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Honorary Nonwhite
Back in February, some readers of my Taki’s Magazine column “Alexander Hamilton, Honorary Nonwhite” were baffled by why I was devoting so much attention to a Broadway musical about a rapping version of the apostle of Wall Street and limits on democracy. But time is validating my concern.
From The Atlantic, a deeply self-serious article by a white liberal law professor about how Hamilton the Broadway musical can be exploited to change the Supreme Court forever:
Will Lin-Manuel Miranda Transform the Supreme Court?
With the success of the Broadway hit Hamilton, Americans have been given a new version of the Founding Fathers—one that could open the door to a more liberal interpretation of constitutional originalism.
RICHARD PRIMUS JUN 4, 2016 POLITICS
It is hard to know which was less foreseeable: that a reality-TV star with no government experience would be the Republican nominee for president or that the smash hit of Broadway would be a rap opera about the man behind the Federalist Papers. But there is a reason why the two phenomena arise at the same time, and there is a reason why that time coincides with the end of America’s first nonwhite presidency. The birther-in-chief’s campaign for high office and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical speak to the same deep issues about American identity at a time when the nation’s demography increasingly resembles that of the larger world. They just approach the subject from different perspectives. One seeks to protect an America that is still mostly white and Christian against Mexicans, Muslims, and other outsiders deemed dangerous. The other is so confident in the multiracial future that it rewrites the American past in its image. …
By the way, the cheapest pair of tickets for Hamilton available via TicketMaster are priced at $2,793.96.
Update: Stubhub as pairs of tickets starting at $1,640.50 (plus fees).
As I wrote in February:
A simple model that helps make much about the modern world easier to comprehend is that of a high-low tag team against the middle. As part of a time-tested strategy of divide and rule, the rich tend to push for policies and attitudes that increase identity-politics divisiveness—more immigration, more Black Lives Matter rioting, more transgender agitation, and so forth—which makes it harder for the nonrich to team up politically to promote their mutual economic interests.
You could call it: “Diverse and Conquer.”
A striking example of how identity politics turn in practice into the Zillionaire Liberation Front has emerged in the war over which Dead White Male to kick off the currency to make room for a woman: the $10 bill’s Alexander Hamilton or the $20’s Andrew Jackson. Bizarrely, the reactionary genius Hamilton, apostle of rule by the rich, is rapidly morphing in the conventional wisdom’s imagination into an Honorary Nonwhite.
As Hillary Clinton said shortly after my “Alexander Hamilton, Honorary Nonwhite” column:
“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” Mrs. Clinton asked the audience of black, white and Hispanic union members, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the L.G.B.T. community?,” she said, using an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. “Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
At each question, the crowd called back with a resounding no.
Back to The Atlantic:
The result of this contest will shape the future of constitutional law. If Donald Trump is elected, the Republican Party may extend its hold on the Supreme Court into the indefinite future. If he loses, the Court will have a majority of Democratic appointees for the first time since 1970. But that prospect, momentous enough on its own, understates the transformation that may be coming. To see the larger possibility, one must imagine not just a majority-Democratic Supreme Court but a majority-Democratic Supreme Court in a world after Miranda’s Hamilton.
What Does It Mean to Be a Republican?
The writing of the Constitution is part of America’s origin story. Not coincidentally, judges as well as other Americans commonly read the Constitution through their assumptions about the Founding generation. … What shapes constitutional law, however, is not the actual original meaning of the Constitution. It is the original meaning of the Constitution as imagined by judges and other officials at any given time. And how judges imagine the original meaning of the Constitution depends on their intuitions—half historical, half mythical—about the Founding narrative. If you can change the myth, you can change the Constitution.
Hamilton is changing the myth. For decades, originalism in constitutional law has had a generally conservative valence. Now, week by week, the thousands of patrons who pack the Richard Rodgers Theater and the hundreds of thousands more who listen obsessively to Hamilton’s cast album or download the viral videos are absorbing a new vision of the American Founding. And so the balance shifts. With the Supreme Court on the brink of moving leftward and Hamilton electrifying audiences from the Grammys to the White House, the lawyering class’s intuitions about the Founding are poised to change. The blockbuster narrative of this election year retells the nation’s origin story as the tale of a heroic immigrant with passionately progressive politics on issues of race and on issues of federal power. The audience is on its feet. So to all those Americans who expect original meanings in constitutional law to support mostly conservative outcomes, here is your Miranda warning: Within the foreseeable future, a jurisprudence of original meanings may fuel the most progressive constitutional decision making since the days of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Just you wait.
Just you wait, indeed.
From the late 1930s until the early 1970s, the Supreme Court was an agent of progressive social change. The justices issued landmark decisions on racial desegregation, voting rights, free speech, criminal procedure, and sex equality. The Court also authorized active federal management of the national economy, ambitious social-welfare programs like Medicare and old-age pensions, and a host of other new departures that would earlier have been thought to lie beyond the federal government’s jurisdiction. Millions of Americans saw the Court as a heroic vanguard, a symbol of American ideals on the march.
By the way, remember how the Times Square theater district flourished in the 1970s from the Miranda ruling and other liberal Warren Court decisions? Remember how 42nd Street was the happiest place on earth after liberalism got done with it? Here’s Times Square ten years after the Warren Court’s Miranda v. Arizona decision:
And here’s what Times Square looks like recently after 20 years of law-and-order mayors of New York City:
Somehow, I suspect the upcoming Hamiltonized Supreme Court will find some Constitutional penumbra exception to keep Times Square looking like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s in 2016 rather than Travis Bickle’s in 1976. After all, it would be a betrayal of Alexander Hamilton’s legacy for rich New Yorkers to be inconvenienced. But for you flyover folks in Ferguson and Dubuque, just you wait …
… But the complete explanation for the difference in liberal and conservative attitudes toward originalism is broader, and one big part of that broader framework has to do with race. The Founders were a cohort of wealthy white men, many of them slave owners. …
But this liberal take on original meanings was never able to tap into the full power of old-time originalism, because the greatest cache in American constitutional culture lies, for all its faults, in the generation of 1787. …
One cannot know in advance how deeply a Broadway musical will change American intuitions about historical narrative. But it is hard to overstate the preliminary indications. Hamilton is a Pulitzer-Prize winning production whose cast album has gone platinum faster than any album in the history of Broadway. The music is blow-the-roof-off amazing, with both the musical-theater crowd and the leading lights of hip-hop exclaiming hosannas. The audience is not just listening; it is rapt. In cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation, Hamilton’s production company has staged special performances for tens of thousands of students in New York City’s public schools. Soon, a collection of touring companies will bring the show to audiences across the country. If art can change ideas—and of course it can—then it does look like a new vision of the Founding is ready to rise up.
As a weapon of social change, Hamilton is trained directly on the intuitions that previously made the Founding the differential property of conservatives. In part, this is a matter of the substantive political values that Miranda’s protagonist represents, both on the structural issue of federal power and on currently salient social issues like immigration. But Hamilton’s larger enterprise is exploding the politics of racial memory that have, in recent decades, made liberals queasy about embracing the Founding too closely. On that score, Hamilton attempts nothing less than regime change. Not in the sense of replacing the president with a different president, but in altering the way that Americans—of all races—think about the identity of the republic.
The show takes barely 30 seconds to establish its perspective on this issue. In the opening sequence, half a dozen nonwhite rappers take turns contributing verses to an introduction of the title character. … Hamilton does something new. The same African-American actor who announces, in the play’s first minute, that this story will neither hide slavery nor deny its brutality also refers immediately to the white-man title character as a “brother.” Hamilton, announces the nonwhite cast communicating in a paradigmatically nonwhite genre, was one of us. Not because of some bizarre claim that the first treasury secretary was actually not a white man. But because we see him as ours. (The next rapper calls Hamilton “our man.”) …
The audience sees a company of modern Americans—mostly African-American, and entirely nonwhite—rapping out an origin myth for the $10 Founding Father, who is their brother, even as they invoke the horror of slavery.
My impression is that genuine rappers, as opposed to Broadway chorus boys, are more into the $100 Founding Father, because he’s on the Benjamins.
… It aims to give nonwhite Americans today access to the cultural power of the Founding by showing that black people can own the characters of men who owned black people—and that they can do so without either muting their own blackness or overlooking the evils of the past. … It aims to let nonwhites feel ownership of the Founding, not by offering nonwhite historical figures with whom to identify but by creating conditions in which a black American today, as a black American today, can identify with Washington, or Hamilton, or even perhaps with Jefferson, villain though he be.
When it comes to the less-famous characters, the play may even succeed in the remarkable feat of getting the audience to imagine 18th-century white men as black men, perhaps without realizing that they are doing so. …
And who is to say whether what the show does for less-famous characters today is a harbinger of what it, or its successors, will do for Washington and Jefferson in the future? The leading Founders are already figures of myth. That’s precisely what makes them potent in the rhetoric of law and politics. How people imagine mythical historical figures is at least as much a function of their own mental maps as it is a function of dispassionate history. As long as the mental maps of Americans feature deep social cleavages on the basis of race, the historical fact that the Founders were white will figure in citizens’ images of Washington and Jefferson. But in a future America, one that was thoroughly multiracial and egalitarian, a nonwhite image of Washington might be no more jarring than dark-skinned images of Jesus have been among nonwhite Christian populations around the world. At that future juncture, the argument that Hamilton misrepresents the 18th century would be like the argument that originalism is a bad way to make most constitutional decisions. As a matter of intellectual analysis, it’s a pretty good point. But it’s a complex and inconvenient point, and it is unlikely to withstand the power of a good story. Hamilton tells a pretty good story, with thumping good music to help it along. By the time you leave the theater, maybe even Washington is a little bit brown. Or at least, maybe one of the images of Washington residing in your brain is a little bit that way.
… The question is then not whether Hamilton does justice to the past by depicting it accurately but whether Hamilton builds justice in the present by reallocating the ownership of the republic.
To put the point more cogently: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
Broad public absorption of Hamilton’s vision would not replace a false picture of the past with a true picture. It would replace one false picture with a different false picture. In scholarship, that substitution would not be an appropriate aspiration. But in the politics of national identity, the practical alternative to the reigning myth is never a careful historical understanding. It is always some other myth.
The success of Hamilton’s project would mark an inflection point in the politics of American memory. … But if Miranda’s frame replaces Marshall’s, or even just competes with it, then white liberals can be less ambivalent. Surely white liberals can lay as much claim to the Founders as their nonwhite allies do. … And when liberals appropriate the Founding, they will emphasize both consciously and subconsciously those sources that can be made to do work for liberal causes in modern constitutional law. Some of those causes will coincide with the politics of Hamilton, or those of Hamilton, or both. Others may not. But we can be confident that the meanings that liberals give to the Founding, once they are inclined to play the game of originalism, will be liberal-leaning meanings. What matters is who tells the story.
As Lenin liked to say, the central questions in politics are always “Who? Whom?”
Here is “white liberal law professor” Richard Primus’s maternal grandfather:
Sigmund Strochlitz, 89, Leader in Holocaust Causes, Dies
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/nyregion/21strochlitz.html?_r=0
Primus and his bride got a nice write up in the NYT for their wedding:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/fashion/weddings/06brensike.html
Echoing (ahem) a recent wry comment by Jack D:Interestingly, someone helpfully provided such a tool, but Google removed it: The drolly named Coincidence Detector.
Hamilton is a Pulitzer-Prize winning production whose cast album has gone platinum faster than any album in the history of Broadway.
And Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The appeal to accolade strategy presumes that there is something meaningful backing the accolade. If the elite institutions are corrupted and rotting from the center, then what they elevate as being important and worthy is merely a reflection of their own internally corrupt values and likely diverges from independent measures of value which correspond to results produced in the real world.
Caltech admits students on merit. Harvard admits students in order to create racial diversity and must lower standards for many NAMS. To say that Harvard graduates the elite of the nation essentially boils down to a tautology. Harvard elites who are less intelligent than Caltech elites will be outperformed by the Caltech graduates in fair contests. A corrupt society which continues to elevate the Harvard elites will be a society rotting from the inside. Same with the Nobel committee, same with the Pulitzer organization, etc.
Can there be any better proof that the author of that article is bluepilled or enbubbled, can there be any sadder illustration of the elite gambling everything away like decadent noblemen in a Hindu myth, than all these awards being seen now as fake and worse than worthless?
"Diversity is unity ... diversity is strength. War is peace. All cultures are equal (although some are more equal than others). Long live the Empire!"
A note: Some historians have noted that empires by their very nature necessitate diversity in their political doctrine and organization. Recall that one of the reasons that American Blacks were given "equal rights" in the 1960s and the Constitution was retconed to require it was driven by President Eisenhower and his administration competing with the Soviets for influence in the newly independent European colonies in Africa. It was a foreign policy decision. I can imagine that the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that opened our borders to non-European immigrants was based on a similar consideration.
A lesson: There is no hope for our survival as a cohesive nation state unless we give up the Empire so we can purge Washington of its imperial courtiers and their imperial pretensions. This is the real contest between Trump and the Hildebeast.
The Supreme Court rapping out its decisions – What a delight! The Atlantic actually paid for this drivel? I believe you, but it’s sad, so sad. Rap on O, Ship of State, rap on.
There is indeed. And as sure as the Learned Elders can smell the goal-line, nearer than they ever dreamed possible even 10 years ago, I knew down to my shoetops that we wouldn’t hear a word about these reasons in this article.
And just so long as (((Dr Primus))) and his, um….. (((associates)))……continue to maintain a stranglehold over Official Reality and Allowable Discourse, the hated white gentile whom (((we))) taught to doubt, and then loathe, himself, and then throw away his birthright and destiny both, can at last be taught to die.
I’m saving my money for “Lincoln: the story of a progressive white male who chopped his balls off for transgender insecurity….and did that thing with slavery.”
I found that out while checking up on the latest news about Bat-Boy and Manny the horse with a man's head.
http://www.law.umich.edu/FacultyBio/Pages/FacultyBio.aspx?FacID=raprimus
FWIW Richard Primus spent at most three years in the dreaded private sector before moving into the University of Michigan School of Law. This is why he has the time on his hands to theorize to us about the Alexander Hamilton rap musical mash-up.
