Category Archives: Politics

Lines in the sand

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Britain and France drew lines. A century ago, there were no nations in the Ottoman Empire’s former Middle Eastern territories: not only no Israel, but no Syria, no Lebanon, no Iraq, no Jordan. All were conjured up after the Ottoman collapse by the British and French, who essentially sketched lines randomly in the sand. If you were a Kurd, say, tough luck; your people get separated into various entities with no say in their own fates. Other ethnic and religious groups were similarly bound together, however uncomfortably, at the whim of the colonial powers.

So the British and French drew lines. Cross one line today, and you get a European-level standard of living, broad ethnic diversity, property rights, gay pride parades, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, a free press, democratic elections, Nobel prizes, a fair and functioning judiciary, a thriving private sector. On the other side of the line, you get, well, the opposite. That doesn’t mean just the Palestinian territories – it includes 100% of the former Ottoman lands.

You’d think the governments of those nations would want to emulate Israel. Instead they’d rather destroy it. And just what kind of world would they leave behind? Continue reading →

A Look Back: Germany and migrants

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A piece that I posted some years back has gained new relevance with the horrific violence that has broken out across the UK. The German government had taken in over 1 million migrants in a single year, the overwhelming number of whom were young Middle Eastern males who effectively just walked across the border. That seemed a recipe for disaster. As I noted, the native population are “not there for the money or security; they’re there because that’s who they are”. Yet those people had no say in a massive demographic shift that would affect them profoundly. I mentioned that while controlled immigration is one thing, a flood of migrants on that scale was bound to have consequences. And so it has proved, albeit in the UK. I wondered what might happen “when an oppressed people rise up against their oppressors – those people being the German public, and the oppressors the German government (substitute the names of other European countries as appropriate)”. We’re now finding out. 

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were at the time still vying to be their respective party’s nominee for that year’s presidential election. Otherwise, the references should be clear. 

Continue reading →

West End: Left-Handed Diversity

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The vast majority of the UK population, as elsewhere, is right-handed. All else being equal, i.e., no difference in acting ability between left-handers and others, we would assume that left-handed performers on the West End will make up a minority of actors in most cases unless the shows specifically require the talents of such performers (Waiting for Lefty, maybe?).

Thus, when left-handers emerge on stage way above their population levels (around 3% for this subset vs. 31.7% of all West End musical actors (2019)), theatergoers can be forgiven for thinking that the selection process is skewed. As talent is presumably evenly dispersed among the population, these groups are clearly being chosen above the remaining 97% of actors for other reasons. Any idea what that could be?

Continue reading →

A Look Back: Gaza under Hamas: Hope is not an option

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Gaza under Hamas: Hope is not an option

This column from 2014 provides some background for the horrors inflicted by Hamas on Israel this past weekend. I said regarding the tunnels that Israel “should not have to wait for its citizens to be killed to rid itself of this horrific threat”, and that applies as well to Hamas itself. The wanton slaughter of teenagers attending a “concert for peace” speaks for itself, not to mention the stripping and parading and spitting on captives and corpses and the depraved celebration of death. I would like to say that the utter barbarism of the terrorist group’s latest actions has exposed it for what it is, but its nature has been sadly clear for years. It’s time for Israel to deal with the issue definitively. 

West End diversity: Perception vs. reality

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7/10/19 (Wed)

I’ve previously written about the ethnic diversity in London theater here and here, including my impression that certain ethnicities appear on stage far too often to be blind casting or coincidental. Now there are statistics to back that up. Research by British theater magazine The Stage finds that black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) performers account for 38% of musical performers as of April 2019, starkly higher than their 13% ratio of the UK population.

Black performers in particular account for 31.7% of all musical roles (i.e., 85% of the BAME total) despite being only 3% of the UK population. East and South Asians, who significantly outnumber blacks in the general population (7%), account together for only 3.7% of West End musical performers. The percentage for white actors is 62.2% (87.1% of general population) and other ethnicities 2.2%.

So the diversity problem is solved at least for black performers, right? Of course not, you insensitive hick. Continue reading →

“Man problem” at NY Times

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The NY Times has printed yet another theatrical essay bemoaning the male supremacist content of classic Broadway musicals (“The Broadway Musical Has a Man Problem”, May 2, 2019). The author, one Amanda Hess, states,

“In 2019, a central obsession of American culture is the reassessment of all of its previous obsessions. We are reviewing our stories with a skeptical eye and banishing outdated plots on feminist grounds.”

Really? And who is this we, Tonto? Continue reading →

CNN’s Reiwa agenda

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4/3/2019

Every Japanese emperor gets his own imperial era name, one of the perks of the job, and it was announced this week to great fanfare that the era to take effect when the new emperor is enthroned on May 1 will be named Reiwa.  Thus, the remainder of 2019 will be known in Japan as Reiwa 1, and succeeding years will follow in kind until the next emperor takes over. The present era, Heisei, will finish its 31-year run when the current emperor, Akihito, abdicates on April 30. He will be known in future textbooks as Emperor Heisei.

