CNN's new president Chris Licht wants staff to staff to stop saying "big lie" and just say "Trump election lie" or "election lies."

Mediate reports.

On a Tuesday conference call with management and show executive producers, Licht was asked for his thoughts on 'the big lie'.... According to a source, Licht argued that using “the big lie” makes the mistake of adopting branding used by the Democratic Party, thereby weakening the objectivity of the network....

That is, the problem is not the blithe evocation of Hitler, but the similarity to Democratic Party branding. To denounce the Hitler analogy would be to impugn the Democratic Party. Licht apparently just thinks CNN is better off looking less partisan.

"Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich... took an adolescent girl’s diary and raped it into The Diary of Anne Frank, a sitcom...."

"The Frank family, you will recall, have been hiding from the Nazis and squabbling about 'whose turn it is to feed the cat.' At the end, the Nazis show up to take them all to their (offstage) deaths. The Hacketts’ play ends with Anne’s line: 'I believe people are still good at heart.' I’d always considered this merely loathsome twaddle.... For whether or not the line was scribbled by Anne Frank, the Hacketts adopted it as the punch line for their play, that is, that by which they wished their vision to be remembered. But the line brings to mind that of Joseph Goebbels. Addressing the Gestapo, he said, 'History will note that we did these things while still preserving our essential humanity.' The Hacketts’ line, similarly, can be understood as 'These monsters are basically good at heart, despite what they have done to the Jews.'"

Writes David Mamet, in "Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch."

I don't think Mamet means to question whether those words appear in the diary (as it was published), just the placement of those words at the conclusion of the play. Here's the full text of the diary, and here's the context of the line that the Hacketts chose to put at the end of their play: 

"Joseph Goebbels didn’t die. He just got a job at Hallmark."

Joseph Goebbels didn’t die. He just got a job at Hallmark. https://t.co/oKKOyYxXa6

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) December 26, 2019

ADDED: The linked article at Salon is "Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda/Forget 'Triumph of the Will' — the most insidious authoritarian propaganda comes in the form of schmaltz" by Amanda Marcotte. Isn't this like what Jonah Goldberg did — from the right — in his book "Liberal Fascism"? Goldberg wrote:

For generations our primary vision of a dystopian future has been that of Orwell’s 1984. This was a fundamentally “masculine” nightmare of fascist brutality. But with the demise of the Soviet Union and the vanishing memory of the great twentieth-century fascist and communist dictatorships, the nightmare vision of 1984 is slowly fading away. In its place, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is emerging as the more prophetic book. As we unravel the human genome and master the ability to make people happy with televised entertainment and psychoactive drugs, politics is increasingly a vehicle for delivering prepackaged joy. America’s political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered....

The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it. It cannot be done, and even if, as often in the case of liberal fascism, the effort is very careful to be humane and decent, it will still result in a kind of benign tyranny where some people get to impose their ideas of goodness and happiness on those who may not share them...

Make people happy with televised entertainment... sounds like the Hallmark channel. So let's read the Amanda Marcotte thing, published jollily on Christmas at Salon:

When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl's films celebrating the Third Reich... even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of "normality."

There's plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview. It's storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling... Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.

Both Marcotte and Goldberg are afraid of oppressive government and think cheap televised entertainment is softening the people up to accept it.

I saw that #Trumpacronyms is trending on Twitter.

I clicked through and this one caught my eye:

Treasonous
Racist
Using
Manipulative
Propaganda#Trumpacronyms pic.twitter.com/KifvbPbTb7

— Social✽Fly (@socflyny) August 19, 2019

1. Who's Social✽Fly? I don't know, but Cory Booker follows her (click to enlarge and clarify):

2. You don't need more than one example of the acronym-making to see what dull non-fun it is.

3. The Goebbels propaganda list is always a useful read, and it's ironic when you use it in your own propaganda. I feel sad to think that it is deployed by so many people who don't even imagine that they are engaging in propaganda and the things on the list sound like what their side is doing too.

4. From the Wikipedia article "Big Lie":

The phrase was also used in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

5. Never allow the public to cool off... who's following that program now?

"Charles Krauthammer, who died on June 21, wrote one of the articles about terrorism that has most influenced me..."

