It's Hard To Cancel Culture When It's The Real Thing

 In the current war by various aggrieved populations against white, Eurocentric culture, one sees in particular a strong desire to "cancel" (as the prevailing idiom goes) anything and everything associated with white males. But it is not so easily done when a particular artifact is, in effect, the real thing.

A case in point is a recent New York Times story entitled "A 'Messiah' for the Multitudes, Freed from History's Bonds." Therein, the Times reports on how a Canadian entity named the Grain Theater in cooperation with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has put together a version of "Messiah" aimed at celebrating the country's multicultural aspects and in some cases, grievances.

But hey, wait a minute. The music is still that written about 280 years ago by a white male, George Friedrich Handel, a German by birth but English by choice and eventually a British citizen. And for good reason: no one has since ever been able to do anything like it.

"Handel understands effect better than any of us -- when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt." That's an English translation of something Mozart said in German. And Handel's genius in that respect is ever-present in 'Messiah,' written as a secular oratorio despite the fact that it tells the story of Christ.

So the Canadian version referenced above features, among other things, a Muslim woman in a head scarf singing "She (as opposed to 'he' [Jesus]) was despised" to reflect her own family situation. And so forth and so on.

Handel, by the way did not write the words to "Messiah."  Rather, they were assembled from the Bible and the Book of Common prayer by a wealthy, but largely forgotten Englishman named Charles Jennens. So changing them does not in anyway strike a blow at the composer. In this case, it doesn't even strike much of a blow at Jennens. Rather, the soprano mentioned above, Rihab Chaieb, alters some Biblical words she doesn't happen to think are important in order to co-opt Handel's achievement for her own purposes.

"My reinterpretation of the 'Messiah' is about feeling despised and rejected as a first-generation immigrant in Montreal." she told the Times. "But by taking Jesus out of the equation and making it more personal, I have reclaimed the 'Messiah' as my own." In other words, "it's all about me" which is pretty much the mantra of the present.

I suppose she could have written or commissioned new, more politically correct or "woke" music, based on the racial, cultural or sexual status of the composer,  for her sentiments rather than relying on some old white male melody, but one suspects the impact would not be quite the same.

Associative Thinking

“I believe that we are all perpetrators and victims of one of the most evil and insidious social constructs in Western history: white male supremacy.” So said Ijeoma Oluo in her latest book "Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America."

I thought about that viewpoint today as I read an op-ed feature in the Dec. 12, 2020, New York Times entitled "These Girls are Being Cut and Married in Droves."

It's about underage girls having their genitals mutilated and being forced into marriage. While the account centers on a region in Northern Kenya and argues that such practices have greatly increased as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the author says similar practices exist elsewhere.

Ms Oluo, a Nigerian-American, was born in Texas and now lives here in Seattle. In 2018, she published a book entitled "So You Want to Talk About Race," which became a best seller.

Reed College and the Ongoing Culture Wars

Recently, I seem to be writing more about the fact that this is a country of two different narratives, and about the associated culture wars, than about fiction.

In brief, one narrative has it that as diversity increases, in large part due to continuing, significant, non-white immigration, the country is going to change significantly, and for the better as more voices are heard and new populations acquire power, money and command of culture.

The other narrative is that America is great because it is, in effect, the culmination of European culture that traces its values and intellectual notions to ancient Greece and Rome. Certain numbers of non-white, non-Europeans are welcome, but they should accept and adapt to the long-standing white culture and political power.

The U.S.: A Nation of Competing Narratives?

Instead of talking about fiction, here's a brief word about society and politics.

Like a lot of people I have been puzzling over how we got where we are and in the course of doing so, I have been reading a lot more conservative commentary than I used to.

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is NOT "Us"

Those old enough to remember the cartoon strip "Pogo" (my personal all-time favorite) know that the headline of this post is a paraphrase of one of Walt Kelly's most famous lines and it came to mind most recently when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's piece "Your Writing Tools Aren't Mine" in the April 30, 2017, New York Times Sunday Book Review section.

White Male Culture: Dominant, But Soon To Be Exotic

When long-time New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton recently died, The New York Times obituary quoted Hamilton's friend, Lewis H. Lapham, as saying the following:

“You were never in doubt about who the cartoonist was. He had a particular beat, as it were — the preppy world, the world of Ralph Lauren, the Protestant WASP establishment that was on their way out, holding on to their diminishing privileges.”