THE JAZZ SINGER PREMIERED ON THIS DAY IN 1927: It is usually regarded as the first feature-length “talkie” (though it contained only a bit of actual talking).

Starring Al Jolson, who performs several scenes in blackface, the film is the story of a Jewish boy, Jakie Rabinowitz, who longs to be a jazz singer. His father, on the other hand, wants him to follow the family tradition and become a synagogue cantor. Jakie eventually runs away to follow his dream of show business stardom.

Alas, just as he is about to make it big, he finds out that his father is on his deathbed. Young Jakie is thus needed to sing the Kol Nidre for Yom Kippur in his father’s stead. If he fails to show up for the premiere of his big show, his fledgling career will likely be ruined.   But who will sing at the Yom Kippur service?  (Yes, I know … it’s probably a bit too melodramatic for the 21^st century, but whatever ….)

With Justin Trudeau and all, blackface has been a big news item lately.  Here is an aspect of the issue that I did not realize until recently (though it doesn’t surprise me): Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer were both very popular with African Americans. When the film played in Harlem, Harlem’s newspaper, the Amsterdam News, called it “one of the greatest pictures ever produced.” About Jolson, it wrote: “Every colored performer is proud of him.”

I also did not realize that Jolson had been such a champion of African American performers. Here is what Wikipedia says:

While growing up, Jolson had many black friends, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who became a prominent tap dancer. As early as 1911, at the age of 25, Jolson was noted for fighting discrimination on Broadway and later in his movies. He promoted a play by Garland Anderson, which became the first production with an all-black cast produced on Broadway. He brought a black dance team from San Francisco that he tried to put in a Broadway show. He demanded equal treatment for Cab Calloway, with whom he performed duets in the movie The Singing Kid.

Jolson read in the newspaper that songwriters Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, neither of whom he had ever heard of, were refused service at a Connecticut restaurant because of their race. He tracked them down and took them out to dinner, “insisting he’d punch anyone in the nose who tried to kick us out!” According to biographer Al Rose, Jolson and Blake became friends and went to boxing matches together.  …

Jeni LeGon, a black female tap dance star, recalls her life as a film dancer: “But of course, in those times it was a ‘black-and-white world.’ You didn’t associate too much socially with any of the stars. You saw them at the studio, you know, nice—but they didn’t invite. The only ones that ever invited us home for a visit was Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler.”  …

Jolson’s physical expressiveness also affected the music styles of some black performers. Music historian Bob Gulla writes that “the most critical influence in Jackie Wilson’s young life was Al Jolson.” He points out that Wilson’s ideas of what a stage performer could do to keep their act an “exciting” and “thrilling performance” was shaped by Jolson’s acts, “full of wild writhing and excessive theatrics”. Wilson felt that Jolson “should be considered the stylistic [forefather] of rock and roll.”

Interesting.

THEY FIGHT: A new GOP comes out swinging.

One example can be found in the confrontation between Indiana congressman Jim Banks and NPR’s Michel Martin this past Wednesday. Martin was fulfilling NPR’s unwritten charter of putting the wildest fringe leftist thinking into comfortable terms to make them acceptable to the denizens of the suburbs. Banks, a freshman representative who saw service in Afghanistan, wasn’t having any.

Martin was attempting to put across the accepted narrative about the Trump/Zelensky call – that Trump asked the Ukrainian president for dirt on Biden as a “favor,” that he immediately turned the conversation to Hunter Biden, that there was a “quid pro quo,” and so on, all backed up by her claim that she had the transcript “in front of her.”

Banks immediately cut to the chase on that, shutting down Martin with a single line: “…read the part of the transcript that would indict the president on high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Of course, Martin could do no such thing, and despite some further word games, that was the end of it, leaving myriads of NPR listeners clutching their worry beads in shock and alarm.

Along with Elise Stefanik’s bold defiance of the House Democratic elite, this is a serious indication that a new GOP is pecking its way out of the shell.

Nice, isn’t it?

UPDATE (From Ed):

Just think of NPR as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and soothing monotone radio voices, and it all makes sense.

(Updated and bumped).

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: The Word ‘Jungle’ Becomes too Offensive For Suburban Chicago High School For Homecoming.

It could just be temporary however — in 2012, the word “Chicago” itself was considered racist by some of the very best people employed by NBC.

In other 21st century homecoming news, Rod Dreher writes that “In Tennessee, the homecoming queen is a dude in a dress.”

HOUSECLEANING: Trump orders new national security adviser to make ‘substantial’ staff cuts: report. “President Trump has instructed his new National Security Adviser to make substantial staffing cuts to the 300-member National Security Council, according to reports — after years of Republican complaints of agency bloat and overreach. . . . The NSC staff, which numbered around 100 during the Clinton and Bush administrations, swelled to 400 full-time members under President Obama.”

