XPost: alt.honesty, chi.general, sac.politics
XPost: alt.politics.democrats, talk.politics.guns

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449153/chicago-theater-critic- shunned-racial-honesty

In the Windy City, telling unpopular truths will get you ostracized.

In Chicago, where there were more homicides last year than in Los Angeles
and New York City combined, expressing any support whatsoever for the
police is now considered an outrage. Should you point out that, say, a
play seems to suggest cops are evil crackers, you may find yourself
denounced as a racist and targeted for abuse and ostracization.

A theater writer has just found that out. In what the website American
Theatre dubbed “the review that shook Chicago,” adding in a subhead that
“Local theatre artists rise in revolt,” veteran theater critic Hedy Weiss
of the Chicago Sun-Times criticized a new play called Pass Over, which I haven’t seen but is being described as a kind of update of Waiting for
Godot filtered through the sensibility of Black Lives Matter. The play, by Antoinette Nwandu, was mounted by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, perhaps
the most celebrated outfit of its kind outside of New York City. Weiss
found its racial politics to be a bit reductionist, and offered these
thoughts in her review:

No one can argue with the fact that this city (and many others throughout
the country) has a problem with the use of deadly police force against African-Americans. But, for all the many and varied causes we know so
well, much of the lion’s share of the violence is perpetrated within the community itself. Nwandu’s simplistic, wholly generic characterization of
a racist white cop (clearly meant to indict all white cops) is wrong-
headed and self-defeating. Just look at news reports about recent
shootings (on the lakefront, on the new River Walk, in Woodlawn) and you
will see the look of relief when the police arrive on the scene.

Cue unbridled rage. Steppenwolf charged her with “deep-seated bigotry.” An actor named Bear Bellinger announced that he would not perform if Weiss
showed up at a workshop production he was appearing in. An ad-hoc
coalition that might as well have dubbed itself the Blackball Hedy
Movement (but is actually called the Chicago Theater Accountability
Coalition, or CTAC) launched a petition via change.org to organize the
theater world of Chicago against Weiss by denying her invitations to its
plays. Several theater organizations have publicly agreed to join the blackballing effort, and dozens have offered noncommittal statements of support. The group’s broadside against Weiss reads, “Over the last few
years especially, we have joined together to make it clear that
inappropriate language or behavior does not have a place within our
community, and that prejudice of any kind will not stand.”

Wait a minute — inappropriate behavior? Inappropriate language? Weiss
cannot reasonably be accused of either of these things. She isn’t
disrupting plays. She isn’t using curse words and slurs in her reviews.
She isn’t, as far as I know, belching loudly during shows nor unwrapping candies during quiet moments. CTAC should be honest with itself and admit
that its charge against Weiss is that she is thinking inappropriate
thoughts. It was less than two years ago that Steppenwolf mounted a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Do these people not recognize their
kinship with the thought police? Do they not see that “Shut up” is not an argument?

To join the Hedy Weiss Resistance seems self-defeating on the one hand and pointless on the other — she could, after all, simply buy tickets to the
plays, and pass along the cost to her employers (the Sun-Times pledged
such support in its editorial defending her). Moreover, if she actually
were successfully kept away from plays in Chicago, those plays would lose
the publicity fillip of being written about in a widely read newspaper.

Do these people not recognize their kinship with the thought police? Do
they not see that ‘Shut up’ is not an argument?

And what part of Weiss’s review is indefensible? Is not most of the
violence perpetrated against blacks in Chicago, and elsewhere, carried out
by other blacks? Of course it is. I won’t bother to cite statistics
because everyone knows this. Do not ordinary law-abiding black citizens
respond with relief when mayhem is answered by the arrival of police? To
say otherwise would be to charge black communities with valuing bloodshed
more than order. As for whether the portrayal of the cop in the play is
meant to indict all police officers, or whether that portrayal is
simplistic and generic, I couldn’t say, not having seen the play. But expressing opinions on the depth and subtlety of a play is what all
theater critics do.

Weiss, we are told gravely, has “done this before,” meaning she has said politically incorrect things. Thirteen years ago she called Tony Kushner a “self-loathing Jew” in a review of his play Caroline, or Change. Kushner
once called the state of Israel “a moral, political catastrophe for the
Jewish people” and wrote the movie Munich, which was a moral-equivalence
piece evincing at least as much disgust with the Mossad for tracking down
and assassinating the Palestinian terrorists who carried out the 1972
Olympics massacre as it did with the PLO murderers themselves.
Nonsensically, Weiss also stands charged with “body-shaming” for praising
the costumes in a production of Mamma Mia, saying they “make the most of
the many ‘real women’ figures on stage,” referring euphemistically to
plump performers, but contrasting them with backup dancers who had
“perfect bodies.” An aggrieved cast member replied in a huff that all
women’s bodies are perfect.

The theater world is a place where being “subversive” and “transgressive”
are considered the highest of all virtues. But what’s going on in Chicago
is a reminder is that greasepaint revolutionaries can barely handle even
mild intellectual opposition. They picture themselves riding bravely into
the battlefield of ideas. But if anyone shows up to fight for the other
side, they cry meekly, “Excuse me, I don’t think you’re allowed here.”


--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party has run out of gas.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for ending the disaster of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)