It’s a serious question. Several episodes lately have reminded me of the ubiquitous saying about how we all risk becoming the thing we most hated in our youth, or that we inevitably turn into the person we hate most, etc. There are too many versions of the quotation to list.
I started my mind wandering down these dark corridors while researching a post I may never write about Harvard’s gobsmacking alumni magazine this month, as various writers and revered minds tried (and failed) to make sense out of the university’s recent travails without, somehow, saying anything critical about the woman at the center of them, deposed Harvard president Claudine Gay. After all, she is still on the faculty (and black, and a woman, and a DEI warrior), so being overtly negative about her conduct—as in making her accept responsibility—apparently would be too transparent to countenance.
In an essay reprinted from the “Chronicle of Higher Education,” Derek Bok (who became president of Harvard while I was a student there) wrote about the school’s cultural challenges, and, I noticed, never mentioned the term “progressive” once in his article, only the term “liberal.” And I thought, “Wow. Talk about being out of touch.” Does Bok really think today’s militant, intolerant, censoring, bullying, doctrinaire progressives would qualify as liberals in his era? Sure, they embrace many of the same agenda items, being anti-war, pro-drug use, wanting abortion on demand and other Sixties obsessions. But they are anything but liberal in the classic sense.
Four well-known stand-up comics recently retrieved notice that their appearances had been cancelled by Seattle’s Capitol Hill Comedy Club/Bar. The club explained,
“After careful consideration and discussions with our team, investors, local comedians, and neighborhood advocacy groups, we’ve encountered a challenging situation that requires us to revisit the planned shows. Capitol Hill is known for its progressive values, and we’ve received significant feedback expressing concerns about the alignment of these upcoming shows with the neighborhood’s ethos. This feedback includes concerns from local advocacy groups that are deeply embedded in our community and work towards upholding its values.”
Fascinating. I also recently heard a vintage performance by legendary political humorist Mort Sahl in his prime, before he became bitter and repetitious in old age. I was impressed at how Sahl, who was clearly a liberal, joked at the expense of both political parties and their various members, while ridiculing a range of policies and positions that covered the entire ideological landscape. A generation earlier, Bob Hope, a political conservative, did the same thing. When it began as a fresh TV site for satire nearly 50 years ago, Saturday Night Live could be counted on to mock both parties equally. Now they have a comedy gold in a doddering President reminiscent of Tim Conway’s’s mumbling old man character on the Carol Burnett Show, and they won’t touch him.
Today comedians who dare to puncture the progressive bubble are deemed hostile to “community values.” Kevin Downey, Jr., a stand-up comic who is also an occasional conservative pundit, wrote of the change,
What exactly did these four comedians do wrong? The club didn’t mention any jokes these guys may have made in the past to ruffle the non-binary tailfeathers of the local comedians, club staff, or “advocacy groups.” It looks to me like this is nothing more than some good old American censorship and a chance to silence comedians who dare to be themselves.
This is head-spinning. Tommie Smothers, who died recently, sacrificed his career to comic integrity, refusing the command by the conservative suits at CBS that he and his brother stop their increasingly pointed jokes about President Johnson and the Vietnam war. The Smothers Brothers’ variety show was cancelled at the peak of its popularity, and even fans who were not always in agreement with the Smothers’ political views concluded from the firing that the establishment (it was called that then) couldn’t bear to be exposed by humor, and that its crucial vulnerability was truth.
Now it’s the progressives who can’t handle the truth, want to obscure it, bury it, hate those who seek it, and censor those who won’t knuckle under. Woke local comic Juno Man fits right in: she said this makes her want to work with the venue even more. “I have loved working with this club and am more resolute in doing so given their decision to prioritize the safety and inclusiveness of the local community,” she said on Facebook. Safety!
The transformation is nearly complete.
Ethics Alarms 
But hey, Democrats of the old south were inclusive too, so long as you were white and neither Catholic nor Jew. The inclusive tolerant left is an exclusive club that only like minded people can join.
I assume these comics will only poke fun at white heterosexual conservative males because if you can’t mock the people you hate there is nothing funny about laughing at yourself.
I didn’t know their was antisemitism in the South. I think that is northern Democrats projecting. The Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and Attorney General for the Confederacy was Jewish. The ADL claims the south was antisemitic because Georgia convicted a Jewish man of raping and killing a 13 year old who was one of his employees. The only problem is, the guy was probably guilty (by the standards of the time). There were 2 main suspects and the other one was a black man who found her body and had bloodstains on his shirt. The Southern legal system let the black man go and convicted the owner of the factory over the black man with the girl’s blood on his shirt. Do you really think this conviction was based on racism or based on the types of evidence used to convict people of such crimes at the time?