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: In the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald maps the Streets of San Francisco.

This city has been conducting a three-decade experiment in what happens when society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. It has done so in the name of compassion for the homeless. The result: Street squalor and misery have increased, while government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles guiding city policy remain inviolate: Homelessness is a housing problem, it is involuntary, and it persists because of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

“Everyone’s on drugs here . . . and stealing,” an ex-convict named Shaku explains from an encampment of tents, trash and bicycles across from Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district. A formerly homeless woman living in a city-subsidized hotel, asked if she does drugs, replies: “Is that a trick question?” Jeff, 50, slumps over his coffee cup at 7:30 a.m. A half-eaten muffin sits next to him on a filthy blanket. “I use drugs, alcohol, all of it,” he tells me, his eyes closed. “The whole Tenderloin is for drugs.”

* * * * * * * * *

The stories the homeless tell about their lives reveal that something far more complex than a housing shortage is at work. The tales veer from one confused and improbable situation to the next, against a backdrop of drug use, petty crime and chaotic child rearing. There are few policy levers to change this crisis of meaning in American culture. What is certain is that the continuing crusade to normalize drug use, along with the absence of any public encouragement of temperance, will further handicap this unmoored population.

Carving out a zone of immunity from the law and bourgeois norms for a perceived victim class destroys the quality of life in a city. As important, that immunity consigns its alleged beneficiaries to lives of self-abasement and marginality. Tolerating street vagrancy is a choice that cities make. For the public good, in San Francisco and elsewhere, that choice should be unmade.

Read the whole thing.

The entire city, whose last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964, is a monument to the Fox Butterfield effect, which the SF Weekly publication stumbled into a decade ago: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s.”

The city is just waiting to be used as backdrop for a Trump 2020 campaign commercial. And Trump’s cabinet has already started teeing off on it, finally.

ALL THE RUSSIA/UKRAINE STUFF HAS JUST BEEN AN EFFORT TO DISTRACT: Brennan Hears Barr’s ‘Chilling’ Footsteps.

Flashback, March 2017: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Romney Republicanism could never win.

METAPHOR ALERT: Washington’s Newseum to close by year’s end. “A museum dedicated to journalism and the First Amendment is set to close its doors near the National Mall by the end of the year.”

A decade ago, John Podhoretz dubbed it “The News Mausoleum:”

The Newseum is chock-a-block with television studios, both actual (ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos is now broadcast from it) and pretend (facilities allow visitors to anchor their own “newscasts”). Nonetheless, its true subject is the glorious history of the newspaper and its vital role in American life since the early 1700’s. But herein lies a stark and bitter irony. For the simple fact is that, slogan or no slogan, the news is not coming to life, at least as far as newspapers are concerned.

For newspapers, these are the end times, or something very much like them. Every week provides a new marker on the road to apocalypse: hundreds of layoffs in Los Angeles, circulation scandals in Dallas and Long Island, buyout packages in New York and Washington. Newspaper-circulation numbers are released twice a year, and for the past decade those numbers have charted an uninterrupted downward curve, accelerating at speeds now approaching an avalanche.

Designed as a monument to the daily, the Newseum may in fact be its mausoleum, with the marble First Amendment slab serving as its tombstone.

Perhaps the Newseum could have stayed opened if its gift shop sold items that people wanted to buy. Flashback to last year: Newseum caves to outraged mob of news reporters, removes “Fake News” T-shirts from gift shop.

MORE LIKE A CRY FOR ATTENTION: ‘Mine! Mine! It’s mine!’ — How cultural appropriation tantrums are really just a cry for help.

THIS LOOKS LIKE A REPRISE OF THE KAVANAUGH APPROACH, WHERE ONE BOGUS ACCUSATION IS FOLLOWED BY ANOTHER EVEN MORE BOGUS ONE: Report: A second “whistleblower” may be coming forth. Does it matter? Who will be the Michael Avenatti of this “scandal?”

SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB: Tanning Salons Could Be Targeting Gay Men by Opening in LGBT Neighborhoods, Putting Them at Risk of Cancer.

(Classical reference in headline.)

I THINK THEY ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THIS STUFF: Petition to Towson University: Introduce ‘mandatory hate-bias training.’

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WE MAY NEVER KNOW HIS MOTIVE: Paris police killer had ‘radical vision of Islam,’ French officials say.

HMM: Zogby hits polls: ‘I do not hear anyone talking about impeachment’ in Midwest.