Category Archives: Political Correctness

Its the perfect antidote for our current state of affairs. Stand Up Comedian Steve Solomons latest book (Political Correctness & Other Forms Of Insanity) is loaded with belly-laughs.meaningful (painfully funny) discussions about his: ex-wife, therapist, cats, dogs, and a hundred hilarious topics we all (except Steve) deal with in our day to day struggle with humanity and iPhones.

You will read about the little things that drove Steve into therapy: Press one for english, Dad and Mom entering the digital age, Steves personal urologist, Millennials and last but but certainly not least family dinner; where if youre under 60, you have to stay at the childrens table.

Available on Amazon

To say that an evening spent with Steve Solomon is like being with a dear, funny friend, is an understatement. In truth, an evening with Steve is more like being with dozens of hilarious friends and eccentric members of your own family.

Steve has taken the art of impersonation and honed it into a science. He masterfully weaves different dialects and crazy characters into his stories. These tales take on a life of their own as Steve recounts memorable moments from his past and makes hysterical observations of the things we all relate to.

A native of Brooklyn, Steve grew up in the multi-ethnic neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay. This was the perfect training ground for a dialectician. As the class clown and as a very authentic sounding Chinese restaurant delivery boy, Steve learned at an early age how to use his gift for imitating accents to his advantage.

He also realized that he was a prolific writer of jokes; real jokes. And, blinded by the glitz of show business, he submitted dozens of his stories to periodicals, friends and stand up comics he knew in the business.

His previous book, three-time award winning:My Mothers Italian, My Fathers Jewish & Im In Therapy met with rave reviews and great audience acclaim throughout the country; and became one of the longest running one-man shows in Broadway history.

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My View: Political Correctness and Other Forms of Insanity Times Square Chronicles - Times Square Chronicles

Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy is not a racist.

As a college football coach for decades, it would have been impossible for Gundy to hide prejudice if he had even one ounce of it.

Now, the liberal media is feeding the frenzy that Gundy is a racist because he wore a T-shirt with initials of a conservative news network that had the audacity to be critical of Black Lives Matter.

Black lives do matter but all lives should matter.

And free speech should matter.

Universities used to teach that debate and differences of opinion could be tolerate because they promoted intellectual growth and freedom of expression.

But no. Gundy sinned by wearing a T-shirt that with the initials of a network that dared to challenge political correctness.

The term racist has no meaning now because it has been so misused and abused. A racist is someone who hates someone of another race. The media definition now is that you are a racist if you disagree with any part of their leftist ideology.

So Gundy is a bad person because he liked some of the stuff he saw on TV. And the players at OSU now are in control of what coaches should and shouldnt do or wear.

OSU President Burns Hargis quickly abandoned his football coach because even though he pretends to be a conservative Republican, he prefers being liked by ultra-liberal professors to following common sense.

Mike Gundy is a good person and the best coach OSU has ever had. Its a shame that his good name is being dragged through the mud because of a disrespect for freedom of speech.

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Editorial: Gundy and freedom of speech - Tulsa Beacon

The Gringa

by Andrew Altschul

Melville House, 421 pp., $27.99

A gringo, in US English, is generally understood to be a white person from the United States. We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called Gringoes, is the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary, from John James Audubons Western Journal of an 1849 trip to the gold fields of California. Both the OED and Merriam-Websters agree that the word is pejorative or contemptuous.

In Spanish, gringo is a way of saying foreigner, applicable to whichever group is locally most numerous. In Uruguay, a gringo might be an Italian or a Russian. La Gringa, by the playwright Carmen Rivera, which has run for decades at Repertorio Espaol in Manhattan, tells the story of a Puerto Rican woman raised in the United States who visits the island for the first time. The dictionary of the Real Academia Espaola currently notes no disparaging connotation and says gringo is usually associated with English speakers, though in Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru a gringo can be anyone with fair hair and light skin. Gringo can also mean a foreign or unintelligible language. One etymological conjecture derives it from griego: Greek.

The palefaced English speaker from the US who heads south of the border is a familiar figure in the literature of the Americas. Carlos Fuentess The Old Gringo (1985; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) takes up the story of Ambrose Bierce, the midwestern journalist who, in 1913, disappeared in Mexico; it was the first Mexican novel to become a best seller in the United States. A complete literary history of the gringo would have to extend back at least a full century, to Mara Ruiz de Burtons The Squatter and the Don, published in San Francisco in 1885 and mostly ignored until 1992, when it was republished in the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage series by the University of Houstons Arte Pblico Press.

Born to a landowning Mexican family in Baja California, Mara Ruiz married Henry Burton, the commander of the US troops who occupied her town in 1847. The Squatter and the Don explores, in English, a tangled web of connections between a Spanish-speaking native Californian family and a white family from the North who are squatting on land to which the Mexican government once granted the Californians title. Ruiz de Burton wrote the novel to push back against the negative stereotypes the squatters used to justify their land grab. Of their patriarch, Ruiz de Burton writes, It can hardly be said that he understood himself, for he sincerely believed that he had forever renounced his squatting propensities. The characterization is classic: the gringo always believes, erroneously, in his own innocence. Ruiz de Burton believed in hers, too. The adjectives she most often pairs with the nameless Indian characters in The Squatter and the Don are lazy and stupid.

Ruiz de Burton was struggling to maintain title to land of her own as she wrote her novel, but the cultural territory it claims, the right to a voice and an audience within the discourse of the invading nation, was just as important to her. If the struggle for cultural territory seems to have grown particularly fierce in our day, that may be because, unlike Ruiz de Burton, some of the writers and communities now engaged in it have achieved enough clout to draw attention to their resistance. The more that pushback affects how and by whom stories are told, however, the more it is, in turn, accused of shackling us all in chains variously known as political correctness, identity politics, or cancel culture. A statement by PEN America, issued earlier this year in response to objections leveled against American Dirt, a novel by Jeanine Cummins, categorically reject[s] rigid rules about who has the right to tell which stories. All of us, goes the general defense, should be able to write whatever we want, about whomever we want.