BTW I am employing a lawyer who is about Primus’ age of 46. My lawyer is all hustle and little relaxation. He works for himself in the dreaded private sector I just mentioned where when his Samsung Galaxy went out last month it was a mini-disaster for him. He is a conservative, pro-Second Amendment taxpayer while this Richard Primus is a tax eater and leftist theoretician. His wife too who is employed by that same U of Michigan taxpayer subsidized law school. Ann Coulter graduated from there.
Too often it becomes a chore to read liberal blatherings. As I worked my way through this essay I kept thinking that the author had a goal and was backfilling the essay with a whole lot of rationalization in order to come to his conclusion, and then I came to this:
Conservatives have a potent weapon with their focus on originalism. That weapon needs to be neutralized and the best way to neutralize it is to either muddy it or to appropriate it and redefine it. How to do that? Write an essay for the Atlantic and riff off of Hamilton and elevate the play into a cultural juggernaut which will sweep all of society to the Left and multiracialism and help to rewrite the past so that it better fits present-day liberal dogmas.
The actual cultural impact of Hamilton on minorities’ views on the Founding Fathers? Zilch.
The actual real world influence of this essay? Zilch.
You actually read it? I thought that's what we paid Steve for - to read this s**t for us. I only skimmed the exerpts, and only actually read Steve's commentary.
My God, our country is in such deep trouble. White pathological altruism will be America’s downfall. Reading and researching these issues is so incredibly depressing. It’s a sadistic coterie of envious non-whites and masochistic white people gleefully churning out books and articles and papers about the Browning of America via white demographic dispossession, subjugation and humiliation.
The propaganda war is just endless.
I follow the less closely than I used to because it's so discouraging.
The actual cultural impact of Hamilton on minorities' views on the Founding Fathers? Zilch.
The actual real world influence of this essay? Zilch.
We’d better hope that this Atlantic article has no influence with anyone, or we can all look forward to living in a Gramscian dystopia.
Of course, Antonio Gramsci and his disciples envisioned "The Long March Through The Institutions" as the way to achieve a proletarian utopia. It's therefore a bit amusing to witness Primus' repurposing of the concept to serve the interests of tech oligarchs and the other winners of our New Gilded Age.
I'm entirely confident that the privileges of this visionary ideologue and his heirs will be retained, even expanded... La révolution dévore ses enfants? Jamias!
In Lin Manuel Miranda’s commencement speech at UPenn, he refers to Alexander Hamilton as an immigrant from The Caribbean.
When people hear immigrant from The Caribbean, they don’t think of White males. Caribbean conjures up images of Black people playing bongo drums on the beach and Bob Marley.
How come nobody on the Left ever refers to John McCain as an immigrant from Panama? Why is he just a Stale Pale Male? If Alexander Hamilton was a Person Of Color, John McCain is one as well.
From “we president now” to “We foundin’ daddies now!” I was thinking about giving a heads up to this article, but damn—the professor is even more uselessly verbose than Cuckor Friedersdorf.
Richard Primus’s leftist condescension to NAMs goes to 11. Triple bankshot: He thinks that NAMs are going to appreciate Founding principles if they can be fooled into believing the Founders were vibrant bruthas. Occam’s razor: He’s an anti-white who wants to sink the Constitution while mooching off tax revenue.
This guy was so on point with the iSteve themes encapsulated in those Orwell and Lenin quotes that either he reads you or you know the modern leftist mind better than they know themselves.
Was Hamilton an “Invade the World, Invite the World” kinda guy?
Liberals appropriating the Founding. That is one of the more jarring ideas that I’ve read. Is the Eye of Soros going to use its laser beam with a lens to melt history, while disfiguring the present? Fortunately, the November elections could hinder their plans.
I'm sick of having my Anglo-American culture appropriated.
It's not OK.
And it hurts.
P.S. Note that Hamilton is referred to as a “weapon of social change” ready to be forced down the throat of captive American schoolchildren so as to brainwash yet another generation and presumably lead us into the “future America…thoroughly multiracial and egalitarian”.
We need to defund the universities, now.
I have maintained for a couple of years now that we need to abolish tenure at state universities. Make it possible to fire professors..............and then fire them.
I think it would be a winning issue in state elections, and it would put the academic left on the defensive.
The future belongs to People of Color
Your daughters will give birth to amen of Color
How you line them apples?
When people hear immigrant from The Caribbean, they don't think of White males. Caribbean conjures up images of Black people playing bongo drums on the beach and Bob Marley.
How come nobody on the Left ever refers to John McCain as an immigrant from Panama? Why is he just a Stale Pale Male? If Alexander Hamilton was a Person Of Color, John McCain is one as well.
Indeed, John McCain was an immigrant from Central America.
That would explain why John McCain is pro-open borders. It's tribal, he is just looking out for his raza.
“Indeed, John McCain was an immigrant from Central America.”
That would explain why John McCain is pro-open borders. It’s tribal, he is just looking out for his raza.
Similar thought at work in U.K. Brexit supporters want stronger bonds with the Commonwealth (former British Empire countries) than E.U.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12193101/Brexit-will-allow-Britain-to-embrace-the-Commonwealth.html
There’s that Rockefeller Foundation at work, still funding left wing propaganda after five decades. They underwrote the smear campaign against Robert Moses in the 1960s, supposedly because he tore up some Puerto Rican tenements to build the Cross Bronx Expressway and wanted to flatten the more decrepit parts of Greenwich Village to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway. The foundation funded both Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro to write hatchet jobs against the greatest urban planner of the 20th century, in part because Nelson Rockefeller wanted to roll up a bunch of public benefit corporations Moses controlled into the MTA to suck the profits out of the cities economically valuable infrastructure to subsidize NYC’s crappy transit system. Rockefeller also wanted to give away control of the parks commissions to political cronies and family members.
Billionaire’s Liberation Front, indeed.
I checked out the link. That $2,794 gets you literally the worst seats in the house, the very back row of the rear right mezzanine in the extreme corner.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/nyregion/21strochlitz.html?_r=0Primus and his bride got a nice write up in the NYT for their wedding:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/fashion/weddings/06brensike.html
Good find. I was about to erroneously call Primus an “ethnomasochist.”
Echoing (ahem) a recent wry comment by Jack D:
Interestingly, someone helpfully provided such a tool, but Google removed it: The drolly named Coincidence Detector.
Hamilton, the guy that wanted a President for life, in other words a King, the guy that pushed for the first national bank, the guy that wanted a strong central government, and the guy that initiated the whisky tax that started the Whisky rebellion.
The whisky tax was against the poorest people in the nation. It was the people on the western side of the Appalachians that had to distill the fruits of their labor in order to easier haul it over the mountains to the population centers. That tax was used to pay rich bond holders of the American Revolutionary war debt. No other people in the US were being taxed by the federal government. Just those poor dirt farming people on the frontier.
Thank God Aaron Burr shot the sorry bastard dead.
Its very telling that the powers that be suddenly elevate this guy to a hero. And it all began with some bs book on Hamilton by a guy named Chernow.
I'll second that.
OT, Slavoj Zizek at spiked-online.com:
Who writes this “Hamilton” stuff? Who reads the article? Who watches “Hamilton” at $1400 per ticket? Shades of Leonard Bernstein in “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers”.
“Hamilton” is some seriously privileged virtue signaling, like buying a splattered-ink painting called “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” for a few million dollars. Heck, I don’t think “Angels in America” tickets cost $1400.
Given these prices, Ta-Nahisi Coates really missed the boat. He should have sold gold-plated, limited-edition copies of his new comic book for $5000 so the “Hamilton” crowd could put them on their bookshelves for cocktail party display.
Slave porn like “Hamilton” and “Twelve Years a Slave” holds a prurient fascination for New York and Hollywood that requires periodic purging and release. See e.g. “Mandingo” (Kyle Onstott, 1957), which made it to off-Broadway (1961), and to film (1975) by De Laurentiis.
The Mandingo book covers and movie posters suggest its eternal glandular appeal.
“Yeah, ‘Hamilton’ — it was pretty amazing,” David told the Daily News columnist. “But I have a feeling there are a lot of white people who are saying they are completely blown away even though they didn’t really understand half of the things the people on stage were saying.
“‘They just want to solidify their liberal bona fides and how cool they are: ‘Yea, I love Hamilton. Yea I get it, I’m hip.’” Larry David
From the one snippet of this show that was on the Grammys the lyrics were barely understandable. Doubt that anyone can explain Hamilton’s ideas about monetary policy and a strong federal government in a rap musical. The John Adams/HBO/Paul Giamatti miniseries was mostly historically accurate in depicting Hamilton as the the beginning of big government and borrow/invade/invite. So Miranda has taken the one Founding Father of questionable parentage and filled his story with his own PC ideas that have nothing at all to do with the real Hamilton. Miranda is trying very effectively to remake the legend. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
On a positive note we have gotten them to acknowledge, albeit indirectly. that the other Founders were not immigrants. Pat Buchanan contested “the nation of immigrants drivel” by pointing out how Washington, his father and grandfather were all born in Virginia, and thus were not immigrants. Yet it was still popular to claim they were all immigrants.
Now by focusing on Hamilton and trying to differentiate him from the other Founders, they are also reinforcing the the fact that the majority of the other Founders were not immigrants, and where white Europeans.
Of course conservatives will be too afraid to embrace this and will allow the left to co-opt Hamilton, and God knows whom else, while trashing the Founders who cannot be retconned.
So instead of putting to rest myths like the nation of immigrants, the left will create more of their own in their never ending quest to destroy this nation.
Liberals appropriating the Founding.
I’m sick of having my Anglo-American culture appropriated.
It’s not OK.
And it hurts.
Ironically, as G. Washington’s Chief of Staff, Hamilton was involved in the planning of the successful 1779 Sullivan Expedition, the objective of which was to essentially exterminate (via burning villages and crops) the Iroquois in western New York.
And Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The appeal to accolade strategy presumes that there is something meaningful backing the accolade. If the elite institutions are corrupted and rotting from the center, then what they elevate as being important and worthy is merely a reflection of their own internally corrupt values and likely diverges from independent measures of value which correspond to results produced in the real world.
Caltech admits students on merit. Harvard admits students in order to create racial diversity and must lower standards for many NAMS. To say that Harvard graduates the elite of the nation essentially boils down to a tautology. Harvard elites who are less intelligent than Caltech elites will be outperformed by the Caltech graduates in fair contests. A corrupt society which continues to elevate the Harvard elites will be a society rotting from the inside. Same with the Nobel committee, same with the Pulitzer organization, etc.
I came here to say this.
Can there be any better proof that the author of that article is bluepilled or enbubbled, can there be any sadder illustration of the elite gambling everything away like decadent noblemen in a Hindu myth, than all these awards being seen now as fake and worse than worthless?
Is the Federal Reserve a “big bank?”
“I checked out the link. That $2,794 gets you literally the worst seats in the house, the very back row of the rear right mezzanine in the extreme corner.”
With prices that high, the New York City audience paying to watch a Puerto Rican play a WASP are going to disproportionately be Jews. With prices that high, there won’t be a lot of Puerto Ricans in the audience cheering one of their own kind becoming a success in life.
In Year 2 they will have touring companies at lower prices to let flyover liberals wealth- and virtue-signal.
In Year 5 they will make a movie (for the proles) complete with teachers guides and lesson plans to hammer home the racial significance.
In Year 6 they will wrap it up with eight or ten Academy Award nominations accompanied by a several-months-long stream of editorials re whether "America is finally big enough" to give a whole bunch of Academy Awards to a NAM epic.
Think "Angels in America".
Actually, Abraham Lincoln was a trans man.
I found that out while checking up on the latest news about Bat-Boy and Manny the horse with a man’s head.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/nyregion/21strochlitz.html?_r=0Primus and his bride got a nice write up in the NYT for their wedding:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/fashion/weddings/06brensike.html
You sure have to hand it to them. For all their pushing multiracialism and multiculturalism, they sure do marry race-pure and breed like bunnies. Oh, to have 41 lineal descendants of my race and tribe when I die and (doubtless) all college-educated! So what is their secret? What makes them culturally immune? What keeps feminism from shriveling their women’s wombs?
Mr. Strochlitz is a half or third a generation older than my folks, so it doesn't completely line up, but then he didn't have kids until after the war, so it's closer. His four baby-boomer kids isn't wildly atypical for the time.
What is atypical is that he averaged 3.5 kids (his grandkids) our of each of those four. That's definitely high for the boomers, doubly so for college educated boomers. (In my relatively large--parental generation Iowa raised--extended family only myself and one cousin have three kids, most two, three ones and three zeros.)
The 23 great-grandkids is an undercount. For instance Primus born in '69 married in 2007 to a five years his junior bride. Any kids they may have had are not included in this 23. And probably most of those grandchildren are younger than he is. (None of my boomer cousins had had kids by '69. Only a few have grandchildren.)
Hard to argue with tribal identity pushing such reproductive success.
~~
I'd love for Jews (the Ashkenazi) to throw in with us. More or less admit that their tribalism was the outlier and just throw in their lot with the West and work to preserve it. But that is not happening. What you see is the solid tribalism of the Orthodox, or continued heavy anti-white, anti-majoritarianism among the seculars, even the ones outbreeding into the gentile population.
Even more so, I'd like to see we white gentiles to develop a tribal identity of our own. Unfortunately we don't have a racial religion. Christian universalism helped make Western nations the *best* nations--most pleasant, most prosperous--in the world, but it's downside has been opening us up to easy exploitation.
I'm not any kind of a serious Christian, but i know plenty of them from my neighborhood, the kids' schools and Scouting. Mostly good folks, and they do tend to procreate modestly above norm. But also you get the "save the world silliness. Two of the Christian families in our Scout troop have adopted black kids--love, effort, resources that could have, should have gone into having more children of their own. Immigration love. Saving Africans ... all that sort of crap is there. Even the Mormons are full of save-the-world and pro-immigrant nonsense. Sad times.