"... and possibly one of the most influential articles to me on any topic. It came out when I was 20 years old, in the middle of college, forming my views and writing style. I've read it over and over since then, and it's hard to describe the impact this short piece has had on me. In one paragraph, Krauthammer simply quotes another great writer, V.S. Naipaul, who died on August 11. The quotes are from before September 11. Naipaul later said: 'I saw this calamity coming, but no one was interested.'"

Writes my son John, linking to the Krauthammer article "The Enemy Is Not Islam. It Is Nihilism" (Weekly Standard). From that article, dated October 22, 2001:

The distinguished Indian writer and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who has chronicled the Islamic world in two books ("Among the Believers" and "Beyond Belief"), recently warned (in a public talk in Melbourne before the World Trade Center attack), "We are within reach of great nihilistic forces that have undone civilization." In places like Afghanistan, "religion has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure. They are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down." This kind of fury and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or political solution. "You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated."...

This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel--mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Throughout, the soundtrack endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood, with blood, with blood." Bin Laden appears on the tape to counsel that "the love of this world is wrong. You should love the other world... die in the right cause and go to the other world."...

"But the two dictators were would-be intellectuals—Adolf Hitler a failed painter inebriated with the music of Wagner, and Mussolini a onetime schoolteacher and novelist."

"Unlike American philistines, they thought literature and the arts were important, and wanted to weaponize them as adjuncts to military conquest.... During World War I German patriotic propaganda vaunted the superiority of Germany’s supposedly rooted, organic, spiritual Kultur over the allegedly effete, shallow, cosmopolitan, materialist, Jewish-influenced 'civilization' of Western Europe.... Hitler invested considerable money and time in the 1930s, and even after World War II began, in an effort to take over Europe’s cultural organizations and turn them into instruments of German power.... Goebbels and Hitler were as obsessed with movies as American adolescents are today with social media. Convinced that cinema was their era’s main engine of cultural influence, they tried to control filmmaking as far as their influence could reach.... The dominance of American films had troubled European filmmakers and intellectuals from the beginning.... Hitler’s efforts to stem the mass appeal of Hollywood films and jazz only made them... more seductive and, in a final irony, prepared for the triumph of American music, jeans, and film in the postwar world by trying to make them taboo...."

From "The Cultural Axis" in The New York Review of Books. The reviewed book is "The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture."

"You are all Goebbels! Goebbels would be proud!" shouts Jack Posobiec at the players and audience at the "Julius Caesar" performance in Central Park last night.

We see him at the end of the video he is making of his partner-in-protest Laura Loomer, who barged up onto the stage yelling about "political violence against the right." "It's unacceptable!" she instructs. She gets 6 seconds before the voice on the loudspeaker takes control, announcing "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to pause," and after half a minute security has hustled her off the stage.

The "Julius Caesar" performance is the one with a Trump lookalike playing Caesar and getting stabbed to death on stage.

Here's some more information about about Prosobiec and Loomer. They both work at The Rebel. She's been a reporter for Project Veritas. He got a lot of attention in this New Yorker piece, "The Far-Right American Nationalist Who Tweeted #MacronLeaks" (May 7, 2017):

Jack Posobiec is the bureau chief and sole employee of the Washington, D.C., office of the Rebel, a Canadian media outlet that specializes in far-right video commentary. Last weekend, I met him at a Peet’s Coffee a few blocks from the White House. He told me, “As a journalist, I use all the tools at my disposal”—mostly YouTube, Periscope, and Twitter—“to seek the truth and disseminate the truth. That’s the purpose of journalism, right? At the same time, I also do what I call 4-D journalism, meaning that I’m willing to break the fourth wall. I’m willing to walk into an anti-Trump march and start chanting anti-Clinton stuff—to make something happen, and then cover what happens. So, activism tactics mixed with traditional journalism tactics.”

They broke the 4th wall* last night.

When is it acceptable to disrupt a performance and appropriate an audience that did not assemble to hear your message?

And who, if anyone, was "like Goebbels" last night? (We've seen so much of the left calling the right Nazis, and this shows Nazi-calling goes both ways.)