Its pleasant to think of literature as a free territory where the imagination can wander at will. Kafka wrote Amerika without ever setting foot in the New World. Among contemporary Latin American writers, this maneuver is something of a trend. The Mexican-Peruvian writer and provocateur Mario Bellatin sets some of his work in Japan but has said he wont ever go there: I want to maintain my distorted idea of what Japan is, he told an interviewer in 2015a sort of essence, a constructed essence, fictitious and flawed. Carlos Yushimoto, a Peruvian writer currently based in the US, situates much of his fiction in Brazil, a country he has never visited. The imaginative freedom of not knowing, or knowing only a wholly mediated entityones own self, reflected from afarcan be more creatively exhilarating than any mere encounter with the real thing.

In this respect, The Gringa, a recent novel by Andrew Altschul, raises an important question: Does fiction, particularly fiction that claims to be based on history, have any responsibilities at all vis--vis real people and their lives, places they inhabit, truth? At a time when systematic disinformation campaigns are abetting the rise of authoritarian governments the world over, might it be unwise to discard all concepts of boundaries or dividing lines between the imaginative freedom of literary fiction and distortion or falsehood?

Successful works of fiction tend to handle history with great care, particularly where real individuals are concerned. Don DeLillos Libra (1988) chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald in the years leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the Spanish novelist Antonio Muoz Molinas Like a Fading Shadow (2017; translated by Camilo A. Ramirez) portrays James Earl Ray on the run in Lisbon after assassinating Martin Luther King Jr; and the Bolivian novelist Rodrigo Hasbuns Affections (2017; translated by Sophie Hughes), a terse contrapuntal interplay of voices and perspectives, evokes the Ertls, whose patriarch, Hans, the cinematographer for several of Leni Riefenstahls Nazi films, moved his family to Bolivia in 1952. Monika Ertl, Hanss daughter, grew up among Bolivias ruling classes, then joined the survivors of Che Guevaras defeated guerrilla movement, and in 1973, at age thirty-five, was killed by Bolivian security forces.

All of these novels call their protagonists by their real names and adhere, for the most part, to the known record of their lives, though that is no simple matter. One of Libras most celebrated insights is that in the overwhelming information overloadthe endless fact-rubblefact that is generated by an event like the Kennedy assassination becomes unsustainable and yields to myth. And by the time each of these books was written, Bierce, Oswald, Ray, and the Ertl family were dead, receding into myth.

Portraying the living is a more delicate question. A brilliant and enigmatic approach to the artistic adaptation of living characters is proposed by Is This a Room, which premiered in 2019 at the Kitchen in New York City. In the director Tina Satters staging of the FBIs official transcript of its interrogation of now incarcerated former intelligence specialist Reality Winner, the actors perform the transcript verbatim, complete with freeze-frame pauses for the redacted passages.

Though her name does not appear in the pages of The Gringa, an initial version of the publishers webpage for the novel, since rewritten, announced that it is loosely based oncontroversial American activist Lori Berenson. In any case, that is immediately clear to anyone remotely familiar with Berensons life story. Before getting to the novel, a review of her life is in order.

She grew up in New York City, the daughter of two college professors. In 1988, as an undergraduate at MIT, she became concerned about the unequal treatment of refugees from the cold war battlegrounds of Central America. Those fleeing left-wing violence were likely to be granted asylum by the US government; those fleeing the violence of right-wing governments were likely to be refused. After a three-month trip to El Salvador in her sophomore year, Berenson dropped out of college to work with the Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front (FMLN), then a Marxist guerrilla group combatting the Salvadoran military, now one of El Salvadors two main political parties. She first worked with the FMLN in Washington, D.C., then moved to Nicaragua in 1990. Two years later, following the successful conclusion of a United Nationsbrokered peace process, she moved to El Salvador, where she was part of a team supplying secretarial support to Salvador Snchez Cern, an FMLN general. (In 2014 Cern was elected president of El Salvador and held that office for the next five years.)

Berenson arrived in Peru in November 1994, fluent in Spanish and having lived in Latin America for four years. A year later, at the age of twenty-six, she was arrested on charges of abetting a foiled plot by the Tpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) to attack the Peruvian Congress. Berenson had rented a house where members of the MRTA were living and where, after her arrest, several MRTA members and one police officer were killed during a shootout. A sizable cache of weapons and ammunitionof which Berenson had no knowledge, or so both she and members of the MRTA attested in courtwas found inside.

She spent the next fifteen years in Peruvian prisons. In 2009, while still in prison, she gave birth to a son, Salvador. When Jennifer Egan profiled her for The New York Times in 2011, while she was in the process of being paroled to spend the next five years under house arrest in Lima, Berenson told her, Ive always been a very private person. A common enough thought. But Egan was struck by the extent to which she and other members of her family were profoundly privateto an extent that seems quaint in our self-exposing era. In 2015 she was allowed to leave Peru, and she and six-year-old Salvador flew to the United States. Meanwhile, in Peru, Alberto Fujimori, the president who made political hay out of prosecuting Berenson, was himself convicted in 2009 on charges of extensive corruption and human rights abuses that included ordering death squads to commit massacres. He remains in jail today.

You will learn little of this from The Gringa. Instead, the novel offers up an effigy it calls Leonora (Leo) Gelb, a gringa in Peru. Right off the bat, we learn that Leonora Gelb hated America. The America she hates is vaguely defined, but has one particular embodiment: the Hard Rock Caf. The sight of a Hard Rock Caf being constructed as part of a glittering Lima shopping mall called Va Amrica fills Leo with rage and disgust. When the mall is complete, she thinks, the masseswill crawl over its glossy surface like maggots on meat.

Anyone whos been near a college campus or peeked at social media in the last decade will recognize Leo as a Social Justice Warrior. SJWs, according to Urbandictionary.com, are people who claim to be fighting for social justice but are actually validating their own ego, looking for special treatment, or attention. Typically, an SJW is very easily brainwashed by far-left college professors. Another SJW characteristic is to push back at negative stereotypes: SJWs are individuals who are mad and get triggered by everything.

