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“If you wish to succeed as a jester, you’ll need
To consider each person’s auricular:
What is all right for B would quite scandalize C
(For C is so very particular);
And D may be dull, and E’s very thick skull
Is as empty of brains as a ladle;
While F is F sharp, and will cry with a carp,
That he’s known your best joke from his cradle!”

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(Or ought I to have called this post: “So please you, Sir, we much regret/If we have failed in etiquette“?).

In any event, to briefly sum the case, the facts are these: on January 28th, James Taranto, writing in the WSJ, quoted a letter from a person named Rory Page, complaining about a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which read in part:

“I must call you on something that was inserted into the play which I am almost positive was not in the original book… The comments made in such a cavalier and oh-so-humorous way were uncalled for. Now, I realize you play to a mostly liberal audience in Missoula and so, I am sure, felt comfortable in your calling for the beheading of Sarah Palin. I am painfully aware that most in the audience tittered with laughter and clapped because ‘no one would miss her’ but there were some in your audience who took great offense to this “uncivil tone” about another human being.”

The news of this performance has drawn the ire of the website Conservatives4Palin. They cite this issue as an example of “left-wing” violent rhetoric against Mrs. Palin, which would indicate hypocrisy among left-wingers who have complained about Mrs. Palin’s use of violent rhetoric.

These are the known facts at present. From here, I shall speculate a bit.

I did not attend the performance in question. Indeed, I’d never heard of the people who performed it  until reading of this incident. Also, I have not been able to find a transcription of the lyric in question. However, based on Page’s quoting the line “no one would miss her”, I suspect it was in Ko-Ko’s famous “little list” song.

If that is in fact the case, the grounds for outrage are decidedly shaky. For it’s a tradition that dates back to Gilbert himself to alter the lyrics in that song. According to Ian Bradley’s The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, Gilbert substituted “the critic dramatist”, “the scorching motorist” and others. Likewise, it is also a tradition to reference various politicians in the last verse–since none are alluded to by name, the performer may mimic their mannerisms to convey who “would not be missed”.

Cheer up, though, Conservatives! On page 574, Ian Bradley’s book also quotes these lyrics that Gilbert added in 1908, in which he beats Ayn Rand to the punch by about a half-century:

“All those who hold that publicans it’s virtuous to fleece, 
And impose a heavy war tax in these piping times of peace 
And preach the code that moralists like Robin Hood held true,
That to benefit the pauper you must rob the well-to-do,
That peculiar variety of sham philanthropist,
   I don’t think he’d be missed–I’m sure he’d not be missed!”

UPDATE: While researching this further, I came across a website called “Ethics Alarms”, which contains much more information and commentary about this matter, including the offending lyric. It’s an excellent site, and makes many of the same points I made above, only better written.

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I know a lot of people complain about it, calling it things like “irrelevant” and “boring”, but I happen to enjoy watching it. Sure, some say it’s a waste of time. Well, no more so than watching any other sporting event.

Anyway, I’ll probably watch a bit of it today, if for no other reason than as an act of defiance to the fans who are always complaining about its very existence.

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Seeing thingy mention that her most viewed post over at Pondering Life was “just a blip of information, nothing new or extraordinary,” reminded me that the same thing has happened to me. This post has almost 3 times more views than any of my others. Why? Maybe because of the D’Souza thing, but I’ve talked about that on other, more in-depth posts. Maybe it was people looking for a weather forecast. I really can’t figure it out.

I’ve long wondered if it was the title, though I can’t see why it would be. But if it is, I hope to make this post generate more views with its title.

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As you may remember, I have in the past talked about three major philosophies that crop up often in politics: cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and materialism; or perhaps more simply, greed.

Well, it occurred to me today that it so happens that these philosophies are all represented by the major factions in Bethesda Softworks and Obsidian Entertainment‘s video game Fallout: New Vegas. I realize this may sound odd, but hear me out:

The New California Republic represents cosmopolitanism, or at least a Social-Democratic government that believes in modern-day values. They do to some extent impose Democracy by force, but nonetheless seem to hold more “enlightened” ideals.

Caesar’s Legion, meanwhile, represents Nationalism. They are a reactionary, semi-Fascist force that believes in primitive rituals, very traditional–even barbaric–social and gender ideas, brutal punishments, and a sort of Nietzschean romanticizing of power.

Finally, Mr. House represents wealth, greed and materialism. His reliance on science, technology, wealth, and mathematics (in the form of the gambling in the casinos) demonstrates this.

These aren’t all perfect fits, of course, and I have no idea if any of the writers consciously thought about any of these choices or not when they wrote the game. But it’s an interesting allegory, and I personally think it shows that more thought and care went into F:NV‘s storyline than goes into your typical video game plot, making it far more sophisticated than the typical “pure good vs. pure evil” archetype.

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Interesting article by Edward Castronova in the WSJ Review about gaming and its morality lessons. An excerpt:

 I foresee a future in which people who grew up playing hard games outperform those who wasted their youth watching films like ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ The trick is not to set specific hours of media use, but to first have a sound conception of virtue and then tailor media consumption to enhance it.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say “wasted”, but it is an interesting point. In fact, I don’t think I really agree with all of his points, but nonetheless it’s a rather complex and thought-provoking piece; worth a read.

