The Memorial for the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was defaced during the protests.

That regiment was the all-black unit immortalized in the film Glory.

Men who had been born free fighting for the liberation of their enslaved brethren in the Confederacy.

So, makes perfect sense that the protests would vandalize that one.

Current mood: this.

Turns out it's a regular target of the Epsilons (yes, I'm really hacked off) who will eventually run the show.

"A thousand men signed up just after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, just think about that," said Liz Vizza, executive director of Friends of the Public Garden. "These are men who, if they were captured in the south, would be enslaved or murdered. But this cause was so important to them, they signed up to go fight for their freedom."

The memorial has been vandalized before – with paint in 2012, and the sword was broken off in 2015 and 2017.

The Memorial is one of the great achievements of America's greatest sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 

Wise people know its significance as a timeless tribute to the black American in arms--and to liberty itself.

But we seem to have hit "peak wisdom" some time back, and it continues to dwindle away by the hour.

Shakespeare for Epsilons.

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” 
                                                                        --Ray Bradbury.

 An interesting article about our continued descent from our cultural heritage: essentially, a theatre troupe in Oregon is rendering Shakespeare into 21st Century American English. No word yet on whether the new scripts will use emojis.

My beloved wife's reaction when I told her this:

That's her verbatim response, by the way.

Hard to argue, really.

For nearly half a millennia English speakers have enjoyed, or at least consumed, Shakespeare’s work in its original language. Often the plays are shortened, sometimes variants from different folios are chosen, but Shakespeare’s words have never been changed wholesale to accommodate the intellectual laziness of a generation of artists and audiences. Why now, when more people graduate college than at any time in our history, do we need Hamlet for Dummies?

Is Shakespeare’s language difficult at times? Yes. Does it require effort to understand? Sure. But has anything happened to the English language or its speakers that make the works inaccessible? Absolutely not. Telling students and audiences they aren’t smart enough to get Shakespeare, that some appointed “experts” need to simplify it for them, turns appreciation of his work from an accomplishment into a literary participation trophy.

There is no reason for any of this. Shakespeare remains relevant to us on stages, in movies, and in our classrooms. Beyond that direct contact, works like “West Side Story,” “Sons of Anarchy,” and “Strange Brew” all use his stories in unique modern ways. But how equipped will we be to appreciate these adaptations if we don’t have a solid grounding in his actual plays?

I have to admit, I really got a kick out of the Strange Brew reference. Yes, it's true: the Bob and Doug Mackenzie classic really does have Shakespearean underpinnings.

But back to the major point: yes, this is bad news. Currently, it's just one troupe, but if it catches on, sheesh. 

Yes, Shakespeare can be rough-going at first. Especially when you approach him from the printed page. That's the key, though: seeing it performed? You see the players and the light goes on. 

As is the case with all parents, I like to think that all of my children are above average.  

I know they're not, but...

I do know that my older three (ages 14, 12 and 11) have seen Baz Luhrmann's take on Romeo and Juliet. The thing is...they got it. And they think Romeo's a twit, not so by the way.

Nevertheless, they followed along and understood it. And enjoyed it. Does that mean they are some trio of amazing prodigies? No, though I will defend their brainpower to all and sundry. 

The thing is, we didn't treat Shakespeare like some odd artifact from a bygone era suitable only for eccentric tweedy eggheads and other Anglophiles. Rather, it is something worthwhile for them, too--with a little effort. 

Apparently, such assumptions are bizarre, so now we have this exercise in mutilation to meet the dumbed-down expectations of our times. If "expectations" they are.

The tragedy isn't just that we're losing so much. Rather, it's that those to whom we are supposed to pass the torch will have no idea of what was lost.  

On the bright side, that might keep them from shooting us. 

That, and the latest distracting app for their smartphones.   

Just. Can't. Wait...

Oh, look--NBC is going to give us a "dramedy" about Wendy (39%) Davis.

Written by Jennifer Cecil, the untitled project centers on a female Democratic senator who, after losing the Texas governor’s race, gets her world turned upside down. In the vein of The Good Wife, while she pieces her pride back together, she goes to work in the law firm of her best friend — a black male Republican — and discovers that with no political future to protect, she can unshackle her inner badass.

So, you're telling me there will be lots of clapper lines for progressives and endless stereotyping of idiot bigoted conservatives--all heavily larded with an Ally McBeal sensibility?