So yes, this raises the (rather good) possibility that the ADL was formed to defend a pedophile murderer and treat him as a hero.
Michael, I could be wrong but my understanding of the Klan was that only Protestant faiths were acceptable. I know that Catholics were persecuted in the South
Well, Republicans were treated even more harshly than Catholics by the KKK. Weren’t roughly half the people lynched by the KKK during the Civil Rights Era white Republicans? However, you didn’t say the KKK, you said the South in general. I am pretty sure the KKK was more discriminatory than most people.
Good point,
“Weren’t roughly half the people lynched by the KKK during the Civil Rights Era white Republicans?“
To no one’s surprise, the NAACP and the SPLC don’t seem to think so; is there a link that claims otherwise, MR?
PWS
Well, here we are.
I recently commented that the Alice Cooper group, on it’s School’s Out album in 1972, credited Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Elmer Bernstein for using lyrics and melodies from West Side Story in the song Gutter Cats vs. the Jets, and the instrumental Grande Finale.
Never did I expect to be expounding on this bit of trivia: in 1970, the Alice Cooper group released its second album (under Frank Zapa’s Bizarre Records label), Easy Action (which I believe is a West Side Story reference (sorry, Jack, I don’t think I have ever seen the original movie, but I heard it was recently re-made)). The final track on Easy Action is a largely instrumental piece entitled, Lay Down and Die, Goodbye. It begins with a sample of Tom Smothers, but he does not appear to be credited in the song.
From Wikipedia:
The closing track “Lay Down And Die, Goodbye”, which was originally written and recorded as a single B-side by the band when it was called Nazz, begins with a sample of Tom Smothers saying “You are the only censor; if you don’t like what I’m saying, you have a choice: you can turn me off”.
For more Alice Cooper trivia, stay tuned for any posts by Jack about Mae West in Sextette, the Sgt. Pepper’s movie, Salvador Dali, Meat Loaf (the singer, and maybe the food), Megadeth, Vincent Price, Pat Boone, and Groucho Marx.
-Jut
You really should see both “West Side Story”s, both because the first film was considered an immediate classic (and Russ Tamblyn’s in it!) and because the contrast with Speilberg’s superfluous, woke remake is itself a window into the evolving culture. Should it matter than Natalie Wood played a Puerto Rican girl when she was really Russian? Do you care that Marnie Nixon did all of her singing for her, just like she did for Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady”? Other than virtue-signaling, was the gimmick of having scenes spoken in Spanish (with no subtitles) justifiable?
i don’t disagree. And, I probably have had the opportunity to see it in College (they would have weekly movie nights that featured a variety of films: the Bicycle Thief and the Icicle Thief on the same night). I know I missed Birth of a Nation and, probably, Rashomon. They must have played West Side Story at some point-and I might have even seen it-but I don’t think I did.
Maybe I should commit to it. On your recommendation, I have gone through Uncle Tom’s Cabin recently, a book that has been sitting on my bookshelf for 20 years. Very much worth it, as much for the story as to understand the historical context in which it was written (in other words, understanding the historical context in which it was written, which can be gleaned by reading the book, Lincoln’s comment to Harriet Beecher Stowe about her War makes much more sense).
-Jut
That makes me happy, Jut. When I read it, I was shocked that the book isn’t a mandatory read in high school. Arguably the single most important book in US history.
The great thing about missing great movies is that you have something terrific to look forward to. I remember a Stanford intern I had at the Chamber of Commerce. When she told me she had never seen Casablanca, I gave her the assignment to watch it with her boy friend. The next day, she said to me, simply, “Oh my god.” These things bind us all together.
Read a book called “Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America” by David S. Reynold’s. It goes into detail about the post-Civil War watering down of the book and its impact by traveling roadshows and other spectacles, leading us to the unfortunate “Uncle Tom” pejorative used today.
I still haven’t seen Schindler’s List, and I do not think I am any the worse off for it.
I’m never sure whether I’m a progressive or a liberal. I kinda reject labels. Some of my more leftie friends say that makes me a modernist. I’ve been accused of worse.
Curmie,
I am glad you say that, because the divide is often elusive, and I am not quite sure I get it myself.
conservative and liberal seem to be opposite sides of the same coin
conservatives describe how things are, and liberals loosen up the stringent parts of that. They are opposed, but they are struggling within the same system. Think of the right to vote, or civil rights.
both sides agree on the right to vote, but the devil is in the details. They argue about the details.
progressives are more difficult. They are not arguing for the other side of the same coin; they are arguing for a different coin.
progressives push to transgress the current system into a new paradigm. We go beyond rights of man to seguing about animal rights, ecological right, etc. Progressives are the Bobby Kennedy/john Lennon types: this has never happened, so why can’t I do that.
liberals are more measured and prudent.
but, honestly, when people try to distinguish Conservatives, liberals, and progressives, they don’t explain the differences.
so, how do I really know what they are saying.