Continue reading →

Tony Awards 2018: Their Virtue Doth Parade

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  • Tony Awards 2018

6/12/18 (Tues)

In one corner of the world, the Broadway glitterati pats itself on the back and loudly proclaims its tolerance even as it rises and cheers Robert De Niro’s clarion call, “F**k Trump and all his supporters” (I paraphrase).

In another corner at exactly that same moment, President Trump is in Singapore preparing for an historic meeting that could lead to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and peace in a highly unstable part of the world.

And that juxtaposition clearly doesn’t strike anyone on Broadway as odd. The Tony Awards is a party on its own self-obsessed planet. I’m a big Broadway fan and have probably seen more of the play nominees than a lot of Tony voters, but I have to wonder about an industry that clearly despises the people it feeds off of. Continue reading →

My Not-So-Fair Lady, Part 2

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  • My Not-So-Fair Lady, Part 2, 4/25/18 (Tues)

Eliza Doolittle is now officially woke, going by the reviews of Bartlett Sher’s just opened revival of My Fair Lady. The newly conceived ending, as gleaned from spoilers (not to be revealed here), has the former flower girl breaking decisively from her mentor Higgins and going off on her own. No suggestion of romantic love or tolerance for human quirks as in the original musical. That would undoubtedly have pleased the resolutely feminist George Bernard Shaw, who insisted to the end that Eliza would never have returned to Higgins after she has become an independent woman. (In the final scene of Pygmalion, the basis for the musical, Higgins commands Eliza to go buy him a pair of gloves, at which she snaps, “Buy them yourself”, and leaves angrily.) That said, Shaw’s own actors in the original stage show and the producers of the film version, to his fury, all altered the ending without his permission to hint at a budding love affair. So any change back to Shaw’s original concept would be swimming against a long established tide.

But maybe not these days. Continue reading →

London Theater: Diversity vs. Quality

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  • London Theater: Diversity vs. Quality

Quentin Letts, a critic with the London-based Daily Mail, has caused a stir with comments on an actor in a recent Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production. In a review of The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, he remarked,

“There is no way he is a honking Hooray of the sort that has infested the muddier reaches of England’s shires for centuries. He is too cool, too mature, not chinless or daft or funny enough.

“Was [the actor] cast because he is black? If so, the RSC’s clunking approach to politically correct casting has again weakened its stage product.

“I suppose its managers are under pressure from the Arts Council to tick inclusiveness boxes, but at some point they are going to have to decide if their core business is drama or social engineering.”

That set off a barrage of criticism in the UK press, which almost universally branded Letts a bigot for suggesting that the actor may have been cast for reasons other than his talent. The RSC slammed his “blatantly racist attitude” and insisted that the actor’s race had nothing to do with their decision to hire him for this part, citing his many stage and television appearances as proof, I assume, of his acting ability.

I haven’t seen the show, which I understand is quite good, and the actor for all I know is very fine. But I understand completely where Letts is coming from. Continue reading →

My Not-So-Fair Lady: Those dangerous old musicals

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  • My Not-So-Fair Lady: Those dangerous old musicals

The New York Times has decided that old musicals are a danger to society. A recent article, “The Problem With Broadway Revivals: They Revive Gender Stereotypes, Too”, complains that revivals of Carousel, My Fair Lady and Kiss Me, Kate present women as inferior beings who endure abuse from their male counterparts: “Billy Bigelow hits Julie Jordan. Henry Higgins molds Eliza Doolittle. Fred tames Lilli.” It claims unsurprisingly that these revivals are a “huge conversation” among the #MeToo movement. (It also discusses Pretty Woman, a new musical based on the film that is scheduled to open this year.) The article quotes worried musician Georgia Stitt as saying, “In 2017 is the correct message really ‘women are there to be rescued’?”

Well, no. That’s not the message at all, and the problem isn’t the musicals but the shriveled viewpoint of those perpetual victims who turn everything they touch into proof of their own suffering. Stacy Wolf, an academic (naturally) who has written a feminist history of Broadway, calls the characters in such musicals “pathetic”, and Stitt asks rhetorically, “Are these the shows I’m going to take my 12-year-old daughter to?”

Depends on how you look it, doesn’t it? Continue reading →

Electoral college — again

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I had thought the subject of the electoral college had died out until the next presidential election in 2020, but this excellent Frontpage Mag article defending the system recently comes not too long after a New York Times editorial on November 7 that had taken precisely the opposite view, recommending that the electoral college be jettisoned and the presidential election held by pure popular vote. I had made my views clear around a year earlier in the wake of the November 2016 election and recycled those in a response to the Times editorial:

“In the EU, four countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy) have more than half the population of the 28-member bloc. There is no way that Belgium or Greece or Denmark, say, is going to allow the Big Four to have their way through a pure popular vote given the deep differences among the member nations.

“That’s how Alabama and North Dakota and Alaska feel about NY and California. Thirty states chose Trump vs. 20 for Clinton, for better or worse. I don’t see how Clinton could have claimed legitimacy in that case. The electoral college may need reform, but a popular vote in a continental-sized country makes no sense to me.”

That may have been too brief to get the point across, but it generated a large number of comments, some of them pretty outrageous. Continue reading →