Small Arms Fire

“America is no longer what it could be.” Res ipsa loquitur.

Pull that Ad. Greyhound is canceling an ad campaign about how peaceful it is to ride the bus: “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage.’” Bad timing. A passenger riding from Edmonton to Winnipeg is accused of beheading and cannibalizing a fellow passenger. Rage is everywhere, it seems.

MSM R.I.P. Tim Rutten of the LA Times says the old media have been dethroned. They allowed The National Enquirer and bloggers to do the real reporting on John Edwards, while they buried the story, applying a clear double standard that favors Democrats. Edwards then admitted the facts:

With that admission, the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.

Why Do These Words Sound So Nasty? Terry Teachout takes on the revival of Hair 40 years later:

So how does “Hair” look 40 years on? Pretty thin, alas, though the damn-the-torpedoes staging and choreography of Diane Paulus and Karole Armitage and the impassioned singing and dancing of the cast (Caren Lyn Manuel and Patina Renea Miller are especially good) succeed in making it seem marginally fresher than it really is. Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director, has written yet another of his eye-rollingly fatuous program notes, this one assuring us that “Hair” was “a contemporary play influenced by the sweep and scale of Shakespearean dramaturgy.” The truth is that “Hair” was and is a poorly crafted revue whose second act disintegrates before your eyes. James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who collaborated on the book and lyrics, didn’t know the first thing about how to write a musical, and their idea of scintillating wit was to rhyme “pederasty” with “Why do these words sound so nasty?”

Solzhenitsyn and Moral Equivalence. Eamonn Fitzgerald reminds us why Sozhenitsyn mattered:

Reviewing The Gulag Archipelago in 1974, George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker: “To infer that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency.” Like so many left-wing intellectuals (American and European), Steiner was in denial and could not bear to read the message that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote when he presented the “Worker’s Paradise” as it really was: a hideous lie. Solzhenitsyn robbed the anti-West of its most cherished illusions and he cruelly exposed the moral equivalency of the Eric Hobsbawms and lesser-know Stalinist sympathizers and fellow travellers. In The Gulag Archipelago, the USSR functionary was revealed as being every bit as evil as his Third Reich counterpart.