Perhaps in our coming minority future, the surviving whites will become a lot more tribal. However, i suspect that Richard Primus's desired Supreme Court "originalism" will abuse and harass efforts at white identity and community as much as possible.
"Hamilton" is some seriously privileged virtue signaling, like buying a splattered-ink painting called "Man's Inhumanity to Man" for a few million dollars. Heck, I don't think "Angels in America" tickets cost $1400.
Given these prices, Ta-Nahisi Coates really missed the boat. He should have sold gold-plated, limited-edition copies of his new comic book for $5000 so the "Hamilton" crowd could put them on their bookshelves for cocktail party display.
Slave porn like "Hamilton" and "Twelve Years a Slave" holds a prurient fascination for New York and Hollywood that requires periodic purging and release. See e.g. "Mandingo" (Kyle Onstott, 1957), which made it to off-Broadway (1961), and to film (1975) by De Laurentiis.
The Mandingo book covers and movie posters suggest its eternal glandular appeal.
All well and good Big Bill but Mandingo (with Ken Norton in the 1975 movie) came out when America was culturally conservative so you know it had minimal SJW themes in book and movie.
Seems to me that we’ll need a lot more immigrants from India and China for that to work out….
Hey, I’m all for higher levels of Scottish immigration to the USA….
Of course, Anglo-America’s “origin story” (mmm, origin story, another sign of the “comic bookization” of popular culture?) has older roots than that: John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Penn, Plymouth Rock, Jamestown,….
Well, the musical does make Jefferson look like a pimp…Perhaps that will make it easier for Black men to identify with old Tom?
But what about fair-skinned Northern Asians (Koreans, Japanese, Northern Chinese)? Do they get a Jesus with East Asian facial features?
What Scottish immigrant? Alexander Hamilton was a Caribbean who spoke with a Bob Marley accent, had dreadlocks, and liked to play bongo drums on the beach. Does that sound Scottish to you MON? He was no Groundskeeper Willie.
The actual cultural impact of Hamilton on minorities' views on the Founding Fathers? Zilch.
The actual real world influence of this essay? Zilch.
Well, then, I can translate it for you very succinctly: kiss your white America and your Second Amendment goodbye, white boy.
Richard Primus, J.D., M.O.T.
” The other is so confident in the multiracial future that it rewrites the American past in its image.”
Or, to put it more directly, they lie about our history.
As long as we’re just making up stuff, why not pretend that Marvel comic books are foundational documents? After all, as the preamble of the Constitution tells us, with great power goes great responsibility. Why not? A poem on a stupid little plaque at the base of a statue has been elevated unto holy writ, so why not four-color “literature”.
“But in a future America, one that was thoroughly multiracial and egalitarian, a nonwhite image of Washington might be no more jarring than dark-skinned images of Jesus have been among nonwhite Christian populations around the world.”
A lot of Catholic churches in Latin America still use the image of a blond haired and blue eyed Jesus Christ, even though most Latin Americans do not have blonde hair and blue eyes.
“Hey, I’m all for higher levels of Scottish immigration to the USA….”
What Scottish immigrant? Alexander Hamilton was a Caribbean who spoke with a Bob Marley accent, had dreadlocks, and liked to play bongo drums on the beach. Does that sound Scottish to you MON? He was no Groundskeeper Willie.
The actual cultural impact of Hamilton on minorities' views on the Founding Fathers? Zilch.
The actual real world influence of this essay? Zilch.
“Too often it becomes a chore to read liberal blatherings.”
You actually read it? I thought that’s what we paid Steve for – to read this s**t for us. I only skimmed the exerpts, and only actually read Steve’s commentary.
I try to understand my enemy, I try to learn how to think like my enemy. It takes a lot of concentration and will power to stay focused as I read their gibberish.
If it actually were the case (dubious, to be sure) that the chief aim of Hamilton was to enable blacks or other non-whites to identify themselves with American history and the (white) American founding, would that really be such a bad thing from a citizenist point of view?
I honestly think this is more totally insane than anything that ever happened in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Maybe Americans will soon start defecting to North Korea in order to live in a relatively sane, normal country…
Mao had his "Little Red Book". Is there anything comparable for our situation ... perhaps a "Little Blue Book" sitting on a desk somewhere to outline the new utopian vision? Regardless, I don't think our current "Cultural Revolution" has any more of a chance for success than Mao's Cultural Revolution.
Just to put this historical revisionism into context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790
Was Hamilton an "Invade the World, Invite the World" kinda guy?
He will be.
Be patient. The Broadway prices are high so New Yorkers can both virtue-signal AND wealth-signal.
In Year 2 they will have touring companies at lower prices to let flyover liberals wealth- and virtue-signal.
In Year 5 they will make a movie (for the proles) complete with teachers guides and lesson plans to hammer home the racial significance.
In Year 6 they will wrap it up with eight or ten Academy Award nominations accompanied by a several-months-long stream of editorials re whether “America is finally big enough” to give a whole bunch of Academy Awards to a NAM epic.
Think “Angels in America”.
We need to defund the universities, now.
“We need to defund the universities, now.”
I have maintained for a couple of years now that we need to abolish tenure at state universities. Make it possible to fire professors…………..and then fire them.
I think it would be a winning issue in state elections, and it would put the academic left on the defensive.
The whisky tax was against the poorest people in the nation. It was the people on the western side of the Appalachians that had to distill the fruits of their labor in order to easier haul it over the mountains to the population centers. That tax was used to pay rich bond holders of the American Revolutionary war debt. No other people in the US were being taxed by the federal government. Just those poor dirt farming people on the frontier.
Thank God Aaron Burr shot the sorry bastard dead.
Its very telling that the powers that be suddenly elevate this guy to a hero. And it all began with some bs book on Hamilton by a guy named Chernow.
“Thank God Aaron Burr shot the sorry bastard dead.”
I’ll second that.
Except, of course, that we don’t actually have any accurate paintings of Jesus, and we do of George Washington and all of the other founders.
Really, have we now literally reached the point that we must stop believing our lying eyes?
This article generally has the strange aspect of psychotic delusion.
I'm sick of having my Anglo-American culture appropriated.
It's not OK.
And it hurts.
Liberal behavior is Inappropriate but they are shameless. Those seem to be fellow travelers.
Has anybody been able to suffer through any of the “musical” numbers of this play for a real assessment? Is it as bad as most rap, or actually better? Is it possible to differentiate on any level?
As for Hamilton himself, he was an immigrant with a remarkable similiarity to the Corsican, the Georgian, and the Austrian. He just didn’t live long enough to cause too much trouble. He caused enough. Aaron Burr is the real hero.
The initial song from which this all started is on YouTube and was performed at the White House several years back (to Obama, of course). It was told from the perspective of Aaron Burr. It was actually quite good - amazingly good. The cast album, though, seems to be dreck. I listened to samples of every single song when it was first released and couldn't get into any of them. My 15-year-old niece is really into it, so I've heard a few songs all the way through - and it hasn't changed my opinion that it's crap. But take crappy music, a young cast, and some high octane dance numbers and you can still get a musical that reels the suckers in. "Spring Awakening" is a good example of that.
My brother gets season tickets to the touring Broadway shows. He told me when Hamilton comes through town (the tour has just been announced) they plan to sell their tickets and he thinks he'll net $1,5000 or more for the five of them. He's done that before so I don't think he's exaggerating. Hopefully his daughter will be over the show by the time that happens, or she may never forgive him.
I thought it was a rather silly article, in the sense that it seems to imply that performances of Hamilton will suddenly make Northern urban black folks content, because they will finally be able to “relate” to the Founding.
Not only is that an idiotic idea, but the percentages involved are just not that important. Black folks in the US comprise about 12% of the population, whereas the real issues concern the approximately 30% who are of Latin descent.
I do think the author is right about one thing. The SCOTUS and politics generally is going to become more liberal, that is, statist, that is, based on social programs to quiet a restive population. It’s just a question of how socialist we become and whether anyone is honest enough to use the “S” word.
However, that agenda, and the progressive liberal pushing forward of that agenda, is not going to depend on a musical that “allows” progressive to “imagine” the Constitution, or to “relate” in a groovy kind of way with the Founders. Except for serious students of the subject, history is mostly a post facto handmaiden and justification for politics. Nothing new here.
What is a bit surprising to me is the very lax statement of what the Constitution is to be, that is, something that anyone can “imagine” it to be, at any particular point in time. I can understand the development of postmodernism in many respects, but I do not think that postmodern jurisprudence has any chance in a well ordered society.
The plan was the make blacks white (cf. Cliff Huxtable). That having failed, the new plan is evidently to make (historical) whites black. The connotation of white in this case being "blank" rather than any specific ethnicity, i.e. post-ethnic/national.
One hears this all the time, that this number is staying steady percentage-wise. Yet the overall population is going up. Which is why in 1970 there were 22 million blacks in America, and now there are about 40 million. So they basically doubled while staying the same percentage. Which is why they seem to be everywhere yet the percentage stays the same. So it's false to suggest the black population isn't growing, as some do (not saying you did). It's grown quite a lot in my lifetime.
The propaganda war is just endless.
This is self-interest, not altruism.
I also think these new types, like this author, might have been fellow travelers previously. That project didn't work, so they've got this new cause, pushing "diversity".
But they won't be able to reverse this one. They're gambling a lot and they're going to lose (or their children will, in their new "utopia").
Do they really think that the newly empowered diverse ethnics will appreciate what they've done? Not at all. The best we can hope for is that there'll be so many different ethnicities that no one group will be able to take over.
If you reimagine the founders as black, then non-blacks may have trouble identifying with them. Perhaps the solution is to make one third white, one third black, and one third Latino, like the 9/11 statue based on that Record photographer’s photo of the 3 white firefighters.
Next up, the Iwo Jima image: one white, one black, one latino, one in bicycle shorts. (but what flag is being raised?)
After that, perhaps we could ret-con all the names on the Vietnam memorial to make them more reflect American society. I could totally see a Syrian refugee feeling alienated at the lack of surname diversity during his citizenship-enrichment tour.
The gist of all of these articles from our rulers in Manhattan is attack the white core of America.
Plan A: dispossession
Plan B: transmogrification
Plan C: combination of A/B
…they wouldn’t like an Israeli equivalent to this theatrical/political bulldozer at all. Retconning the founding of Israel? That would be an act of war!
Was Hamilton an "Invade the World, Invite the World" kinda guy?
No, the opposite. He was strongly opposed to getting involved in France’s war with Britain and was against immigration, at least later in his career.
We got house seats for about $150 apiece last October. Probably couldn’t do that now, but still…don’t believe everything you read.
Of course, after he's had a rest, he can come back for a limited run and get another spike in ticket prices.
Subjects for future Rap musicals:
Black Jack Pershing: The name says it all
Sherman! The greatest liberator of black slaves deserves his own musical.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/737843094952017920
If it didn’t happen in The Atlantic, it didn’t happen… oh, wait…
Hi, Ron. Just want to say thank you for hosting this site.
Hey, if a poem on a statue can be make Constitutional law, why not a play?
I heard Hip Hop music is heavily used in the New York City Broadway musical of Hamilton, even though the urban inner city World Star Hip Hop demographic can not afford to drop almost $2,800 dollars for a ticket.
Do most affluent middle age and senior citizen Jews who go to watch Hamilton actually bump rap music in their cars while driving?
Does George Soros blast Big Booty Hoes by 2 Live Crew out of his car speakers or Bitch Please by Snoop Dogg?
That’s good. If liberals appropriate the Founding Fathers for their own purposes, that leaves conservatives less embarassed by their cultural heritage of embracing openly anti-democratic policies. It increases the chance of a Pinochet, or at least some cozy Freikorps.
My take on this musical is different than Prof. Primus, perhaps due to my larger knowledge of history.
Desecrating the symbols, idols, monuments of the defeated has been standard practice for many millenia. Recall that Bush II had the huge statute of Saddam Hussein pulled down before his cheering troops. Over 3 thousand years before that the Pharaoh had the statues destroyed of folks who annoyed him. Even more recently in America, Confederate war heroes were posthumously dishonored by removing their statutes from public view.
This Hamilton musical is one more example of this common political behavior.
But even that doesn't quite capture what's happening, I think, because it implies they knew who he was in the first place. Beware of underestimating the ignorance of American pundits. For example, this tweet by NBC Sports columnist Joe Posnanski linking to his essay on what it's like to see Hamilton was shared over 1,300 times:
https://twitter.com/JPosnanski/status/737077009831059456
Here's the part where I stopped reading his essay:
"It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda."
"A previously minor Founding Father"? He was only the most lastingly influential of them. And you didn't need to read Chernow to know that; you just needed to have an cursory knowledge of American history.
For another example of ignorance, check out the second paragraph of this FT column by Jacob Weisberg over the weekend:
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/739345340042743808
I noted the protectionist part there, but you could also argue pretty easily that Lincoln was also an authoritarian and a racist. Of course, he still emancipated the slaves, and deserves credit for that, but I don't think Weisberg is trying to retcon him into an anti-racist, free-trade Hillary Clinton / Jeb Bush Republicrat -- I just think Weisberg is ignorant about American history. He knows Lincoln = good and Trump = bad, so he assumes Lincoln's positions must have all be the opposite of Trump's.
I was going to write a letter to the editor of the FT about that, but I had already fired of one on Gillian Tett's latest tone-deaf column when I saw that, so I DMed FT editor Lionel Barber instead, suggesting he consider assigning a fact-checker to Weisberg, based on Weisberg's ignorance about Lincoln, and his previous ignorance about Wilkie, which had been called out by a previous letter writer.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/734539043917180928
I noticed this from the article; with the notion hanging over it that in time Western countries will naturally and beneficially have the demographics of the globe.
That would explain why John McCain is pro-open borders. It's tribal, he is just looking out for his raza.
That may explain why he is a senator from Arizona and not Idaho!
Similar thought at work in U.K. Brexit supporters want stronger bonds with the Commonwealth (former British Empire countries) than E.U.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/12193101/Brexit-will-allow-Britain-to-embrace-the-Commonwealth.html
Good one.
