For about the 800,00th time, the NYT platforms yet another variation of this old Mort Sahl joke.
Art imitates life.
12+ hours later from my previous post on lead NYT stories and it’s still pretty much the same thing. While Google completely ignores Easter (the equivalent of flipping its middle finger to white Christians), here are the lead evening stories in today’s Jew York Times:
So, maybe getting that PhD in African art history was not such a smart thing after all… for a [1](white) girl. It might’ve worked in 2008, but not in virtue-spiraling 2018:
The Brooklyn Museum has sparked outrage in the black community after tapping a white woman to curate its vast African art collection.
On Monday the museum appointed Kristen Windmuller-Luna, 31, who has a Ph.D. in African art history from Princeton University, lectures in Columbia University’s department of art history and archaeology, and once worked as an educator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was “responsible for adult and college gallery tours in the African galleries.”
Despite the stellar résumé, her hiring left some wondering why a qualified person of color did not get the post.
“Seriously, @brooklynmuseum? There goes the neighborhood for good,” opined Philadelphia journalist Ernest Owens on Twitter.
“People from the African Diaspora are frustrated w/white people being gatekeepers of our narrative,” tweeted Kimberly Seldon.
Whoops-e-daisy!
It gets even better with the official Museum reply:
“…. That might be *my* head in a basket…”
“Kristen is the perfect choice to build upon the Brooklyn Museum’s track record as an innovator in the collection and exhibition of the arts of Africa,” said Jennifer Chi, the museum’s chief curator, in a statement.
In other words, the Asian chick who is the museum’s curator likely had “Could it be me next?” worries racing through her head as she hastily drafted the statement.
Ha ha! This has made my Easter Day complete.
References
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The WSJ piece Drudge linked to has got some howlers (“Germany Struggles With an Unfamiliar Form of Anti-Semitism”). The first paragraph actually begins (no, this isn’t parody):
BERLIN— Solomon Michalski loved going to his new school on a leafy Berlin street because it was vibrant and diverse, with most students from migrant families. But when the teenage grandson of Holocaust survivors let it slip that he was Jewish, former friends started hissing insults at him in class, he says.
How has Merkels’ Million Muslim March helped things?
The notion that some among the well over a million recent arrivals—many from Syria, where criticism of Israel laced with anti-Semitic clichés has been part of the official discourse for decades—might be harboring prejudice about Jews has presented authorities here with a dilemma.
Jewish representatives say Germany’s tried and tested toolset to combat anti-Semitism through education is failing to reach communities that often don’t speak German and know little about Nazism and the Holocaust.
The ‘tried and tested toolset’. LOL
Barbara John, a former Berlin integration czar, said cases of Arab families resisting Holocaust education or refusing to send their children on the traditional school trip to concentration camps have come up since the 1960s.
In other words, Germany’s “New People” are not hamstrung by continuous barrages of manufactured guilt. They are much more secure in their own indigenous and religious identities than native Germans are.
I wondered whether the following paragraph indicates merely the inefficiencies of a P.C.-addled bureaucracy or whether it is an example of a deliberately strategy of misinformation:
German police attribute more than 90% of cases nationwide to far-right offenders. But Jewish activists and victim representatives say the data is misleading because police automatically label any incident where the perpetrators aren’t known as coming from the far right.
I found this statistic fascinating:
Back then, however, Germany’s Jewish community, half-a-million strong before Hitler’s rise to power, had become virtually extinct. It began growing again in the 1990s thanks to immigration from the former Soviet Union and, more recently, from Israel, making the fight against anti-Semitic prejudice an even more urgent necessity. Germany now has an estimated 200,000 Jews, more than 100,000 of whom are in Berlin.
So, 1 out of every 2 Jews living in Germany live in Berlin. So much for dispelling the stereotype of Jews as an urban people, not all that familiar with toiling the land and whatnot.
The piece’s final paragraph reads like similar pieces about Jews in modern day France:
As for Mr. Michalski, he says he recently started googling property prices in Israel. “For the first time I’ve seriously thought about leaving. I hope it won’t come to that,” he said.
Alas, for whites living in Germany or France, there is no Israel to flee to.
It’s my annual Easter ritual to repost this most gorgeous of songs. As an XTC fanatic, it is, in my humble opinion, the absolute high point of Andy Partridge’s stellar songwriting career (a ‘fact’ I once had the pleasure of telling him in person.) From the song’s melody, to the instrumentation and production choices, to the earthy lyrics rich with pagan imagery and symbolism, the song never fails to give me goosebumps and, occasionally, teary eyes of joy. If I get a choice in the matter, this is one of the songs I’d want playing at my funeral.
