Tuesday roundup

Lots of keystrokes are being wasted today over the death of George Michael. A full-on gush can be found at Rolling Stone, but it's really everywhere. Let me say something that applies to most of the pop stars who have died this year: Anyone who made his or her mark in any musical style that could be loosely classified as rock after about 1970 has made his impact on the basis of derivation. And spare me the argument that the Beatles basically brought Chuck Berry back to American shores through an English filter. The elements of the British Invasion acts' originality were obvious. What George Michael did was take a few compositional conventions - the propulsive, echo-laden Motown dance tune, the sultry ballad, and the funk-infused pean to sybaritic abandon - and give them "attitude," that is, a sheen of image-obsession, a fashion-layout celebration of self. And he was shooting heroin and hosting orgies right up until he died. That he is getting such reflective coverage just because he took the deep six is yet another indicator of how daunting the task of arresting our cultural rot is going to be.

Which leads me to the play Hamilton. No, I haven't seen it, but it's been made clear to me that it is basically historically accurate and actually celebrates the life of that remarkable Founding Father. But I knew something was fishy when I heard that the musical numbers were of the hip-hop genre and that those in charge of casting took one major liberty with historical accuracy: the racial identity of the story's figures.

Then there came the lead actor's diatribe after Mike Pence came to see the show. Then it came to light that said lead actor had a track record of social-media vulgarities and outrageous racial pronunciations.

Now comes this:

the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is asking for donations to Planned Parenthood.

According to Lin-Manuel, you can enter for a chance to win a trip to see “Hamilton” by donating to the abortion giant.

Yep, if you win, we’ll fly you and a friend to all three cities next year to see all three productions AND you’ll get backstage meet-ups with the cast.

All it takes to win is a $10 donation to Planned Parenthood Federation of America. My mother, Dr. Luz Towns-Miranda Ph.D., is on the national board of directors of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the not-for-profit advocacy and nonpartisan political arm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and I’m urging you to make this critical donation and to go to PlannedParenthood.org to learn more about the work they’re doing.

Oh, goody. You might just win some coveted tickets, and all it takes is donating one of your Hamiltons to an organization that murders 323,000+ unborn lives per year. Gain tickets, trash your conscience.

Please read Kevin Williamson's NRO piece on the outrage being heaped upon the Whole Foods store on Columbus Circle in Manhattan for offering chopped cheese sandwiches. Cultural appropriation, doncha know:

There is, in the parts of New York City above 125th Street, something called the chopped-cheese sandwich, or, as one local calls it, the drug-dealer sandwich. As a former resident of the South Bronx who was before that a Philadelphia resident, I will let you in on a little secret: The chopped-cheese sandwich is a knock-off of the Philly cheesesteak sandwich, which is itself — how to put this gently? — garbage food. (Delicious garbage food, to be sure.) Just as Philadelphians get insanely tribal over their preferred cheesesteak vendor (the one you want is from Bella Italia in Ardmore, by the way), New Yorkers, or at least a certain subset of them, take a cultish attitude toward their chopped-cheese sandwiches. The item even shows up in rap videos as a sign of uptown authenticity.

Chopped-cheese fetishism is an extension of bodega fetishism (my local place in the Bronx was run by two very rage-y Egyptians who were always screaming at somebody on the phone in Arabic and hence was known as the “Bodega al-Qaeda”) which is itself only a sub-current of the worst and phoniest of all New York pretensions, i.e., complaining about how nice the city became once Rudy Giuliani put his boot on the neck of the squeegee man and all his little criminal friends. You hear this all the time, upscale Manhattanites who have never been so much as downwind of a mugging talking about how they miss the old days when Times Square was full of hookers and porn shops and the city was so much more “vibrant” and nobody wanted to live there.

“Vibrant” means poor and dirty and terrible, which is to say, the opposite of Whole Foods, which is expensive and clean and great. So when Whole Foods began selling its own version of the chopped-cheese sandwich — on Columbus Circle, no less, from a cart marked “1492,” for eight bucks — the culture warriors lost their damned minds. The usual noises were made: cultural appropriation, imperialism, etc., evil Corporate America selling a ghetto staple to white-bread tourists in an entirely anodyne corner of Manhattan.

But the real cultural appropriation here is being done by those black and brown critics of Whole Foods: If there is a definition of well-off white-people problems, it’s worrying about what’s for sale at Whole Foods. You think the poor and dispossessed and oppressed of this world care about whether that $25-a-pound roasted salmon is farm-raised or wild-caught? I think not. If you are close enough to a Whole Foods to get pissed about what’s in the deli case there, you are a 1-percenter, globally speaking. You have won the game of civilization, and if you aren’t happy with the state of your life, then you probably aren’t trying hard enough. 

And if you're not tired enough from peeling back the layers of cultural implication in the  above situations, there's the Drexel University professor and his tweet about white genocide. Was it a genuine call for racial obliteration? Was it satire? Do you need an aspirin?

And, in the midst of the ongoing insanity, the towering Thomas Sowell has decided to retire from column-writing. Do not miss his farewell piece:

There are words that were once common but that are seldom heard any more. The phrase “none of your business” is one of these. Today, everything seems to be the government’s business or the media’s business. And the word “risqué” would be almost impossible to explain to young people, in a world where gross vulgarity is widespread and widely accepted.

Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: “What were you doing for the last twelve years before you got here?”

Reading about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the widespread retrogressions of Western civilization that followed, was an experience that was sobering, if not crushing. Ancient history in general lets us know how long human beings have been the way they are, and dampens giddy zeal for the latest panaceas, despite how politically correct those panaceas may be.

When I was growing up, we were taught the stories of people whose inventions and scientific discoveries had expanded the lives of millions of other people. Today, students are being taught to admire those who complain, denounce, and demand. 

Arresting the rot is going to be all the more daunting without the aid of Dr. Sowell's weekly reports on the lay of the land.