ADDED: Interrupting the players and even getting on stage with them is traditional:

Since most theatre performances were often three hours long... the behavior of the audience became very rowdy, the audiences did not keep quiet, or arrive on time, or remain for the whole performance they would simply get up and leave whenever they felt like it. They joined in on the action occurring on stage, interrupted the actors, and even sometimes got on the stage. They also talked during dull moments, and threw rotting vegetables, especially tomatoes at the actors...

___________________

* "Breaking the 4th wall" normally refers to the actors deviating from the theatrical convention of behaving as if they're in a 4-sided box and the audience isn't there. It's something the playwright or the director chooses to make part of the show. It's presumptuous for someone not connected with the show to take it upon himself (or herself) to break the wall. I've seen plays where it looks like that's happening, where one of the actors is seated in the audience and he starts heckling the play and getting a response from the actors on stage and it takes a little while to realize that's part of the play.

"'Goebbels had very nice eyes but,' she added with a laugh, 'he was a devil!' She said Adolf Hitler, on the other hand..."

"... was always very pleasant to her – and [her husband] Harlan would often remark on his amazing eyes. She was not unimpressed by Hitler’s eyes herself."

She = Kristina Söderbaum, quoted in a Guardian article subtitled "She was the Nazis’ pin-up, the Aryan sex symbol whose films fired up the SS. In this previously unpublished interview, Kristina Söderbaum talks about Hitler’s charm, shooting scenes as the Allies closed in – and being nicknamed the State Water Corpse."

Here's how she looked in one of her less evil and more ridiculous movies:

"The weird thing is, people don’t care why. They only care if you’re on their side. So it actually made most of the problems go away. Almost instantly, people stopped calling me Joseph Goebbels."

"In terms of my safety, it absolutely worked, exactly as I imagined it would work. . . . I’m actually safer because I’ve endorsed Hillary Clinton."

Said Scott Adams, explaining to the Wall Street Journal why he endorsed Hillary Clinton even though "he doesn’t vote, disagrees with both candidates on policy, and thinks both are too old."

Was Adams actually unsafe when people were inferring that he supported Trump? "I don’t go out much, and when I do, people don’t recognize me," so he'd had no scary encounters. The danger was merely inferred — perhaps to spice up observations about the comparison of Trump to Hitler. He says that calling Trump Hitler is "a call for assassination": "There’s no other way you can [expletive] interpret that."

And if Trump is Hitler and he's perceived as "Hitler"'s propagandist, then he is "Goebbels":

"A few dozen times, people referred to me publicly as [Nazi propagandist] Joseph Goebbels, just because I was talking about Trump’s persuasion skills, not his policies or anything."

"To me that was a call to violence. It’s an indirect call, but it’s saying if you kill Joseph Goebbels, you’re doing the country a favor."

If Adams were really afraid he'd get killed, he wouldn't contribute to stirring up the Hitler-Goebbels-assassination ideation. But it's interesting banter, all of it — including (and especially) the notion that people are professing support for Hillary Clinton because other Hillary supporters are making it feel dangerous not to support her. And that seems like some insidious (pro-Trump) persuasion move, doesn't it?

I believe Adams isn't for either candidate, but he's doing what he likes to do: writing about what's interesting to him. I could be wrong, because I am biased: It looks to me as though he does what I do. And I understand how people construe writing about Trump without contempt as support for Trump.

You must assure the good people that you are for Hillary, and Adams makes a game out of giving people the assurance they demand. That exposes the coercion involved, and most people don't like to be coerced. So the expression of support for Hillary cues people to think it would be transgressive and liberating to vote for Trump. Safe too, since the vote is secret.

By the way, I read Scott Adams's book, and "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life," and it corroborates the assertion that people don't recognize him:

For over a decade I’ve been semifamous for creating Dilbert, but I’m still generally unrecognized in public. When I meet people for the first time without the benefit of a full introduction, I’m treated like any other stranger. But if the topic of my job comes up, people immediately become friendlier, as if we had been friends forever.

