NOW HE TELLS US: Francis Fukuyama Postpones the End of History.

#METOO: I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser. “In class, Avital was waited on by her aide-de-camp, a graduate student who followed her around the Village like Tony Hale on HBO’s Veep. If the energy in the room was not to her liking, she became frustrated. During one session, she abruptly stopped the lecture midthought, blaming her students for making her feel drained. It took a beat for anyone to realize she was serious.”

Plus: “In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.”

Yeah, but that attitude threatens the whole feedlot.

HE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW:

ASHE SCHOW: Lies, Damned Lies, And Campus Sexual Assault Statistics.

UNCONSTITUTIONAL: Mass. AG Faces More Legal Pressure Over Unilateral Gun-Ban Expansion.

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BUT OF COURSE: Arizona Democrat to ICE agents: “You will not be safe.”

OPEN THREAD: It’s Saturday Night.

I’LL GO WITH #1: Poppy seeds: delicious bagel topping or dangerous narcotic?

LIBERAL HOLLYWOOD’S FIRST MAN GETS IT ALL WRONG – NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS A PROUD AMERICAN.

The globalist revisionism of Ryan Gosling’s new film is all about “placating the Chinese box office and not adherence to historical accuracy. Remember that next time they talk about how brave they are as artists standing up to fascism,” Stephen Miller tweets.

John Hinderaker writes at Power Line that as with earlier Hollywood films that distort the truth of a historical American event, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK, an exciting movie when viewed as a fiction, but utterly devoid of facts regarding Kennedy’s assassination and the man behind it, or more recently, Truth, Robert Redford as a waxworks recreation of Dan Rather in the midst of his Memogate debacle, “movies live on more or less forever. An insomniac businessman turns on the TV set in his hotel room. He scans the movies available for in-room viewing and comes across ‘Truth.’ Hmm. Sounds interesting. He watches it. A young couple has decided to spend the evening chilling with Netflix. There is a film on a subject they have vaguely heard about, the Kennedy assassination, but about which they know nothing: ‘JFK.’ They watch it. Hollywood’s lies are forever. As time goes by, and fewer people remember the truthful version of events, their capacity to deceive probably grows rather than diminishing. ‘First Man’ represents a more subtle deceit than ‘JFK’ or ‘Truth,’ but it is deceit nonetheless.”

Back and to the left. Back and to the left.

MICHAEL WALSH: Is the Pope Catholic? Or is Francis a social-justice warrior and environmentalist? The faithful want to know.

JOHN COLTRANE AND THE END OF JAZZ:

The fact that this 55-year-old recording is the year’s most significant jazz release tells you all you need to know about the health of jazz in 2018. The only real argument is about the clinical symptoms of jazz’s death and when it happened. It would be wrong to claim that jazz died with Coltrane in 1967, the year that rock cemented its takeover at Monterey. For one thing, many of jazz’s inventors were still going. Louis Armstrong, the first of the master soloists, had his biggest hit, “What a Wonderful World,” in 1967. Duke Ellington, the Debussy of the big band, was in 1967 preparing the second of his three “Sacred Music” concerts. And in 1967, jazz still contained the seeds of at least two of its final evolutions. The trumpeters Miles Davis and Donald Byrd had yet to form their electric bands, with Davis heading toward bleary oblivion and Byrd toward the dance floor. But Armstrong’s pop hit was orchestral, Ellington’s band always had been orchestral, and the crowded studios and thick textures of Davis’s In a Silent Way and Byrd’s Places and Spaces were, in their disorderly ways, orchestral too. None of this music was played by acoustic quartets.

* * * * * * * *

The assumption that it was the musician’s task to develop the music reveals how deeply jazz was soaked in the forms and assumptions of European art music. A Balkan folk musician or a West African griot doesn’t seek to push his people’s music forward technically but to imitate it and preserve their sonic memory. But a jazz musician, like a classical composer, has the modern itch. Imitation is not enough; he must go beyond his sources. He pursues formal development for its own sake and believes in progress. Jazz didn’t exactly die with Coltrane, but he certainly helped to kill it. No one (apart from Miles Davis) read its inner logic so clearly. No one did more to pulverize show tunes and the blues into stardust. Arguably no one did more to reunite secular Western art with religion, which is where secular Western art came from and what it had been striving to rejoin ever since it left. And no one (again apart from Miles Davis) did it better.