The Gringa efficiently checks off each box. Raised in the suburbs of New Jersey by upper-middle-class parents, Leo graduates from Stanford, where she is radicalized by a professor whose worka mishmash of theory, documentary research, personal recollection, and fictionalized re-enactmentsholds that the demands inherent to storytelling inevitably contaminate the source material, warping it into a form with no claim to historical reality. He also has his students do fieldwork among migrant laborers, street gangs, and prostitutes. Leo is radicalized, then, by the very combination of theory and renewed attention to the marginalized that right-wing commentators since 1990 (coincidentally, the year Berenson left the United States) have spun into the phantom enemy, as Moira Weigel calls it, of political correctness, that leftwing political programmeseizing control of American universities and cultural institutions.1

Eager for its readers to join in the chortling, The Gringa doesnt miss a chance to put Leos self-serving, liberal bad faith on parade. While still at Stanford, she protests the Gulf War, accompanied by a sometime lover named Marden, a mixed-race man she has met in one of the tenured radicals classes. Like every other well-attended protest depicted here, this one soon turns violent. Cops slam nightsticks into Marden, who lies helpless in the street. Leo drops the pipe shes carrying, rips off her balaclava, and takes refuge in Macys. Heading to the mens department, she buys her father (who pays her credit card bills) a tie for his birthday. Marden never comes up again.

A couple of years later, vaguely motivated by a photograph of the dead body of the anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko she saw at a Peter Gabriel performance in high school and appalled by the $200 centerpieces at her investment banker brothers wedding, Leo decamps to Peru with scant command of Spanish and no prior experience of living outside the United States. She wants to do something, to help. She believes in her own innocence. Soon enough shell be sobbing Yo soy terrorista in a freezing prison cell.

The MRTA, the group living in Lori Berensons rented house, was eventually held responsible for 1.5 percent of the deaths resulting from Perus internal conflict between 1980 and 2000.2 But the wholly fictional guerrilla group Leo gets involved with is called the Cuarta Filosofaa name resonant with the Maoist cult known as Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path, which caused 54 percent of those roughly 68,000 deaths. To underscore this tacit accusation, one of The Gringas epigraphs is from Abimael Guzmn, the philosophy professor who founded Sendero.

The other epigraph, from DeLillos Mao II (1991), sounds a lot like the garbled theory spouted by Leos Stanford professor, but also appears to be offered in defense of the novels purportedly postmodern project: Is history possible? Is anyone serious?

The promotional copy from The Gringas publisher touts it as subversive. Of what, exactly? Its characterization of Leonora Gelb is fully in line with such publications as the New York Post, which, upon Berensons return to her native city in 2015, ran an editorial that denounced her, associated her with the deaths of 50,000 people, and sneered at liberals for lioniz[ing] her. Lori Berenson is a single parent who has had to readjust to a country she hadnt lived in for a quarter-century while coping with the trauma of decades of incarceration. What are the ethics of publishing a book that constructs such an ugly caricature, links it to a vulnerable, living individual (who told Egan about receiving death threats), and proceeds to elaborate upon this theme for four hundred pages? In an interview with Berenson conducted around the same time as Egans 2011 profile, the Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti noted that Berenson was paroled to house arrest because the Peruvian authorities determined she represented no threat to anyone. In an earlier article about her, Gorriti reminded his readers that in addition to Salvador Snchez Cern, two other recent democratically elected Latin American heads of stateBrazils Dilma Rousseff and Uruguays Jos Mujicaspent their younger years in militant guerrilla resistance groups. Yet the ethical premise of The Gringaif it has oneseems to be that engagement in any way with people who were involved in armed resistance renders one fair game for any and all vilification.

In a useful recent essay titled How to Unlearn Everything, the novelist Alexander Chee proposes three questions for fiction writers who are thinking of depicting people who do not look like you. These questions, however, can only be useful to those who ask them. The Gringa remains placid in the certainty that its author, or his counterpart, a character named Andres, an expat novelist from the US who tells himself that stories cant hurt anyone, is depicting someone who very much looks like himself.

If we were to pose the first of Chees questionsWhy do you want to write from this characters point of view?Andress answer might be that Leonora Gelb is not an oppressed person of color but, like him, a figure of white privilege, an educated, middle-class, US citizen. The many shared elements in their backgrounds appearto Andres, at leastto offer blanket protection from any charge of cultural appropriation and grant his imagination carte blanche.

Andres, too, hates America. He not only hates but is embarrassed by it. As is Leo. On a bus ride through Lima, she listens as the radio blares news of President Clinton, nonsense from the USKathleen, Paula, Monica, names out of a sorority house, or a bad sitcomand she groans aloud at the unforgivable silliness. (The ostensibly female Leo deplores the unforgivable silliness of women and their irredeemably womanish names.) Andres also shares Leos loathing for the Hard Rock Caf. He prefers to party in more authentically Peruvian venues.

After seeing the photographs of Abu Ghraib in 2004, Andres gives up his meaningless job teaching writing, sells everything he owns, and abandons his homeland for the wide world of not-America, where he didnt have to care about politics or anything much at all: Everything was lovely. Lovely and light, ultimately meaningless. Not living in the United States and taking no interest in politics renders him innocent of the various traumas the nation inflicts upon itself and others, or so he believes. Despising consumerism, Andres furnishes his apartment sparsely and makes nightlife his personal-finance priority, spending his evenings with Peruvian women and various expat friends. Andres often depicts himself in an unflattering light and sometimes gets skewered by other characters, too, which seems intended as both exculpatory and charmingly self-deprecating. Oh, Andres, what a monster of ego you are, a Canadian female journalist whispers to him.