Did you know that book is about 1/4 diet book? His advice is summed up as: "I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, whenever I want." The trick is in the "want," and if you think of yourself as a robot, there is a way to want what you need to want.

"And I would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him."

"And obviously it would be okay to kill anyone who actively supports a genocidal dictator, including anyone who wrote about his persuasion skills in positive terms. (I’m called an “apologist” on Twitter, or sometimes just Joseph Goebbels)."

Scott Adams explains his reason for endorsing Hillary (even as he maintains his prediction that Trump will win in a landslide).

By the way, here's a guessing game I made up. I took this picture from the TV yesterday (the Jake Tapper Sunday show). The question is: What word is Trump saying?



ADDED: The winner appeared at 9:05 AM. EDH:

Chi-na.

It's Spokaoke — spoken-word Karaoke.

"The burly fellow in the gray T-shirt and red-and-white-striped suspenders is absolutely killing Patton’s speech to the Third Army."

“We’re not going to just shoot the sons of bitches,” he yells, waving his arms like a maniac as beads of sweat form on his forehead. “We’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket!”...

“There’s something about the embodiment of performing [these speeches] for a group,” says [Spokaoke creator Annie] Dorsen as she sips white wine at a table next to the stage. “It has a certain kind of immediacy. You get a kind of feeling of what it would be like to actually be the intended audience. That becomes really powerful.... I think a lot of people get up there and are surprised that the speech works them as opposed to them working the speech... One guy in New York, he got physically ill after reciting Joseph Goebbels’s ‘Total War’ speech. It’s an uncomfortable thing to speak words you don’t believe.”

I absolutely love this idea. What speech would you do?

"ACLU Board Member Resigns After Urging People To Kill Supporters Of Trump."

"Loring Wirbel’s Facebook post was captured by The Daily Caller – a right-leaning online newspaper."

The post states, “The thing is, we have to really reach out to those who might consider voting for Trump and say, ‘This is Goebbels. This is the final solution. If you are voting for him I will have to shoot you before Election Day.’ They’re not going to listen to reason, so when justice is gone, there’s always force…”...

The ACLU of Colorado released a statement saying it “does not condone the recent personal Facebook post of regional volunteer Loring Wirbel..."....

Of course, the media is full of statements comparing Trump to Hitler and it's no wonder people hear that as a call to stop him and his followers now while there is still a chance. Wirbel just got publicly humiliated, and what he did is now displayed as what it means to go too far, putting it out, in writing, on the internet. But I assume there is much more talk like that, in more trusted circles, and I know there are, every day, many public statements that have the potential to affect intemperate or disordered minds as a call to violence.

ADDED: Wirbel might have thought he was well situated in humor. He recommends speech. You should just say to other people "If you are voting for him I will have to shoot you" before you can vote (not actually shoot them). He uses speech to talk about speech and the way that speech no longer works on some people. They are beyond reason, the idea is, because no reasonable person, by his definition, could decide to vote for Trump.

He might very well thought that was funny and that reasonable people would understand how it is funny. Now, I'm concerned about how speech like that is heard and acted upon by those with intemperate or disordered minds. That is, like Wirbel, I worry about the unreasonable people. He's worried that unreasonable people will vote for Trump, and I'm worried that unreasonable people will — because of all the jacked up rhetoric — commit acts of violence.

Now, I have to give this post my "civility bullshit" tag, because I can see that I'm doing what I have long called civility bullshit. Since I'm saying the Trump-is-Hitler speakers need to tone it down lest they inspire real violence, I need to flag my own hypocrisy.

"With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely..."

"... It would be positively a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him."

Said George Bernard Shaw about William Shakespeare, from "Shakespeare sucks: a history of Bard-bashing."

ADDED: Speaking of George Bernard Shaw, his name comes up twice in (the book I'm reading) "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." At pages 242-243:

No one who lived in Germany in the Thirties, and who cared about such matters, can ever forget the sickening decline of the cultural standards of a people who had had such high ones for so long a time....