Read the whole thing. Of course, jazz had already survived its earlier attempt in the late 1940s at making its audience “more selective,” as Spinal Tap’s manager would say, thanks to albums with strong melodies such as Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ 1959 interpretation of Porgy and Bess, Dave Brubeck’s classic single “Take Five,” and the numerous swing bands and crooners still touring in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but its recovery was a temporary one. Previewing Ken Burns’ 2001 documentary Jazz, Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote:

Bebop offered challenges musicians thought they could never get from traditional swing bands, as well as an improvisational ethic that provided an escape from the tough work of writing strong melodies. Some of the players saw this: In 1949 drummer Buddy Rich fired his band because his players “just want to play bop and nothing else. In fact,” Rich added, “I doubt they can play anything else.” Louis Armstrong, whose centennial is being celebrated this year, once referred to bebop as “crazy, mixed-up chords that don’t mean nothing at all.” Before long swing had become a joke. Producer Quincy Jones recalls in the documentary Listen Up that as a young musician he once hid backstage from bebop trumpeter Miles Davis so Miles wouldn’t know he was in the swinging band that had just left the stage.

Suddenly, jazz was Art. Gone were the days when 5,000 people would fill the Savoy Ballroom to lindy hop to the sunny sounds of Ella Fitzgerald or Count Basie. Bebop was impossible to dance to, which was fine with the alienated musicians in Eisenhower’s America. (You can bet this era will be well represented by beatnik Burns.) Even bebop’s own founders weren’t safe from the ideological putsch: when Bird himself made an album of pop standards with a band backed up by a string section, he was labeled a sellout. Then Elvis, to simplify matters greatly, reinvented swing for a new generation, and the Beatles arrived with sacks of great new melodies, and jazz was over as a popular music. Remarkably, beboppers and their fans still blame the drop-off on American racism. Miles once called pop music “white music,” and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in a documentary about the Blue Note label, offers that “whites couldn’t appreciate anything that came from black culture.” Yet whites were as responsible as blacks for making stars of Ella, Basie, and other black swing artists. Only two kinds of music were allowed on the radio following the news of FDR’s death: classical and Duke Ellington.

As Judge wrote, “Some of the new jazz was undeniably brilliant, and many of the bebop and hard bop recordings that have been remastered and reissued only seem to acquire more appeal with age,” but the urge to go further and further out also risks dramatically shrinking an audience that, ultimately, wants to be entertained. Judge notes that “The unflinching critic Stanley Crouch tells a funny story about Ellington that sums up the problems jazz has had finding an audience since the bebop revolution: in the 60s, bassist Charles Mingus suggested to Ellington that they make an ‘avant-garde’ record together, employing some of the chaotic elements then popular in the free-jazz movement. Ellington replied that he had no desire to take jazz that far back.”

AND RIGHTLY SO: ISS leak highlights concerns about orbital debris and station operations.

For cleanup, we need better law. And here’s a longer piece (PDF) that Rob Merges and I wrote for the Environmental Law Reporter.

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THE WINTER SOLDIER IN WINTER: Guess Which Famous Democrat Won’t Rule Out Running In 2020?

FLASHBACK: WHOOPI GOLDBERG TIED MCCAIN TO SLAVERY’S RETURN.

Related: From Austin Bay at the Observer, A History Lesson for Howard Kurtz: Honest Reporting Died Long Ago.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Having quit Twitter, Wil Wheaton “still trying to process” how some people never gave him a chance.

Exit quote: “The exact kind of toxic call out culture that he helped spearhead has come back to bite him in the ass.”

