Counterfeit

How do you fight a piece of popular culture that completely mangles history?

You put out some popular culture of your own

Historians fighting back against the pop revisionism of Hamilton with a musical of their own.

Reed’s “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” is an uncompromising take-down of “Hamilton,” reminding viewers of the Founding Father’s complicity in slavery and his war on Native Americans.
“My goal is that this to be a counter-narrative to the text that has been distributed to thousands of students throughout the country,” said Reed, who teaches at the California College of the Arts and the University of California at Berkeley and whose latest novel is “Conjugating Hindi.”
Reed, whose play had a recent reading in New York and who is raising money for a four-week production in May, is part of a wave of “Hamilton” skeptics — often solitary voices of dissent amid a wall of fawning attention — who have written journal articles, newspaper op-eds and a 2018 collection of essays, “Historians on Hamilton.”
Miranda’s glowing portrayal of a Hamilton who celebrates open borders — “Immigrants, we get the job done!” — and who denounces slavery has incensed everyone from professors at Harvard to the University of Houston to Rutgers.
They argue that Miranda got Hamilton all wrong — the Founding Father wasn’t progressive at all, his actual role as a slave owner has been whitewashed and the pro-immigrant figure onstage hides the fact that he was, in fact, an anti-immigration elitist.
“It’s a fictional rewrite of Hamilton. You can’t pick the history facts that you want,” said Nancy Isenberg , a professor of American history at Louisiana State University who has written a biography of Aaron Burr and is the author of “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.”

It all fits into my plan to do a musical on the life and legacy of Calvin Coolidge.

6 thoughts on “Counterfeit

  1. Ishmael Reed, the Reed of this article, is a long-time racism grifter – I had to read one of his books for a college English class in 1974. I skimmed this article yesterday and inferred that the problem with the play Hamilton is that the revisionism and mangling of history is just not the correct kind. Had Hamilton been depicted as a racist Trump with slaves, there would’ve been No Problem.

    This article is still more of the left eating its own. What I really want to see is if/when Hamilton’s playwright apologizes for his impurity.

  2. There is a company in California that has hired coders and graphic artists to comb over old movies and remove non-pc artifacts: racist language and cigarette smoking. The idea is that the right to stream these old-fashioned movies will then be sold to outfits that specialize in children’s entertainment.
    Along the way, the viewers will learn a false history.
    No one, back in the 1930s and 1940s, thought that cigarette smoking and casual racism would ever be controversial.

  3. I liken this to the deliberate ignorance leftists treat Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger with.

    They don’t like the truth…

    “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan…I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses…I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak…In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.” (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)

    MP, is the company called “Ministry of Truth LLC.”?

  4. From the story:

    “For Reed and Isenberg, the omissions and distortions in “Hamilton” are part of a larger problem with the way the Founding Fathers are portrayed in mainstream history, often as flawless, enlightened geniuses. It even has a name: “Founders Chic.”

    The Founders were enlightened geniuses in every sense. They were also men of their times. I usually never miss the opportunity, in discussions about slavery, to remind everyone that the very first legally recognized slave in America was owned by a Negro, Anthony Johnson. Johnson also held many white (Irish) indentured servants.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/horrible-fate-john-casor-180962352/

    Like to see a musical about that.

  5. If I invented a cure for cancer, but in my autobiography confessed that I dislike hairless cats, would the Left be so outraged at my intolerance and lack of commitment to diversity that they’d refuse to take the cure? I suspect not – nobody cares about cats.

    What if I confessed to disliking hip hop music? People who listen to hip hop? People who make hip hop? That industry is dominated by Black musicians. Would my racism be enough for them to boycott the cure? Again, I suspect not. I suspect they’d pressure my employer to fire me as punishment for holding un-good opinions, even as they demand the government invalidate my patent so it can hand out the cure to everyone, for free. And my name would be erased from every history book. “Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.”

    So Reed doesn’t think the Founders deserve praise for inventing an entirely new form of government that has been spectacularly successful for ordinary citizens? Fine, refuse to live under it. Move to Canada or Honduras or Vietnam. Have nothing to do with America or Americans. Just don’t insist on receiving the benefits while scorning the men who gave them to you.

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