Andres is also the author of a published novel; Peru is supposed to provide him with something further to write about. Which brings us to the second of Chees questions: Do you read writers from this community currently? A Peruvian acquaintance recommends Csar Vallejo, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, and Mario Vargas Llosa to Andres, but he doesnt like reading in Spanish, and his copy of Vargas Llosas Conversacin en la catedral (1969), a novel about a young middle-class Peruvian man who gets involved in leftist politics, sits unread and fading on a windowsill. Though Andres also acquires a work by the Peruvian Marxist Jos Maritegui as room decoration, his real literary reference points are all gringos: DeLillo, Walter Laqueur, Roth, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Melville. This is also largely true of his female terrorist alter ego, who lugs a copy of Moby-Dick around with her everywhere.

Andres does read a lot about Leonora Gelb, though, or so he tells us. Once hes convinced himself shes the subject matter Peru has thoughtfully served up for him, he becomes research-obsessed and gathers accordion files full of clippings, some of them supposedly by Gustavo Gorriti. The Gringa goes out of its way to ape the sort of archival work that fiction writers who deal carefully with history engage inonly to dismiss it all as meaningless. I read all eight thousand pages of the Truth & Reconciliation Commissions 2003 report, Andres boasts. None of it made sense to me. By the end of the day Id forgotten everything Id read. Leonora Gelb does not exist, so its no surprise that Andress pretend delving proves unfruitful. But the novel insists repeatedly on its grounding in fact. When Andres has a breakthrough in his writing process and excitedly calls his agent back in the States, she sees tremendous potential: creative nonfiction is very much in vogue, she says.

If gringo can be semantically slippery as it moves between Spanish and English, American, another term whose meaning is not limited to those from the United States, is even more so. Dont call me a gringa, Leo tells a Peruvian acquaintance, apparently understanding the word as a pejorative: Im American. Somos todos americanos (We are all Americans) is how Peruvians tend to reply to both Leo and Andres when they make that statement. The various historical and etymological reasons they have for doing so are not unpacked. What The Gringa itself means by American eventually grows clear when Leo learns, too late, that the Cuarta Filosofa infiltrator who foils her plot to blow up the Hard Rock Caf claims to share her nationality. Yes, of course, we are all Americans, the man she once knew as Comrade Miguel tells her during an interrogation. Sabes qu? My fathers from Baltimore. I lived there until I was nine.

Real America, it turns out, is located back in the US, and the novels most duplicitous character, Comrade Miguel, is the one who claims to conjoin that Real America with Peru. The novels last word on what it means to be an American is offered by a Peruvian girlfriend, pregnant with Andress child, who pleads with him to be part of the babys life: He will look up to you, his American father, and think you are like a hero, like a superhero so far away. The child will not, himself, be an American.

Chees third question, Why do you want to tell this story?, is an easy one. Not content with making its heroine a quasi-Senderista and the mastermind of a terrorist plot, The Gringa eventually holds her metaphorically at fault for the events of September 11, 2001, and punishes her for that, too. After Leo is paroled to house arrest in Lima, a protest in front of her house turns violent and shes shot in the chest and killed. Then, as Andres entertains implausible thoughts of becoming a better person, the novel peters out. The exciting denouement it has in mind for itself lies elsewhere.

The Gringa repeatedly evokes a video of Leo that mimics the infamous clip of Berenson that many commentators believe was what sent her to jail. Taken shortly after her arrest in January 1996, it shows her infuriated, shouting at the top of her lungs, denouncing the Peruvian government. It was a godsend to the Fujimori administration, which made that open-mouthed, raging foreign woman into the face of Peruvian terrorism. The Gringas highest aspiration seems to be to elicit that same reaction: to be denounced by Berenson. Controversy sells books. The novel cites a definition of terrorism, also from DeLillos Mao II: The language of being noticed [is] the only language the West understands.

The Gringa has been noticed in this essay as a symptom of our time. Its characters trumpeted anti-Americanism seems like a posture of the left. But what does it tell us? All protest is a form of masturbation and can only lead to violence. Attempts to help others, rectify wrongs, or create change are narcissistic, self-serving, and delusional. Knowledge and expertise are a fraud and historical fact a bauble to play with or smash at will, with no regard for the consequences to anyone. And there are just two places in the world: the United States and elsewherethe latter useful only as a backdrop for stories about the homeland. For all the hostility toward America The Gringa depicts, its provincial exceptionalism and hunger for outrage make it right at home with the people who claim they want to make America great again.

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Fiction and Responsibility | by Esther Allen - The New York Review of Books

As a college freshman I began waiting on Newseek magazine to come out so I could turn to the back and read George F. Wills column. Reading him taught me how to write a lead sentence, how to structure for persuasion, and, I daresay, it provided me with my first real lessons on how to think through the cactus-like political problems that arise in a messy republic such as ours.

Newsweek is a pale shadow of its former self, but Mr. Willpeople refer to him as George; I cannotstill writes for The Washington Post.

His most recent editorial begins with a lead sentence that again caught my eye. Its shattering honesty struck me as much-needed in a time when foolishness masquerades as heroics, pandering masquerades as sympathy, and reaction masquerades as reasoned response.

His sentence: A nations gravest problems are those it cannot discuss because it dare not state them. His thesis is astonishing: A significant part of the intelligentsia cannot think.

Lets mull that over for a bit. How can we solve our problems if those best suited to state them dont dare even state them and, if they do, are not able to think about them?

Asked differently, how can we solve our problems if the shaming class remains ever-ready to call us out if we do anything less than follow the party line?

How can we solve even the simplest problems when our infantile efforts at political correctness preclude any actual thought?

When we find ourselves there, our ship is sailing to rocky shoals where reason seems, if not dead, at least abandoned, cast overboard out of fear.

Our news class reimagines stories rather than reports them. Its goal, it seems, is to make us believe that we are a nation of less-than-decent people who should be cowering alone behind locked doors and wearing facemasks.

Our historians recreate history rather than help us learn from it. Their goal, it seems, is to re-cast those great men who founded this nation into the role of nation-stealers who were only here to rob, pillage, and plunder.

