Annals of woke literature

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back I saw a link at Powerline to an article in The Critic entitled, “On the chopping block.” I idly clicked on it, wondering what it was about, and saw that it concerned one of those all-too-common flaps over some author’s use of statements some group or other finds objectionable. This began a cascade of events that led to the resignation of Sir Philip Pullman, president of “the august writers’ institution the Society of Authors.”

These are Brits, in case it wasn’t obvious by now. But it could just as easily have taken place here, or in Canada, or just about anywhere in the Anglosphere. A bit of inside baseball; I hadn’t ever heard of that “august society” before. Nor had I heard of Sir Philip Pullman, or the book in question, or its author Kate Clanchy. But I became curious to learn what her offensive words or phrases had been, and so I quickly read the article and discovered that they’re not even quoted in it, although they’re described this way: “ableist” and racist. The book itself is entitled Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, and it won something called the Orwell Prize.

Orwell? Yes, that Orwell:

Each year, our independent panels award prizes to the writing and reporting which best meets the spirit of George Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’.

So what language did Clanchy use that was so terribly offensive? I read another entire article on the brouhaha and then a third one before I found anything that gave me a more precise idea. It’s as though her words were so toxic that they couldn’t be mentioned, even in an article covering the episode.

But here they finally are, in an article in The Guardian entitled “Kate Clanchy to rewrite memoir amid criticism of ‘racist and ableist tropes’”.

Rewriting a memoir to suit current political demands – what could be more deserving of an Orwell Prize?:

Kate Clanchy is rewriting her critically acclaimed memoir after widespread criticism of her portrayal of her pupils, particularly children of colour and autistic children.

It follows reports that the publisher, Picador, had been in discussions to update future editions of the Orwell prize-winning book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, after days of online scrutiny over offensive passages, and was criticised for not going far enough in its initial statement.

Readers and fellow authors had been critical on Goodreads and Twitter of descriptions in the memoir, including the use of racial tropes such as “chocolate-coloured skin” and “almond-shaped eyes”, and references to one student as “African Jonathon” and another being “so small and square and Afghan with his big nose and premature moustache”.

Another passage was highlighted for the inclusion of ableist descriptions, in which Clanchy, a poet and teacher, refers to two autistic children as “unselfconsciously odd” and “jarring company”, and writes “probably, more than an hour a week” in their company “would irritate me, too, but for that hour I like them very much”.

The award-winning teenage author Dara McAnulty, who is autistic, shared the passages and tweeted: “Some people didn’t believe me when I shared some of my education experiences and how teachers felt about me … We can understand how you really feel about us.”

Oh, the horror!

When Clanchy’s book was awarded the prize, the group described it as “moving, funny and full of life”. The publishing world and the woke twitterati seem bound and determined to leach those characteristics out of all future offerings.

How the left is further taking over public schools in Minnesota

The New Neo Posted on by

This sort of educational project is being exposed more and more now, but for a long time such things have been happening outside of people’s awareness. And that was part of the left’s plan.

It’s hard to say how many states have experienced this degree of change in the goals of public education. What percent of the whole? Is it happening only in bluer-than-blue states, or has it penetrated elsewhere? My guess is the latter, at least to some extent.

Here’s part of the story in Minnesota (MDE stands for the Minnesota Department of Education):

When MDE appointed the standards drafting committee, it took the unprecedented step of excluding academic subject matter experts in history, civics, geography and economics. Instead, it stacked the committee with political activists, community organizers and their allies, who dominated the process.

These activists’ goal was not to revise and improve “rigorous standards” in “core academic subjects” in our state’s K-12 public schools, as law requires. On the contrary, they view Minnesota’s public education system — as drafting committee member Jonathan Hamilton, of Education for Liberation Minnesota, has described it — as a “white supremacist puzzle that must be taken apart and exposed for the lie it is (emphasis added).”

