It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like [co-writer and director Alan] Rickman himself, ought to know better.
So why don't they?...
"My Name Is Rachel Corrie," by contrast, is a scrappy, one-sided monologue consisting of nothing but the fugitive observations of a young woman who, like so many idealists, treated her emotions as facts. "I am disappointed," she declares, "that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world." To mistake such jejune disillusion for profundity and turn it into the climax of a full-length play is an act of piety, not artistry.
October 21, 2006
"Politics makes artists stupid."
Let's check out the part of the Wall Street Journal we can all read. They've got a piece by my favorite Wall Street Journal writer, Terry Teachout, about the play -- shudder -- "My Name Is Rachel Corrie":
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The central point, distorted by Teachout, is that Corrie's death was no accident.
Teachout's central point was that the play sucked. Are you sure you read the review?
Thanks, Murdoch. I haven't seen a better summary of the anti-semitic Jew=Nazi meme in quite a while.
I'm sorry, but not everyone that is critical of Israel is a kook, or anti-semite. They refuse to behave like a responsible country and join the IAEA, and verify their nuclear caches. They continually spy on us, and play us for saps. I would argue they need nukes, considering their nast neighbors. But why not just come clean, as we ask other countries to do?
Why on earth would Israel drop between 1-3 million cluster bombs, with a 40% dud rate, all in the last 72 hours while a peace agreement is being worked out?
The play is being advertised in NYC as an exercise in "moral clarity." The ad on WQXR this morning featured Rickman, proclaiming in the deepest British accent that Corrie's words are freighted with moral authority and offer a much-needed beacon of clarity.
But if it's moral clarity one is after, I think you are more likely to find it in the hand-outs being offered near the theater by those looking to publicize the "other Rachels," as they call them. They are handing out sheets with the pictures of a dozen or so other girls or young women, all named Rachel, who died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when one of those peace loving Palestinians decided it was a great time for a suicide bombing in Israel.
In calling this play "an ill crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop," Teachout was just being kind.
We mock her "martyrdom" and celebrate her stupidity on Saint Pancake Day.
Does this somehow make you think you're "tough" on some level? Is this what you guys jackoff to at Freeper - A video of a woman getting crushed by a bulldozer? What a pathetic bedwetting world you must live in. Always afraid of something, and need assurances from everyone that you will be okay.
My only hope is that you're sterile, and you cannot spawn anything from that reptillian brain. Right or wrong, she had more balls than you will ever hope to have, and since I assume you're not "fighting" from anywhere besides your computer - I will count you as yet another 101st Fighting Keyboarder.
It is entirely clear from the evidence of those present at the time that the driver who killed her was at best astonishingly reckless and at worst simply didn't care about her life.
Not that there'd be anything wrong with either circumstance. She was aiding and abetting terrorists at the time, after all. I'd have happily killed the bitch myself if I'd been there.
I don't think America wants settlements built on land where ownership is disputed.
Um, the United States is LOCATED on land whose ownership is disputed. It isn't like caucasians, blacks, and asians are native to North America.
But in any case, there's nothing unusual about allies disregarding each others' wishes. Look at the history of the NATO nations over the last half-century, for example.
Does this somehow make you think you're "tough" on some level? Is this what you guys jackoff to at Freeper - A video of a woman getting crushed by a bulldozer?
When that incident happened I only felt sorry for the bulldozer driver, not Corrie. The poor bulldozer driver had his life turned upside down because some terror-loving nitwit recklessly got in his way where he couldn't even see her and caused him to accidentally run her over.
Awfully good of Althouse to drop this "review" on to her blog and then saunter away to watch Project Runway, or whatever it is she does when the Freepers and Little Green Fascists show up to mock the dead.
And here I always thought it was "Artists make politics stupid."
"Um, the United States is LOCATED on land whose ownership is disputed."
Yeah, but we're not exactly asking Israel to help finance and strategize against the hungry natives currently fighting back, now are we?
So basically Israel's problem is that it didn't do the smart thing and just wipe out the troublesome natives. Interesting.
Anyway, we don't give Israel money to finance their war against the Palestinians. We pay Israel NOT to wage war on the Palestinians, because their doing so would harm our interests in the area. That's why Israel has been taking a halfassed approach to dealing with Palestinian terrorism this past few decades.
The ony reason the Palestinian Arabs still exist in greater Israel is that the Israelis have decided that it is not in their interests to do away with them. The financial and military assistance we give them, as well as the possibility that we'll back them the next time the Arabs invade, lets the Israelis feel safe in spite of the fact that they live next door to millions of people who want them dead.
Maybe someone told Alan Rickman that he looked Jewish, and he was so insulted that he wrote this play.
The photo of a screaming rage-filled Rachel Corrie is sufficient proof that she was acting as one of the enemy at the time of her death and thus deserves no sympathy at all.
The play was a stupid idea, as idiotic as Al Franken's recent bomb, "Al Franken: God Spoke".
Corrie is a poster child for a supposedly nice American kid choosing to support evil. It's like the radical journalist John Reed as portrayed in 'Reds'. She wasn't naive any more, she was evil herself by the time she died.
The other Rachels deserve a play. Corrie deserves to be ridiculed.
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