The theater, it must be said, retained much of its excellence as long as it stuck to classical plays.... The Nazi playwrights were so ludicrously bad that the public stayed away from their offerings, which invariably had short runs. The president of the Reich Theater Chamber was one Hans Johst, an unsuccessful playwright who once had publicly boasted that whenever someone mentioned the word “culture” to him he wanted to reach for his revolver. But even Johst and Goebbels, who determined what was played on the stage and who played and directed it, were unable to prevent the German theater from giving commendable and often moving performances of Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare.

Strangely enough, some of Shaw’s plays were permitted to be performed in Nazi Germany— perhaps because he poked fun at Englishmen and lampooned democracy and perhaps too because his wit and left-wing political views escaped the Nazi mind.

And pages 783-784:

The Special Search List, G.B. (die Sonderfahndungsliste, G.B.) is among the more amusing “invasion” documents found in the Himmler papers, though of course it was not meant to be. It contains the names of some 2,300 prominent persons in Great Britain, not all of them English, whom the Gestapo thought it important to incarcerate at once. Churchill is there, naturally, along with members of the cabinet and other well-known politicians of all parties. Leading editors, publishers and reporters, including two former Times correspondents in Berlin, Norman Ebbutt and Douglas Reed, whose dispatches had displeased the Nazis, are on the list. British authors claim special attention. Shaw’s name is conspicuously absent, but H. G. Wells is there along with such writers as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, C. P. Snow, Noel Coward, Rebecca West, Sir Philip Gibbs and Norman Angeli....

 AND: I accidentally wrote over this post, so I'm reconstructing it. Here are all the original comments:

Michael K said...
In spite of the decline of US culture (I sometimes want to reach for a revolver lately), I suspect Shakespeare will be perfumed long after Shaw is forgotten.

8/3/14, 10:00 AM

Phil D said...
Quote from Shaw on the show trials:
"They often have to be pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks," wrote Shaw, apparently justifying Stalin's execution of many of those who had led the Bolshevik revolution in 1917" (Mind, I find the execution of the "Old Guard" by Stain one of those silver linings. After all, It's the only justice the communist mass murderers ever got, to be killed by their own kind. But millions were murdered together with them).

From wiki;
"Prominent British writers who visited the Soviet Union in 1934, such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, are also on record as denying the existence of the Famine in Ukraine"

Other sources;
"The Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw, after receiving a tour carefully orchestrated by the Soviets, proclaimed in 1932: 'I did not see a single under-nourished person in Russia, young or old.' "

Shaw, a good artist but an extraordinary piece of excrement as a human being, the perfect example of the moral degeneracy of the left.

8/3/14, 11:54 AM

Ann Althouse said...
"In spite of the decline of US culture (I sometimes want to reach for a revolver lately), I suspect Shakespeare will be perfumed long after Shaw is forgotten."

A nice autocorrect there: perfumed.

We're talking about dead bodies...

8/3/14, 11:57 AM

Sam L. said...
I see Shaw was NOT on the list.

OOOOOOOohhhhhhhh, dat HURTS.

8/3/14, 12:43 PM

Robert Cook said...
Sounds like professional jealousy on Shaw's part, borne of his realization he would never equal Shakespeare's genius or achievement.

8/3/14, 12:45 PM

David said...
Another difference: Shakespeare's plays were wildly popular and financially successful.

8/3/14, 1:22 PM

ganderson said...
And Lord Blackadder's take on the Bard:
http://youtu.be/NM-Y1ch4b5c

8/3/14, 2:20 PM

NotquiteunBuckley said...
"ON STAGING SHAKESPEARE AND ON SHAKESPEARE'S STAGE

By Orson Welles

Director of the Mercury Theater

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man's season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elisabeth.

Shakespeare speaks everybody's language, but with an Elizabethan accent. When he came squawking and red faced into it, England could carry a tune and was learning to talk. It was a kid of a country, waking up noisily and too suddenly into adolescence and bounding blithely into the sunny, early morning of modern times."

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=190

8/3/14, 2:21 PM

Left Bank of the Charles said...
Perhaps the Nazis considered Shaw an Irishman not an Englishman. I do wonder what follows that because.

8/3/14, 3:02 PM

LYNNDH said...
Ann, am I being blocked? Second email the past week that did not post.