James Whistler: [Something witty]
Oscar Wilde: Oh, James, that’s so witty. I wish had said that!
Whistler: Don’t worry, Oscar, you will.
King: "What?!?"
Whistler: "It was one of Shaw's."
https://youtu.be/UxXW6tfl2Y0
You actually read it? I thought that's what we paid Steve for - to read this s**t for us. I only skimmed the exerpts, and only actually read Steve's commentary.
You actually read it? I thought that’s what we paid Steve for
I try to understand my enemy, I try to learn how to think like my enemy. It takes a lot of concentration and will power to stay focused as I read their gibberish.
L-M M announced he’s leaving the show in July, so that’s probably driving up prices now.
Of course, after he’s had a rest, he can come back for a limited run and get another spike in ticket prices.
Black Jack Pershing: The name says it all
Sherman! The greatest liberator of black slaves deserves his own musical.
Another idea:
“Has anybody been able to suffer through any of the “musical” numbers of this play for a real assessment? Is it as bad as most rap, or actually better? Is it possible to differentiate on any level?”
The initial song from which this all started is on YouTube and was performed at the White House several years back (to Obama, of course). It was told from the perspective of Aaron Burr. It was actually quite good – amazingly good. The cast album, though, seems to be dreck. I listened to samples of every single song when it was first released and couldn’t get into any of them. My 15-year-old niece is really into it, so I’ve heard a few songs all the way through – and it hasn’t changed my opinion that it’s crap. But take crappy music, a young cast, and some high octane dance numbers and you can still get a musical that reels the suckers in. “Spring Awakening” is a good example of that.
My brother gets season tickets to the touring Broadway shows. He told me when Hamilton comes through town (the tour has just been announced) they plan to sell their tickets and he thinks he’ll net $1,5000 or more for the five of them. He’s done that before so I don’t think he’s exaggerating. Hopefully his daughter will be over the show by the time that happens, or she may never forgive him.
Is that going to be the new portrait on the five-dollar bill perchance?
The actual cultural impact of Hamilton on minorities' views on the Founding Fathers? Zilch.
The actual real world influence of this essay? Zilch.
Except we really aren’t talking about “conservatism” or “liberalism” here.
We are talking about two very different groups/tribes and two very different Founding Text traditions.
Mr. Primus does not have roots in Founding Stock America. His roots involve envisioning a world-repair (tikkun olam) scheme where this republic is remade in his own people’s image. I.e., The Two Percent. (Which is why all that bashing on about minority this and minority that, and victim this and slavery that.)
That tradition is grounded in occupying societies, gaining power within them, and doing as much violence as possible to their fabric before moving on.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3531164,00.html
http://forward.com/news/134962/the-chinese-discover-jews-and-israel-and-can-t-s/
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/oh-to-be-jewish-in-china/
And most notably:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/12/influencing-how-jews-are-seen-in-china-its-all-about-nobel-prizes-and-tolerance-of-dissent/
Your references support your first assertion ("gaining power within [societies]") but give no facts at all concerning your second assertion ("doing as much violence as possible").
Your last reference mentions the discouraging of discussion that Jewish influence might have a negative effect, but provides no such reasoned discussion. In other words, there is no case made that Jewish influence is negative in your references. Whether it is or isn't is a different discussion, but that discussion is not provided.
Desecrating the symbols, idols, monuments of the defeated has been standard practice for many millenia. Recall that Bush II had the huge statute of Saddam Hussein pulled down before his cheering troops. Over 3 thousand years before that the Pharaoh had the statues destroyed of folks who annoyed him. Even more recently in America, Confederate war heroes were posthumously dishonored by removing their statutes from public view.
This Hamilton musical is one more example of this common political behavior.
This is something different. No one is toppling a statue of Hamilton, even metaphorically (though, you could argue, knocking him off the $10 would have been the equivalent of it). They are retconning him.
But even that doesn’t quite capture what’s happening, I think, because it implies they knew who he was in the first place. Beware of underestimating the ignorance of American pundits. For example, this tweet by NBC Sports columnist Joe Posnanski linking to his essay on what it’s like to see Hamilton was shared over 1,300 times:
Here’s the part where I stopped reading his essay:
“It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda.”
“A previously minor Founding Father”? He was only the most lastingly influential of them. And you didn’t need to read Chernow to know that; you just needed to have an cursory knowledge of American history.
For another example of ignorance, check out the second paragraph of this FT column by Jacob Weisberg over the weekend:
I noted the protectionist part there, but you could also argue pretty easily that Lincoln was also an authoritarian and a racist. Of course, he still emancipated the slaves, and deserves credit for that, but I don’t think Weisberg is trying to retcon him into an anti-racist, free-trade Hillary Clinton / Jeb Bush Republicrat — I just think Weisberg is ignorant about American history. He knows Lincoln = good and Trump = bad, so he assumes Lincoln’s positions must have all be the opposite of Trump’s.
I was going to write a letter to the editor of the FT about that, but I had already fired of one on Gillian Tett’s latest tone-deaf column when I saw that, so I DMed FT editor Lionel Barber instead, suggesting he consider assigning a fact-checker to Weisberg, based on Weisberg’s ignorance about Lincoln, and his previous ignorance about Wilkie, which had been called out by a previous letter writer.
from the Libertarian national convention.
I have maintained for a couple of years now that we need to abolish tenure at state universities. Make it possible to fire professors..............and then fire them.
I think it would be a winning issue in state elections, and it would put the academic left on the defensive.
Big waste of time. Instead, encourage high school students to do distance learning.
I agree with you, Dave.
Next up, the Iwo Jima image: one white, one black, one latino, one in bicycle shorts. (but what flag is being raised?)
After that, perhaps we could ret-con all the names on the Vietnam memorial to make them more reflect American society. I could totally see a Syrian refugee feeling alienated at the lack of surname diversity during his citizenship-enrichment tour.
The Rainbow Flag, of course. That's what our brave boys (and women, and trans-persons) were fighting for in WWII, dont' you know - LGBT rights.
“the successful 1779 Sullivan Expedition,”
Led by a Negro…remember the Irish ‘became’ white…general.
But even that doesn't quite capture what's happening, I think, because it implies they knew who he was in the first place. Beware of underestimating the ignorance of American pundits. For example, this tweet by NBC Sports columnist Joe Posnanski linking to his essay on what it's like to see Hamilton was shared over 1,300 times:
https://twitter.com/JPosnanski/status/737077009831059456
Here's the part where I stopped reading his essay:
"It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda."
"A previously minor Founding Father"? He was only the most lastingly influential of them. And you didn't need to read Chernow to know that; you just needed to have an cursory knowledge of American history.
For another example of ignorance, check out the second paragraph of this FT column by Jacob Weisberg over the weekend:
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/739345340042743808
I noted the protectionist part there, but you could also argue pretty easily that Lincoln was also an authoritarian and a racist. Of course, he still emancipated the slaves, and deserves credit for that, but I don't think Weisberg is trying to retcon him into an anti-racist, free-trade Hillary Clinton / Jeb Bush Republicrat -- I just think Weisberg is ignorant about American history. He knows Lincoln = good and Trump = bad, so he assumes Lincoln's positions must have all be the opposite of Trump's.
I was going to write a letter to the editor of the FT about that, but I had already fired of one on Gillian Tett's latest tone-deaf column when I saw that, so I DMed FT editor Lionel Barber instead, suggesting he consider assigning a fact-checker to Weisberg, based on Weisberg's ignorance about Lincoln, and his previous ignorance about Wilkie, which had been called out by a previous letter writer.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/734539043917180928
I used to read Joe Posnanski regularly; he was (and sometimes still is) a very good sportswriter. He’s like Bill Simmons in that he’s good at speaking from the POV of a true sports fan (in the sense of fanatic), although he was orginally more of an in-the-locker-room guy.
So I carried on and read the whole Posnanski essay, and I suggest readers of this thread do the same. It’s incredibly relevant to this conversation.
Just witness the following sequence:
If you want an articulate, blow-by-blow account of exactly how ‘Hamilton’ is ret-conning the mythos of the founding fathers in a contemporary stale pale male’s brain, just as Richard Primus suggests, you could not do better than this.
Joe doesn’t even need to go to Room 101; he’s happy to pay for the privilege of loving Big Brother.
His description of the show does clarify its appeal: If you use hip hop and fancy clothes you can narrate history and foster patriotism. It also suggests that Hamiltonmania can be used for all sorts of things: if Posnanski used it to celebrate parental love, and Primus used it to celebrate packing the Supreme Court, maybe someone else can use the show to promote toothpaste or transgender swimming pools. You can be sure that there will be a thousand articles in the next year that will be using something from this musical as a hook: "In Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, the characters sing about harnessing the power of the falls in Paterson, New Jersey, so let me tell you how to fix that leaky faucet in the kitchen ..."
Success always leads to derivative sequels; I'm sure, right now, there are people developing musicals on other scenes in American history (T Genius missed the boat by not writing his US Grant musical, preferring to write comic books instead.) Actually I don't think it's a bad thing if people become enthusiastic about their identity as Americans, even if the history is bowdlerized, and historical characters are compelled to talk in Millenial street jargon.
“In ’N Out Burgers live up to the hype.”
Nah. I’ve been eating at In-N-Out several times per year over the last decade and a half and occasionally before that going back to the early 1980s. I’m happy to have that opportunity, but don’t let the hype raise your expectations too high. In-N-Out is very good but not miraculous.
Now, on the other hand, Chik-Fil-A …
Nah. I’ve been eating at In-N-Out several times per year over the last decade and a half and occasionally before that going back to the early 1980s. I’m happy to have that opportunity, but don’t let the hype raise your expectations too high. In-N-Out is very good but not miraculous.
Now, on the other hand, Chik-Fil-A …"
In-N-Out has the worst fries in the history of mankind. Heck it's an insult to even call them fries, when they actually taste like shoestring potatoes from a can that you can purchase at any supermarket.
Chick-Fil-A waffle fries however are a Godsend.
Yeah, I agree, but at least it’s a lot cheaper than two tickets to Hamilton . . . .
A subtheme of the Posnanski article is his responsible-Dad attempt to justify spending what clearly seems, even to him, an inordinate amount of money.
But who is to say that his Responsible Dad act is not worth it? Here's how Posnanski's article about "Hamilton" starts out:
"The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am."
So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.
All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he's Not White.
That message seems awfully cheap.
“What made Hamilton different, I think, was that in addition to rising up, in addition to surpassing those hopes, it felt familiar too, as if we’d already seen it long ago and are now happily remembering.”
I haven’t seen the musical. I’m sure it’s fine.
But I suspect that much of its appeal is in validating for white people who can afford to see “Hamilton” in New York just how great life in New York is these days for white people who can afford to see “Hamilton.”
You see, Alexander Hamilton was the ultimate New Yorker, and sure, he was a plutocrat who feared and loathed democracy. That used to sound bad. But now we know that’s not the point, the point is that he was an Immigrant from the West Indies, so he was Diverse!
Granted, if you look at Hamilton’s portrait on the ten dollar bill, he looks like the whitest man of all time. But the point is that he was Diverse. Okay, maybe Alexander Hamilton doesn’t look diverse to you. We’ll just have to agree to disagree that you are unable to see what I can see. I can’t really explain to you why Hamilton and thus everybody in New York who can afford to see “Hamilton” is Diverse, but you’ll just have to trust me on this because, after all, I’ve seen “Hamilton.”
And you haven’t.
Indeed.
But who is to say that his Responsible Dad act is not worth it? Here’s how Posnanski’s article about “Hamilton” starts out:
“The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am.”
So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.
All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he’s Not White.
That message seems awfully cheap.
And I suspect Joe can afford it anyway.
https://twitter.com/johnlegere/status/736730114684297220
cause he’s been kicking’ ass as the ambassador to France
I would be embarrassed on behalf of a 10 year old if he wrote such dreck. Amazing that adults are taking this seriously.
I think the bottom line is that Joe Posnanski’s Hamilton article just shows that he loves his daughter. And that’s great. There’s no agenda otherwise.
His description of the show does clarify its appeal: If you use hip hop and fancy clothes you can narrate history and foster patriotism. It also suggests that Hamiltonmania can be used for all sorts of things: if Posnanski used it to celebrate parental love, and Primus used it to celebrate packing the Supreme Court, maybe someone else can use the show to promote toothpaste or transgender swimming pools. You can be sure that there will be a thousand articles in the next year that will be using something from this musical as a hook: “In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, the characters sing about harnessing the power of the falls in Paterson, New Jersey, so let me tell you how to fix that leaky faucet in the kitchen …”
Success always leads to derivative sequels; I’m sure, right now, there are people developing musicals on other scenes in American history (T Genius missed the boat by not writing his US Grant musical, preferring to write comic books instead.) Actually I don’t think it’s a bad thing if people become enthusiastic about their identity as Americans, even if the history is bowdlerized, and historical characters are compelled to talk in Millenial street jargon.
But who is to say that his Responsible Dad act is not worth it? Here's how Posnanski's article about "Hamilton" starts out:
"The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am."
So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.
All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he's Not White.
That message seems awfully cheap.
Well said, Steve!
And I suspect Joe can afford it anyway.
His description of the show does clarify its appeal: If you use hip hop and fancy clothes you can narrate history and foster patriotism. It also suggests that Hamiltonmania can be used for all sorts of things: if Posnanski used it to celebrate parental love, and Primus used it to celebrate packing the Supreme Court, maybe someone else can use the show to promote toothpaste or transgender swimming pools. You can be sure that there will be a thousand articles in the next year that will be using something from this musical as a hook: "In Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, the characters sing about harnessing the power of the falls in Paterson, New Jersey, so let me tell you how to fix that leaky faucet in the kitchen ..."
Success always leads to derivative sequels; I'm sure, right now, there are people developing musicals on other scenes in American history (T Genius missed the boat by not writing his US Grant musical, preferring to write comic books instead.) Actually I don't think it's a bad thing if people become enthusiastic about their identity as Americans, even if the history is bowdlerized, and historical characters are compelled to talk in Millenial street jargon.