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…just kidding. The stock market isn’t controlled by the President, or the Congress, or the Fed chairman, or anyone else.

And yet, when the Dow hit 14,000 back in 2007, some Republicans seemed to think that the President did deserve the credit, so I guess the fact it has nearly doubled in value over Obama’s two years must be due to his excellent work.

Right?

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I just read a rather interesting post by Ross Douthat, made in responding to Michael Lind’s criticism of Star Wars as “primitivism”. Douthat argues that the prequels were more like Lind’s preferred Star Trek, writing:

“…the lost Old Republic that the rebels fight to restore in the original films was revealed to be , well, ‘a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN,’ with the Jedi Knights as its peacekeeping force and the lightsaber as the equivalent of the blue helmet.

For Lind, then, I can only assume that watching the prequels was an immensely gratifying experience. And for the rest of us, the knowledge that Lind’s prescription for “Star Wars” helped produce three of the most disappointing science-fiction blockbusters ever made should be reason enough to reject his prescription for America.”

I agree with Douthat’s analysis, though not his conclusion. Because, you see, I thought the prequels were better than the originals. No–that’s not quite true. I thought A New Hope and The Phantom Menace were about equally good. Other than that, the prequels were better.

Someday, I’ll have to write a post about that.

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Conservative film critic John Nolte has capped off his series on the “Top 25 Left-Wing films” with Oliver Stone’s JFK. In the preamble, explaining why he considers it a “liberal” film, Nolte writes: “Simply put, the Left cannot psychologically or emotionally reconcile their undying hatred of the Vietnam War with their undying love for the same president who escalated our involvement in that war.”

Well, I’m sure Nolte would consider me part of the “Left”, and I don’t believe in any of those conspiracy theories. In any event, however, whether Nolte’s claims are true or false is irrelevant for my purposes. What I want to discuss is the Republicans‘ peculiar attitude towards President Kennedy. For they too seem to have paradoxical feelings towards him. As in, for example, the conservative wiki Conservapedia’s analysis of him as “basically a conservative”.

Republicans have come lately to believe that his tax-cuts were the precursor to President Reagan’s supply-side, Laffer curve-based tax cutting program. (That Kennedy was in fact following the advice of Keynesian economics is strangely forgotten.)

They also seem to admire Kennedy for having a hawkish approach to foreign policy–and there is clearly some truth to this. After all, he had been a military man, and no doubt he certainly found himself in quite a few showdowns with Khrushchev. His anti-communism is hailed by the Republican party of today.

The Republican admiration for Kennedy isn’t complete, of course. There are still times when they find it useful to portray Kennedy as just another Liberal president, to be reviled like Woodrow Wilson and FDR. In what is perhaps the seminal work of the Tea-Party canon, Liberal Fascism, you can really see author Jonah Goldberg wrestling with this dilemma.

Goldberg doesn’t like a lot of Kennedy’s behavior in office, and draws upon it to further his “Liberalism resembles fascism” argument. But when, he gets right down to it, Goldberg can’t just lump JFK in with the rest of the supposedly “liberal fascists”, writing: “While not a modern liberal himself, JFK was turned after his death into a martyr to the religion of government.” Goldberg writes that Kennedy’s myth was “hijacked” by Lyndon Johnson to advance his own brand of (you know it) “liberal fascism”.

This is interesting because it illustrates just how complex the Republicans’ relationship to JFK’s legacy really is. Maybe they just think it would be too cruel to openly despise a man so tragically cut down, or maybe–as a cynic might put it–they are simply looking to do a bit of myth-hijacking for themselves.

Or maybe they feel compelled to offer gestures of bipartisanship, but cannot seriously claim that there was anything good about more recent Democratic Presidents for fear of implying that they were in fact legitimate politicians with reasonable ideas. Such an implication would no doubt draw a sharp rebuke from Rush Limbaugh. So, they are forced to reach back nearly a half-century to find some Democrat who they can like without risking much ideological ground.

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Permit me to annoy you with a silly eccentricity of mine: I don’t like it when poets and songwriters use rhymes that don’t, as it were, rhyme. By this, I mean rhyming  “name” with “lane”, or “town” with “around”, for example. (Incidentally, H. P. Lovecraft also complained about this in his essay “The Allowable Rhyme”)

I’m not necessarily saying this is wrong–who determines what is “wrong” in art, after all–but it does slightly irritate me. I suppose this is because the first time I ever paid attention to rhyming was when reading/listening to W.S. Gilbert’s lyrics and poems and he never (well, hardly ever) tried to rhyme things that didn’t actually rhyme.

Now, admittedly, I quite enjoy Warren Zevon‘s lyrics as well, and he committed this crime against rhyme quite often–probably at least once every song. So, I mean, I try not to be closed-minded about it. But at the same time, I think when people start deciding its okay to rhyme “mike” with “right” or some such, it seems to take the challenge out of it a little, maybe.

But then, I’m not a poet or songwriter, so I realize I’m really not in a position to make the rules on this.

(As a related aside, I did once think that it when be interesting if you used words like “lane” and “name” in poetry if they were incorporated into the structure of the poem itself–e.g., in a typical ABAB rhyme scheme, you could have all the A’s be rhymes and all the B’s be things like “lane” and “name”.)