"The Mandrake" (with Changes)

So a couple weeks ago I mentioned that the University of Georgia was doing a highly unusual take on Machiavelli's "The Mandrake":

This being 2016 in America, the opera will not be performed with the original music.

“We’ve made them rap songs with lots of stomps and percussion type beats,” Marotta said.

And this being 2016 on an American college campus, the opera will be cast in order to make a point about gender.

In order to change up the stereotypes and force the audience to ask deeper questions about power play and gender roles, all of the male roles will be played by women and all the women roles are to be played by puppets.

Out of curiosity, I went to see the UGA production yesterday afternoon. I have the following to report:

1) I am forced to conclude that the claim that their intention in selecting an all-female cast was to "force the audience to ask deeper questions about power play and gender roles" was a lie to protect the play from university censorship. The play was 90 minutes of intensely raunchy, bawdy humor. They stole the 'ongoing urination' joke from Austin Powers. They had a scene with disguises in which a priest was carrying walnuts in his mouth 'to disguise his voice,' which they turned into a three-minute long routine about one of the characters desiring 'nuts in my mouth' ("I have some," replied another character, "but they're a little bit salty").

My sense is that you couldn't have run the same play with the same jokes with a male/female cast on the contemporary university campus. Run the same jokes with an all-female cast, under the banner of 'forcing the audience' to do difficult conceptual work, and no censors even cast their eyes in its direction.

2) The "rap" music was a bad idea. Possibly this was because the cast, in addition to being all-female, was all-white-female. In addition to not being very good at writing hip-hop music, their voices lacked the strength and range to be intelligible over the stomping and clapping. Neither I nor my wife could actually understand anything they were saying during these routines.

3) It turns out that Machiavelli gave by far the strongest lines in the whole play to the young wife. The only time in the entire play that anyone stands up for what is right and invokes morality without any shade of self-interest is her monologue. It comes right after she submits to her (bribed) priest's advice that she go along with the plan. In the monologue, she says that she hopes that if his advice (which includes adultery that will lead to the death of an innocent) is coming from any sort of admixture of self-interest or faithlessness, then that she calls on all the demons of Hell to make sure that his soul is planted right beside hers so that she can watch him suffer for all eternity. It's really powerful stuff.

Because of their casting decisions, this speech -- the moral heart of the story -- was delivered by a one-and-a-half-foot tall puppet.

4) There were the expected number of jokes at the expense of Catholics and Republicans written into the play. FOX News and Donald Trump came in for special mention. The priest was supposedly bisexual and dissolute as well as corrupt. Just as you couldn't have run this play with a male/female cast without drawing university censorship, you couldn't have run the same jokes pointed at Islamic clergy without drawing down a university ban. Aimed at Catholic and conservative American targets, though, these jokes are perfectly safe.

5) Two jokes were aimed at the fear of giving offense in sexual matters on the university campus. These were both funny and well-received by the audience. The first involved the question of whether a meeting was properly described as a rendezvous -- no, said one character, 'because that sounds sexual, and you didn't obtain our consent!' The other was delivered when a character, disguised as a pirate, was singing a song that went, 'We say yo-ho-ho, but we don't say 'ho,' because that would be disrespect-ful.'

In spite of everything, it wasn't the worst 90 minutes of my life. I doubt I would take the opportunity to go see it again, but the actresses were clearly enjoying themselves so it was at least somewhat fun to watch. They played to and with the audience -- if you were in the front row of any of the seats, and they had seats on three sides of the stage, you would likely be involved in the play at some point. The performance was packed, too, at the Sunday afternoon matinee that was also its final performance. Clearly they had crafted something that was very popular for their intended audience.

Mad Max? Really?

It was a little startling to hear that Mad Max swept the B-level Academy Awards last night.  Much as I love the series, the last episode was kind of dumb and forgettable.  Well, at least no one was nuts enough to hand it any awards for things like directing, screenplay, or acting, and it's fair enough to say that its costumes and make-up and so on were well crafted.  (But sound editing?  Seriously?  Do they throw darts for that award, simply treat it as a consolation prize, or are there judges who genuinely pay attention to the technical aspects of sound editing?)

On the other hand I have to admit it's the only movie on the entire Oscars roster I've actually seen, so it's not as though I had my finger on the pulse.

Some Suggestions for "Common Ground"

An academic writes that his students -- he has taught at elite universities like Princeton and Georgetown, but currently at Notre Dame -- are "know-nothings." The questions they can't answer are good starts for us.

