One of the big Broadway hits of 2016–17 was Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, a musical version of War and Peace. I heard about it when it was nominated for a slew of Tony Awards, including one for its star, Josh Groban. I didn’t know who he was, and when I was told I forgot. To me, a Broadway star is Mary Martin or Zero Mostel. If you don’t know those names, you’ll have to do what I did—ask someone. Turns out Groban is a huge musical star and a massive box-office draw. He also happens to be white.
When Groban’s contracted time was up and he left the show, he was replaced by Okieriete Onaodowan, who had played several roles in the Broadway musical Hamilton. Yet even that association, with the most hyped show of the last decade, wasn’t enough to sell tickets. The producers of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 decided to what any sane businessperson would have done: they offered to buy out the rest of Onaodowan’s contract and replace him with a major box office name, Mandy Patinkin—who, like Groban, happens to be white. The problem is, Onaodowan is black—as is most everyone in Hamilton; whites are encouraged not to audition for any of the major parts and would not be hired even if they were brilliant. (Why aren’t the SJWs protesting that?)
As soon as the Patinkin plan was announced, members of the Broadway community, Social Justice Warriors, and diversity zealots made the absurd charge that producers were being insensitive by replacing a black actor with a white actor—despite the fact that the part was created by a white actor, which the whiners neglected to consider. Patinkin, a champion of liberal causes and underdogs, withdrew immediately, tweeting, “I hear what members of the community have said and I agree with them.” Okay, he’s entitled to believe that. But what the producers said in their statement was craven capitulation to what was focused hysteria:
We had the wrong impression of… the casting announcement and how it would be received by members of the theater community, which we appreciate is deeply invested in the success of actors of color—as are we—and to whom we are grateful for bringing this to our attention. We regret our mistake deeply, and wish to express our apologies to everyone who felt hurt and betrayed by these actions.7
The italics are mine. The insanity was theirs. The producers not only let themselves be deafened by a handful of loud voices, they self-flagellated for having made a sensible business decision. End result? The play closed. Onaodowan was unemployed anyway, along with everyone else involved with the show. Well done, Social Justice Warriors.
Have the angry SJWs learned anything? Of course not. They remain not only hysterical but hypocritically hysterical. They gleefully created audience confusion with “color blind” casting in shows like the New York revival of 1776 in 2016, in which, among others, Martha Jefferson was played by a black actress, leading some audience members to mistake her for Sally Hemings; and in Kung Fu, a 2014 show about Bruce Lee in which the white actor James Coburn was played by a black actor, the SJWs refused to allow historically accurate portrayals of real people.
The justification for this nonsense is the bogus claim of “white privilege,” a mantra that was upended, as we’ve noted, with affirmative action in 1961. Now the claims of white privilege are simply hate. They are designed to justify punitive actions against a perceived enemy. Instead of writing new shows, instead of being creative and resourceful, frustrated actors blame the white man for their failure. The notion that casting directors should simply hire the best people isn’t even acceptable. White people must be excluded, punished.
In the summer of 2017, the esteemed North Shore Music Theatre in Massachusetts cast non-Hispanics in the three lead roles of Evita—as was done when the show was first produced on Broadway, whence Mandy Patinkin rose to fame as Che. One of those actors, Constantine Maroulis, may not have been a household name for me, but he was a finalist on American Idol and that obviously carries some box-office heft.
One young New York actress, Lauren Villegas, founder of Project Am I Right?, posted this gem: “Blackface does not happen in theater today, yellowface largely does not happen, but Latinx characters do not get the same kind of care when being cast,” she wrote.8 Incidentally, Latinx—pronounced “Lateen-ex”—is a genderless alternative to Latino and Latina. That term is being foisted on a public that is largely unaware that the theater term bravo is for a man, brava for a woman. I suppose bravx is next.
North Shore Music Theatre Evita director Bill Hanney responded in an interview: “If a Latino person came in and they were the best, they’d be in my show. We found the right people. Our focus was not to find a Latino. It was to find the right Eva, Che, and Peron, etc.”
But that line of reasoning did not matter to Villegas, who responded, “Authenticity comes from lived experience. Actors do more than pretend; we draw on who we are. I hope people realize that choosing to appropriate a culture they don’t know will only perpetuate shallow stereotypes.”
By that logic, no one but a Jew can ever again play the major roles in Fiddler on the Roof. Only the French can appear in Phantom of the Opera, which, after all, is set in the Paris Opera. Only Jersey boys should be able to act in Jersey Boys since there is a unique voice and culture few non-Jerseyites would really get. And unless we can find a Kryptonian, don’t count on seeing Superman in a movie or TV show again. I’m being facetious about the Man of Steel. But in a world insanely scrubbed of traditional gender identity, Villegas and those who echo her sentiments seem strangely obsessed with something called racial identity. I would add that Daniel Day-Lewis won the Best Actor Oscar for Lincoln in 2012, and Day-Lewis is British. Should his Oscar be taken away for this blatant example of “cultural appropriation”?