Activists’ weapon of choice in taking our schools apart is Ethnic Studies. Forget about teaching students about the historical leaders and events that shaped our democracy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and America-led victories in World War II. MDE’s new “fifth strand” trains K-12 students to view our nation’s social and political institutions with suspicion and hostility and seeks to enlist them in what Hamilton has referred to as a “political struggle” to change the social, economic, and cultural system that underlies our polity.

How will Ethnic Studies play out in Minnesota classrooms?

When the Minnesota Legislature adopted our state’s social studies standards in 2004, it authorized MDE to revise them every 10 years to “raise academic expectations for students, teachers and schools.” By law, state standards must be both “objective” and “measurable,” and “consistent with” the U.S. and Minnesota Constitutions.

But MDE’s proposed standards fail on all these fronts. Under the new Ethnic Studies standards, one of which is entitled “Resistance,” for example, students are instructed to “organize” to resist America’s “systemic and coordinated exercises of power” against “marginalized,” oppressed groups.

“Education for Liberation Minnesota” – Minnesota is in need of liberation, but not the kind that Jonathan Hamilton seeks. No wonder the left is so against Florida, DeSantis, and what’s happening there, as well as demonizing writers such as Christopher Rufo who have been hard at work exposing the left’s racist education game. The left is well aware that most Americans are against this sort of pedagogy, but the hope was to accomplish it under the sneaky guise of something that sounds righteous such as “ethnic studies.” Now more and more of America is becoming alerted and alarmed.

I am reminded of some passages from Allan Bloom’s prescient 1980s book The Closing of the American Mind. He knew what was happening and what it meant, and tried to warn us. Here’s a passage of Bloom’s that I quoted in this previous post:

Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…

But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.

In my post, I added this observation:

I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.

But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.

Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization.

So here we are.

A Russiaphile writes about the war in Ukraine

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s someone who’s not inclined to judge Russia harshly. And yet this war has caused him to rethink his former love of the country and its people.

It’s a very sad reflection on how it is that events can challenge and change even long-held and deeply-entrenched beliefs. I know the feeling well, although not regarding Russia. However, like the writer, I have loved Russian literature from the moment I first encountered it (which in my case was in high school), and took college-level courses in the subject as well as some Russian history. As a young child, I saw this wonderful movie in a Manhattan movie theater, and it opened my eyes early on to the fact that the Russian people were not our enemies and how deeply they had suffered during World War II. But I never lost sight of the tyranny of the Soviet government towards the Russian people and to the inhabitants of the countries of Eastern Europe, and rejoiced when they gained their autonomy.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

I have been a Russophile for as long as I can remember. Or, to put it more exactly, since I was eight years old, when I attended a school play performance of Gogol’s The Government Inspector…

At the age of 26, I moved to the Baltic State of Estonia, and I was seeing Cyrillic signs on the building and hearing Russian spoken around me. I was meeting real Russian people who were angry about the loss of their Empire, and bitter to find themselves suddenly a minority in a country which had abruptly seceded from the USSR. But I also found that such people were invariably generous and happy to discuss literature and answer my questions over a cup of black tea.

That was 25 years ago, and in the intervening years, Russia and its culture consumed my adult life. I became interested in other post-Soviet countries—Hungary, Romania, Estonia—but as they say in Hungary, “When it rains in Moscow, the umbrellas go up in Budapest.” Everything in this region, like it or not, begins and ends with Russia. Not a week has gone by when I haven’t tried to understand it better. I can speak Russian now, I converted to Russia’s Orthodox church, and I have a half-Russian daughter who knows barely a word of English. What was once so distant and unfamiliar has become a part of my daily life and, in my child, a part of my family too. I often said while I was living there that the Russians did not feel like a foreign people to me, and that in my Southern Russian city I felt, to a great extent, that I was among my own. I continued to feel that way until the early morning of February 24th, 2022, when a chasm suddenly opened up, perhaps permanently.

Please read the whole thing. It really cannot be summarized.