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their minds are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten it origins and aims, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference about itself....

[A]sk them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian war? What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? What happened to Charles I? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What happened at Yorktown in 1781? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? Who can tell me one or two of the arguments that are made in Federalist 10? Who has read Federalist 10? What are the Federalist Papers?

I have to admit that I've never read Paradise Lost. Nor, ah, Lincoln's third inaugural. His second one is really good, though!

How to Engineer a Famine

AEI charted the biggest recent famines.  To get really big numbers, you almost have to institute socialism, but less severe famines can be achieved by bad luck with war or weather, or simply a floundering or chaotic social or political system.  China was hit over and over in its pre-socialist days, then had the one disastrous episode in 1958-1962, after which it's largely kept the problem at bay.  The area of Africa that encompasses the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia are obviously nowhere you'd want to be.

Sometimes I Wish I Lived in an Airstream

A Quick Update on the Common Ground Series

For the last two weeks I have been swamped with work and have not had time to add to the Common Ground series. However, I did update the Books Under Copyright post with suggestions from Grim and Ymar, so that should be good now.

Two more planned posts in the series will cover Daily News and War, and that should catch us up with past discussions.

After I finish covering sources of information and ideas, I would like to begin discussing what we believe are the common problems our nation faces. After that, naturally, I would like to start discussing possible solutions, and finally, how those solutions could be achieved.

That said, I don't foresee having a lot of time to post for the next couple of weeks. Feel free to add sources or discuss any of this in the comments. I'll look back at them when I'm writing future posts, and I plan to try to keep the sources posts updated with new material.

Yeah, That's Not Working Out

In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican National Committee issued a postmortem that recommended, among other things, a change of tone, “especially on certain social issues that are turning off young voters.” That evangelical dentist in South Carolina has become a political liability — unless, of course, he’s willing to keep his mouth shut in public.

The plan was straightforward: turn socially conservative Christians into the African Americans of the Republican Party, a bloc of voters with no place else to go but who can be managed and kept at a distance from the party’s new brand.

You might want to reconsider that strategy, if there's still time.

It must seem unfair to Republican grandees. In spite of her campaign slapping Black Lives Matter advocates around, Clinton apparently is pulling a bigger share of the black vote than Obama (although among a much less enthusiastic Democratic primary electorate). Why can't their unwanted-but-needed base voters be as loyal to the party elite?

Life just isn't fair, I guess.

Primaries

I'm gearing up to run the primary elections here in my precinct, and realized in talking to a brand-new volunteer that I don't at all understand the relationship between the Texas popular vote and the caucuses that are held as soon as the polls close.  Nor did I understand whether Texas was a winner-take-all or a proportional state.  It turns out there was good reason for my confusion:  in an apparent attempt to wire around the Republican National Committee's rules for holding a winner-take-all primary before March 14, the Texas Republican Party put together a complicated mechanism, since modified by an RNC ruling, that . . . does something I can't quite figure out.  Apparently it's mostly proportional by state district popular vote, but some at-large delegates are proportional by statewide popular vote, and there's some kind of mechanism for allocating the delegates that would have gone to anyone who was under 20% of the popular vote, but there's also some kind of special rule depending on whether the top candidate won a majority or only a plurality.  I give up.  Here's a link.  It's Byzantine.

Security

Kuwait: Thank You, America

Via Bob on the FOB.

Don't Ask About Benghazi

Former Marine thrown out of Bill Clinton rally by security as crowd jeers, screams over him.

“To me the story is the crowd,” Fox & Friends host and Army National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth said Saturday. “This guy stands up (and) said ‘I’m a Marine. I’ve done two tours in Iraq’ — You go to a Republican rally, tell it like it is, the crowd erupts in applause for the Marine and says ‘thank you for your service this is fantastic,’ instead silence, crickets (at the Clinton rally).”

“It shows you we’ve got two very different electorates that look very differently towards that service.”

That story was told in the first Democratic debate, when the crowd (and the audience at home) treated a Navy Cross and Silver Star awardee as if he was "creepy" when he made reference to his service at war in the Marines.

UPDATE: Don't ask about BLM, either. In fact, don't even passively display signs that mention it.

Meagan Mwanda and Ashona Husbands never wanted to hold the Hillary Clinton sign in the first place.

