Quote of the Week...from George McGovern

The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.                            ---George McGovern

In this era when civility has so disintegrated that crowds of people rise up at a Trump rally to chant "Send her back!" regarding one of his political opponents whom he has just spoken against, the late Senator McGovern's above quote is worth taking into account.  Now I understand that those who defend our country in the military...sometimes laying their lives down in times and places of international conflict...do have to strictly follow orders and believe in their missions as it all goes down the chain of command.  But that's not what McGovern, himself a decorated fighter pilot in World War II (35 missions, Distinguished Flying Cross), was talking about.  For it's those brave soldiers who do what they do not only to defend the "homeland", but also our precious freedoms we hold so dear here.  And of them all, perhaps the most valuable is our freedom to express our opinions openly without the fear of persecution.  That does not imply, of course, that what we say or write won't have consequences...but the state should not be in the business of shaming and intimidating people it disagrees with, and the president is the personification of the state in our country.  The great late conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once remarked that he never put down other people...just their ideas.  And that's what's so disturbingly wrong with the atmosphere pervading our political world today.  A lot of Trump fans accuse his opponents of hating on him but they need to acknowledge that he set the pattern with his continual insults against anyone he regarded as a critic or adversary.  I do not like the attitude of the four freshman representatives dubbed "The Squad" because they also tend to personify their criticisms of others instead of focusing on their ideas and philosophies.  One of these stated recently that if your skin color is like hers and you don't support her agenda, then you need to shut up.  Another claimed in essence that criticizing any of them amounted to racism.  And I am getting so tired of politicians and supposedly unbiased media figures hanging the terms "racist" or "bigot" so freely on people who are expressing a different opinion on one of the many important issues facing us.  It's getting so bad now that politicians who are not saying anything are being so accused by their silence.  I did not like Donald Trump's recent tweets suggesting the four maverick representatives go back to  their old countries and believe they displayed his ignorance to the world: one of them is the descendant of American slaves, one has Puerto Rican ancestry...which means she and her family as American citizens go back further than Trump's family, one...of Palestinian parentage...was born in the USA, and the other is a naturalized citizen from Somalia.  ALL are American citizens and were duly elected by their constituents to represent them.  I don't agree with a lot of what they have to say, but let's concentrate on their ideas and not them as people, please.  And it would help for them to do likewise...

Reported Discrimination Against Conservatives Speaking at Some Public Colleges

I was watching one of the C-Span channels this morning and there was a program featuring lawyers representing conservatives who claim to have been discriminated against at some public universities regarding speaking engagements.  Two colleges in particular...California @ Berkeley and Washington...were cited by the attorneys for stifling the free speech of conservatives who had been invited to speak on campus by student groups, usually the campus Republican group.  The college administrators' tactics were similar with politically right-leaning speakers: (1) charge an exorbitantly high security fee that is much lower or completely waived for liberal speakers, (2) force the conservative speaker to make his or her presentation in a remote location, often off-campus far from public transportation, (3) place a "curfew", often around 3 pm, as the mandated finishing time for the speech (which inherently creates a schedule conflict with students attending classes), and (4) impose a gag rule prohibiting the student group from promoting the event in the media.  The lawyers noted that speakers for liberal groups and causes were not treated in this manner, and they showed as an example how differently conservative and liberal guest speakers were treated during a calendar period.  I was impressed by the program, but so far haven't found it on the network's webpage...

Free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment is NOT designed to protect speech that people want to hear: it's aimed at protecting speech that they DON'T want to hear.  If you're a professor, administrator, or student at one of these publicly-funded universities and can't handle someone with a different point of view expressing themselves, then why should you realistically expect those who disagree with your viewpoints and philosophies to respect you when you want to communicate them?  There are two forces going on that are making our society more and more divided and full of hostility.  One is the resurgence of racism and hate groups and the other is runaway political correctness, the adherents of which automatically slap "racism", "sexism", "hate", and other labels on people who don't fit the accusations but who have a different way of seeing things nevertheless.  It's a shame that so many folks idolize their own set ways so much that they are incapable of tolerating another perspective to the point where they fight to prevent its expression...

