Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
Something new for SITD \u2013 a movie review.<\/p>\n
I almost skipped \u201cThe Greatest Showman\u201d because the reviews were bad.\u00a0 Critics hated it.\u00a0 P.T. Barnum wasn\u2019t cool.\u00a0 The film focused on the wrong things.\u00a0 They wanted it to be about racism, not circuses.\u00a0 But I\u2019m tired of being scolded for sins I didn\u2019t commit and I\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad I watched it.\u00a0 I recommend you watch it, too.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know much about Barnum\u2019s personal beliefs and I really don\u2019t care.\u00a0 Every genius, every general, every giant had warts but that\u2019s not why we remember them.\u00a0 And sure, the film shows historical social disapproval of inter-racial dating, but that\u2019s nothing new.\u00a0 The plot device is \u201cstar-crossed lovers\u201d and it\u2019s as old as Pyramus and Thisbe, as classic as Romeo and Juliet, as popular as Showboat or West Side Story.\u00a0 Get over yourselves, people, it\u2019s just a movie and more importantly, it\u2019s a lot of fun.\u00a0 I particularly liked the \u201cCome Alive\u201d scene and the finale.\u00a0 They show the circus that I remember when I was a kid and the magic came to town.<\/p>\n
We could use a lot more of that in America, today.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I keep wondering if, much less when, the social pendulum is going to swing back the other way.<\/p>\n
It just keeps swinging out toward “absurd”.<\/p>\n
Actually, that’d be a fun blog project someday; trace the rise and fall of ideological intolerance over time.\u00a0 Toxic Metastatic PC isn’t the first bout of it our culture has had, although it’s a doozy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Something new for SITD \u2013 a movie review. I almost skipped \u201cThe Greatest Showman\u201d because the reviews were bad.\u00a0 Critics hated it.\u00a0 P.T. Barnum wasn\u2019t cool.\u00a0 The film focused on the wrong things.\u00a0 They wanted it to be about racism, not circuses.\u00a0 But I\u2019m tired of being scolded for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67522,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67521\/revisions\/67522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}