RIP Robert Morse

The New Neo Posted on by

When I read that Robert Morse had died at the age of 90, my first thought was “Drat!” My second thought was, “How could he be 90? Impossible!” Because to me Robert Morse always looked like a kid.

Morse rose to fame as the lead in the Broadway musical “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” He also starred in the film version, although I never saw him in either except in video clips. This one, which is a song he sings to himself in a mirror, perfectly captures his impish (the adjective that’s so often used to describe him) verve and humor, and that gappy grin with the dimples. The guy can really sing, too:

(For a more recent revival and comparison featuring Matthew Broderick, who in my opinion can’t hold a candle to Morse, see this beginning at 00:40).

However, I have very strong memories of seeing Morse on stage before that, in a musical practically no one knows anymore called “Take Me Along.” It was a musical version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah Wilderness,” and I had to look it up to see the year: 1959. Wow. It starred Jackie Gleason, who had been a big TV personality as Ralph Kramden (a show I used to watch), as well as Walter Pidgeon. But to me, and to most of the audience, the real star was Morse, who lent it tremendous energy and comic earnestness as the family’s teenage boy, although he was close to thirty at the time. Every number he did stopped the show. Morse’s talent beamed out into the audience with wattage that couldn’t be denied.

Alas, there are no clips of him in that production. But here he reminisces about the experience:

A completely and utterly unique actor.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep feeling the need for roundups because there are so many news stories of interest these days. It seems pretty intense out there.

(1) Tucked away at the end of this story is a hint at something I’ve suspected, as have some other commenters on this blog:

Chechen troops have widely been seen as playing the role of “enforcers” during the war, and many survivors of the Bucha massacre outside Kyiv said the mass execution of civilians only began after Chechen troops were sent in to replace Russian soldiers there.

I have no idea whether that’s true, though – and at this point neither does anyone else except the people involved.

(2) Another deceptively edited interview with Trump.

(3) “Bookworm” Andrea Widburg advises not to throw away your masks yet, and I agree:

…[T]he Biden administration has a problem: because it’s clearly lost the center, it must double down on pleasing the base — and the base wants masks. Rather than come out and admit that, the Biden administration shifted to the CDC the responsibility for deciding whether to appeal the order, and it turns out that the CDC doesn’t want to lose its power…

The CDC quite predictably wants the DOJ to appeal the ruling against the masks on transportation.

(4) Victor Davis Hanson catalogues the ways in which Biden has deliberately hurt America.

(5) Liz Cheney’s re-election donations are barely coming from Wyoming. Instead:

According to a Federalist analysis of Cheney’s campaign finances to date based on public records from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), less than 10 percent of the dollars Cheney raised came from Wyoming residents. Only about 2 percent of Cheney’s total contributors were from her home state.

In contrast, donors in Northern Virginia with fundraisers featuring Utah Sen. Mitt Romney sent more than $880,000 to the campaign, a full six figures higher than the $780,000 raised among Wyomingites. Cheney raised more than $760,000 from California and more than $720,000 from Texas.

But I’m not at all sure that any amount of money would make Wyoming voters like Cheney or vote for her.

Here’s a new poll on Biden’s approval numbers

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, you may think polls are garbage. But I find this recent one of interest. It indicates that young voters are deserting Biden:

The new poll found that Biden’s approval rating among millennials and Generation Z respondents had dropped nearly 20 points since the beginning of his presidency.

Thirty-nine percent of Generation Z respondents said they approve of the job Biden has done as president, a 21-point decline from 60 percent of respondents who approved of Biden’s handling of the job when he first took office.

Forty-one percent of millennial respondents said they approve of Biden’s job as president, a 19-point decline from 60 percent of respondents who approved of his job as president through the months of January and June 2021, his first months in the White House.

That sounds encouraging. However, here’s a caveat:

Along party lines, 30 percent of Generation Z respondents who identify as Democrats said they approve of Biden’s job as president, while 52 percent of independents and 18 percent of Republicans surveyed agreed, according to the poll.