Recently Saw The Greatest Showman Movie

The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman as American history's "greatest showman" P.T. Barnum, is a musical taking excerpts and people from that figure's illustrious life in the mid-to-late 1800s, simplifying things considerably and ignoring others...culminating in a sympathetic portrayal of Barnum as a good-natured and ambitious family man who gets sidetracked by that ambition.  The dancing and songs look and sound more like they belong in High School Musical, in which Zac Efron, who's plays Barnum's associate, also starred (and danced).  If you are seriously into movies like Hairspray and High School Musical, I think you'll really like The Greatest Showman for the same general kind of dancing here...unfortunately, that genre never has sat too well with me...

Fortunately, my usually almost-allergic reaction to seeing the kind of choreography reminiscent of Michael Jackson's Thriller video, with everyone moving their arms and legs in sync and en masse, isn't all that The Greatest Showman is about.  For one, it does touch upon the events of Barnum's life...including his recruitment of "freaks" for his museum (a controversial matter with today's extreme political correctness as it is), the visit...along with "Tom Thumb"...to then-young Queen Victoria in England, the promotion and touring of Swedish singing star Jerry Lind, and the burning down of his New York headquarters, to name a few.  Also, I picked up very clearly that the "bad guys" in this movie tended to belong to one of two groups: the elitist snobs who were excessively conscious of their own "place" in society and the intolerant, uneducated rabble, who seemed to think that their main purpose in life was to angrily go around in mobs holding torches and railing and fighting against people not like themselves.  The protagonists, of course, were normal, reasonable people like ourselves in 2018, and with the same enlightened contemporary views on class, gender, and race...I doubt that the real historical folks were so PC back then...

I liked The Greatest Showman for the compelling characterization that Hugh Jackman gave to his protagonist, and the acting of Efron, Michelle Williams, and Zendaya in supporting roles was excellent.  I brushed aside the historical inaccuracies and treated it as a compelling, personal story...maybe others would enjoy it more if they did the same...

The Beach, The Who, and Politically Correct Self-Censorship

Right now I'm sitting here on my fifth-floor hotel balcony in Daytona Beach, looking out on the high tide coming in on the beach and the very windy conditions, thinking that, although this is the time of day that I typically do my outdoor run, I think I might just wait until I have a little more beach to run on.  On the other hand, it's already rained a bit this morning and the outlook for the afternoon just increases the probability of storms.  Oh well, maybe I'll just end up using the treadmill in the exercise room... 

When I'm at the beach like this, listening to the waves and sea gulls, sometimes I think of the great British rock band The Who.  Why? The answer lies on their masterpiece album Quadrophenia, which I bought in 1997 but was originally released in 1973, and contains a number of tracks that vividly put the listener on the beach.  One is Sea and Sand, which I moderately liked...I liked just about everything on this great album...and another is Bell Boy,  which I consider to be one of The Who's all-time greatest songs.  Bell Boy has two lead singers on it, Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon.  I wasn't aware of Moon's vocal contribution until recently, having thought all these years that Daltrey was just altering his voice in a comical way.  But on MTV/Live (Cox Channel 1098 in Gainesville) there was a documentary show about the making of Quadrophenia that spotlighted Moon's special role in the song.  And it was this very show that disturbed me concerning possible self-censorship for the sake of political correctness...

The documentary, titled The Who: Quadrophenia--Can You See the Real Me? went in chronological order to how the different tracks were finally arranged on the album.  It was toward the end, and they had just discussed the recording of Bell Boy and I was anticipating them reviewing how they made the beautiful...and sinister...next track, Doctor Jimmy, which in my opinion was the crowning achievement of Quadrophenia.  But they didn't discuss Doctor Jimmy...no, they just skipped right over it to the final song, Love, Reign O'er Me.  Although that last track was full of sexual overtones, Doctor Jimmy may have been considered too politically dangerous to discuss, with the themes of jealousy, violent revenge, and sexual conquest and aggression dominating its lyrics.  But it was not promoting any of these negative and undesirable feelings and behaviors: it was revealing something about the inner darkness of one of the story's characters (Quadrophenia is structured around a story, much as The Who's Tommy was three years earlier).  Surely they could have said something to this effect and still talked about the song on the show.  And who knows, maybe Pete Townshend, who nearly single-handedly created, wrote, and produced Quadrophenia, just didn't think it was significant enough to cover in the documentary.  But Doctor Jimmy was a big staple on album rock radio and any show about Quadrophenia that omits it has to be questionable, for whatever motives...