I agree Posnanski would never have sprung for those tickets if it weren’t for his daughter, but I’m not so sure there’s no harm being done when a ret-conned faux-history like Hamilton is used as a ‘weapon’, as the Atlantic essay puts it.
I can’t read Posnanski’s exultations about Hamilton without feeling a bit queasy, no matter how much he loves his daughter . . . it’d be nice if he could at least try to maintain some perspective on what he’s watching.
Do you really think seeing Hamilton makes people feel enthusiastic about their identity as actual Americans, or is it making them feel good about being ‘Hamilton Americans’, i.e. members of a tribe that exists only via acquiesence to a particular vision of social engineering that’s meant to undermine, or even overthrow, the real thing?
I get the sense in both articles that a lot of people in this country (mostly prog lefties) feel alienated from our colonial past, and part of this embarrassing gush about Hamilton has to do with these people overcoming that sense of estrangement, through the alchemy of having the Founders turned into Founders of Color and singing vulgar doggerel. It's not the way I would prefer to inspire patriotism, but there it is.
There are numerous false notes, of course. The idea of white people taking pride in our country once they can convince themselves that they are Persons of Color because Black People and Latinos are transcending white is a page right out of Rachel Dolezal. So is the self-satisfaction of white people actually seeing themselves as POC because they forked over $2,500 to see a musical which is like two months of income for real disadvantaged people in this country, black and white.
I don't get the sense that there's an actual political program being pushed in the musical, maybe there is, but the social(ist) engineering that's underway is not dependent on the musical. That's a whole nuther set of problems.
Well, I can agree about the queasy thing, but I prefer to be more reticent about my loved ones.
I get the sense in both articles that a lot of people in this country (mostly prog lefties) feel alienated from our colonial past, and part of this embarrassing gush about Hamilton has to do with these people overcoming that sense of estrangement, through the alchemy of having the Founders turned into Founders of Color and singing vulgar doggerel. It’s not the way I would prefer to inspire patriotism, but there it is.
There are numerous false notes, of course. The idea of white people taking pride in our country once they can convince themselves that they are Persons of Color because Black People and Latinos are transcending white is a page right out of Rachel Dolezal. So is the self-satisfaction of white people actually seeing themselves as POC because they forked over $2,500 to see a musical which is like two months of income for real disadvantaged people in this country, black and white.
I don’t get the sense that there’s an actual political program being pushed in the musical, maybe there is, but the social(ist) engineering that’s underway is not dependent on the musical. That’s a whole nuther set of problems.
Do most affluent middle age and senior citizen Jews who go to watch Hamilton actually bump rap music in their cars while driving?
Does George Soros blast Big Booty Hoes by 2 Live Crew out of his car speakers or Bitch Please by Snoop Dogg?
No,but it lets their nephews in theater criticism listen to a musical about the Founding Fathers without feeling guilty.
His description of the show does clarify its appeal: If you use hip hop and fancy clothes you can narrate history and foster patriotism. It also suggests that Hamiltonmania can be used for all sorts of things: if Posnanski used it to celebrate parental love, and Primus used it to celebrate packing the Supreme Court, maybe someone else can use the show to promote toothpaste or transgender swimming pools. You can be sure that there will be a thousand articles in the next year that will be using something from this musical as a hook: "In Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, the characters sing about harnessing the power of the falls in Paterson, New Jersey, so let me tell you how to fix that leaky faucet in the kitchen ..."
Success always leads to derivative sequels; I'm sure, right now, there are people developing musicals on other scenes in American history (T Genius missed the boat by not writing his US Grant musical, preferring to write comic books instead.) Actually I don't think it's a bad thing if people become enthusiastic about their identity as Americans, even if the history is bowdlerized, and historical characters are compelled to talk in Millenial street jargon.
There is this thing called modern dress Shakespeare. They usually use the original language though.
And Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The appeal to accolade strategy presumes that there is something meaningful backing the accolade. If the elite institutions are corrupted and rotting from the center, then what they elevate as being important and worthy is merely a reflection of their own internally corrupt values and likely diverges from independent measures of value which correspond to results produced in the real world.
Caltech admits students on merit. Harvard admits students in order to create racial diversity and must lower standards for many NAMS. To say that Harvard graduates the elite of the nation essentially boils down to a tautology. Harvard elites who are less intelligent than Caltech elites will be outperformed by the Caltech graduates in fair contests. A corrupt society which continues to elevate the Harvard elites will be a society rotting from the inside. Same with the Nobel committee, same with the Pulitzer organization, etc.
Agree. The Empire of the United States is now ruled by an elite drowning in political correctness and the illusions it fosters. Our current corrupt political culture in which nothing works reminds me of the Eastern Roman Empire and its attempts to dislodge the Vandals from North Africa: multiple attempts on the part of 100,000+ armies and navies to dislodge 60,000 barbarians … and failing each time. Recall Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s what happens when effeminate courtiers and political correctness replace competence in the affairs of state.
“Diversity is unity … diversity is strength. War is peace. All cultures are equal (although some are more equal than others). Long live the Empire!”
A note: Some historians have noted that empires by their very nature necessitate diversity in their political doctrine and organization. Recall that one of the reasons that American Blacks were given “equal rights” in the 1960s and the Constitution was retconed to require it was driven by President Eisenhower and his administration competing with the Soviets for influence in the newly independent European colonies in Africa. It was a foreign policy decision. I can imagine that the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 that opened our borders to non-European immigrants was based on a similar consideration.
A lesson: There is no hope for our survival as a cohesive nation state unless we give up the Empire so we can purge Washington of its imperial courtiers and their imperial pretensions. This is the real contest between Trump and the Hildebeast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkckuFUfi0k
“Valence”: now there’s a big-time bullshit trigger warning.
In this so-called analysis, then, Lin-Manuel Miranda will have recast Alexander Hamilton–or is it Aaron Burr?–as The Man Who Shot The Pro-Liberty Valence.
I’m so confused.
Posnanski’s career took a major hit when he embedded with Joe Paterno and family for what all hoped would be a happy biography. But he did so at the exact time the Jerry Sandusky case exploded. Rather than tell the truth, he continued to indulge his subject and his family depicting the great man as blameless as it became clear Paterno knew all about his former defensive coordinator’s crimes. Here Posnanski is a guy trying to get his career back on track by embracing pop culture nonsense. He cannot go back to being a sportswriter because he has no credibility in that arena. But what better way to establish his SJW bona fides than to embrace this nonsense.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/nyregion/21strochlitz.html?_r=0Primus and his bride got a nice write up in the NYT for their wedding:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/fashion/weddings/06brensike.html
And Primus is doing an excellent job of demonstrating why the Germans may have had good reason to dislike a certain tribe.
If one doesn’t condone racism then one should support the right of Europeans to not be flooded by racist foreigners who wsnt to impose their alien wsys on the natives.
Technically they were “white Europeans” but it would be far more precise and meaningful to say they were Anglos. You are the one “retconning” them to fit some pathetic pan-European ideological agenda.
Don't take my word for it. Ask Jefferson:
http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Anglo-Saxon
The play might be fine but I am always amused by the assertions of ultra-white liberals that hip hop is a potential force for positive social change because it speaks to the young and diverse. When I was in public school in the late 80s and early 90s we always were encouraged to do special projects in school that consisted of creating an original rap song about the subject (usually not to sell or use drugs) and I still occasionally read about public schools doing the same thing today – how’s that working out?
I also appreciated the author of this piece baldly stating that one of the appeals of Hamilton is the subject’s “passionately progressive views on…issues of federal power.” This is the point that rarely gets the attention it deserves – while the left will proclaim that any given prominent GOPer is a fascist because it implies they are dictatorial, it’s the left for whom muscular central authority over every element of life is the desired goal of politics.
Citizenism is wishful thinking that denies the tribal nature of humans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/nyregion/21strochlitz.html?_r=0Primus and his bride got a nice write up in the NYT for their wedding:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/fashion/weddings/06brensike.html
I wonder if Mr. Primus would be so enthusiastic about Palestinian Arabs “appropriating” the founding narrative of Israel for their own Islamic causes…. perhaps someday they’ll write a stage play about Menachem Begin and Irgun dressed in keffiyehs rapping out passages from the Q’uran?
The black man and the red man have always been at odds.
Ron, agree. Is there any hope for the Republic when cognitive dissonance and inconsistent, delusional, and counter-factual states-of-mind are common practice in government, academia, and the MSM? This is of special concern when dissenters, as in Mao’s utopia, are publicly humiliated, castigated, and ruined.
Mao had his “Little Red Book”. Is there anything comparable for our situation … perhaps a “Little Blue Book” sitting on a desk somewhere to outline the new utopian vision? Regardless, I don’t think our current “Cultural Revolution” has any more of a chance for success than Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
No, it would not be a waste of time. It would force the professoriate to expend all their effort on defending their own sinecures. And, if it worked, it would remove those sinecures from which the professoriate works to demolish society. It would actually be a highly useful and, I think, popular issue.
“You see, Alexander Hamilton was the ultimate New Yorker, and sure, he was a plutocrat who feared and loathed democracy. ”
Moreover, the people who are shelling out $2,700+ to see Hamilton are plutocrats (or the hirelings of plutocrats) who also fear and loathe democracy.
But even that doesn't quite capture what's happening, I think, because it implies they knew who he was in the first place. Beware of underestimating the ignorance of American pundits. For example, this tweet by NBC Sports columnist Joe Posnanski linking to his essay on what it's like to see Hamilton was shared over 1,300 times:
https://twitter.com/JPosnanski/status/737077009831059456
Here's the part where I stopped reading his essay:
"It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda."
"A previously minor Founding Father"? He was only the most lastingly influential of them. And you didn't need to read Chernow to know that; you just needed to have an cursory knowledge of American history.
For another example of ignorance, check out the second paragraph of this FT column by Jacob Weisberg over the weekend:
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/739345340042743808
I noted the protectionist part there, but you could also argue pretty easily that Lincoln was also an authoritarian and a racist. Of course, he still emancipated the slaves, and deserves credit for that, but I don't think Weisberg is trying to retcon him into an anti-racist, free-trade Hillary Clinton / Jeb Bush Republicrat -- I just think Weisberg is ignorant about American history. He knows Lincoln = good and Trump = bad, so he assumes Lincoln's positions must have all be the opposite of Trump's.
I was going to write a letter to the editor of the FT about that, but I had already fired of one on Gillian Tett's latest tone-deaf column when I saw that, so I DMed FT editor Lionel Barber instead, suggesting he consider assigning a fact-checker to Weisberg, based on Weisberg's ignorance about Lincoln, and his previous ignorance about Wilkie, which had been called out by a previous letter writer.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/734539043917180928
from the Libertarian national convention.
Next up, the Iwo Jima image: one white, one black, one latino, one in bicycle shorts. (but what flag is being raised?)
After that, perhaps we could ret-con all the names on the Vietnam memorial to make them more reflect American society. I could totally see a Syrian refugee feeling alienated at the lack of surname diversity during his citizenship-enrichment tour.
“Next up, the Iwo Jima image: one white, one black, one latino, one in bicycle shorts. (but what flag is being raised?)”
The Rainbow Flag, of course. That’s what our brave boys (and women, and trans-persons) were fighting for in WWII, dont’ you know – LGBT rights.
You forgot to add the Q. It is now LGBTQ. Get with the times man, what are you a hermit living in an isolated rural shack?
My beef (pun intended!) is with the Springsteen concert. Saw him once at the old Giants Stadium, from the opposite end zone. He was the size of an ant and, if you looked on the Jumbotron, his lips weren’t synched with the sound.
But who is to say that his Responsible Dad act is not worth it? Here's how Posnanski's article about "Hamilton" starts out:
"The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am."
So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.
All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he's Not White.
That message seems awfully cheap.
I was kind of wondering about that when I saw this tweet by T-Mobile’s CEO. Is the message young women are getting to find a man like Hamilton or Miranda? I guess it’s a win either way.
“It’s Springtime for Hamilton and America….”
People used to tar and feather newspapermen for idiocy like this or ride them out of town on a rail. Either would be appropriate if just to encourage the others.
In this so-called analysis, then, Lin-Manuel Miranda will have recast Alexander Hamilton--or is it Aaron Burr?--as The Man Who Shot The Pro-Liberty Valence.
I'm so confused.
The valence BS trigger is the Prog/Cathedral/Media hint that they intend to induce some serious chemical reactions to break apart the valence bonds in the atoms that make up society and so reorder America. That is some dangerous ‘pro-nuclear’ thinking, and the average citizen has no clue of the resulting post-reaction radiation that will ruin what the genius of Founding Fathers built.
Steve, Gruff deserves the Gilt Edge, no?
Not only is that an idiotic idea, but the percentages involved are just not that important. Black folks in the US comprise about 12% of the population, whereas the real issues concern the approximately 30% who are of Latin descent.
I do think the author is right about one thing. The SCOTUS and politics generally is going to become more liberal, that is, statist, that is, based on social programs to quiet a restive population. It's just a question of how socialist we become and whether anyone is honest enough to use the "S" word.
However, that agenda, and the progressive liberal pushing forward of that agenda, is not going to depend on a musical that "allows" progressive to "imagine" the Constitution, or to "relate" in a groovy kind of way with the Founders. Except for serious students of the subject, history is mostly a post facto handmaiden and justification for politics. Nothing new here.
What is a bit surprising to me is the very lax statement of what the Constitution is to be, that is, something that anyone can "imagine" it to be, at any particular point in time. I can understand the development of postmodernism in many respects, but I do not think that postmodern jurisprudence has any chance in a well ordered society.
It’s both silly and an accurate reflection of the conventional wisdom among our ruling corporate/political classes.
The plan was the make blacks white (cf. Cliff Huxtable). That having failed, the new plan is evidently to make (historical) whites black. The connotation of white in this case being “blank” rather than any specific ethnicity, i.e. post-ethnic/national.
It’s not exactly guilt. They still feel no affection for the founding fathers of the American nation, since the concept of nation is one they’ve been taught to loathe (nationalism being what caused those things we’re never to forget). What Hamilton allows then to do (according to this article) is to appropriate the fathers as the founders of their post-national cosmopolitan tribe.