Early Friday, the two Georgia State University freshmen walked to Atlanta’s City Hall to hear the Democratic presidential candidate. Last week, they attended a rally by Bernie Sanders at Morehouse College. They wanted a chance to size up Clinton on Friday but say they didn’t get it.

Mwanda and Husbands claim they were kicked out of the rally for writing “Black Lives Matter” on the back of a Clinton sign.

“Why are these three words such a threat to her and her campaign?” Mwanda said.

But I thought Hillary Clinton was inevitable because of her African-American Southern firewall?

We Have the Right People

General James "Mad Dog" Mattis writes on the clarifying effect of combat service.

For the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—poorly explained and inconclusive wars, the first major wars since our Revolution fought without a draft forcing some men into the ranks—the question of what our service meant may loom large in your minds. You without doubt have put something into the nation’s moral bank.

Rest assured that by your service, you sent a necessary message to the world and especially to those maniacs who thought by hurting us that they could scare us.

No granite monuments, regardless of how grandly built, can take the place of your raw example of courage, when in your youth you answered your country’s call.

We need to do a better job of recruiting these veterans into our politics.

Happy Birthday, Johnny Cash

Apparently he was born on February 26th in 1932. Just two days ago was the anniversary of his singing this song live at San Quentin in 1969. I love most of what Cash did, but this one is my favorite.

What Effect Does Native Tongue Have on Musical Enjoyment?

Before you read the article, decide what you think is most likely. Then let's talk about the results.

CDC, FBI: Bicycles are More Deadly than "Mass Shootings"

Well, that's unexpectedly honest.

[W]hile there were 418 deaths in “mass shootings” from 2000 to 2013, there were 800 deaths by bicycle in 2010 alone.

Moreover, there “were an estimated 515,000 emergency department visits” due to bicycle accidents.

And CDC death statistics for 2010 show there were 26,009 deaths from “falling” for that year alone. That’s right–26,009 deaths in one year from falls from ladders, counters, roofs, mountains, etc.

There were an average of 29.8 deaths a year for 14 years from “mass shootings.”

Round that up to 30, and the US population down to 300,000,000. That makes the math very easy.

It's Not Just Conservatives Getting Banned on Twitter

It's Democrats who object to Hillary, too. And, er, hashtags that oppose her.

In a truly egregious move yesterday, Twitter suspended the account responsible for #WhichHillary, activists @GuerrillaDems. Twitter also removed #WhichHillary from trending status — odd, considering the hashtag received more than 450,000 tweets in less than 24 hours.

Obviously the hashtags were guilty of offensive conduct.

Friday Advertisement

Apparently chewable candies in Scotland have wine in them. Good wine, it looks like:



Via Tartanic, a band that knows a few things about rocking out in a kilt.

In Praise of Congress

The representative branch takes a lot of heat, and much of it rightly, but it is still our best hope in the Federal government. Structurally, for the reasons the Founders identified, it is the one most responsive to the People. Lately, there have been a few signs that Congress is beginning to get some things right.

We saw Congress going after John Kerry in yesterday's post, but they are challenging the State Department's madness on more than one level. A House committee has just approved a bill that would require the State Department to explain why they are not treating the Muslim Brotherhood as a named Foreign Terrorist Organization, expressing the sense of Congress that the Brotherhood has met all of the requirements.

Gowdy's investigations continue to gain access to new information that the Clinton State Department worked to keep hidden from Congress.

And here is a congressman who is also a military pilot, standing up for the ranks of the deployed.



These are just glimmers of hope in a sea of corruption and influence. Nevertheless, they aren't nothing.

Trump Rules

Super Tuesday is around the corner. We can tell we are near, this year, because the Republican debate has descended to the middle-school level.

"I don't repeat myself." "You repeated yourself five seconds ago."

This is being widely commended today as what it takes to stand up against Trump. You've got to show, they say, that you're the Alpha.

Alphas don't yip like puppies, boys.

UPDATE: Governor Chris Christie endorses Donald Trump.

UPDATE: Right-leaning journalists are not happy about it, either. Although I don't think Spencer Ackerman ("Attackerman!") qualifies. I met him once -- and he's a solid journalist, the kind of guy who does the legwork that journalism used to be about. He's just not right-leaning.

Philosophy Major? Fries With That?

Well, that's not impossible, but philosophy tops the humanities in expected salaries according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. So in addition to the real project -- learning to think and understand -- your kids might actually get a decent job, too.