What the "Power of Hashtag" says about us.

Kevin Williamson guts, fillets and rolls in panko bread crumbs the mortifying narcissism of our social media bubble, and the supposed grownups who embrace it:

Slavery in Nigeria, the occupation of Ukraine, whatever: It ain’t about you, Sunshine.

The “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign, directed at the fanatical Islamist slavers in Nigeria, has inspired selfies fromU.S. senators and the wife of the president of these United States, while State Department spokesman Jen Psaki, the Pippi Longstocking of the diplomatic world, took to Twitter to photograph herself with a “United for Ukraine” placard. To confront the heinous crimes of Boko Haram, a U.S. senator has many options — for example, introducing an authorization to use military force against said terrorist franchise. The U.S. State Department has many tools at its disposal for confronting the expansionist tendencies of Vladimir Putin.

The selfie is not among those tools.

Imagine, if you can, the abjectly juvenile state of mind necessary to contemplate the hundreds of Nigerian girls taken into slavery by a fanatical Muslim anti-education militia — whose characteristic activity beyond slave-taking is setting fire to children— and, in the face of all that horror, concluding: “You know what this situation really calls for? A cutesy picture of . . . me!” Bad enough when your cousin Caitlin at Bryn Mawr does that — but senators? State Department officials? These are men and (disproportionately, I think) women of power and influence, who have the ability to engage with the world and change it. But they are enchanted by the unique witchcraft of the age of social media, the totemic power of the digital expression of the self.

Read it all--a few times at least. 

Then ponder how far we've fallen.

"America's Colleges and Universities: Where Our Future Leaders Take Hideously-Expensive Vacations from Reality, Common Sense and Adult Responsibility."

University's "weapons policy" bars fencing club from campus: 

[North Dakota State University's] Police and Safety Office Director Ray Boyer cited the school's policy manual and Code of Student Behavior, saying sabers and swords are prohibited on campus:

"They are deemed weapons, and as such, possession or use on University owned or controlled property is prohibited," he says.

Club members who are trained to properly use the equipment say they don't think an epee is much worse than a baseball bat. "In fact, I think it's less dangerous. If you look up like statistics, fencing is an incredibly safe sport," says the club's President Winfield Brand.

Glenn Reynolds puts the culture of academic idiocy into a handy nutshell:

 As Twitter wag IowaHawk japes: "If I understand college administrators correctly, colleges are hotbeds of racism and rape that everyone should be able to attend."

That sums it up pretty well. Though the claim that one in five women on campus is sexually assaulted is pretty clearly bogus — as Bloomberg's Megan McArdle notes, it includes things like sexual touching over clothes, which hardly constitute rape — it's widely repeated, and that surely makes young women a bit less enthusiastic about attending. Then all the responses — involving, basically, kangaroo courts that strip male students charged with sexual assault of all due process protection — don't make campuses more appealing to male students, who are already an under-represented minority on most campuses.

Then there's the race hysteria. Just last week, students at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota canceled a "Hump Day" celebration featuring a camel because someone thought the camel signified racism against Muslims. (Yes, Muslims aren't a race, but that doesn't matter, apparently.) We make fun of Victorians for substituting the term "limbs" for the too-racy word "legs," and for supposedly covering table legs with cloth, but our own era is prone to similar over-delicacy, and campuses — supposedly centers of critical thought — seem to be the worst offenders.

Dartmouth cancelled a charitable fund-raising "fiesta" because one student complained that the word "fiesta" was racist. And going beyond race, commencement speakers, ranging from Condi Rice at Rutgers to Christine LaGarde at Smith, have been turned away by rabid student protests, mocked here by Yale Law's Stephen Carter.

From the economics to the politics, colleges and universities are looking less like serious places to improve one's mind and one's prospects, and more like expensive islands of frivolity and, sometimes, viciousness. And that is likely to have consequences.

Can you say "bursting bubble"? 

I knew you could!

Well, maybe not after four years of college, but you get my drift.

Orwellian group-think comes to real-world science fiction writing.

A little recondite, but instructive: the Hugo Awards and SFWA are the latest (if minor) institutions to have succumbed to the left's jackbooted tolerance enforcers. The issues have risen to the attention of USA Today, so it's newsworthy instead of merely nerdworthy.