But who is to say that his Responsible Dad act is not worth it? Here's how Posnanski's article about "Hamilton" starts out:
"The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am."
So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.
All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he's Not White.
That message seems awfully cheap.
Kind of risky. If she takes the whole message to heart and brings home a guy any darker than Miranda, I wonder if Posnanski would plotz.
“With the Supreme Court on the brink of moving leftward…”
A truly bogus statement that attempts to completely re-frame reality. As our host often says, liberals have no idea, or simply refuse to admit, they’ve been in charge of the country for the last 50 years. In the last few decades, the Supreme Court has been trying to merely slow the rate of change.
“From the late 1930s until the early 1970s, the Supreme Court was an agent of progressive social change. The justices issued landmark decisions on racial desegregation, voting rights, free speech, criminal procedure, and sex equality.”
He leaves out a small decision from 1973 that allegedly had something to do with privacy. I like how the overall tenor of the article is that liberals are now going to become strict constuctionists in changing the constitution. They are looking to co-opt the only arrow in the conservative quiver.
“What matters is who tells the story…”
Isn’t this truly what it’s all about? Someone commenting on this very site put it extraordinarily well: history is malleable to a determined storyteller.
Was Hamilton an "Invade the World, Invite the World" kinda guy?
As the key supporter of a national bank to enrich his crony friends, he was all about “in hock to the world” though.
Whistler: “Your majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss.”
King: “What?!?”
Whistler: “It was one of Shaw’s.”
I wish the libs that want to live in a POC majority country, would explain just how they intend to stay on top; the elite, after the turnover. From reading what they write and say, they don’t appear to have any qualms about it. It’s just the natural order of things for them to stay on top?
If they get what they wish for, it’s gonna be a mucho big surprise!
But who is to say that his Responsible Dad act is not worth it? Here's how Posnanski's article about "Hamilton" starts out:
"The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am."
So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.
All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he's Not White.
That message seems awfully cheap.
Been mentioned before on this site, but fathers transferring their dynastic urges to their daughters explains a fair chunk of Feminist foolishness in contemporary America….
The biggest feminists these days were probably neglected weirdos as kids. More attention seekers than Daddy's girls.
Not only is that an idiotic idea, but the percentages involved are just not that important. Black folks in the US comprise about 12% of the population, whereas the real issues concern the approximately 30% who are of Latin descent.
I do think the author is right about one thing. The SCOTUS and politics generally is going to become more liberal, that is, statist, that is, based on social programs to quiet a restive population. It's just a question of how socialist we become and whether anyone is honest enough to use the "S" word.
However, that agenda, and the progressive liberal pushing forward of that agenda, is not going to depend on a musical that "allows" progressive to "imagine" the Constitution, or to "relate" in a groovy kind of way with the Founders. Except for serious students of the subject, history is mostly a post facto handmaiden and justification for politics. Nothing new here.
What is a bit surprising to me is the very lax statement of what the Constitution is to be, that is, something that anyone can "imagine" it to be, at any particular point in time. I can understand the development of postmodernism in many respects, but I do not think that postmodern jurisprudence has any chance in a well ordered society.
Black folks in the US comprise about 12% of the population,
One hears this all the time, that this number is staying steady percentage-wise. Yet the overall population is going up. Which is why in 1970 there were 22 million blacks in America, and now there are about 40 million. So they basically doubled while staying the same percentage. Which is why they seem to be everywhere yet the percentage stays the same. So it’s false to suggest the black population isn’t growing, as some do (not saying you did). It’s grown quite a lot in my lifetime.
The whisky tax was against the poorest people in the nation. It was the people on the western side of the Appalachians that had to distill the fruits of their labor in order to easier haul it over the mountains to the population centers. That tax was used to pay rich bond holders of the American Revolutionary war debt. No other people in the US were being taxed by the federal government. Just those poor dirt farming people on the frontier.
Thank God Aaron Burr shot the sorry bastard dead.
Its very telling that the powers that be suddenly elevate this guy to a hero. And it all began with some bs book on Hamilton by a guy named Chernow.
Does the musical include the duel between Burr and Hamilton? Might be worth it just for that.
Exactly. Preceded by the replacement of God by self as an object of worship, as can be seen in that quote. Becoming gods (to themselves) they’ve sought to create their daughters in their own image.
“What matters is who tells the story.”
And it was always thus.
This explains second wave feminism (Title IX) but not the the kooky third wave.
The biggest feminists these days were probably neglected weirdos as kids. More attention seekers than Daddy’s girls.
The Rainbow Flag, of course. That's what our brave boys (and women, and trans-persons) were fighting for in WWII, dont' you know - LGBT rights.
“The Rainbow Flag, of course. That’s what our brave boys (and women, and trans-persons) were fighting for in WWII, dont’ you know – LGBT rights.”
You forgot to add the Q. It is now LGBTQ. Get with the times man, what are you a hermit living in an isolated rural shack?
I've seen it rendered as LGBTQWERTY, which I thought was pretty funny.
All analogies to Israel are anti-Semitic and out of bounds.
Whatever prices Hamilton! tickets are fetching, and however much the chattering classes chatter about it, the wider impact of the show continues to be ridiculously overstated. I was watching Band of Brothers recently, and when an officer happened to mention that Oklahoma was still running on Broadway the company sprung into a spontaneous performance of the title song. Whether or not this is accurate, it is absolutely impossible for the same to happen for any song from Hamilton. Because regular people don’t know them. Because the show, and Broadway in general, have no relevance to regular people’s lives. Unless they happen to visit New York.
Which isn’t to say the show won’t have relevance to graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia in the coming generations. But if you think the ones setting legal precedence are likely to be originalists, you’re nuts. Or if what it means to be an originalist hasn’t been progressing minute by minute already, you’re out of touch. If you think the Constitution or what the Founders and Framers thought matter, you’ve missed the boat. The Supreme Court already gave us the right the gay marriage. Hamilton!, I don’t imagine, makes George Washington a homo. So reality is already ahead of Hamilton! By the time kids who put on their own Podunk High productions get to law school we’ll be arguing over whether 12 year olds have the right to marry, and sentient robots will be telling us Thomas Jefferson had them in mind all along.
That said, Broadway can still be pretty influential, and far beyond New York. There are high school and community theater productions of past Broadway hits all over the country.
The actual cultural impact of Hamilton on minorities' views on the Founding Fathers? Zilch.
The actual real world influence of this essay? Zilch.
Originalism is not a potent weapon. It fails constantly. Pretty much the only thing it has going for it is that people occasionally read the Constitution, which was written in comprehensible English. But it’s harmless, because the Constitution has no force of law. Or at best it’s an empty shell, full of the prevailing ideology. Anti-originalists already won, and have already danced on the Constitution’s grave generations ago.
Articles in the Atlantic might as well be telling us Hamilton! Will finally kill the menace of George III-ism.
Do you mean this George III?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Bush
As for originalism, I do believe it is potent as an organizing principle. I concede your point as to its failure in the politcal-judicial wars. A march through the institutions translates into more power than having a foundation to your ideology.
“In ’N Out Burgers live up to the hype.”
Nah. I’ve been eating at In-N-Out several times per year over the last decade and a half and occasionally before that going back to the early 1980s. I’m happy to have that opportunity, but don’t let the hype raise your expectations too high. In-N-Out is very good but not miraculous.
Now, on the other hand, Chik-Fil-A …”
In-N-Out has the worst fries in the history of mankind. Heck it’s an insult to even call them fries, when they actually taste like shoestring potatoes from a can that you can purchase at any supermarket.
Chick-Fil-A waffle fries however are a Godsend.
So he admits that there IS such a thing as an actual original meaning of the Constitution, but we are free to ignore that and “imagine” a new one if it suits us better. This is less dishonest, but more who-whomist, than deconstructionists who pretend that words have no inherent meaning at all. It turns out that leftists don’t have to formally overthrow the government of the US – they can just “imagine” the Constitution into meaninglessness ( a “Constitution” that positively requires the states to let boys marry boys) and reach the same goal. All those folks throwing bombs in the ’60s and before were just wasting their time and got nowhere, but word by word, drip by drip, guys like Primus will erode the Constitution more effectively than they ever could.
This is just the usual post-modern tyranny. “Original meaning” doesn’t actually mean “original meaning”,it means, “whatever WE say is the original meaning”. Lewis Carroll anticipated all of this long before Lenin, before Orwell, before deconstructionism:
The left took over while the right snoozed. We made it very easy, really.
Since Alexander Hamilton was an immigrant from the Caribbean, why was there no reggae music incorportated into this Broadway musical?
This reggae song should have played when the Alexander Hamilton character by Lin Manuel Miranda first appears on stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k05n4xpXFeI
Child pornography of the most extreme type was sold openly there. Most sourced from Robert DiBernardo’s warehouse premises, rented from the husband of Geraldinae Anne Ferraro
The propaganda war is just endless.
It really is depressing and one feels so helpless to change anything.
I follow the less closely than I used to because it’s so discouraging.
The initial song from which this all started is on YouTube and was performed at the White House several years back (to Obama, of course). It was told from the perspective of Aaron Burr. It was actually quite good - amazingly good. The cast album, though, seems to be dreck. I listened to samples of every single song when it was first released and couldn't get into any of them. My 15-year-old niece is really into it, so I've heard a few songs all the way through - and it hasn't changed my opinion that it's crap. But take crappy music, a young cast, and some high octane dance numbers and you can still get a musical that reels the suckers in. "Spring Awakening" is a good example of that.
My brother gets season tickets to the touring Broadway shows. He told me when Hamilton comes through town (the tour has just been announced) they plan to sell their tickets and he thinks he'll net $1,5000 or more for the five of them. He's done that before so I don't think he's exaggerating. Hopefully his daughter will be over the show by the time that happens, or she may never forgive him.
This is reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s MOULIN ROUGE from (gosh!) 15 years ago now. No musicality, just the “clever” repurposing of lyrics from several well-known pop music standards in song-and-dance routines that had energy and not much else. Was supposedly popular at the time, but barely anyone remembers these days.
"Hamilton" really reminds me more of "Spring Awakening" - a show with a lot of angst, a political ax to grand, and some powerful dancing, but when I left the show I found that both the show (and especially the music) were totally forgettable. I found Miranda's earlier hit, "In the Heights," to also be insanely overrated. The music from it doesn't really seem to have entered the songbook.
What are they gaining, if you say it’s self-interest? They remind me of Communist fellow travellers. Now they themselves didn’t suffer only because they never had to live under it.
I also think these new types, like this author, might have been fellow travelers previously. That project didn’t work, so they’ve got this new cause, pushing “diversity”.
But they won’t be able to reverse this one. They’re gambling a lot and they’re going to lose (or their children will, in their new “utopia”).
Do they really think that the newly empowered diverse ethnics will appreciate what they’ve done? Not at all. The best we can hope for is that there’ll be so many different ethnicities that no one group will be able to take over.
He’s somewhat atypical. Speculating … probably in part because of having a strong holocaust enhanced tribal identity and desire to propagate the Tribe, which rubbed off on his kids.
Mr. Strochlitz is a half or third a generation older than my folks, so it doesn’t completely line up, but then he didn’t have kids until after the war, so it’s closer. His four baby-boomer kids isn’t wildly atypical for the time.
What is atypical is that he averaged 3.5 kids (his grandkids) our of each of those four. That’s definitely high for the boomers, doubly so for college educated boomers. (In my relatively large–parental generation Iowa raised–extended family only myself and one cousin have three kids, most two, three ones and three zeros.)
The 23 great-grandkids is an undercount. For instance Primus born in ’69 married in 2007 to a five years his junior bride. Any kids they may have had are not included in this 23. And probably most of those grandchildren are younger than he is. (None of my boomer cousins had had kids by ’69. Only a few have grandchildren.)
Hard to argue with tribal identity pushing such reproductive success.
~~
I’d love for Jews (the Ashkenazi) to throw in with us. More or less admit that their tribalism was the outlier and just throw in their lot with the West and work to preserve it. But that is not happening. What you see is the solid tribalism of the Orthodox, or continued heavy anti-white, anti-majoritarianism among the seculars, even the ones outbreeding into the gentile population.
Even more so, I’d like to see we white gentiles to develop a tribal identity of our own. Unfortunately we don’t have a racial religion. Christian universalism helped make Western nations the *best* nations–most pleasant, most prosperous–in the world, but it’s downside has been opening us up to easy exploitation.
I’m not any kind of a serious Christian, but i know plenty of them from my neighborhood, the kids’ schools and Scouting. Mostly good folks, and they do tend to procreate modestly above norm. But also you get the “save the world silliness. Two of the Christian families in our Scout troop have adopted black kids–love, effort, resources that could have, should have gone into having more children of their own. Immigration love. Saving Africans … all that sort of crap is there. Even the Mormons are full of save-the-world and pro-immigrant nonsense. Sad times.
Perhaps in our coming minority future, the surviving whites will become a lot more tribal. However, i suspect that Richard Primus’s desired Supreme Court “originalism” will abuse and harass efforts at white identity and community as much as possible.
But even that doesn't quite capture what's happening, I think, because it implies they knew who he was in the first place. Beware of underestimating the ignorance of American pundits. For example, this tweet by NBC Sports columnist Joe Posnanski linking to his essay on what it's like to see Hamilton was shared over 1,300 times:
https://twitter.com/JPosnanski/status/737077009831059456
Here's the part where I stopped reading his essay:
"It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda."
"A previously minor Founding Father"? He was only the most lastingly influential of them. And you didn't need to read Chernow to know that; you just needed to have an cursory knowledge of American history.
For another example of ignorance, check out the second paragraph of this FT column by Jacob Weisberg over the weekend:
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/739345340042743808
I noted the protectionist part there, but you could also argue pretty easily that Lincoln was also an authoritarian and a racist. Of course, he still emancipated the slaves, and deserves credit for that, but I don't think Weisberg is trying to retcon him into an anti-racist, free-trade Hillary Clinton / Jeb Bush Republicrat -- I just think Weisberg is ignorant about American history. He knows Lincoln = good and Trump = bad, so he assumes Lincoln's positions must have all be the opposite of Trump's.
