AM

I finally got around to retrieving the car seat that someone threw out in front of the vineyard near my mailbox. (Don’t try waiting dumpers out — as if it is not your responsibility to clean up California roadsides.)

An acquaintance had also emailed and reminded me that not far away there was a mound of used drip hose on the roadside. That mess proved to be quite large, maybe 1,000 feet of corroded and ripped up plastic hose. I suppose no scavenger thinks it can be recycled. I promise to haul it away this week. One must be prompt: even a small pile attracts dumpers like honey to bees. They are an ingenious and industrious lot (sort of like the cunning and work ethic of those who planted IEDs during the Iraq War). My cousin’s pile across the road has grown to Mt. Rushmore proportions. Do freelance dumpers make good money promising to take away their neighborhood’s mattresses and trash without paying the $20 or so county dumping fee? And does their success depend on fools like me, who are expected to keep roadsides tidy by cleaning up past trash to make room for future refuse?

We all know the famous Republican Jeb! (as his campaign seems eager to avoid use of his last name and believes an exclamation point will get people excited about him, I’ll indulge that wish) who is now an immediate heavyweight in the Republican primary after his long-expected announcement for president.

But don’t let the R that often makes its way in front of his name fool you. Jeb! loves lots of things that Democrats and big government progressives love.

Jeb! loves Common Core, for example. To be fair, a number of Republican heavies once advocated Common Core in its inception, only to later reject it when a groundswell of opposition arose — including Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, and Mike Huckabee. The latter have all reversed course on Common Core due to largely (but not solely) conservative backlash. Jeb! on the other hand, stands alone among the Republican field in his estimation that Common Core is about upholding sensibly applied state standards, and his aides suggest that since “[s]tates had to opt in, and they can opt out.”

Barack Obama owes his position to his membership in a class that is destroying America: the intellectualoids — shallow people able to fool others into believing they possess superior intellects.

In his 2007 book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Barack Obama and Why He Can’t Win, Shelby Steele did an excellent job of explaining how and why such a small man might have been on his way to making such big history. Although Mr. Steele’s final assessment of what the outcome was going to be was incorrect, he nevertheless coined two important cultural terms — Challengers and Bargainers — that were polite enough to be used in a benign sort of way when categorizing the two main types of officiating blacks that have defiled our civic square. According to the Challenger-Bargainer theory, Barack Obama was one of the most attractive, articulate, and “bookish” Bargainers that America had come across since the Civil Rights movement, ergo his successful candidacy.

Knowing when to answer a door, when to ring a bell, whether or not to take an elevator was essential during an oppressive occupation.

A French friend, who was a very young girl during the German occupation of Paris, once told me that those dark years were like a “secret garden.” She knew it existed, but she never knew how to enter it or what exactly it contained. What had happened? How did the Parisians thwart the harshness of the German occupation? Should they have done more to oppose it? And, inevitably, what would she herself have done as an adult under the same circumstances? No one, not even her parents, would easily speak about this period to her. Was it sadness, shame or just therapeutic forgetting?

Charles Kaiser’s “The Cost of Courage” combines a thorough and quite accessible history of Europe’s six-year murderous paroxysm with a deftly told story from this secret garden. The Boulloches—father Jacques, his wife Hélène and their four children—were a comfortable bourgeois, Catholic Parisian family: “They blend[ed] a soft anticlericalism with a sharp republican spirit.” As with many such families under the occupation, this one was divided about how to react to its indignities.

Jacques, the director of France’s highway system, had fought heroically in World War I and readily helped Jewish friends go into hiding in 1940. But he thought it essential to serve France and not to “weaken the nation, to which he and his ancestors ha[d] devoted decades of service.” He and Robert, the eldest son, continued to work—as technocrats, not ideologues—for the Vichy regime. Robert, who had served in the French army during the short war of May-June 1940, returned to his job in the finance ministry but was soon recruited by a Resistance group. He declined because of his age (27) and his feelings of responsibility to his defeated nation. Instead, he suggested to the recruiters that his younger brother, André, would be ideal for such work. Soon the three younger Boulloches—André (25), Jacqueline (22) and Christiane (17)—began diligently and dangerously serving an at first chaotic, then increasingly sophisticated Resistance.

The administration is forcing low-income housing into wealthy enclaves, whether or not anyone wants it.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are popular with black voters, but that doesn’t mean the couple wants to live around them. And vice versa. This reality troubles President Obama, though his remedy is what’s really troubling.

When the Clintons went house-hunting in 1999, neighborhood diversity wasn’t much of a priority. The family settled on a five-bedroom Colonial in Chappaqua, N.Y., a lush suburb north of New York City where the population is more than 90% white, less than 1% black and multimillion-dollar homes abound. No one has produced evidence of racial discrimination against buyers who can afford homes in Chappaqua and other wealthy enclaves of Westchester County, where the town is located. But monochrome residential housing patterns upset the sensibilities of officials in Mr. Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development.