That’s Entertainment

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Something new for SITD – a movie review.

I almost skipped “The Greatest Showman” because the reviews were bad.  Critics hated it.  P.T. Barnum wasn’t cool.  The film focused on the wrong things.  They wanted it to be about racism, not circuses.  But I’m tired of being scolded for sins I didn’t commit and I’ve always enjoyed the circus so when I happened to be on an airplane where the film was available to watch on the seat-back screen, I dove right in.  I’m glad I watched it.  I recommend you watch it, too.

I don’t know much about Barnum’s personal beliefs and I really don’t care.  Every genius, every general, every giant had warts but that’s not why we remember them.  And sure, the film shows historical social disapproval of inter-racial dating, but that’s nothing new.  The plot device is “star-crossed lovers” and it’s as old as Pyramus and Thisbe, as classic as Romeo and Juliet, as popular as Showboat or West Side Story.  Get over yourselves, people, it’s just a movie and more importantly, it’s a lot of fun.  I particularly liked the “Come Alive” scene and the finale.  They show the circus that I remember when I was a kid and the magic came to town.

We could use a lot more of that in America, today.

Joe Doakes

I keep wondering if, much less when, the social pendulum is going to swing back the other way.

It just keeps swinging out toward “absurd”.

Actually, that’d be a fun blog project someday; trace the rise and fall of ideological intolerance over time.  Toxic Metastatic PC isn’t the first bout of it our culture has had, although it’s a doozy.

 

4 thoughts on “That’s Entertainment

  1. Here is scary thought – the pendulum HAS swung back. All the way.

    In the Victorian era, the pendulum swung toward social constraint. There was all kinds of things you couldn’t do, say and think in polite society. One might say it reached its peak with the Prohibition. . From then on, until the millennium, the bob swung.n toward social liberty and libertine behavior.

    Think Hugh Hefner, Lenny Bruce, Supreme Court rulings and Hollywood.

    Now the pendulum is swinging back hard. Not in the direction most of us are familiar with – but toward the scolding fundamentalism of #METOO and social justice warriors – in other words, Victorian-style social constraint. Think plastic straws, campus speech, Samantha Bee.

    What has happening to millennial sensibilities is nothing less than a full-blown, evangelical born-again (woke) religious revival and like their hard-core fanatical puritan brethren of 100 years ago, they are going to tell you how to live.

    The mistake with the pendulum analogy is believing that the pendulum swings on the same axis, it doesn’t because history moves its path.

  2. In the past social rules about sex have had the goal of establishing and controlling paternity. A father (or the fathers family) was responsible for supporting his children & their mother.
    For the first time in history that is not an issue.
    Also, for the first time in history, you have men and women working alongside one another. Mixed sex work places are a new phenomenon.
    This is not a pendulum swinging back. It is an effort to manage relations between the sexes in a new age where abortion and birth control are used to control reproduction, and where men and women are expected to spend significant time together without developing a sexual relationship.

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