“Lived experience”? According to Villegas’s “logic,” the role of Jenny Diver in The Threepenny Opera should be played exclusively by prostitutes, the role of Che can only be acted by mass murderers—and forget Macbeth, which requires an actor who has committed regicide. What an arrogant assumption to declare that someone cannot “know” another culture or profession, while at the same time giving people of color a free pass to take any classically and historically “white” role from Julius Caesar to Willy Loman. As an anthropologist, not an actor, I can assure you that that opinion is as naïvely knee-jerk as traditional nativism. I have a friend, who is white, who has been studying martial arts for sixty years in New York City’s Chinatown and also among Japanese martial art masters. He is Daoist, and more “Asian” in thought and deed than many Asians I’ve met who were born in the United States. Is his dedication to studying, preserving, and sharing the culture of martial arts an act of ignorance, aggression, or insensitivity? Or could it possibly be rooted in honoring something worthwhile and fulfilling? Given that he is a white male, many SJWs would automatically assign sinister motives no matter what his actual motivations.
And in case you were wondering, this firebrand Villegas uses the gender-neutral actor to mean both male and female performers. That’s part of the political madness language spillover we discussed earlier. To date, no one has been able to articulate, as far as I’ve seen, just what is wrong with the distinct words actor and actress. It must gall activists that all the major awards shows still use these terms—though don’t be surprised if that’s the next to fall.
I see on Villegas’s resume two things of interest. First, on the front page she provides a tutorial about how to pronounce her name: “Vee YAY! Gahs.” While I understand the basic dignity that the correct pronunciation of one’s name provides, she seems to take militant pleasure in 1) assuming people are going to pronounce it incorrectly, and 2) preemptively correcting them. I am assuming that when she refers to foreign places like Rome she also says “Roma” and Hawaii is “Ha-VAH-ee” and insists that others do the same. We live in America. The diversity you espouse means, by definition, that we do things that align with our own broad vocal background, not your preferences or idiosyncrasies. Second, I note that Villegas portrayed Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, someone who is not Latinx but Middle Eastern. She also played a Brit
in Mary Poppins. Good for her.
There is no denying that, however brilliant, Othello should no longer be played solely by an Orson Welles or a Laurence Olivier in makeup. But to deny white actors access to roles while giving actors of color a hall pass to every role is exactly the kind of hyphenated America that Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson warned against. It is the kind of hysterical overreach that has crippled and scarred Americans for more than five centuries.
It is also racism. In the summer of 2017, the theatrical union Actors Equity teamed with Project Am I Right? in an unapologetic act of overt discrimination. They put on a production in New York called My Whitelist Cabaret (AKA Roles I Could Get If I Was White/Cis/Non-Disabled). The union, which is supposed to stand for the rights of all stage actors, subsequently tweeted, “What an incredible event! The future looks pretty good. Let’s make it come soon.”
Being “of color” does not give anyone the right to act with willful contempt for law and decency. Being “of color” is not a license to practice segregation. The SJWs who are seeking not just parity but retribution are tearing us apart. They are no different than those who abused Reconstruction for their own gain. Just as those repercussions echo to this day, so will the focused hysteria of the rabid hyphenates cause scars that will take generations to heal—if they don’t first rip the nation apart.
EIGHT YEARS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION
Being of “anything,” whether it is “of color” or “of humble origins,” doesn’t give you special privileges in America, though many people think it does. This brings us to future mass hysteria, which promises to be no less bilious than that which came before. For example, I saw a chart recently suggesting that college graduates who have been hand-carried through their lives are about to suffer a big blow. They have already taken on decades of student debt, except for the quota-driven people of color and illegal residents who were granted scholarships to add diversity to the university Web pages. They are already unable to find jobs, despite President Trump’s efforts to create new ones. Eight years of the new plantation owners at Facebook, Apple, and other firms outsourcing to India and China and a brain-drain resulting, in part, from Obama’s gutting of NASA, have left the United States with frighteningly few opportunities for scientists, mathematicians, and engineers even though we have been told that this is the direction of the future. Even with Trump’s revitalization of NASA, we are still presently forced to pay Russian $710 million every time we put an astronaut into space on board one of their rockets. That’s how far behind we are.
Students who are unemployed and financially underwater were among the many desperate youths who rallied behind Bernie Sanders in 2016 with his utopian fantasies. He tapped their desperate hysteria and turned it into primary votes. These kids did not vet him from the windowless rooms in their parents’ basements, since they didn’t learn how to think, only to memorize, work on their tablets or smartphones, and react like little automatons. Again, that is the perfect breeding ground for hysteria. No thought, just reaction.
Well, for these people the future looks worse and their hysteria will increase accordingly. Every year, four million Americans turn eighteen, graduate from high school, and head off to college for four years of smoking dope, listening to radical professors, protesting against conservatives (who are, in fact, looking to protect their future), and finally majoring in something for their remaining time in school. Meanwhile, during the eight years of the Obama administration, the United States of America permitted an average of one million legal immigrants each year to apply for and work at jobs within our borders. The very administration that was hailed by leftists as the future of our nation with Obama as our savior was allowing for—even encouraging—the destruction of an entire generation’s worth of viable work and workers.
