"We are now policing traditional gender boundaries, and stripping achievements from women, in the name of gender-blindness. The gender-woke movement is eating its own tail."

Says the top-rated comment at "At Shakespeare’s Globe, a Nonbinary Joan of Arc Causes a Stir/Even before the production debuted, it had inflamed a rancorous debate about sex and gender that plays out almost daily in Britain" (NYT). 

From the article:

[The playwright Charlie] Josephine said the decision to make Joan nonbinary came after studying Joan’s life and realizing that Joan of Arc had been willing to die at the stake rather than stop wearing men’s clothing. This was “not a casual fashion statement,” Josephine said. “It was a deep need for them.” Josephine wanted to depict what it would have been like for “a young person in a female body, who is questioning gender in a very different society than what we live in now,” they said. “My younger self really needed a protagonist like this,” they added.... 

A quote from  the Globe’s artistic director: “Everyone’s got an idea of how plays should be done and how historical figures should be treated. All 'I, Joan' was doing, [said], was asking, 'Who is Joan for now?'"

"Does this dress make me look guilty?"

Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress accused of being a society scammer, was found guilty. There is an Instagram account devoted to her style in court. Our chief fashion critic @VVFriedman explains why courtroom fashion actually matters.

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 2, 2019

The linked article isn't just about Sorokin but about various celebrities making questionable courtroom fashion choices. Excerpt:

And in 2011, during her trial for felony grand theft in Los Angeles, Lindsay Lohan garnered more attention for what she wore on her way to court — very short, clingy dresses, often in white or beige — than for the reasons she was in court, which may not have helped with her legal troubles, but made a different kind of case for her own fame in the public eye. “She walks into court like a movie star,” the lawyer Gloria Allred told The Times during the trial. “Apparently she hopes to be one.”

Ms. Allred also said then that her own general approach was to advise clients to dress for court as though they were dressing for church.

Some people get attention, some grab attention, and some — these are the ones you need to look out for — garner attention. It's not enough for them to have the attention right there in the moment. They need to amass it — to pile it up as if in a storehouse or granary.

ADDED: My all-time favorite celebrity courtroom look was Anna Nicole:



She won — in the Supreme Court, on a jurisdiction issue — and then she died and then she lost.

AND: To my eye, the look Anna Sorokin conjures up is the persecuted innocent:

The canonization of teenagers.

I feel as though, because children were murdered, I shouldn't be expressing shock at bad taste, but I don't think it's just aesthetics that I find so troubling....



You can read the article here. Excerpt:

[L]ifting her eyes and staring into the distance before her, González stood in silence. Inhaling and exhaling deeply—the microphone caught the susurration, like waves lapping a shoreline—González’s face was stoic, tragic. Her expression shifted only minutely, but each shift—her nostrils flaring, or her eyelids batting tightly closed—registered vast emotion. Tears rolled down her cheeks; she did not wipe them away.....

In its restraint, its symbolism, and its palpable emotion, González’s silence was a remarkable piece of political expression. Her appearance also offered an uncanny echo of one of the most indelible performances in the history of cinema: that of Renée Maria Falconetti, who starred in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic silent film from 1928, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”... Falconetti, who never made another movie, gives an extraordinary performance, her face registering at different moments rapture, fear, defiance, and transcendence... [W]hen Joan knows that she is to be martyred, Dreyer’s camera lingers on closeups of Falconetti, with her brutally close-cropped hair, her rough garments, and her anguished silence. Her extraordinary image in that sequence could be intercut almost seamlessly with footage from Saturday’s rally....

Our potential saviors gleam all the more brightly against the pervasive political and civic darkness of the moment.

I become very uneasy when politics looks like religion.

The word "passion" in "The Passion of Joan of Arc" is based on the meaning "The sufferings of Jesus in the last days of his life, from the Last Supper to his death; the Crucifixion itself" which has been extended to "The sufferings of a martyr, martyrdom" (OED). Joan of Arc was martyred, killed because of her adherence to Christianity.

Should the suffering of someone who was shot — or who huddled in fear of getting shot — by an evil/insane gunman be called The Passion? The closeups of Falconetti and paintings of the Crucifixion reinforce religious faith. If you engage with these images, you experience vicarious suffering, and perhaps you feel you should — you do — believe what was so important to them that they died like that.

But a child in a school shooting has no internal beliefs that brought her to the place where she is suffering. No opponent of her beliefs is putting her to the test. And she would gladly run away if she could. Yes, González made a powerful demonstration of how terrible it is to be caught in a school shooting. But it would be a mistake to take the idea of that suffering and merge it with beliefs that we ought to adopt because of that suffering. The policy proposals of gun control are not the equivalent of the Christian religion. The children happened to be caught, horribly, in a very bad place, but that was happenstance, not because of their belief in gun control.

Who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a statue of Joan of Arc in New Orleans?