-Jut
Watch—when “progressive” becomes a pejorative label like “liberal” did, the new, bright, shiny term will be “modernist.”
“we all risk becoming the thing we most hated in our youth”
I guess I should’ve hated millionaires…
Modern progressives are basically Nazis with longer hair, just like that one officer said that black lives matter is basically the Klan with a tan. Ouch. Most people have now forgotten that going on 60 years ago, the militant activists were just as destructive as the progressive militants are today.
The thing is, that all fell apart when they lost their defining issue, which was Vietnam. The current group of progressive is not going to lose their defining issue because it’s all domestic. It’s not about a war that’s being fought in a foreign country that is going to one day end. You’re right when you say that the transformation is nearly complete, but I think what the progress is in this country are becoming is something very sinister. They are becoming a group that considers a dictatorship okay and a one-party state ideal as long as it’s them who’s in charge.
It’s not even limited to the United states, a recent poll in the UK shows that a majority of young people there would be okay with a dictatorship because they think the democracy has failed. Haven’t heard that since the 1930s, when the Great Depression had the world falling on its face and a lot of folks were beginning to look towards the Soviet Union and even Nazi Germany and say that maybe democracy wasn’t the way to go because it looked like these places were getting things done. Of course they weren’t, or some of the things they were doing were things no one should ever consider doing, but they hid the bad parts very well. The United States is never going to fall the outside conquest, but I think it’s closer to falling from inside than it’s been in quite a while
I remember that Harvard decided to randomly assign students to dorm rooms about 1990. By that I mean they randomly assigned male and female students without regard to sex. So, a female student could get a random male roommate. The students were not allowed to opt out of it. It caused an uproar, but all the students who complained were sent to reeducation and the massive outcry from the parents resulted in Harvard sending them all letters calling them intolerant bigots. Harvard did it for a second year just to show that they couldn’t be cowed by intolerant conservatives. After giving started to suffer, they ended the program. So, yes, I believe that today’s intolerant, bigoted, censorius students would be right at home as a mainstream liberal at Harvard in 1990.
The early 1990’s had a lot of political indoctrination and censorship on college campuses. Students were subjected to sensitivity training routinely. My brother’s orientation had a rather typical exercise. A line was drawn on the floor in the middle of the room. One side of the room was labelled ‘comfortable’ and the other ‘uncomfortable’. Statements were read and you had to go to the side of the room that was appropriate. The statement ‘Date a random person of another race’. One student asked for clarification and they were told that no questions were allowed. When she went to the ‘uncomfortable’ side, 4 student orientation leaders berated her for 5 minutes, telling her that she wasn’t worthy of a black man dating her, that she was racist scum, that she would lose her dorm assignment, etc. So, a typical Marxist struggle-session. Remember, these activities existed in liberalism since the 1960’s when Marxism became popular. All this stuff we see today has been common on college campuses for 50+ years, it just wasn’t openly acknowledged. Now, the people indoctrinated into this are now in all positions of power in society and it can be openly shown. As a topical example, Palestine Solidarity Committee (PLO student affiliate) was holding protests, promoting terrorism, and firebombing the property of Jews on my campus in the 1990’s without any repercussions. In the Women’s Studies classes, male students were not allowed to speak so they wouldn’t ‘intimidate’ the female students (even though class participation was part of the grade). We had racially segregated ‘lounges’. When Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was celebrated, the university published a list of activities and whether that one was open to ‘all’ or only black students. There were campuswide protests when the university tried to stop the black fraternities from selling alcohol to minors as fundraisers (the racists!).
By 1995, I would have been expelled for stating an opinion that any of the things above was wrong, due to the speech codes. I was lucky that I went while the speech code was being reviewed by the courts and right after it was stuck down. They then implemented new ones and by 1995, the ‘Code of Nonacademic Conduct’ was binding, but unpublished. You would be brought in a tried, but never told what you did to violate the code or what the violation was. That’s right, you would be brought in, told you violated the code and asked to defend yourself. If you asked “What did I do to violate the code?”, you would be told that you know what you did. If you asked “What part of the code did I violate?”, they would state that the code was confidential.
So yeah, the students today would completely fit in with the liberals students of the 1990’s and after.
Welcome to East Germany.