With cancel culture shredding our culture, that expression might take on a whole new meaning. Sing some of the songs from this tale of U.S. sailors fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, and you might find your reputation hanging from the nearest oak tree.
Let’s start with the score’s most egregious offense in today’s politically poisoned climate: its treatment of women. Back in 1949, when the musical first appeared, euphemisms for women like “dolls,” “dames,” and “broads” were as common as saddle shoes and bouffant hairdos. Oscar Hammerstein, lyricist for South Pacific, opens the song “Honey Bun” with these words:
My doll is as dainty as a sparrow,
Her figure is something to applaud,
Where she’s narrow, she’s narrow as an arrow,
And she’s broad where a broad should be broad.
When sung, those “broads” come as “baaaa-rod. Sing it that way today, and the misandrists will be after you with stilettos—and I don’t mean high heels.
“There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame” contains lines like these...
- The critical theorists who dominate so many of the humanities departments in our universities are behind the cancel culture movement, teaching students a new Trinity:
- recognition of oppression,
- protest against that oppression, and
- liberation.
Which means wiping out our past.
This erasure of culture is not unique to the United States. It has already occurred in Communist China and in other Communist states and is well underway in Western Europe. Customs, traditions, the arts, history itself: all are under steady assault. As in those places, radicals and their weak-kneed accomplices are putting the butcher’s blade to our American culture and history.
What will be the outcome if we allow this butchery?
In “The crusade to erase history,” columnist Christine Flowers cites this passage from George Orwell’s 1984:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
Flowers then writes, “I will not say the appropriate things. I will not apologize for a guilt I do not bear. I will not engage in pithy, socially woke slogans. I will not grovel, bend the knee or worry that my words might get me ostracized, unemployed or even killed.”
Her words should serve as banners and bugles to the rest of us.
As for me at this moment, it’s time to clean the house and listen to South Pacific.
Full blast."...Read all!!
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