I'm reading this story at PJ Media  — which misquotes the graffiti in the headline and makes it sound as though the graffiti was on the statue when it's actually on the base. So let's switch to The Times-Picayune (which is linked at PJ Media):

The phrase "Tear it Down" was hastily sprayed in black paint across the base of the golden Joan of Arc statue on Decatur Street in the French Quarter sometime earlier this week. It has since been removed, with only the vaguest traces of the paint remaining.

The "Tear it Down" tag would seem to relate to the debate surrounding the city's ongoing removal of four Confederate monuments. But the statue of Joan of Arc, a 15th-century military leader, martyr and Catholic saint, hasn't been mentioned in the controversy to this point.

Now, wait a minute! This article is from last May, and the PJ Media article went up yesterday and doesn't mention that the defacing of the Joan of Arc monument predated the current uproar over the removal of Civil War monuments. But there was a "Take Em Down NOLA" movement at the time that — as the Times-Picayune tells us — aimed at the local Confederate monuments (and this group denies targeting the Joan).

Anyway, who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a Joan of Arc monument? Do you leap to assume that some idiot believes that Joan of Arc has to do with the Confederacy? Maybe that's how you have fun. At PJ Media, the author (Tom Knighton) does not assume it was ignorance about Joan of Arc. At the end of his piece he says:

It's also possible that this was the result of someone being intentionally ridiculous. After all, while removing statues of Confederate leaders is the big thing, there are also movements to remove a Thomas Jefferson monument from outside of Columbia University and a Teddy Roosevelt from outside of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. So maybe someone is just trolling these lunatics.

Yes, that theory fits the facts better than the theory that some idiot thought it was a pro-Confederacy statue.

But it could also be anti-Catholic. Speaking of ignorance of American history, it's ignorant not to know that the KKK and other nationalists have been virulently anti-Catholic. Here's a Wikipedia article, "Anti-Catholicism in the United States."

Here's some KKK artwork from 1925:

You see the tear-it-down enthusiasm.

There are people who would want to take down a statue of a Catholic saint. Quite aside from the KKK, what about people who want the strict separation of religion and government? Why is there a religious monument in the public square?

"Dressing for being burned at the stake is never a good look."

A perfect comment, here.

ADDED: Leelee Sobieski actually played the part of Joan of Arc in a movie a while back. You can see what she wore to the burning at the stake here.

AND: The Leelee Sobieski "Joan of Arc" came out in 1999, but there are numerous movies about Joan of Arc. Many have seen the great 1928 film "The Passion of Joan of Arc," directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, but that movie is the 8th on the list of movies about Joan of Arc. Second on the list is this 1899 short film "Jeanne d'Arc," directed by George Méliès, one of the first color films. Watch it:

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "Christian" is.

That's my idea of how to answer the question whether any given person is a Christian. I'm basing my answer on the famous old Bill Clinton answer...



... which always made sense to me. In the case of whether someone is a Christian, the answer could easily vary based on whether your definition of Christian is just someone who consistently asserts that he's a Christian — which was apparently Dana Milbank's definition, causing him to insist that it's easy and obvious to say that Obama is a Christian — or whether you think a Christian is someone with a particular set of sincerely held beliefs — which could have been what caused Scott Walker to say he didn't know whether Obama is a Christian.

I would suggest that there is a definition of Christianity within which it is possible to assert that no one is a Christian and another that gets you to the answer that everyone is a Christian.

Should politicians get into the activity of defining Christianity? Consider that Obama seems to have decided he can and should define Islam. (He has a pragmatic reason for saying that ISIS is perverting Islam and therefore only lies in saying it is Muslim.) But is there any good reason for any American politician to tread into the territory of saying what Christianity is?

"Sarah Palin is launching a nationwide bus tour starting Sunday in Washington..."

"... Palin will also be stopping at other spots of symbolic national significance on the East Coast, including the Civil War battlefields at Gettysburg and Antietam, and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.... In addition to the tour, Palin’s camp recently announced a two-hour promotional film about the former governor set to premiere in Iowa next month."

So... does that mean she's going to run for President?

Is Sarah running?
	Obviously.
	She's testing the waters, as they say.
	Probably not. Just grabbing attention.
	No. Being President is not her thing. Wise up, America. Ignore this woman.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: That film — according to the Guardian — "will present her as a Joan of Arc-like figure beset at every turn by vicious leftwing enemies seeking to thwart her ambition of reviving the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan." Somehow I doubt that the film actually mentions Joan of Arc. If not, the linked article has quite a deceptive headline: "Sarah Palin likened to Joan of Arc in two-hour documentary film." The title of the movie is "The Undefeated," which sounds more like the title of an American western than any reference to Joan of Arc. But the British website comes up with Joan of Arc, who was not undefeated. She was captured, purchased by the British and then tried — unfairly — and executed — brutally — by the British.

The crusader.

(Another pic from Ted's Toys.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Joan said:

I looked it up, wondering if it might be a suitable stand-in for Jeanne d'Arc, but that's too much of a stretch. If it had been closer, I would've asked if I could borrow it for my profile picture.

Chip Ahoy says:

Photoshop for you, crusader figurine Jeanneified.