8/3/14, 3:49 PM

virgil xenophon said...
@Althouse/

Your not too far from my generation (I'm 70) and you consider yourself an educated and credentialed person yet you're JUST NOW getting around to reading Shirer?? I read him as a soph in H.S. when it was first published in 1960. Your intellectual curiosity must have developed late in life..

8/3/14, 4:00 PM

virgil xenophon said...
PS: Well, I take that back partly, AA. Your reference to culture and reaching for a gun shows you have at least a nodding acquaintance with the utterances of Herman Goring..

8/3/14, 4:04 PM

Fred Drinkwater said...
Thank you for the reminder to re-read Shirer. I first read it when I was about 17, and was impressed by the apparent quality of the reportage. Now I'm curious to see what a few years will have done to my opinion.

8/3/14, 4:04 PM

The Godfather said...
Do you remember Mark Twain's hilarious put-down of J. Fenimore Cooper? You can find it here: http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html

It was, of course, unfair, because literary conventions had changed between Cooper's time and Twain's. (In retribution, Twain's reputation today suffers from the fact that his work is considered not politically correct because of his frequent use of the N-word.)

But the Shaw put down of Shakespeare and Homer is different. These writers of course wrote in accordance with the conventions of their times, and those conventions are different from those of our time. But both wrote works that can speak to us hundreds or thousands of years later, not withstanding those stylistic differences. Whereas Shaw's work is now just a period piece: often witty to be sure, but reflecting a socially time-bound ideology, and one at least somewhat disgraced by subsequent events.

8/3/14, 5:09 PM

SOJO said...
I only developed an appreciation for Shakespeare after I saw his work performed live at a playhouse. Having to read him in high school with American kids struggling through the prose and a zillion footnotes was no fun at all.

8/3/14, 5:38 PM

John said...
Everybody says shakespeare represents the perfection of English drama.

I wonder how many of those fans actually read him? Not as a HS or college requirement but for pleasure.

I've read, or tried to read, several of his plays since school. Never could get through them.

I have seen several of them acted on stage, films of on stage and movie adaptations and they are much better seen than read.

I've read half a dozen of Shaw's plays for pleasure and they are much better reading than Shakespeare.

One man's opinion.

John Henry

8/3/14, 8:35 PM

John said...
Speaking of Willy the Shake, does anyone else remember Lord Buckly? 50's and 60's hipster (when the word meant something) comedian?

As he started his version of Marc Anthony's eulogy to Ceasar:

Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies Knock Me Your lobes.

I came to lay Ceasar out, not to hip you to him.

And so on...

Just checked YouTube and there is not much there but I did find this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksevaIflRnI

John Henry

8/3/14, 10:05 PM

traditionalguy said...
The thing about Shakespeare is that he was witty. and also that he knew all of the questions a man has from living this life...not the answers, but all the questions.

GBS was also witty, but that was about it. Shakespeare is without competition and GBS could not find a way to beat him, so instead he just took a superior attitude about Shakespeare to fool the weak minded.

8/3/14, 10:37 PM

Rich Rostrom said...
avid 8/3/14, 1:22 PM said...

Another difference: Shakespeare's plays were wildly popular and financially successful.

As were Shaw's. Shaw was a very accessible and entertaining playwright. He should not be confused with avant-garde and kitchen-sink playwrights like Beckett and Ionescu and Pinter.

8/4/14, 12:04 AM

John said...
traditionalguy said...

Shakespeare is without competition...

So Trad Guy,

What is the last play of Shakespeare's that you read for pleasure and when?

I'd be curious about others here who sing Willie's praises. What is the last thing of his you read and when?

Is anyone actually reading Shakespeare?

John Henry

8/4/14, 6:55 AM

richard mcenroe said...
Shaw progressed, over his life, from the parodic use of monsters such as arms dealers and Napoleon to shock his bourgeois British audience, to admiring pastiches of Britain's enemies ("The Inca of Perusalem") to uncritical praise of Hitler and Stalin.

He looked at the monsters and the monsters looked back.