Our politicians hijack any tragedy. Their goal, it seems, is to magnify the tragedy ten-fold, all the while promising us that their solution is the true Balm of Gilead. With a sleight of hand that would make jealous Pen and Teller, they, with sincerity born of years of effort, virtue signal in an effort to keep us from noticing that they were in office when the real reasons behind this new problem arose and, having been in a place of responsibility, did nothing.

Will ends his column brilliantly: The barbarians are not at Americas gate. There is no gate.

We need a gate, something through which ideas have to pass to be filtered. A way of thinking.

One of my smart friends gave me an Orson Welles quote many years ago. You will remember Orson Welles as the deep-voiced intellectual writer and actor who terrified us with the radio version of War of the Worlds, and who then gave us a movie that is in the top-ten list of every major critic, Citizen Kane. He taught us that The absence of limitations is the enemy of art. That is an aphorism of broad application. Those are words of genius.

We seem to have thrown off all limits and, having done so, we are in deep trouble. Limits are what make things worthwhile; we are defined by them. Imagine a cup of water with no cupit is a mere mess. Imagine a painting with no canvassit is mere paint. And imagine a country with no framework, no basis, no grounding.

History has taught us that there is no such thing as a vacuum. There are barbarians at our gate who want a vacuum. Have you seen how the political class does nothing while the anarchists still hold an entire section of the city of Seattle?

What I keep hearing is that they want the people to be in charge. For better or worse, the people already are.

Our founders, having seen first-hand the perils of a ruling class, gave us an amazing political architecture that ensures that each of us is represented by several levels of people that we and our your neighbors vote into office. Think about thatevery elected official is in place because of the people.

Maybe Mr. Willsee, I still cant call him by his Christian nameis correct. Maybe we have no gate.

But maybe we have a gate that is simply under attack; not removed, but in disrepair; not missing, but in need of reinforcing.

Ancient Israel went through much of what weve gone through. It peaked with David, was divided in two after Solomon, and within about two hundred years the Assyrians invaded the northern half and deported the people.

The people were later allowed to return and to rebuild their gates. The prophet Ezekiel lived during the exile, but he was given a prophecy about rebuilding the nation, and he wrote:

On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have set watchmen; all the day and all the night they shall never be silent.

Where are our watchmen? Im not sure we can depend on the intellectuals. Im not sure we can depend on the politicians. Where should we turn?

Billy Graham died in 2018.

Maybe what we need is a new Billy Graham.

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Maybe what we need is a new Billy Graham - Valley Times-News - Valley Times-News

CLEVELAND, Ohio Do you have a question that youd like to have answered in Hey, Hoynsie? Submit it here or on Twitter at @hoynsie. You can also subscribe to Subtext here or text Hoynsie at 216-208-4346 for a two-week free trial.

Hey, Hoynsie: In light of the Indians considering a name change, heres my idea: The Cleveland Blue Sox. Hear me out.

* The name does carry some team history. In 1901, the Indians first year in the American League, they were called the Bluebirds or Blues.

* It allows freedom to develop lots of cool design possibilities without being tied down to a specific mascot. The name would allow for a logo and uniform thats edgy to classic retro or anything in between. Even with Sox, It need not have the turn of the 20th century Red Sox or old time White Sox graphics.

* To a lesser degree it would also give a bit of symmetry to the AL as it would now have Red, White and Blue Sox.

* To those who suggest theyre being copycats, who cares? Name them after a bird or animal and its sure to be a name already taken. Sheldon Borgelt.

Hey, Sheldon: I think the Indians organization will be considering a lot of things in the months to come. Can they keep the name Indians based on conversations with Native Americans, their fans, sponsors and other stakeholders in the community? Or do they feel a change is necessary?

Thats what the decision is going to be about.

Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, made his debut with the Indians on July 5, 1947.

Hey, Hoynsie: If the Indians abandon decades of history to ameliorate political correctness, I will abandon rooting for a team that has hired a myriad of ethnically different players. To me they are/were all Indians. I love them. I will never abandon the Indians. Dont abandon me. Chris Herald, San Juan Capistrano, Calif., via Youngstown.

Hey, Chris: The Indians have said they arent definitely changing the name, but they are exploring the possibility. There are signs of change all over the United States. Statues that have stood for years are being taken down because of their connection with slavery and racial injustice. The Indians are asking the community that supports them if they should be part of that change.

The Cleveland Blues shake hands after defeating the Whiskey Island Shamrocks at Lakewood Park on Sunday, July 8, 2012. The Cleveland Blues beat the Shamrocks, 12-0. Both teams are members of the Vintage Base Ball Association.The Plain Dealer

Hey, Hoynsie: How about the Cleveland Indians rebrand as the Shamrocks (aka The Cleveland Rocks). The would be a merchandising bonanza. They also could crib the logo of the semi-pro Whiskey Island Shamrocks. -- Patrick Schmitz.

Hey, Patrick: Id love to see the jerseys.

Indians manager Terry Francona.Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com

Hey, Hoynsie: What is your prediction for The Tribes final record this year? Will they make the playoffs? Brent, Amherst.

Hey, Brett: I dont do a lot of things well. Ask anyone who knows me and theyll tell you that. Making predictions on how the Indians will do in a particular season equates with me changing a flat tire at midnight on Deadmans Curve. Its a disaster.

For years people in the Indians front office celebrated when I picked them last and grieved when I picked them to do well. Im going to ask your indulgence for this unique season and stay mum on the matter.

Indians right-hander Shane Bieber.Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com

Hey, Hoynsie: Is there any chance manager Terry Francona will get creative with the starting pitching rotation given the short season? He has demonstrated in the past (2016 postseason bullpen) a willingness to innovate and adapt to his circumstances. Steve Cornelius, Rocky River.

Hey, Steve: Francona manipulated his bullpen in 2016 because a big part of his starting rotation was injured. Right now it looks like hell open this 60-game season with his choice of five healthy starters. He was asked about using a six-man rotation on Friday and said that if he did that, hed eventually cost his best starters Shane Bieber, Mike Clevinger and Carlos Carrasco starts.

In a short season, dont you want your best pitchers pitching as much as possible? Youre right, he does have a wealth of starting pitching, but as we found out last year that can turn to fools gold in a hurry.