That’s not all. Washington provides around three million short-term work permits to aliens every year. So right there, while these kids were partying and occasionally studying for eight years, the market has been inundated with twenty-four million or so workers who will not only work for less, but will send a portion of that money home. And make no mistake, they are and will continue to be hired. Corporations like to put photographs of women, people of color, and pride-marching employees in their annual reports to prove that they are Equal Opportunity Employers. If you see bank ads or cereal commercials, you would think that this is a nation of exclusively interracial marriages. That is not a knock on interracial marriages but on the institutions that fawn on virtue-signaling and targeted demographics for the sake of profits and pandering rather than from any genuine place of celebrating real families.
Several years ago, I wrote a book called Trickle Down Tyranny. (You can find it on Amazon, I’m sure, though I’m also betting the company hasn’t removed the personal attack reviews the way they did by cutting nine hundred negative reviews of Hillary Clinton’s What Happened.) These practices demonstrate exactly how that concept works. Washington imports far more foreign workers than we export. Corporations pay less for this labor and their profits go up. With all the crying about a glass ceiling for women, the Census Bureau’s annual report on income has demonstrated that salaries for men have stayed put since 1973 while the numbers of men earning those wages has plummeted. Meanwhile, the unemployed drive up the tax burden on every town, every state, the entire nation. The future of the country becomes dependent on these foreign workers. At the same time, many of the unemployed turn to pot and opioids to deal with the depression of unemployment and living with mom and dad.
If you think you’re hearing students whine hysterically now, it’s nothing. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember when parents were free to discipline and your mother or father would say, “I’ll give you something to cry about!” Not any longer. Spanking, which for generations was the accepted way to teach children to stay away from hot stoves and sharp knives, as well as to keep them from throwing fits when they don’t get their way, can now get parents reported to Child Protective Services. And children know this. Wait until 2020 or 2024, when their numbers are sufficient to start electing progressive senators like Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker to the Oval Office. The whiners will be promised everything and put on welfare (or its equivalent with single-payer health care, food stamps, and other programs that you and I will pay for—including student loan forgiveness that will be passed on to the families of better-to-do students or those students who dedicated themselves to responsible spending and saving in order to pay back whatever loans they may have accrued).
That is where, when, and how the carcass of the once-great United States will become nothing more than carrion for the masses. As China and India rise, we will sink deeper. And we may well do it without hysteria because Americans, traditional Americans, hardworking roll-up-your-sleeves Americans, will be too tired, feel too consistently betrayed, too dispirited to fight back.
But there is also good news. As we have seen throughout this journey, hysteria is not a self-sustaining quality. It is founded in the vaporous quality of emotion, not mind, and eventually disburses with the light of fact and reason. That is why organizations funded by anarchists like George Soros must morph quickly from Occupy to Black Lives Matter and AntiFA. The potheads who beat defenseless citizens, loot, and riot (and flee when motorcycle gangs show up swinging chains; that’s not an endorsement, it’s just a fact) are children who have to be constantly entertained and distracted, or else they go back into their college dorms to roll more joints.
While these lamebrains rouse themselves for a day or a week at most before retreating to their subsidized lives, the mainstream media—the outlets that hysterically tout their deeds and briefly give them legitimacy—is itself fading. While my audience of loyal, thoughtful listeners grows on the Internet streams, CNN and Fox News and MSNBC see their audiences dwindling. Part of that is an audience becoming unplugged and turning to distractions on their devices; part of that is the loss of responsible journalists in favor of personalities in short skirts and
catering to the idea of diversity rather than, say, someone who is white, older, and may be better qualified due to experience, if nothing else… someone who may know that Edinburgh is pronounced “Edin-burrow,” not “Edin-burg,” which I recently heard on the evening news. With all that the progressives claim to do, addressing the rampant problem of ageism is a major failure on their part. We’d rally, I suppose, if we weren’t too busy supporting our unemployed, the welfare cheats, and governments.
Like dictatorships, hysteria is an extremist concept that cannot survive without the middle, without the Eddies and Ediths of this nation. For the present, while statistics tell us whites are no longer the majority, men and women of the middle are the group that put Donald Trump in the White House. We can rouse that will again.
We will do it because we love America and believe it is worth fighting for—not with hysteria but with purpose and resolve. Not with violent protest but with support for the men and women, diverse and wonderful, young and old and in-between, who comprise our law enforcement and military forces. We will fight for America not with bats and fists but with votes and ideas.
We will do this with other Americans from all backgrounds—Asians, blacks, whites, gays, straights, the entire spectrum of our deep cultural pool—who are not part of the hysterical fringes and who are all part of the “we” who love this nation.
We will do this because without us, without our example, there will be no one on earth left to lead. Not Islamified Europe, corrupt Russia, the repressive Arab states, totalitarian China, North Korea, or any other nation that may self-servingly dominate finance and industry but fail to move civilization and humanity forward. I urge the left to consider this when they throw tantrums about our borders, our so-called Dreamers, our “inequality,” the pseudoscience of climate change, and all the other shibboleths of the left.
Stop Mass Hysteria Page 28