8/4/14, 11:39 AM

Anthony said...
Shirer's book is odd. I read it during a magical summer that I first took classes at UW. Not sure how his analysis of the Third Reich holds up, but I've read it twice. Last time (two years ago) what struck me was how he described many of the Nazi's a "perverts and homosexuals" and such. So not PC today.

"Obama is a despicable man. Dishonest and heartless to the core."

That's a typical comment at Firedoglake, a big left/liberal blog. Here's another (and it's not like I'm skipping over compliments):

It is said that many Americans think that Barack Obama is a nice guy.

Barack Obama is not a nice guy, and the American people may soon realize that he is not a nice guy.

“Underdog” Obama clearly does not want a second term as President.

Perhaps he deserves another “term”, possibly ten to twenty?

And then, a taxpayer-paid visit to the Hague?

And:

Classless, cluless, cruel and corrupt.

"Classless" is a reference to the "Class Act," the voluntary long-term care insurance component of Obamacare, which the Obama administration has announced it will not — cannot — implement. (I'll write some more about that in the next post. This post is about the intensity of hatred aimed at Obama from the left.)

Another comment:

One more knife in the back for the working men and women of the country. This abomination of a president must be removed from office. He is ruining our country.

And:

Obama’s crappy healthcare overhaul is coming apart like a car put together with superglue, as it was supposed to do, of course, after it transferred everything to the insurance corpse and Big PhRMA.

Pretty soon the only thing left will be the mandate to buy skyrocketing insurance.

A commenter named "demi" says: "he’s not looking as well as he once looked. Something is taking a toll on the man." And the immediate response, from DWBartoo is: "I think he resembles Joseph Goebbels more … every single day, demi … the eyes … the eyes are dead."

Another commenter says: "I don’t understand why the right hates Obama. he is the best Republican President they’ve had in decades."

Another:

I tried to read his autobiography. Found it chock full of trite, and gave up. I knew he was full of BS. I knew he was a front for the elites.

The night he got elected, I went to an election party, had to my partner is a big dem supporter. I kid you not people were crying and hugging one another. I was horrified. had a few people shout at me for not going along with the group hysteria.

Which draws the response: "Have to confess: I fell for it."

And:

I wasn’t into the hysteria but I thought that for once I wasn’t voting for the lesser of two evils but somebody I really wanted in there. Now I don’t believe I voted for the lesser but rather the greater of the two evils. At least if McLame had come up with such an abominable plan, the Democrats would have blocked it if for no other reason than because McLame has an “R” after his name.

All right, I'm going to stop now. I've only combed through a third of the comments, but you can see what is happening: Obama has become the embodiment of their grief over the pending stillborn death of Obamacare.

I'm thinking Obama's best hope for reelection is for the Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare — find the individual mandate unconstitutional and the remainder of the law inseverable. Take the whole thing down.  Let Obama rhapsodize about the beautiful future that might have been — it's very pretty when it's not real — and blast away at that terrible Supreme Court that reaches beyond the realm of the law. Ironically, Obama would be publicly denouncing the Court for getting political and secretly grateful that the political benefit came to him.

Think about it. Obamacare is the nonviable fetus that we continue to carry to term, agonizing in anticipation of a stillborn. It's very sad. But there is the possibility of ending the existence of that misbegotten child. Do you like my metaphor? Within it, the Supreme Court is the abortionist. It can intervene right now and end the suffering.

Rush Limbaugh keeps mocking Obama for being too much of a professor.

And I agree with a lot of this mockery. So don't get me wrong: I like Rush Limbaugh. I listen all the time. But that means I catch some things that you may not notice. And I caught a couple of ironies in yesterday's show.

First, he's twice played this clip from the Rodney Dangerfield movie "Back to School":



And yesterday he says that it shows "an economics course with an Obama type professor, an arrogant, conceited snob who has no understanding of what really happens in the business world... who thinks he has all the answers."

So Obama doesn't know what goes on in the real world, and the evidence of what goes on in the real world is... a Hollywood movie. Irony #1.

Later, after this putdown of professors, he's talking with a caller about the subject of "the Big Lie" (a concept from Hitler's "Mein Kampf"):

RUSH: Well, see that's the nature of the Big Lie. You tell something --

CALLER: You're right.