The Indians used their second pick in the June draft to select left-hander Logan Allen from Florida International University.Mikey Berlfein, Florida Internat

Hey, Hoynsie: What will the players the Indians drafted in June be allowed to do this year if theyre not added to the 60-man player pool? Tom Waltermire, Akron.

Hey, Tom: Right now the Indians are at 58 players in their pool for the 2020 season. Theres a chance that the last two spots could be filled by players from the 2020 draft class. Auburns Tanner Burns and Florida Internationals Logan Allen, two college pitchers, could be candidates. Allen has already signed, but Burns has not.

If the drafted players dont join the player pool, Scott Barnsby, Indians director of amateur scouting, said they would set up virtual training sessions for them following the cancellation of the minor-league season. Later in the year, if the virus allows it, perhaps the Indians and other teams will be able to hold Instructional League in Florida and Arizona and invite their recent draft picks.

Cleveland Indians pitcher Emmanuel Clase works in the bullpen during spring training in Goodyear, Arizona. Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com

Hey, Hoynsie: Concerning Emmanuel Clases 80-game suspension for PED use, does that mean hell miss this 60-game season and 20 more next year? Will he still accrue service time during the suspension? Steven Ward, Chardon.

Hey, Steven: MLB and MLBPA agreed that there will be no carryover to 2021 in Clases suspension if this 60-game season is played to completion. If the virus shuts down the season, more negotiations will be needed.

During his suspension, Emmanuel will not be paid or earn service time.

Fanatics has released Cleveland Indians face masks, with sales benefitting two charities. See details and product links below.

New Indians face masks for sale: Heres where you can buy Cleveland Indians-themed face coverings for coronavirus protection, including a single mask ($14.99) and a 3-pack ($24.99). All MLB proceeds donated to charity.

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A leading Republican congressional candidate is taunting the University of Florida for its decision to ban its "Gator Bait" cheer over what the school said were racist origins of the phrase.

Judson Sapp of Green Cove Springs, Florida, a wealthy executive who runs a railroad contracting business, said he has distributed about 1,000 orange-and-blue "Gator Bait" campaign signs across the 3rd Congressional District, which includes UFs campus in Gainesville. Sapp graduated from Florida State University.

Theres a certain amount of irony that the guy who did not go to UF is the only one being extremely vocal about the fact that you should be able to say this, Sapp said in an interview Tuesday during a campaign stop in Lake Butler, north of Gainesville. Its your freedom of speech.

RELATED: Saying Goodbye To 'Gator Bait:' UF Will Drop Chant With Ties To 'Horrific Historic Racist Imagery'

Sapp, who has raised more money than any of the 16 other candidates in the congressional race, said he plans to wear a Gator Bait shirt or pin the next time he attends a Florida sporting event. He called University President Kent Fuchs decision to discontinue the cheer a mistake.

Id love for the university president to kick me out if he wants to kick out a sitting member of Congress, he said. Hes welcome to.

Other Republicans in the race also have criticized Florida's decision. Another top candidate, James St. George, a physician from Fleming Island, said on Facebook that banning the cheer was "disgusting" and called it an example of political correctness.

The fight has turned what the school said was intended as a gesture to address racism into a campaign platform pushing back against what candidates say are left-leaning politics.

The conflict illustrates how racial issues stoked by police shootings and abuses, President Donald Trump's responses and Black Lives Matter protests may play out during elections in 2020, especially in majority-white and largely rural congressional districts. Sapp, St. George and a third top Republican candidate, Kat Cammack, have closely aligned their campaigns with Trump. Democrats have not been competitive since 2010 in the district in north central Florida.

Sapps campaign made stacks of his Gator Bait! campaign signs available during his visit this week to Lake Butler, which included a buffet-style dinner where few people wore masks, despite recently surging numbers of coronavirus cases across Florida. Sapps supporters have posted photos of the signs in their yards, including one showing a fish stabbed with a knife.

In a recorded phone message to potential voters, Sapp barks, "Gator Bait!" and describes himself as a candidate who won't be bullied by liberals.

LISTEN: Justin Sapp's phone message to potential voters

"Sorry for leading with that, but thats how I feel right now," Sapp said in the message. A recording was provided to Fresh Take Florida, a news service operated by the University of Floridas College of Journalism & Communications.

St. George did not respond to six days of calls and messages sent to his personal phone, campaign email and Facebook.

Cammack has not made a position on the UF cheer a centerpiece of her campaign.

The university announced June 18 that its athletic department and band would no longer use the traditional "Gator Bait" cheer directed at opposing players. Fuchs said the phrase has "horrific historic racist imagery," and others said it was tied to accounts of using Black children to hunt alligators in swamps during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The decision and subsequent political uproar put the chairman of the university's board of trustees in an awkward position. Mori Hosseini, one of Florida's largest residential developers, contributed at least $88,200 to Republicans in federal elections, including $5,600 in December directly to Sapp's congressional campaign.

Hosseini did not respond to phone calls to the board of trustees office, his home residence, his professional office, his cell phone or messages to his professional email.

Hosseini said in a statement earlier this month that he promised to improve diversity at UF.

I commit to you today that we will press forward in diversifying our faculty, our student body and our staff, he wrote. We will make it a priority to ensure we are briefed regularly on where we are making progress and where we are not.

The history of the phrase extends to unverified reports of Blacks used to lure alligators during hunts, which was popularized on postcard images during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, said Paul Ortiz, a University of Florida history professor.

Ortiz said he used to show images of the postcards in his classes, but it was so upsetting that some students wept.

This myth was supposed to be funny. It was supposed to be hilarious, he said. And in the end, thats whats most horrifying about it.

Ortiz, a registered Democrat, said he prefers congressional candidates would focus on issues like health care, education and the economy, not preserving the "Gator Bait" cheer.

Its a cheap publicity stunt, he said. That makes Florida look really stupid.

UF spokesman Steve Orlando declined to comment.

