Archive for 2015

June 24, 2015

TIME TO BAN GONE WITH THE WIND? Well, that didn’t take long:

If it were left to me, I would take the flag down (for the reasons South Carolina governor Nikki Haley laid out Monday). But this kind of cheap moral preening is galling. Is it really too much for people to muster the moral imagination that the issue isn’t nearly as simple as that?

A November poll of South Carolinians found that 61 percent of blacks wanted it down. That means nearly four in ten blacks felt differently. Are they deluded? Are they the moral equivalent of self-loathing Jews, happy to live under a swastika?

It’s a sure bet that some of the white South Carolinians marching across that bridge and attending services at Emanuel AME Church also support keeping the flag. That doesn’t mean they’re right, but they surely aren’t the American SS of Jenkins’s imagination either.

Blogger Glenn Reynolds noted that when the South was solidly Democratic, we got Gone With the Wind nostalgia. Now that it is profoundly less racist, but also less useful to Democrats, it’s the enemy of all that is decent and good.

—“The Dignity of Charleston Flies in the Face of the Left’s Uninformed, Anti-South Bigotry,” Jonah Goldberg, writing for his L.A. Times column, which ran yesterday.

But what does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag that flutters so dramatically over the dead and wounded soldiers at the Atlanta train station just before the “GWTW’’ intermission?

Warner Bros. just stopped licensing another of pop culture’s most visible uses of the Confederate flag — toy replicas of the General Lee, an orange Dodge Charger from “The Dukes of Hazzard’’ — as retailers like Amazon and Walmart have finally backed away from selling merchandise with that racist symbol.

That studio sent “Gone with the Wind’’ back into theaters for its 75th anniversary in partnership with its sister company Turner Classic Movies in 2014, but I have a feeling the movie’s days as a cash cow are numbered. It’s showing on July 4 at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the museum’s salute to the 100th anniversary of Technicolor — and maybe that’s where this much-loved but undeniably racist artifact really belongs.

—“‘Gone with the Wind’ should go the way of the Confederate flag,” Lou Lumenick, the New York Post, today.

Hey, MoMA is an interesting choice; considering the very problematic 1930s-era tribal politics of one of its founders; but in any case, will Warners heed Lumenick’s (tacit or otherwise) advice and ban Gone With the Wind on Blu-Ray?

Speaking of which, Mel Brooks has noted that there’s no way Blazing Saddles could be made in today with his fellow leftists in full-bore PC on steroids mode. Last year John Nolte of Big Hollywood received plenty of dismissive scorn from the left for advising his readers, “’Blazing Saddles’ Review: Buy a Copy Before the Left Burns Them All.”

Will that film be next for the full Fahrenheit 451 treatment?

RELATED:

 

Posted at 5:32 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

BERNIE SANDERS’S SOVIET HONEYMOON:

During Bernie’s mayoral tenure, Burlington formed an alliance with the Soviet city of Yaroslavl, 160 miles northeast of Moscow. When in 1988 he married his wife, Jane, the mayor decided it would be a perfect place for his honeymoon. In a tape of his interview with Yaroslavl’s mayor, Alexander Riabkov, Sanders acknowledges that housing and health care appear to be “significantly better” in the U.S. than in the socialist paradise. “However,” he added, “the cost of both services is much, much, higher in the United States.”

Sanders made further globe-trotting expeditions to socialist countries. He visited Cuba, scoring a meeting with Havana’s mayor. In 1985 he attended the celebrations marking the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. “In a letter addressed to the people of Nicaragua, penned in conjunction with that trip, Sanders denounced the activities of the Reagan administration, which he said was under the influence of large corporations,” the Guardian notes. “In the long run, I am certain that you will win,” Sanders wrote, “and that your heroic revolution against the Somoza dictatorship will be maintained and strengthened.” (The Sandinistas were ousted by Nicaragua’s voters in 1990).

When P.J. O’Rouke reported back from a Nation magazine-sponsored river trip up the Volga in 1982, he famously described the pro-commie cruisers as “people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” I wonder if Bernie did the same during his socialist safaris?

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

WE HAVE OFFICIALLY REACHED PEAK LEFTISM: “If it seems to you that the Left has, collectively, lost its damned mind as the curtain rises on the last act of the Obama administration, you are not imagining things.”

Posted at 5:01 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

THE OTHER FLAG CONTROVERSY: US EMBASSY IN LONDON FLIES THE RAINBOW FLAG: From Fausta Wertz at Da Tech Guy Blog.

If the left is going to play the role of self-appointed flag police, they shouldn’t be surprised if someone points out this as well.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

UNABOMBER OR POPE FRANCIS? Take the test!

