All the hate
“Marc Shaiman, the Tony Award-winning composer of the film and stage musical ’Hairspray,’ has done the country a major, if inadvertent, service. He has composed a brief musical piece against California Proposition 8 that takes only three minutes to reveal the ignorance and hate that pervades so much anti-Proposition 8 activism.
“This short musical, viewed more than 2 million times on the Internet … puts hateful words in the mouths of the religious proponents of the man-woman definition of marriage: ’It´s time to spread some hate and put it in the Constitution.’ But no one put hate in the Constitution. The only words Proposition 8 added to the California Constitution were: ’Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.’ What is hateful about that? It may be wrong, but why is it hateful?
“All the hate publicly expressed in the Prop. 8 battle has come from activists like Shaiman. … It is radical gays and radical straights who have led the movement to smear the Mormon Church and to compile blacklists of those who gave money to the Proposition 8 campaign. As one of many examples of their vindictiveness, Shaiman himself is directly responsible for forcing Scott Eckern, the Mormon artistic director of the California Musical Theater, to resign because he made a personal contribution to Prop. 8.”
- Dennis Prager, writing on “A Response to Marc Shaiman´s Musical Against Prop 8” on Dec. 9 at Human Events
Not in Left’s name
“It’s hard to imagine anyone now applauding the Manson murders, as [Bernardine] Dohrn notoriously did in 1969, or dedicating a manifesto to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan. But just because it’s ancient history doesn’t mean you get to rewrite it to make yourself look good, just another idealistic young person upset about the war and racism. We were all upset about the war and racism. …
“Of the many thousands of people involved in the movement one way or another, only a handful thought the thing to do was to form a tiny sect and blow things up in the service of a ludicrous fantasy: i.e., creating a white-youth fighting force that would join up with black nationalists, end the war and overthrow capitalism. Oh, and anyone who didn’t see why that was the right, necessary and indeed only possible course of action was a sellout and a coward.
“I wish [William] Ayers would make a real apology for the harm he did to the antiwar movement and the left. Not another ’regrets, I’ve had a few,’ ’we were all young once,’ ’don’t forget there was a war on’ exercise in self-promotion, but one that showed he actually gets it. I’d like him to say he’s sorry for his part in the destruction of Students for a Democratic Society. He’s sorry he helped [Richard] Nixon make the antiwar movement look like the enemy of ordinary people.”
- Katha Pollitt, writing on “Bill Ayers Whitewashes History, Again,” on Dec. 8 at the Nation blog, And Another Thing
Hands-on work
“Roads and bridges! What joy. Last week’s announcement by President-elect Barack Obama of his massive public works initiative to stimulate the economy won loud applause from me. Not only does the decaying U.S. infrastructure need emergency attention, but construction commissions will be far more substantive and enduring than the half-mythical 5 million ’green’ jobs that Obama was airily promising before the election.
“But then I gulped when Obama also pledged educational reform by putting state-of-the-art computers in every classroom. Groan. Computers alone will never solve the educational crisis in this country: They are tools and facilitators, not primary conveyors of knowledge. Packing his team with shiny Harvard retreads, Obama missed a golden opportunity to link his public works project with a national revalorization of the trades. Practical training in hands-on vocational skills is desperately needed in this country, where liberal arts education has become a soggy boondoggle, obscenely expensive and diluted by propaganda and groupthink.”
- Camille Paglia, writing on “What do the Clintons have on Obama?” on Dec. 10 at Salon
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