Another Republican in the race, Gavin Rollins who in 2011 was inducted into UFs Hall of Fame and is a high school U.S. history teacher also criticized the schools ban of the cheer. In a Facebook post, he said he was the only UF alumnus in the Republican primary and promised to continue to use the Gator Bait cheer at games.

In an interview, Rollins acknowledged the historical racism attached to the phrase but said he has not heard anyone who was offended by the chant, which was popularized by former Black UF football player Lawrence Wright.

All it does is create controversy unnecessarily and focuses the effort on something that isnt a problem, he said. It avoids the discussions on real problems that actually deserve solutions.

Rollins, a Clay County commissioner, trails four opponents in campaign contributions but was endorsed by the son of incumbent Rep. Ted Yoho.

This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at lruiz@freshtakeflorida.com

Original post:

In Race For Congress, Florida's 'Gator Bait' Cheer And Its Links To Racism Become An Issue - WUSF News

The mayor of Duluth was recently quoted by local and national news outlets saying that she wanted to eliminate chief from job titles like chief of police, fire chief, chief financial officer, etc. She said she wanted to do so because chief might be not is offensive to Native Americans and a racial epithet (Council tables title change, June 23).

The mayor should have first resorted to a dictionary. The word chief entered the Middle English lexicon around 1250-1300 C.E., from the Old French word chef, which was a vulgarization of the Latin word caput, for head. The word chief was in widespread usage before any European even knew of the New World. So to eliminate this word from a title because it is potentially offensive to a Native Americans would be absurd.

The Ojibwe-English dictionary online gives several words for "chief." The mayor might have a point if a city employee's title were "Fire Niigaanizim" or "Ogimaa Financial Officer." Since those are not the titles being used, her attempt to change time-honored, inoffensive titles was inane. It was political correctness run askew.

Perhaps the mayor should be more concerned about preventing macro-aggressions like crimes, pollution, or something else that actually harms the residents of Duluth.

Lee Haskell

Coronado, California

The writer is a former resident of Minnesota.

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Reader's View: Changing time-honored, inoffensive titles absurd - Duluth News Tribune

Stop hate for profit goes a campaign slogan that has rattled Facebook and made it change its policy on content censorship. In the wake of the powerful, broad-based, anti-racism protests in the US, following the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, in an act of police brutality in Minneapolis, many powerful companies and brands have come under pressure to demonstrate that they, too, stand with the protesters and not with the racist status quo.

Stop hate for profit is an emotive slogan and it is difficult to defy its emotive power without having credible, independent anti-racism credentials of ones own. So, brands like Coca-Cola, Honda, Verizon, Levis, Microsoft and North Face have decided to stop advertising on Facebook for a month.

At one level, Facebook pays the price for not having to adhere to the norms of respect for veracity and social responsibility that traditional media follow. Not being responsible for what others publish on their platform had been deemed a social media prerogative till organising mass murder of the Rohingya in Myanmar through WhatsApp messages, was proved an irrefutable fact.

At another level, Facebook is prey to zealous political correctness, which wants it to deploy its ability to remove posts regardless of whether this curtails freedom of speech. It now seeks government regulation to draw the line that separates responsible publishing from censorship.

The rush of powerful companies to fall in line with the campaign shows the power of popular culture. Commerce and advertising shaped mass culture, it was believed. But when powerful passions are unleashed by ideology that grips the public imagination, whether emancipatory or otherwise, commerce turns fellow traveller. Moulding public culture yields tremendous power.

This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Economic Times.

Read the original here:

Control the culture, call the tune - Economic Times

Stanley Fish tells us that the 1st Amendment is out of date and predicates that on an assertion that it was formulated when opportunities for speech were scarce [Speech Is Too Free for Stanley Fish, June 28].

Fish ignores that the Founders as we should recognize in todays world, scarce or broad opportunities notwithstanding created the speech clause because they knew that if it wasnt unrestricted, someone would be deciding what speech was allowable.

And who would decide that? Mr. Fish? Despite his illustrious credentials, allowing him and his ilk to control speech is an invitation to rule by a small cadre of elites. Exactly the opposite of an inclusive democracy.

Kip DellingerSanta Monica

In her column discussing comedic use of blackface [Kimmel Apology Is Not Enough, June 26], Mary McNamara makes the somewhat patronizing argument that Intent is also tricky and way too difficult to parse in a mass-audience film or television show.

Does McNamara really believe that audiences are so universally unsophisticated that no one can possibly distinguish between those occasions in which blackface has been used to satirize, denigrate and skewer racists versus those in which it was merely a demeaning stereotype?

Comedy is about taking ideas and turning them on their head, often to powerful, truth-telling effect. To imply that an idea that might be tricky should never be expressed is troubling where art is concerned.

Linda WilliamsonGranada Hills

::

Im glad Kimmel has apologized for the blackface segments on The Man Show albeit belatedly. I will not hold my breath, however, for him to address the objectification of women that was a regular part of that show.

Does Girls on Trampolines sound familiar?

Laura OwenPacific Palisades

::

McNamaras column was one of the better explorations of blackface and liberal comedy.

As a fan of these comedians, and someone who, like Kimmel, has struggled to get my head around the problem, I really appreciated her perspectives and especially her suggestion that honest conversation is more important than defensive apologies.

I wish that everyone who has ever performed in, or just laughed at, blackface comedy could read this article.

Chris GoldsmithCardiff-by-the-Sea

::

I used to be a fan of Kimmel until his show became a humorous version of MSNBC news.

But, having said that, I dont feel that Kimmel should have to apologize for his actions in his past. Bad taste is part of being a comedian.

The liberals have made little or no noise about the governor of Virginia or the prime minister of Canada doing blackface but are coming down hard on Kimmel?

Mark WalkerYorba Linda

::

I cant believe that anyone was doing blackface ever.

I think that when I was a Cub Scout, we did a minstrel show and I did it. It was wrong then, and it is wrong afterward.

I remember when I was pretty young watching The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson (or a clip from it since it came out long before I was born).