PRIORITIES: “An infantry battalion commander sacked in the middle of a deployment with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, was at least partially fired for allegedly using a term that could be disparaging to members of the LGBTQ community, Marine Corps Times has learned.”

UPDATE: “Blasphemy is still an offense, but the gods are different.”

STEVE JOBS’ DAUGHTER SWINGS A WRECKING BALL: “Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs, and in her new memoir Small Fry she fills a much-needed gap in our knowledge about the life of the Apple Computer entrepreneur. Which is a shame. We liked that gap, and now there seems no way to get it back.”

Related (From Ed): Stop treating tech jerks like gods.

OBAMA, BUSH REMEMBER MCCAIN AS MAN WHO’D ‘NOT ABIDE BIGOTS AND SWAGGERING DESPOTS.’

As Trump supporter Jack Posobiec tweets, “They are clearly trying to provoke Trump to get him to respond to someone at the funeral so they can creates a false narrative about him attacking the McCain memorial service”

Update: “Talking about what a uniter McCain was while trolling Trump and his supporters at a funeral is Peak Establishment,” John Nolte of Big Hollywood adds.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “The idea of White Privilege is to pretend that Jaden Smith, or Barack Obama’s kids, have fewer opportunities than some poor, white, son-of-meth-head does, by nature of skin color.” The concept, which became a viral meme thanks to the Web, “was popularized by Peggy McIntosh in a 1989 paper written at Harvard University and titled, ‘White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack.’ It was written as a personal, experiential essay, and it details 26 ways in which McIntosh’s skin color has been decisive in determining her life outcomes…She simply reclassified her manifest economic advantage as racial privilege and then dumped this newly discovered original sin onto every person who happens to share her skin color. Without, of course, actually redistributing any of the wealth that, by her own account, she had done nothing to deserve.”

BOSTON RED SOX RIGHT FIELDER J.D. MARTINEZ’S SECOND AMENDMENT STANCE IS PATRIOTIC, NOT CONTROVERSIAL: Why should an athlete be subjected to a nonsensical controversy ginned up by reporters?

Someone recently dug up an old pro-Second Amendment Instagram post by Boston Red Sox star J.D. Martinez, in which the potential Triple Crown winner posted a picture of Adolf Hitler featuring the quote, “To conquer a nation, First disarm it’s (sic) citizens.” Martinez captioned the post, “This is why I will always stay strapped! #thetruth.”

Needless to say, the discovery triggered a torrent of stories about the “controversial” nature of Martinez’s 5-year-old post—because, apparently, disagreeing with a Hitlerian sentiment is now a provocative position. As it turns out, Hitler never said the words in Martinez’s pro-gun meme, although the dictator indisputably embraced a policy of disarming, in both rhetoric and action.

As Jon Gabriel wrote at Ricochet last year, “Overusing ‘controversial’ is one of my journalistic pet peeves. Whenever a conservative personality, bill, or issue is mentioned by the mainstream press, controversial is the go-to adjective. Meanwhile, a Democratic pol or proposal is described as ‘historic,’ ‘bold,’ or ‘sweeping.’ It’s a subtle difference, but the adjective used is a handy way to position a subject as negative or positive. Curious, I popped over to Google News and learned that the word ‘controversial’ results in ‘about 23,700,000 results’…So the next time you see a news story reporting on a ‘controversial school choice bill,’ translate it to the ‘sweeping, historic, and bold school choice bill’ to reduce your blood pressure.”

MAKE AMERICA MEDIUM RARE* AGAIN: Americans Are Grilling More Steaks for Labor Day With the Economy Humming.

* I know, I know, and it’s one his more monstrous traits.

Related: As Steve Hayward writes at Power Line, “somewhere in the 1970s, coincident with the rise of environmentalism, liberalism embraced the ‘limits to growth’ and turned away from embracing economic growth. ‘Let’s get the country moving again’ is now fully owned by Trump.”

Read the whole thing.

NEW YORK’S OTHER NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Michael Walsh: ‘Democratic Socialist’ in Brooklyn Is Caught ‘Embellishing’ Her Background.