Yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt

This afternoon I attended a Metropolitan Opera simulcast into a local movie theater. The opera is a recent one, Champion by Terrence Blanchard. He is the first black composer to have his operas performed at the Met. This is his second opera there, the first being Fire Shut Up in My Bones about 18 months ago. Champion is about black boxer Emile Griffith whose prime career was about 1960-1965. I am definitely not a fan of boxing, so there must have been something else to draw me. And there was – Griffith was gay. The story centers around a fight with Benny Paret in Madison Square Garden in 1960. Before the fight Paret uses some nasty homophobic slurs against Griffith. And in the fight Griffith pummels Paret, which puts him in a coma, from which he later dies. That key scene – in a boxing ring on stage – is the end of Act 1. The frame for the story is Griffith as an old man, now with dementia because of his boxing career. Even so, he has deep regrets for what he did. We see the younger Griffith arrive in New York from the Virgin Islands. He wants to get a job making hats, but the shop manager sees his physique and that taps into his own dreams of managing a prizefighter. We also see Griffith visit an LGBTQ bar (though that term wasn’t in use at the time) before his big match. Between the taunts and the fight Griffith sings what makes a man a man? Is it inside or outside? How does love fit into it? Act 2 was what happened after that bout. There was further success in the ring, an attempt to marry though they both sing about the loneliness, and the decline and end of his career. Then there is an attempt to find peace because he feels haunted by the dead man. Close to the end the old Griffith sings “I killed a man and the world forgave me, but yet I loved a man and the world wants to kill me.” The music is described as an opera in jazz. There are jazz elements and there are also long sections that sound like modern orchestral writing. I enjoyed all of it – the music, the singing, the story, the acting, and the sets and costumes. I had written about David Gianforte, child of Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, who is nonbinary and lobbied their father to veto the anti-trans bills being passed by the state’s legislature. Charles Jay of Daily Kos, sometimes quoting a story in the Montana Free Press tells a more complete story of what happened between father and child. Here’s a quote from the MFP:

“It’s bizarre to me to read the press release that my father put out,” David said. “He talks about compassion toward children, the youth of Montana, while simultaneously taking away health care from the youth in Montana. It’s basically a contradiction in my mind.”

And Jay ends with this:

But David Gianforte told the Free Press that he didn’t expect his conversation with his father to change the outcome of any of the anti-LGBTQ bills. “He is concerned about his career … And he’s aware that being able to stay in the position of governor is dependent on him staying in favor of the Republican Party,” David said. “And I believe that that affects his decisions on some of these bills.” But David said people need to speak candidly and openly in order to move forward, in their own families or in the public arena. “I feel like I have a voice and I can be heard. And I feel, not only in communicating with my father, that’s not necessarily the main point, but also just showing support for the transgender community in Montana,” David said. “I think that could be meaningful, especially at this time.”

Michael Harriot saw the question “What’s wrong with a classical education?” The person posing is was trying to denigrate black people and implying getting a classical education was far superior to what black people were getting. But Harriot took the question seriously. He was homeschooled and from his mother knew what the phrase meant – learning about Socrates, Plato, and the rest, also learning Greek and Latin which are the roots of about 60% of English. Students learn critical reasoning and how to debate. So what’s wrong with that? Two things wrong. First, it declares what “smart” is. A “smart” person would know what this, this, and this is. Harriot uses the counter example of a cousin who could play anything by ear and do it on at least three instruments. But he couldn’t read music. Gatekeepers to some music groups declared he wasn’t smart enough to join.

Classical Education, that's how. It doesn't measure a student's ability to learn or teach them TO LEARN. It teaches students to learn LIKE WHITE PEOPLE LEARN who have already been deemed smart because they know white things.

Second, those clasicists didn’t know things. They thought the sun revolved around the earth. So why do we base our education on what people believed two thousand years ago? That makes it hard to progress as a society.

Unless, of course, progress is not your goal. If your goal is to ensure that white people are smart, then Classical Education works great. Smart white people write three-act plays like the Greeks and speak Latin at dinner parties and play baroque music on violins. People without a classic education make musical instruments out of turntables because they can't read a treble clef. Without a Classic education, you might start music that evokes MORE EMOTION than the Beethoven with words that Shakespeare didn't and engineer an entirely different form of recording. Or you might invent a cotton gin or a light bulb or a whole genre that WHITE PEOPLE CAN'T DO.