Posted at 4:43 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE: “Anne Lakey, 55, was found guilty of 13 counts of indecent assault on a boy of 13 or 14 and another boy aged 15 over a three-year period following a trial at Teesside crown court,” the UK Guardian reports.

Posted at 4:01 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

NIKKI HALEY’S STOCK RISES AMID FLAG FUROR:

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) is attracting widespread praise for leading the bipartisan effort to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the Statehouse.

Haley’s swift response has put her back in the national spotlight, stoking speculation that she could be the vice presidential nominee on the GOP’s 2016 presidential ticket. The 43-year-old governor saved her party from divisive bickering and damaging headlines that could have lingered for months.

While other prominent Republicans hemmed and hawed, Haley was clear  at her press conference Monday that the flag must come down. Defenders of the flag, meanwhile, largely remained silent.

The long-term political impact of Haley’s new stance — which is much different than her position last year — is unclear. But the short-term effect is obvious.

Note though that hitting Control-F on the above article at The Hill and typing in the words “Fritz” or “Hollings” brings back zero results.

Unexpectedly.

RELATED: “If someone said to [Ann] Coulter, ‘You’re just a whitebread girl from Connecticut, what do you know of America?,’ I imagine she’d have a pointed two-word rebuttal, and that rebuttal would be well-justified,” Ace of Spades writes. “Why is Nikki Haley then to be dismissed [by Coulter] based upon the accident of her own birth?”

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

FLASHBACK: “HILLARY WHITE POWER CLINTON:” “Congratulations, Hillary Clinton, you win the prize for the first Democratic Bigot Eruption since I’ve been keeping track of this,” notes Media Matters Senior Fellow.

Posted at 2:38 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2015

HOLY, MOLY PEOPLE LOVE FOOTBALL: So much that it defies predictions Gabriel Rossman’s seemingly sound predictions of what should happen in the era of DVRs and streaming. What’s he missing?

Posted at 1:52 pm by Virginia Postrel on Jun 24th, 2015

BECAUSE MANNERS MATTER TO SOUTHERNERS: Jason Riley: What Charleston tells us about race relations.

The reaction to the carnage in Charleston represents racial progress of the type today’s liberals have no interest in acknowledging. The post-1960s left derives political power, in the form of voter fealty, from encouraging blacks to view themselves primarily as helpless victims of white racism. The struggles of blacks are the fault of whites, in other words, and until the Dylann Roofs are no more, nothing has really changed.

But the shooting victims deserve to be remembered as individuals, not politicized symbols of black struggle.

Mr. Roof may have his sympathizers, but they are largely relegated to the anonymous fever swamps of the Internet. Racism still exists, alas, and no one reading this is likely to see the day when it doesn’t. But antiblack animus doesn’t explain racial gaps in employment, crime, income, learning and single-parent homes. Furthermore, attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. have evolved to a point where a twice-elected black president has asked the second black attorney general to investigate a shooting in a Deep South state with a black senator and Indian-American governor.

The black left guards its victim status fiercely. Witness the “Black Lives Matter” brigades that reject replacing the slogan’s adjective with “All.”

Riley’s right. The individuals who were murdered in Charleston are being mourned by a tight knit, Southern community, where a lot of racial progress has taken place since the civil rights movement. While those who have never lived in the South love to demean Southerners in various ways and assume they are all redneck racists, the truth is that Southerners–of all colors–are some of the best mannered, polite people in the world. They value community, family and God. When tragedy strikes, the first instinct is to help, and to unify, not to hate, or riot. Yes, there is still racism (flowing in both directions) in the South, but having lived all over the country (except the west coast), I believe Southerners are no more racist that the rest of the country, and perhaps in some ways, less so.

As someone who grew up in the South, I have a hard time imagining the Baltimore riots happening in Charlotte, Charleston, or Savannah. And before someone starts lecturing about how Baltimore is a “Southern” city that had a lot of confederate sympathizers (it did), I know few Southerners–those from the deep South, rather than border states– who would ever characterize Baltimore as a “Southern” city. When I was in high school, a family moved into our neighborhood from Maryland, and we all referred to them as the “Yankee family” for awhile. It was just good-natured joking around, of course (the girl in that family became a good friend), but the family definitely wasn’t “Southern” in its mannerisms and culture.  Nice, to be sure, but not Southern, bless their little hearts.

So when I see what’s happening in Charleston, I am not surprised. I see a bunch of nice, well-mannered, God-fearing Southerners coming together to mourn the loss of good people and condemn an evil act.

Posted at 1:28 pm by Elizabeth Price Foley on Jun 24th, 2015