RUSH: -- so audacious that nobody could possibly think they'd make it up.

CALLER: No. No. Well, Hitler used to do that. Goebbels was great for that, just tell a bigger lie and bigger lie --

RUSH: Hitler didn't need Goebbels. Hitler was the architect of all this stuff. Goebbels, he just implemented it all. He didn't need Bormann. He might have needed Rommel --

CALLER: -- started it all (crosstalk)

RUSH: -- and he might have needed Christoph Waltz, and Hitler might have needed Bormann.

CALLER: Yeah, that's right.

RUSH: But Goebbels made movies out there....

Rush and the caller are suddenly acting like a couple of know-it-all history professors. What the hell does Rush know about who Hitler needed? Irony #2.

Ben Stein hates Borat.

Let's see why. I should say first -- and before reading Stein's comments -- that I saw the movie a few weeks ago. Why didn't I write about it? I started to, actually, but never got past the first sentence. I liked the movie well enough, but I much prefer "Da Ali G Show," with its short Borat segment, mixed with just enough Ali G and Bruno. I'm happier with disjointed sketches than with a long, connected narrative. It must be the blogger in me. Really, I didn't need the narrative frame involving the cross country road trip and Pamela Anderson and so forth (although I took advantage of it in concocting a fact pattern for my Civpro2 exam). As for the little encounters that were stuck in the frame, I've seen many Borat segments on "Da Ali G Show" that were just as funny or funnier.

But let's see what Ben Stein says:

1.) The auteur and star of the movie, Sacha Baron Cohen, is a Jew of high degree in England and now in Hollywood. But much of the movie is viciously anti-Semitic. This includes not just some but many "jokes" about killing Jews, about how Jews are the devil, about how Jews will kill for money, about how Jews are like cockroaches (the last a direct steal from Joachim Goebbels, who compared Jews with breeding rats and insects). This is in a world where we just lived through an anti-Semitic holocaust with the same themes and another is promised by the terrorists in Iran.

These are not funny jokes. These are really just old-fashioned sickening racism disguised as hipness. It's also a smug joke by Sacha Cohen which is basically his endlessly saying, "I hate Jews, too, even though I'm Jewish, and hey, I guess I don't look Jewish because I can say all these horrible Jew hatred things and no one says, 'Hey, what are you doing? You're a Jew.'"

It's repulsive.

Clearly, Cohen means to lampoon anti-Semitism. You could say that it's ineffective, because there really is nothing to force anti-Semites to look critically at themselves and feel chastened. They can sit back and laugh heartily at the anti-Semitism.

I remember the first time I saw Andrew Dice Clay, before I heard all the outrage at his sexism. I thought he was brilliantly lampooning sexism. So I may not the best person to judge.

Back to Ben:

2.) Much of the movie is about Borat making fun of people who have been completely kind to him. This is just infantile and narcissistic oppositional disorder. It's also rude, and it's not very funny. Maybe it is if you are five.

Well, the key question is whether it's funny. But I can see feeling that it's wrong to laugh if he's being rude to people who are trying to be nice to him. But it's awfully straitlaced. All sorts of practical jokes and teasing are sort of mean. You could object to everything going back to "Candid Camera."

3.) Much of the story is mocking and belittling Southerners as a group....

It is a bit cheap to target Southerners.

4.) It has a genuinely nauseating mockery of a woman just because she happens to be black. Why aren't people getting upset about that? It's pure, unadulterated KKK type racism. You have to see it to believe it.

She happens to be a prostitute as well. Actually, I thought the movie got politically correct about the black woman. In the end, Borat goes back to her and marries her. It was more sympathetic than it needed to be. If anything, the movie targeted white men.

5.) Worst of all, it has acute mockery of Christians. There is a long scene mocking Christian fundamentalists, in which Borat makes cruel fun of the idea of Jesus as Savior...

I agree that this was a pretty cheap target. It wasn't so much Christians as rural Southern Christians.

A close friend who saw the movie the same night I did said, "It makes you laugh, but then you want to take a shower after you've seen it."

I think he's being way too prissy about it. What do you think? Is this just a matter of taste or is there a serious moral question here?