Strange that Sheri Few, a lady now pushing hard to institute a classical education, didn’t get a classical education and has never worked as an educator. She must be doing it for a reason... I’m linking to another pundit roundup, this time not for the pundits, but for the comments. Both of the comments of interest are by Captain Frogbert. In the first comment he quoted Awful Falafal Waffles of Kos:

In the minds of conservatives there are: Two races: White and political Two genders: Male and political Two sexualities: Straight and political Two religions: Christian and political

Frogbert added:

[DeSantis,] like nearly all conservatives, believes the entire world should always be a flattering reflection of himself. Anything that does not flatter his bloated ego is wrong, evil, and “political.” Whatever he says and wants can’t be political because it’s simply the world as it should be and MUST be in order that he doesn’t feel lessened by anyone failing to constantly affirm he is the role model for all humanity.

In the second comment Frogbert quoted Tom Nichols of The Atlantic:

It is a movement composed of people who are economically comfortable and middle-class, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt, screwed over, betrayed—and they are determined to get revenge.

Frogbert added:

It’s an entire culture of people who believe they are entitled to far more than they have, and who believe the only reason they are not rock stars/sports legends/sex gods/billionaires/living gods is that everything they are entitled to has been illegally handed to the people they hate (which is everyone not themselves). It’s a culture of entitlement, grievance, and violence. And the greatest threat this nation and world has ever faced.

TealBomb of Kos, in a post from ten days ago, started with:

I planned to start this post with this statistic from the Gun Violence Archive, "As of April 18, at least 5,358 Americans have died from gun violence in 2023, and another 7,128 have died by suicide." But that statistic is already out of date. The number actually increased in the time it took me to write this post. And by the time you read this, the country's gun-related death toll will be even higher. Enough is enough.

And since you’re reading it several days later, yes, the numbers have gone up. She then has a couple things that have improved gun safety, and a few that made the situation worse. She then lists things that Congress can do but aren’t. Mark Sumner of Kos looked at the long list of recent shootings in which small infractions prompted people to fire. He includes a list of the incidents. As part of that he looked at the phrase “An armed society is a polite society.” He wrote:

But even if it were a fictional quote taken completely out of context, the saying turns out to be true, in a way. In a sufficiently armed society, any small transgression is met with bullets. America is sufficiently armed. ... In an armed society, the perceived insult of being asked not to cuss at a child is a shooting offense. Opening someone’s car door is a shooting offense. Pulling into a driveway where the owner was tired of people using their little stretch of blacktop to turn around is a shooting offense. Asking someone to slow down is a shooting offense. Anything that might have ended with an exchange of fists, or just hot words, a raised finger behind a window, or even with one person just mumbling under their breath is a shooting offense. That’s the point of the saying. In an armed society, you don’t dare offend anyone, at any time, about anything. Because everything, no matter how trivial, is a shooting offense. America … is an armed society. We’ve reached that dystopia where a child fetching a basketball, or a cheerleader touching the wrong car on her way back from practice, or a kid stepping onto the wrong porch doesn’t get words or glares. It gets bullets. ... These are such tiny, ordinary, everyday events that they should be forgotten in a moment. That guy next door? Sorry, I don’t remember. What was his name again? Except they turn into trauma, or injury, that can last a lifetime. Or they cut that lifetime hugely short. ... All those scenes you see on TV and movies where multiple people point at each other and no one shoots? Those. Are. Bulls---. When two people have guns, they both shoot. Or at least one of them does. Standoffs make for good tension on screen, but people shoot and keep shooting in real life. If the second person doesn’t shoot, it’s because the first shot saw to that. ... The only way to stop the smallest action from bringing the threat of death, is to stop being an armed society. There are plenty of democracies around the planet which are not. In fact, every other democracy on the planet is not. Somehow they maintain their freedoms even when they can’t shoot someone for being on their porch, touching their car, etc.

And those stand your ground laws, they are written so that a prosecutor has to prove the shooter was not afraid. But fear is why they have a gun in the first place. Dave Grandlund tweeted a cartoon of what could get you killed. He shows tombstones with, “Turning in a driveway.” “Went to wrong address.” “Stray ball.” “Music too loud.” And more. AnonOpsUnited tweeted a cartoon of a character saying, “Remember kids, Guns don’t kill you. The GOP does.” Along with that the tweet includes nine politicians that accept ...

NRA's Blood Money $104,456 Rand Paul $176,274 Ted Cruz $226,007 Chuck Grassley $1,267,139 Mitch McConnell $1,269,486 Ron Johnson $1,306,130 Marsha Blackburn $1,391,548 Josh Hawley $3,303,355 Marco Rubio $13,647,676 Mitt Romney Republicans are killing children

I wrote several days ago that I now understand that Republicans – anyone who blocks gun reform – are doing it for more than the big bundle of cash they are getting from the NRA. They want those deaths. They want the mayhem. They want the trauma. This article, these cartoons, and others I read recently reminded me of one more thing their inaction and obstruction is doing. They are preparing us for mass death.