Twenty-seven percent of millennial respondents who identify as Democrats approve of the job Biden has done as president, while 53 percent of independents and 20 percent of Republicans surveyed also approve of Biden’s job as president.

The large disparity between Democrats’ and Independents’ approval rating is counter-intuitive, and to me it represents the likelihood that the young Democrats disapprove of Biden only because he is ineffective at achieving some of the leftist aims for which they were hoping.

If you look at the chart here, you’ll find another interesting thing: the drop in approval for Biden varies inversely with the initial level of approval. In other words, initially the youngest groups had the highest approval ratings for Biden, and they not only have had the steepest drops, but their approval ratings have now dropped to lower levels than the present levels among the older groups.

The older groups had lower ratings for Biden to begin with, but among Boomers the levels have only gone down seven points (to a current level of 46, significantly higher than among the young). Among the generation before the Boomers (a group the poll calls “Traditionalists”, a designation I’ve never heard before) the ratings haven’t moved at all – they were 48% approval and they remain at 48%, the highest level of all the groups even though that group had the lowest level to begin with. Apparently it’s at least partly because there are fewer Independents in that group. But that doesn’t entirely explain the phenomenon.

In addition, Biden’s approval rating has fallen approximately 20% among blacks and Hispanics – although the levels remain higher than other groups with black approval at 67% and Hispanic at 52%.

It always puzzles me when people who call themselves Conservatives approve of policies or people that no conservative could like, and this poll is no exception with 15% of supposed conservatives approving of Biden’s performance. Either they are lying, joking, misunderstanding the meaning of the term “conservative,” not paying attention, or happy with Biden because he is hurting the fortunes of the left.

Putin’s nuclear-missile-rattling

The New Neo Posted on by

Poor innocent Russia, threatened on all sides by enemies while minding its own peaceful business, wants everyone in the world to know it’s prepared and ready:

Russia announced on Wednesday it had successfully launched a new missile that it said could deploy nuclear warheads at hypersonic speeds anywhere in the world and outwit defenses, a move that President Vladimir V. Putin said was aimed at showing Russia’s adversaries that they needed to “think twice” before threatening his country.

Russia’s been a nuclear power for over seventy years, and for many of those years it’s had a plethora of nuclear weaponry. Maybe I’m forgetting – the Cold War had such a high degree of threat and I was young enough that perhaps I wasn’t paying much attention – but I don’t remember this high a level of global nuclear threat talk from Russia before.

However:

But even if the test was successful, the new missile does not appear ready for use. The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday’s test launch of the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile was its first and that it would enter Russia’s arsenal only “after the completion of the testing program.” There was no immediate comment from American officials about the launch.

Mr. Putin first announced Russia had developed the Sarmat in 2018, but his decision to test it on Wednesday appeared intended to send a blunt message in the middle of the war in Ukraine…

Mr. Putin said in his brief remarks that the Sarmat consisted only of Russian-made components, an apparent attempt to show that Russia’s defense industry was undaunted by Western economic sanctions.

I don’t know how much respect we can have for “Russian-made components” at this point. But no one wants to have to find out.

ADDENDUM:

This event seems to be at least slightly relevant, or perhaps symbolic:

Thursday, a fire ripped through the Russian Ministry of Defense’s 2nd Central Scientific-Research Institute in Tver, some 80 miles northeast of Moscow.

This “research institute” is responsible for designing surface-to-air missiles and ballistic missiles for Russia’s aerospace military programs…

The official story is that old construction and flammable insulation caught fire.

As the author of the piece points out, “Housing a critical design facility in a firetrap speaks volumes for the state of Russia’s military.”

Even some Democrats are sounding the alarm about Biden’s plan to scrap Title 42

The New Neo Posted on by

The vocal Democrat opposition to Biden’s tremendously destructive plan includes quite a few members of the House and even some senators. My guess is that almost none of these people would give a hoot about it if it weren’t for the timing; it’s scheduled to take place at the end of May, which is way too close to the upcoming midterm elections.

Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who announced last year his bid to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Rob Portman, told Fox News Digital that the removal of Title 42 is “wrong and reckless” as he warned of repercussions and the safety of Americans.

“The administration’s decision to roll back Title 42 is wrong and reckless,” Ryan said. “Prematurely ending this policy without a path forward does nothing to keep Americans safe, support our Border Patrol agents, protect asylum-seekers, or bring about the comprehensive fix our immigration system needs.”

Similar remarks came from Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev., Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kan., Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., California Democrat Rep. Mike Levin, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla. (not seeking re-election), Maine Democrat Rep. Jared Golden, Reps. Angie Craig, D-Minn., Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., and Kim Schrier, D-Wash. Senators of the same opinion inclue Sen. Michael Bennett, D-Colo., Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. (of course), Arizona Democrat Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (unsurprising) and Mark Kelly, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. (who was all for ending Title 42 when it was Trump’s policy), and Warnocke of Georgia (facing a tough fight against Herschel Walker). Then there’s Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who has long positioned herself as a moderate but has gone along with just about everything (or maybe in fact everything) the Democrats have done so far, no matter how radical. But guess what? She’s up for a re-election battle in November.

The polls must indicate that removing Title 42 is incredibly unpopular.

Plus, reports of “severe tension”:

Of the numerous inquiries sent out by Fox News Digital, several members of Congress refused to comment on the subject that has caused severe tension among members in the party.

Although I’m not sure this all isn’t just theater, about two weeks ago (April 7) this bipartisan bill was proposed:

Congressman Jared Golden (ME-02), joined by Reps. Tony Gonzales (TX-23), Tom O’Halleran (AZ-01), August Pfluger (TX-07), Stephanie Murphy (FL- 07), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-02), Chris Pappas (NH-01), Don Bacon (NE-02), Greg Stanton (AZ-09), and Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27) introduced today the Public Health and Border Security Act of 2022. The bipartisan bill would prevent President Biden from lifting existing Title 42 immigration restrictions without a plan in place from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to address the expected surge of migrants at the Southern border.

Senators James Lankford (R-OK) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) introduced similar bipartisan legislation in the Senate earlier today…

The bill would prohibit the Biden Administration from ending Title 42 until 60 days after formally ending the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration. Within 30 days of ending the public health emergency, the President must submit a plan to process the migrant surge to Congress.

It sounds like the bill could pass both House and Senate. But do they have the support to override a presidential veto?

Some person or people in the White House must think that rescinding Title 42 is of the utmost importance, even if it harms the re-election chances of Democrats in Congress. Then again, the White House powers that be might be thinking that they’ve already harmed those chances plenty already, so it would be hard to make things much worse.

To mask or not to mask?

The New Neo Posted on by

That is the question.

Or rather, that is a question – a question different places answer differently. For example:

The ruling appeared to free operators to make their own decisions about mask requirements, with the several major airlines — Delta, American, Southwest, JetBlue and United — all announcing they would make masks optional, but New York City’s public transit system is keeping the mandate in place.

MTA communications director Tim Minton said the system was “continuing to follow CDC guidelines and will review the Florida court order.”

I’m not sure I believe this poll, but here’s what it says:

The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that despite opposition to that requirement that included verbal abuse and physical violence against flight attendants, 56% of Americans favor requiring people on planes, trains and public transportation to wear masks, compared with 24% opposed and 20% who say they’re neither in favor nor opposed. Interviews for the poll were conducted Thursday to Monday, shortly before a federal judge in Florida struck down the national mask mandate on airplanes and mass transit. Airlines and airports immediately scrapped their requirements that passengers wear face coverings.

My guess is that the results would be different if taken now.

And this is no surprise:

The poll shows a wide partisan divide on the issue. Among Democrats, 80% favor and just 5% oppose the requirement. Among Republicans, 45% are opposed compared with 33% in favor, with 22% saying neither.