Odin mounts the tree
Bleeds for you and me
Splashing on the lamb
Gamboling with spring’s step
Buds will laugh and burst
Racing to be first
Turning all the soil
As the promptress’ fingers through her spinning script…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm4gm9bmypg&feature=kp
In “Everything You Love Will Be Eaten Alive”, Nathan Robinson discusses Jeremiah Ross’ book Vanishing New York: How A Great City Lost Its Soul:
Essentially, New York City used to be a gruff, teeming haven for weirdos and ethnic minorities. Now, it is increasingly full of hedge fund managers, rich hipsters, and tourists. Tenements and run-down hotels have been replaced with glass skyscrapers full of luxury condos. Old bookshops are shuttered, designer clothes stores in their place. Artisanal bullshit is everywhere, meals served on rectangular plates. You used to be able to get a pastrami and a cup of coffee for 50 cents! What the hell happened to this place?…
CBGB, the dingy punk rock music club where the Ramones and Patti Smith got their start, is forced out after its rent is raised to $35,000 a month. Instead, we get a commemorative CBGB exhibit at the Met, with a gift shop selling Sid Vicious pencil sets and thousand-dollar handbags covered in safety pins. The club itself becomes a designer clothing store selling $300 briefs.
Presumabley a good old fashioned Jewish leftist from NYC, Robinson bemoans the property owners:
The very existence of landlords is staggeringly unfair. A person can live in a place 30 years, pay thousands of dollars a month in rent, and still have their home demolished without having any say in the decision… The greed of landlords and developers is a prime reason that New York is steadily transforming into “Disneyland for billionaires.”
But, this is what happens when a particular ethos, one which extols the virtue of making as much money as one can, becomes the predominant mindset. Trump notwithstanding, NYC real estate owners (the said ‘landlords’) are overwhelmingly likely to have surnames in the –Stein or –Berg vein.
Over the past 75 years, NYC has become a very Jewish city, and the same pattern has affected other so-called ‘boomtowns’ around the country. States of increasing gentrification occur and are eventually surpassed by what one sees in NYC or L.A. today: an emergent artificiality and superficiality, a continuous expansion of Times Square peppered with expensive high-rises and pricey cafes and restaurants, the vast majority of which seem to serve some variation of New American. Other ethnic lifebloods are squeezed dry and eventually evicted.
NYC has become a true ‘globalist’ city, an increasingly cold and alienated cosmopolitanism made incarnate.
Lefties never imagined that the techno-dictators might be an SJW form of dictatorship.
In The Nation, Evan Kindley reviews Daniel Swift’s new book The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound (“The Insanity Defense: Coming to terms with Ezra Pound’s politics”).
A couple of passages stood out to me. First, there is the role that the incipient pathologizing of anti-Semitism (as documented so well in Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique) had in Pound’s case:
[S]ome major paradigm shifts within the American political and medical communities helped to establish the conditions under which the Pound defense was possible. In their recent study Are Racists Crazy?, Sander L. Gilman and James M. Thomas show how, during the early decades of the 20th century, racism and anti-Semitism began to be regarded more and more as pathological conditions. While psychology had earlier focused on the supposed irrationality and moral degeneracy of nonwhite races, utilizing theories that often harmonized with Pound’s own, the discipline gradually shifted, especially as details of the Nazi Holocaust began to emerge, and came to see racism as itself a psychological problem. The theories of émigré psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm, Erik H. Erikson, and Wilhelm Reich, who regarded racism, fascism, and anti-Semitism as symptoms of arrested development or sexual repression, only helped to confirm this notion. “[I]f the nineteenth-century Jew and black American bore the mark of insanity,” Gilman and Thomas write, “by the end of World War II that mark would be placed upon those whose hatred targeted the Jew and black American.”
Then, there is this slice of Greenwhich Village that would never exist today:
Another protégé was John Kasper, the owner of a bookstore in Greenwich Village specializing in racist and anti-Semitic literature. (He’d named it Make It New, after one of Pound’s most famous critical pronouncements.) Later, Kasper became a leading figure in the right-wing reaction to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Normism: The Philosophy of Norm Macdonald, a short book I wrote about the late great comedian, is available on Amazon.