Larry "Monster Hunter" Correia explains part of the problem (the Hugos) in a link within the USA Today column.

Then there's just the general stupidity of demanding that one simply must incorporate PC tropes in one's speculative fiction.

Finally, Sarah Hoyt (not exactly a charter member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy herself) and John C. Wright both lower the boom.

The Left: You'll Have Their Worldview and Like It, H8R!™

In 1989, during my lapsed-Methodist days, I was turned away from a tour of the Cologne Cathedral because I was wearing khaki shorts.

I changed into long pants, returned, and enjoyed the tour.

Get. Over. Your. Self.

Note the seemless segue from Sally's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at the Vatican into pom-pon shaking for Garry Wills' shrieky arguments against the priesthood and sacraments.

What a twit.

Yes, both of them.

America, the Kingdom of Pathological Narcissists.

[Hat tip to Chris for the find.]

Remember: the collective national IQ has plummeted since 1967.

Amanda Marcotte is Dworkin Barbie: all the anger, only more plastic, derivative and frivolous. Combine it with her My Vulgar Little Feminist writing style and her Chatty Cathy pull-string range, and you have a feast of weapons-grade stupid ever time she hits "Publish." The Octomom picture is fitting--at least the battle of wits between them would be a nail-biter.

Let me be the first to reassure her: she doesn't have to reproduce.

But she will have to live with the consequences of an increasing number of people Living The Marcotte Way. As in, she'd better have one hell of a retirement nest-egg or acquire a taste for Alpo in her old age.

Why should the President give a rip about unemployment?

The electorate didn't.


Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners, points out that “it will require a multiyear period of above-trend growth to return unemployment to more normal levels.” He speaks of the “jobs gap,” the difference between current employment levels and what they would be if a few years of catch-up economic growth had reestablished the pre-recession trend. Assuming annual private-sector employment growth of 2 percent, the average of the past three decades, we’re 14 million jobs short. And because catch-up growth never happened — say, a few years of averaging 5 percent growth, as happened after the 1981–82 recession — even if the economy returns to steady 3 percent growth, GDP levels will be trillions lower in the future than they would have been otherwise, due to the lower starting point.

But right now output growth and job growth aren’t even back to trend. And that means every month the output and jobs gaps grow a bit wider. With an economy that hasn’t hummed since the 1990s, we’ve already had one lost decade. If we begin to accept and acquiesce to the creeping new normalcy, America risks suffering its own lost generation. Someone right now needs to say “Enough” — and then back up those words with action. It would be helpful if that person were Obama.

It's what the majority wanted. The President will continue to blame everyone else while the corrosive effects of long-term unemployment, coupled with national insolvency, do the inevitable.

Enjoy!

Proposition: "The collective national IQ peaked in 1967, and has eroded since."

Discuss!

No, I'm grasping towards something like that.

It's a byproduct of cataloguing the books. What strikes me about the America of the 1950s and 1960s is the earnest, serious belief that a general familiarity with matters historical, cultural and intellectual was not only essential, but possible. Durant's Story of Civilization, the Encyclopedia Britannica with its study guides, the Great Ages of Man series, and even rolling on momentum into the early '70s with the Life History of the United States. All general, but well-researched and serious efforts to give the reader a conversational familiarity with a wide range of topics--all because they were worth knowing if one was a well-rounded person. You also saw the flowering of museums, city orchestras, theatrical groups and the like during the same time frame.

Then it ended. The demand dried up, and voila--it was gone. The books went out of print and the arts organizations started to live a hand-to-mouth existence which they haven't, in the main, escaped yet.

Sure, there have been some efforts to push back the tide--Hirsch's Dictionary of Cultural Literacy comes to mind, (hopefully) successful re-funding of museums (the DIA here in Detroit). But nothing like what you saw five decades ago. Nothing like the general presumption that such knowledge is important in and of itself, and is part of a full, well-ordered life. It feels like the fall from, if not a golden age, at least one of silver.

Food for melancholic thought.

I love this picture.

It's the helpful arrow and legend that do it for me.

"Oh, right there in the middle, the thing with the spiraling white bands and all. Thank you--I might have missed that."

More seriously, prayers for anyone in the path of this one--looks like the Atlantic just cooked up its first monster of the year.