I was going to write a letter to the editor of the FT about that, but I had already fired of one on Gillian Tett's latest tone-deaf column when I saw that, so I DMed FT editor Lionel Barber instead, suggesting he consider assigning a fact-checker to Weisberg, based on Weisberg's ignorance about Lincoln, and his previous ignorance about Wilkie, which had been called out by a previous letter writer.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/734539043917180928
Dave, as a comrade-in-arms and a valued contributor to the comments here, I hope you don’t take the wrong way when I say I loathe the comics-derived term “retconning” (though not as much as “meme”) and think it a symbol of the degeneration and infantilization of our culture that we can’t remember any number of better, more adult terms for the concept involved. Supercessionism would work (remember the whole “Jesus was a Palestinian” thing during the Aught’s that banged around for a bit until it was realized it was uncomfortably close to Medieval Church antisemitism and then quickly dropped?). Or- yes- appropriation would also be quite appropriate here, and let’s not worry that it’s used by a lot of the usual dip-heads we like to laugh at here. If you want historical precedents think of the Romans taking conquered peoples’ religious idols back to their capitol. Or maybe the Hapsburgs/Romanovs thinking they were the true descendants of Caesar. But I guess in terms of the true clownish barbarism at work here, Mahomet’s appropriation of the New and Old Testaments (whose stories he could barely recall correctly, and whose spiritual lessons were completely over his head) into the Koran comes closest.
That is, if he existed at all.
If it is appropriate to ask DJE, then DME?
Norman Lehr (and Robert Brustein) are calling. They want their dopey, 60’s-era vision of a post-racial utopia with lots of “creative” (yet at the same time somehow totally unremarkable) raceblind casting choices back.
Given that most (white) men nowadays have only 1 or 2 children, it’s quite possible that either you transfer your dynastic urges to your female offspring or else you might not have any dynasty at all. Even if you do have a son, he may be so damaged by the anti-white male tenor of the times that the girl has a greater chance of succeeding in carrying on your dynasty.
In that pretty meaty “access” piece on Obama and his foreign policy staff about a month ago in THE ATLANTIC, Obama actually reasoned through his ISIS strategy by making analogies to that Batman film with Heath Ledger as the Joker. I mean this is a guy smart enough to probably know who Metternich was without looking up the name on his iPhone, but still seems more comfortable in swimming in wry juvenilia.
But who is to say that his Responsible Dad act is not worth it? Here's how Posnanski's article about "Hamilton" starts out:
"The idea took hold a few months ago. It’s hard to say exactly what sparked it other than … well, have you ever been the parent of a 14-year-old girl? It is a daunting experience. Elizabeth is a good person. She’s a good student. She has a huge heart. She’s a loyal friend. She’s funny too. She likes Death Cab and Spinal Tap and comic books and reading. The other day, she told me that her favorite movie of all time is “The Godfather.” I mean, she is more me than I am."
So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.
All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he's Not White.
That message seems awfully cheap.
“So, dad dropped a few thousand to get across the message to his daughter that, while everybody knows White People Are Bad, you should still marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton.”
When dad tells his daughter she should marry a guy who is like Alexander Hamilton, does he mean physically like Alexander Hamilton? If that is what he means, there was not a lot of melanin in Alexander Hamilton, so if White guys are so bad, dad should tell his daughter to marry a Sudanese Dinka instead of an Alexander Hamilton physical type.
“All you have to do is believe, for complicated reasons, that he’s Not White.”
Ask the Left if Alexander Hamilton was not White, why wasn’t he enslaved by the White man and made to pick cotton as soon as he step foot on U.S soil?
You know when the Left says he was an immigrant from the Caribbean, it’s code word for what they really want to say is that Alexander Hamilton was of Sub Saharan African descent a.k.a Black or at least a Mulatto.
Right. And next we can reimagine John Adams as a cross-between Johnnie Cochran and Sharpton. Who can forget his brilliant court performance when he got justice for the martyrs of the Boston Massacre by hinting that if those Red-coat “policemen” weren’t convicted riots would ensue? Oh wait, no, he DEFENDED those British soldiers and the verdict is (for )now seen as a glory of impartial stale pale male justice.
Obama’s has been free to misuse the constitution while Americans zone out in front of the TV or iPhone after loads of cheap, soporific foods.
The left took over while the right snoozed. We made it very easy, really.
But I guess in terms of the true clownish barbarism at work here, Mahomet’s appropriation of the New and Old Testaments (whose stories he could barely recall correctly, and whose spiritual lessons were completely over his head) into the Koran comes closest.
That is, if he existed at all.
If it is appropriate to ask DJE, then DME?
Articles in the Atlantic might as well be telling us Hamilton! Will finally kill the menace of George III-ism.
Do you mean this George III?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Bush
The Rainbow Flag, of course. That's what our brave boys (and women, and trans-persons) were fighting for in WWII, dont' you know - LGBT rights.
Well, see, Big Bill, this is one of those phenomena in which having money really helps.
Once you’ve gone into a republic created by the sweat and blood of others…
…and replaced its sovereign currency with foreign-controlled central banking,…
…then subjected the majority population to 60+ plus years (as of the 1970s) of currency tinkering so that the value of an hour of their skilled labor falls for the next 50 years…
…the majority of the majority is going to find it damn hard to afford a carton of Marlboros, never mind three or four college-educated kids.
Couple that with a demographic war via control of immigration policy…
http://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/
…while getting your billionaires to tell educated whites that having any children at all is Killing The Planet…
…and convincing the most violent and low IQ fraction of society to join you in your war on the majority demographic, which by the way makes them Victims, not aggressors…
…and making sure that the only people allowed to get educated or have good jobs pass all the SJW-religion-catechism tests that you create…
…and top it off with a dollop of Perpetual Victimhood that your actual victims (naive, trusting, altruistic, fair-minded whites) can’t see through?
Zingo zongo.
A woman friend (colleague, married) once was downloading on me about going home for the holidays–can’t remember which, Thanksgiving or Christmas. She said, “Dammit, I tried to act grown up and not react, but how the hell is it that my family knows exactly which buttons to push?”
Because, I said, they installed them.
A different colleague took me to the “Holocaust Museum” in DC once when we were there on business with a federal agency. The thing was a building-scale Skinner box. Made me think of “Seldom Seen” Smith’s prayers for a “preeee-cision earthquake.”
You can’t expect any aspect of popular culture today to be as universally popular as in the 1940s, because of the proliferation of media, increasing diversity of the population, and atomization of genres.
That said, Broadway can still be pretty influential, and far beyond New York. There are high school and community theater productions of past Broadway hits all over the country.
If Hamilton! were a tv show I might take your point. But you know what? Popular music got around before such a thing as mass media existed. Songs transcend media.
"There are high school and community theater productions of past Broadway hits all over the country"
How past? Beside one song from Rent, plays with the names Weber and Sondheim attached to them, and Les Miserables, I'd have to go back 40 years before I'm familiar with anything original, and I was born in the 80s. I've heard the name Wicked, at least, but couldn't him you a single melody. Either high school musicals and community theater aren't doing their jobs, or Broadway sucks.
Professor Primus’ Atlantic article does a good job of applying Gramscian analysis to the way that views of the Founding Fathers can influence judicial policymaking.
Of course, Antonio Gramsci and his disciples envisioned “The Long March Through The Institutions” as the way to achieve a proletarian utopia. It’s therefore a bit amusing to witness Primus’ repurposing of the concept to serve the interests of tech oligarchs and the other winners of our New Gilded Age.
I’m entirely confident that the privileges of this visionary ideologue and his heirs will be retained, even expanded… La révolution dévore ses enfants? Jamias!
I don’t know if the musical includes the duel or not. I haven’t seen it. Since it caused his death, you would think it would be in the musical.
“Given that most (white) men nowadays have only 1 or 2 children,”
Tucker Carlson has 4 children, which nowadays is not considered normal for a White guy who is neither Mormon, Amish, Orthodox Jew, or Hasidic Jew to have that many kids.
Today’s Left, or whatever its called – Marxo-American Spaghetti-O’s? – cannot tell the difference between reality and entertainment. In a churning try at making a point, this guy’s half-baked thesis is always just out of reach, spiraling away. Maybe he needs to put aside Berger and Luckmann for awhile; come back down to earth. To coin George Carlin, he’s created a reality in which physical presence isn’t really necessary.
My paternal line’s colonial ancestors had been on these shores for five generations by the time they fought in the American Revolution and one served in the First Congress.
That’s called demographic outreach in an election year.
Good catch, and parallel to the BS use of “reactance” the other day.
That’s great. Are you a member of the Sons of the American Revolution?
But even that doesn't quite capture what's happening, I think, because it implies they knew who he was in the first place. Beware of underestimating the ignorance of American pundits. For example, this tweet by NBC Sports columnist Joe Posnanski linking to his essay on what it's like to see Hamilton was shared over 1,300 times:
https://twitter.com/JPosnanski/status/737077009831059456
Here's the part where I stopped reading his essay:
"It is funny, if you think about it. Kids all over America are smitten by a show about a previously minor Founding Father who probably would have gotten chucked off the $10 bill had it not been for the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda."
"A previously minor Founding Father"? He was only the most lastingly influential of them. And you didn't need to read Chernow to know that; you just needed to have an cursory knowledge of American history.
For another example of ignorance, check out the second paragraph of this FT column by Jacob Weisberg over the weekend:
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/739345340042743808
I noted the protectionist part there, but you could also argue pretty easily that Lincoln was also an authoritarian and a racist. Of course, he still emancipated the slaves, and deserves credit for that, but I don't think Weisberg is trying to retcon him into an anti-racist, free-trade Hillary Clinton / Jeb Bush Republicrat -- I just think Weisberg is ignorant about American history. He knows Lincoln = good and Trump = bad, so he assumes Lincoln's positions must have all be the opposite of Trump's.
I was going to write a letter to the editor of the FT about that, but I had already fired of one on Gillian Tett's latest tone-deaf column when I saw that, so I DMed FT editor Lionel Barber instead, suggesting he consider assigning a fact-checker to Weisberg, based on Weisberg's ignorance about Lincoln, and his previous ignorance about Wilkie, which had been called out by a previous letter writer.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/734539043917180928
Vermin Supreme ran as a Democrat in 2012, on the same platform.
That’s Anglo-Saxon.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask Jefferson:
http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Anglo-Saxon
Anglo fits our needs. It's a word with a future.
City Hall in New York City should have a wall dedicated to famous Caribbean Americans like Rihanna, Wyclef Jean, The Notorious B.I.G, Nicki Minaj, Eric Holder, Foxy Brown, etc and …………………. Alexander Hamilton.
Alexander Hamilton the token White Caribbean surrounded by so much Caribbean Blackness.
“Moulin Rouge” was interesting in its own way, and as a movie benefits from the fact that you don’t have to pay $100 to see it as you would a decent production of “Hamilton.”
“Hamilton” really reminds me more of “Spring Awakening” – a show with a lot of angst, a political ax to grand, and some powerful dancing, but when I left the show I found that both the show (and especially the music) were totally forgettable. I found Miranda’s earlier hit, “In the Heights,” to also be insanely overrated. The music from it doesn’t really seem to have entered the songbook.
I disagree with this. References to Broadway musicals, and especially Hamilton, appear with surprising frequency on the FB pages of many of my relatives and friends from my Plains-state childhood. For my cousins who are into NASCAR, Broadway has no relevance. But for my cousin the doctor, my friends who are pharmacists, teachers, and who hold other middle and upper-middle class jobs (at least in midwestern terms) — yes, Broadway is definitely relevant. Many of them visit NYC just to see shows.
I'm not a NASCAR fan. I'm a little cut off from popular culture, but not so as to not be daily bombarded by all manner of dross. I should be tripping over Founding hip-hop. Instead, I only ever hear it described.
Echoing (ahem) a recent wry comment by Jack D:Interestingly, someone helpfully provided such a tool, but Google removed it: The drolly named Coincidence Detector.
Or Cohencidence Detector.
Did any of the people on the stage really understand half of it?
No matter what you think about Donald J. Trump, its imperative that he win the election in November, because the alternative is that Hillary Clinton gets to pack the Supreme Court with her “progressive” cronies. The fallout from that will be we’re then only 5-10 years out (from the date of her Inauguration), from a ruling that upholds a law making it illegal to too strenuously disagree with the Democratic Party, The New York Times, or the faculty at Harvard ie., the vaunted “hate speech” exception will finally be discovered emanating from the penumbra of the First Amendment.
And that’s the end of America as any sort of remotely free society. And very likely sets the stage for a 2nd Civil War.
After Sandusky, JoePa and PSU, there are many who want P.O.S.nanski to never darken the airwaves or papers or wherever again.
The whisky tax was against the poorest people in the nation. It was the people on the western side of the Appalachians that had to distill the fruits of their labor in order to easier haul it over the mountains to the population centers. That tax was used to pay rich bond holders of the American Revolutionary war debt. No other people in the US were being taxed by the federal government. Just those poor dirt farming people on the frontier.
Thank God Aaron Burr shot the sorry bastard dead.
Its very telling that the powers that be suddenly elevate this guy to a hero. And it all began with some bs book on Hamilton by a guy named Chernow.
So this is why blacks consider Hamilton “their guy”. They always hate the white working and middle class. Especially those Scots-Irish in Appalachia.
If the show costs $$$ like Hamilton does, do they spend the money? I live in the NYC suburbs and I wouldn’t even pay the normal Broadway price to see bunch of black people pretending to be Hamilton and his white associates.
I never understood how any meaning of the Constitution but original interpretation, if it can be determined, makes sense. It’s not that I am too stupid to understand the other arguments. It is that I am smart enough to know they must be bs without even reading all of them.
When we read Chaucer or Shakespeare in English class, aren’t we supposed to try to get the original meaning?