I remember feeling repulsed by the fact that a white man was playing a black man and had used blackface to do it.

McNamara is calling out Kimmel. Good for her.

John OppenheimLong Beach

::

Celebrities should use their platforms to educate, enlighten and inform those who are ignorant to the many injustices in our world. If they dont, they are just as much a part of the problem as the solution.

This could have been a real teaching moment for both Kimmel and his many followers.

Sherry DavisPlaya Vista

::

George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Matthias Baldwin, Ulysses S. Grant, Mahatma Gandhi, Theodore Roosevelt, St. Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key have all been the targets of BLM defacing or toppling. They arent around anymore to say Im sorry.

But Jimmy Kimmel, who so proudly and repeatedly blacked up for a television show, simply apologized.

All is forgotten. I dont see any protesters in front of ABC.

Double standard? I definitely see one.

Candy CarstensenLos Angeles

Law & Order insider POV

Regarding: Meredith Blakes analysis A False Sense of Law & Order [June 14]: I was the original non-writing show runner of Law & Order the first three seasons, which means my job was to oversee all aspects of the show from casting to the crew. The conceit of Law & Order was that the episodes would be divided into two halves. The regular characters were different and only connected by the case.

Dick Wolf was not thinking about the politics of Richard Nixon when he named the show, only to communicate that conceit. In fact, what made the show different, innovative and original was its documentary style and most importantly the subject matter of many of the episodes. They dealt with AIDS, homophobia, abortion, child abuse, rape, race, religion and, yes, bad cops.

If Dick could be accused of anything political it was his aversion to what we call political correctness. He resisted pressure from the network to make changes to the social or Black content even when there were threats by the sponsors to pull out.

At the time, to my knowledge, we employed more actors of color than any dramatic series on the air. We paid special attention to make sure people of color were judges, lawyers, doctors, experts, etc. We featured as guest stars many who were not yet household names: Samuel L. Jackson, S. Epatha Merkerson, Roscoe Lee Browne, Wendell Pierce, Mary Alice and Joe Morton.

Characters of color were not disproportionately portrayed in a negative light. Dick did not believe in reinforcing negative stereotypes. The writing was never politicized and often the main characters would have differing points of view.

In the time I spent with Dick he never asked me to do anything that would compromise the values of the show. The popularity of the show and its appeal to a wide sector of society can be attributed to its 20-year run. Dick Wolf respected his audience and never talked down to them.

Joseph SternHollywood

Movie hits all the right notes

Regarding Jen Yamatos review of the movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga [Off-Key Eurovision Is Singing the Wrong Tune, June 26]: The new Netflix film with Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams is precisely what we need in these troubling times. For two hours I felt I was resting in an oasis of laughter, music and romance. A great relief in todays times.

We are becoming more isolated and pessimistic, as we survive a constant bombardment of bad news, partisan bickering and an uncivil national discourse.

Yamato should make sure she doesnt lose her sense of humor. We need more movies like Eurovision.

Luca BentivoglioSanta Monica

View original post here:

Readers on the 1st amendment, blackface and 'Law & Order' - Los Angeles Times

When the Hulu miniseries Little Fires Everywhere premiered in March, it became the streaming services most-watched drama ever in its first 60 days online. Based on Celeste Ngs 2017 novel, the story set in a Cleveland suburb in the late 1990s pits Reese Witherspoons entitled perfectionist Elena, a white mother of four and a journalist, against Kerry Washingtons Mia, a single black mother and avant-garde artist with a teen daughter who struggles to make ends meet. Their paths cross and Mia ends up renting an apartment owned by Elena and also serving as her housekeeper while alas a waitress.

What happens throughout the eight episodes is a microcosm of socioeconomic inequality, hurtful assumptions, white liberal guilt, awkward political correctness and well-earned black distrust in the system as both familys lives become intertwined, for good but also for bad. As we learn more about each mother and the background that formed their fates, both women have their flaws but also earn our sympathies.

SEEMeet the red-hot cast of Little Fires Everywhere

Now jump forward to where we are now after witnessing videos of numerous African-Americans who have died at the hands of white violence from random shooters to abuse by the police who are tasked to serve and protect all citizens in our country. Suddenly, Little Fires Everywhere has become more relevant than ever now that Black Lives Matter has become a movement in our city streets around the country.

Consider this damning line delivered by Mia to Elena, You didnt make good choices. You had good choices! Wearing a face mask may be enough for white people to be protected from COVID-19. But more people of color are dying from the disease because they lack affordable health care options or are too poor to not work and shelter in place. However, one of the optimistic bright spots of the protests is that people of all backgrounds and ethnicities are standing up for justice for all.

SEELiz Tigelaar Interview: Little Fires Everywhere showrunner

As for the movement to take down statues that honor the Confederancy and erasing the names of its leaders from schools and military bases, consider how this stinging rebuke said by Mia to Elena with its echoes of Gone With the Wind resonates right now: You made this about race the day you stood on the street and begged me to be your maid. White women always be friends with their maid. I was not your maid, Elena. And I was nver your friend. The thing is, the setting isnt the South. Its white-picket-fence suburbia in Ohio.

Right now, Little Fires Everywhere ranks in fifth place on Gold Derbys combined prediction odds at 10/1 and rising. However, I believe that the show deserves far more support given Witherspoon and Washington give distinctive, honest and sometimes downright uncomfortable performances as their characters clash. That they had the insight to bring this project to light as executive producers should be applauded. As Vogue noted, The questions it brings up about motherhood, race, identity and power are real and meaningful.

PREDICT the 2020 Emmy nominees now; change through July 28

Be sure tomake your Emmy predictions today so that Hollywood insiders can see how their TV shows and performers are faring in our odds. You can keep changing your predictions as often as you like until just before the nominees are announced on July 28. And join in the fun debate over the 2020 Emmys taking place right now with Hollywood insiders in our television forums. Read more Gold Derbyentertainment news.

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Little Fires Everywhere is more relevant than ever as a portrait of white privilege and that black lives matter - Gold Derby