The Constitution is not a feeling or a penumbra. It is not the Declaration of Independence, a statement of principles and revolution. It is a legal contract between the States and the federal government. As such I don’t see how it would matter if all the founding fathers were black, or hispanic, or pygmy. The meaning would be the same.
And the violence done to it by the 14th Amendment would be the same, too.
This reggae song should have played when the Alexander Hamilton character by Lin Manuel Miranda first appears on stage.
https://youtu.be/dFtLONl4cNc
I disagree. This original, of which that Musical Youth song is a bowdlerized kiddie version, should have been played instead—complete with the inhalation noises.
When I see the name Hamilton!, I am reminded of another aficionado of the exclamation point, Jeb! One takeaway from that felicitous pairing is that even laughable Jebbie, in his current state of imposed recreation, will not need pretend to give a rat’s ass about PC silliness and posturing and gushing over a play. That should hold him at least for a few years, until he is talked out of some abortive run and into elder statesboy for George III’s turn.
So far as I’ve seen among my acquaintance, no, I don’t think they’re springing for Hamilton. It really is astonishingly costly. But they must still be spending thousands, since some of them see multiple shows on a trip. And I think, as with Posnanski’s daughter, for many of them scoring Hamilton tickets would be the apotheosis of their Broadway fandom. I recall some of them just about losing it on FB when the cast of Hamilton did a song at the Grammies or Tonys or something earlier this year.
In our newest era of plutocracy, you’d be surprised how many people can actually afford to spend the money just to do a little bit of virtue signalling.
As for the rest who have seen it, they are people who have scored tickets by currying favor and savvily mastering the art of inside contacts and such. Such are the ways of the mere bourgeoisie in such an age. All this would have been old hat to someone living in 18th century Europe, but we’re having to re-learn some of these skills. Lowly hoi-polloi considerations such scruple and principle have to be firmly set aside, of course.
What’s that you say? We’re being corrupted? Pshaw!
Smart people such as the Clintons saw all this 30 years in advance, and mastered the art of the grift to the extent that they themselves have joined the ranks of the exalted. But the rest of us are still learning to reach for the scraps from the master’s table.
Ok, ok, I admit that’s a lot of words in order to vent about the high price of tickets on Broadway and the facts of supply and demand. 🙂
The biggest feminists these days were probably neglected weirdos as kids. More attention seekers than Daddy's girls.
You’re assuming the weirdos actually believe the nonsense they spew. If they’re just using it to get ahead they’re being masculine. Much manlier than the male feminists following behind, ready to throw cloaks over puddles for milady.
You forgot to add the Q. It is now LGBTQ. Get with the times man, what are you a hermit living in an isolated rural shack?
“You forgot to add the Q. It is now LGBTQ. Get with the times man, what are you a hermit living in an isolated rural shack?”
I’ve seen it rendered as LGBTQWERTY, which I thought was pretty funny.
That said, Broadway can still be pretty influential, and far beyond New York. There are high school and community theater productions of past Broadway hits all over the country.
“because of the proliferation of media”
If Hamilton! were a tv show I might take your point. But you know what? Popular music got around before such a thing as mass media existed. Songs transcend media.
“There are high school and community theater productions of past Broadway hits all over the country”
How past? Beside one song from Rent, plays with the names Weber and Sondheim attached to them, and Les Miserables, I’d have to go back 40 years before I’m familiar with anything original, and I was born in the 80s. I’ve heard the name Wicked, at least, but couldn’t him you a single melody. Either high school musicals and community theater aren’t doing their jobs, or Broadway sucks.
https://youtu.be/pMRl55U0eDw
I’ll start to believe you when I hear one, just one, song from this musical without deliberately seeking it out. Used to be you couldn’t escape Broadway; now it’s a niche market. As I said in another post, I, a child of the 80s, am not familiar with anything past Les Miserables not written by Andrew Lloyd Webber or Stephen Sondheim, save one Rent song. Hamilton! is no exception.
I’m not a NASCAR fan. I’m a little cut off from popular culture, but not so as to not be daily bombarded by all manner of dross. I should be tripping over Founding hip-hop. Instead, I only ever hear it described.
That said, Broadway can still be pretty influential, and far beyond New York. There are high school and community theater productions of past Broadway hits all over the country.
Oh, also, “proliferation,” “diversity,” and “atomization” aside, I could imagine a combat unit singing some execrable Beyonce song today. Broadway, whatever else it is, is barely a part of popular culture anymore.
The last time I was in combat unit and everyone was singing a song, it wasn't Beyonce. It was Iron Maiden's Run To The Hills.
But here are some Swedish marines in Afghanistan acting out a scene from Grease a couple of years ago:
https://youtu.be/1jGT3dsX0c0?list=RD1jGT3dsX0c0
I’m also watching Band of Brothers right now.
As for originalism, I do believe it is potent as an organizing principle. I concede your point as to its failure in the politcal-judicial wars. A march through the institutions translates into more power than having a foundation to your ideology.
Do blacks consider Alexander Hamilton their guy?
No. I just made a good joke. Gilt edge is for must-read stuff.
If Hamilton! were a tv show I might take your point. But you know what? Popular music got around before such a thing as mass media existed. Songs transcend media.
"There are high school and community theater productions of past Broadway hits all over the country"
How past? Beside one song from Rent, plays with the names Weber and Sondheim attached to them, and Les Miserables, I'd have to go back 40 years before I'm familiar with anything original, and I was born in the 80s. I've heard the name Wicked, at least, but couldn't him you a single melody. Either high school musicals and community theater aren't doing their jobs, or Broadway sucks.
Aida debuted on Broadway in 2000. I just went to YouTube and typed in “Aida Community” and got ~26k results. Got about twice as many for “Aida High School”. It seems to be pretty popular around the country. My city’s high school put it on a few years ago.
They also did Once On This Island several years ago. I saw that when it debuted on Broadway in the early 1990s.
You should look up the soundtrack to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which debuted in the 1970s. That has some good tunes on it. Here’s one.
Rocky Horror I despise, despite being a fan of glam rock. I'm familiar with at least five of its songs. That was more than 40 years ago now. Broadway wasn't then what it had been, either, but it was nothing compared to what it is now. Can you even imagine a Marvin Hamlisch of today, for instance?
https://youtu.be/pMRl55U0eDw
Broadway is a bigger deal now than during the Travis Bickle era of Times Square. There are a lot more well-heeled tourists in Times Square today than a few decades ago.
Part of Trump’s popularity in New York is that he was one of the first developers to bet big on reviving Times Square.
Not sure why you’re putting scare quotes around those terms. You disagree that there was less variety in popular music — and ways to hear it — in 1940 than today?
The last time I was in combat unit and everyone was singing a song, it wasn’t Beyonce. It was Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills.
But here are some Swedish marines in Afghanistan acting out a scene from Grease a couple of years ago:
I took a theater appreciation class at Rutgers in 1990-1991, and one of our assignments was to see a show on Broadway. I took a girl I met at school. After the show, she asked if I wanted to walk around a bit and I said no. It might not have been Travis Bickle era, but it was still pretty sketchy.
By the late ’90s, when Rent came out, it had gotten a lot nicer. I ended up seeing that one a few different times, taking friends from out of town. There was one line by a minor character that started to sound anachronistic in cleaned-up New York: “I’m a New Yorker — fear is my life”. But then it sounded relevant again the last time I saw Rent, a few weeks after 9/11.
No, nor even the Swedish Colonial Society, but that’s because my paternal line had very old antipathies toward Swedes. Back approximately, to the Last Glacial Maximum, if not before.
I'm not a NASCAR fan. I'm a little cut off from popular culture, but not so as to not be daily bombarded by all manner of dross. I should be tripping over Founding hip-hop. Instead, I only ever hear it described.
I think I may not have made my point clear: I do agree that Broadway shows comprise a niche market. I’m not saying Hamilton has achieved any kind of pan-cultural familiarity, i.e. to the point that every man on the street in Omaha is humming its tunes. All I’m saying is that I’ve got quite a few midwestern, middle-class connections who are very much aware of Hamilton and its cultural cache. At the moment, they mostly can’t afford the tickets to go see it, but they certainly do go to NYC to see other shows that are less costly. So are they not ‘regular people’?
No, they're not. They are part of the niche market. Regular people would be the "every man on the street" you talk about. I hardly think it contradicts my point about Broadway having limited appeal to say, "Yeah, but Hamilton appeals to a limited group of people I know."
1. If Lin Manuel Miranda got a test back from 23andme, what do you think his ancestral makeup would be? I’m assuming he is at least 90% white Spanish.
2. When Hamilton does make it to high schools, will there be some controversy regarding the many schools that are still almost totally white? Will those schools have to go out of their way to put some vibrants into the play?
The high school in my town is mostly (but not totally) NAM, and they put on the Caribbean-themed Once On This Island (the original Broadway cast of which was 100% black) a few years back. They also did Aida, which had two white leads in the original Broadway cast, but, by convention, always cast a black woman as Aida.
Don't take my word for it. Ask Jefferson:
http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Anglo-Saxon
Times change, and we need a term that serves as the functional equivalent of Hispanic. Anglo-Saxon is too restrictive (I can’t really imagine calling someone with a German name an Anglo-Saxon; it would be like calling a Mestizo a Spaniard).
Anglo fits our needs. It’s a word with a future.
This “Hamilton” musical is such a big deal, a little part of me is actually curious to see it (I’m sure Fathom Events of some similar outfit, will make it available to be seen in one’s local cinema, for those who pay attention to such undercurrents of the culture, and it will eventually be aired on PBS too), but the simple reality is that I have never been able to understand more than about one word in six, when subjected to the “rapping” style of verbal communication. So it’d be a waste of my time.
If you think about it, it's an impressive achievement for L-M M to have classed up live rap like this. The main NYC rap radio station hosts a live concert every year, and often its marred by fights. I've always wonder if part of the reason is that fans are disappointed by how terrible rap often is live (with the exception, I assume, of the biggest-earning acts that can afford to replicate their studio tracks live).
2. When Hamilton does make it to high schools, will there be some controversy regarding the many schools that are still almost totally white? Will those schools have to go out of their way to put some vibrants into the play?
Will those high schools have to bus in a Thomas Jefferson who looks like Prince?
“That tradition [presumably, Jewish messianic vision] is grounded in occupying societies, gaining power within them, and doing as much violence as possible to their fabric before moving on.”
Your references support your first assertion (“gaining power within [societies]”) but give no facts at all concerning your second assertion (“doing as much violence as possible”).
Your last reference mentions the discouraging of discussion that Jewish influence might have a negative effect, but provides no such reasoned discussion. In other words, there is no case made that Jewish influence is negative in your references. Whether it is or isn’t is a different discussion, but that discussion is not provided.
Anglo fits our needs. It's a word with a future.
“Times change, and we need a term that serves as the functional equivalent of Hispanic. Anglo-Saxon is too restrictive (I can’t really imagine calling someone with a German name an Anglo-Saxon; it would be like calling a Mestizo a Spaniard).”
Calling a German an Anglo Saxon is not the equivalent of calling a Mestizo a Spaniard
English is a Germanic language just like German. Germans are culturally closer to the Brits than they are to Mediterranean Southern Europeans and Slavic Eastern Europeans.
There is a reason why Germans in The U.S are not referred to as Ethnic Whites. Unlike the Polish, Jews, French, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians, and the Italians for example who are only found in large numbers in certain U.S states, Germans are found in large numbers in all 50 U.S states. Germans are pretty much WASPs at this point.
2. When Hamilton does make it to high schools, will there be some controversy regarding the many schools that are still almost totally white? Will those schools have to go out of their way to put some vibrants into the play?
It’ll be great for NAM schools.
The high school in my town is mostly (but not totally) NAM, and they put on the Caribbean-themed Once On This Island (the original Broadway cast of which was 100% black) a few years back. They also did Aida, which had two white leads in the original Broadway cast, but, by convention, always cast a black woman as Aida.
It seems like a lot of aficionados know the lyrics before they go.
If you think about it, it’s an impressive achievement for L-M M to have classed up live rap like this. The main NYC rap radio station hosts a live concert every year, and often its marred by fights. I’ve always wonder if part of the reason is that fans are disappointed by how terrible rap often is live (with the exception, I assume, of the biggest-earning acts that can afford to replicate their studio tracks live).
The last time I was in combat unit and everyone was singing a song, it wasn't Beyonce. It was Iron Maiden's Run To The Hills.
But here are some Swedish marines in Afghanistan acting out a scene from Grease a couple of years ago:
https://youtu.be/1jGT3dsX0c0?list=RD1jGT3dsX0c0
Not scare quotes, just quotes. Because they’re words you said. Doesn’t anyone use quotes properly anymore?
“So are they not ‘regular people’?”
No, they’re not. They are part of the niche market. Regular people would be the “every man on the street” you talk about. I hardly think it contradicts my point about Broadway having limited appeal to say, “Yeah, but Hamilton appeals to a limited group of people I know.”
https://youtu.be/pMRl55U0eDw
I’ve heard the name Aida, but despite it being around for 16 years I know absolutely nothing about it. Or nothing that I don’t already know about the Verdi version, of which I assume it’s an update. 26,000 fans doesn’t mean much of anything. I’m sure a could visit a random prom site and find 26,000 hits on a guy eating leather shoes, or something.
Rocky Horror I despise, despite being a fan of glam rock. I’m familiar with at least five of its songs. That was more than 40 years ago now. Broadway wasn’t then what it had been, either, but it was nothing compared to what it is now. Can you even imagine a Marvin Hamlisch of today, for instance?
The last time I was in combat unit and everyone was singing a song, it wasn't Beyonce. It was Iron Maiden's Run To The Hills.
But here are some Swedish marines in Afghanistan acting out a scene from Grease a couple of years ago:
https://youtu.be/1jGT3dsX0c0?list=RD1jGT3dsX0c0
The point of the previous post was that whether or not there is less of a common culture in popular music there is still such a thing as popular music. I have very little interest in hip-hop yet can’t escape passing knowledge of Beyonce’s oeuvre, for instance. Broadway is no longer part of that common culture, even though Hamilton! is hip-hop.