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[unable to retrieve full-text content]The defeat that the Democratic Party has just sustained is being blamed by its more fanatical adherents on racism, misogyny, reaction against ‘lawfare,’ the stubbornness…

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Merging pop and poetry. The post “I admire that”: The songwriters Patti Smith envies first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been is the title Jordan Peterson (or his organization) gave to his 500th podcast, released last week. Apt for Peterson, who has chalked up a few psychedelic journeys and has talked about them with seriousness and insight (though not so much lately), to use as his title the most famous lyric phrase in the entire Grateful Dead songbook. Peterson is challenging us to make our lives a part of the great story right now so that we no longer will flirt so closely with disaster. Apt as well because Peterson is emphasizing adventure as central to life lived at its deepest. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead guessed that that was at the core of his band’s appeal: “Maybe that’s it, maybe we’re just one of the last adventures in America.” In recording #500, Peterson sees the call to adventure as biblical, in God’s imperative to Abraham to get up and leave everything familiar behind and go to the place He would show him. He sees it in the willingness of Jacob to wrestle with God, and has titled his newest book, We Who Wrestle With God, in reverence to the story of Jacob receiving the name Israel after he literally wrestles with a divine being. Putting adventure at the core of the relationship with God requires two things. First, it requires dedication to truth. For Peterson this means a commitment to that which is beyond the limits of our ability to control or manipulate, something which requires the surrender of our pretensions. Truth measures us. We can respond to that measure and commit ourselves to the adventure that ensues, or we can reject that open-endedness and the fear of the unknown for an endless sorry rehash of our own cycle of behaviors. We can dare to put out our thoughts so that, as Alfred North Whitehead wrote, our bad ideas can die instead of us. Whitehead, too, wrote of religion as adventure: The worship of God is not a rule of safety — it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure. In the second place, adventure implies a story. An adventure is not experienced or remembered as a list of facts or a series of abstractions. Rather we experience it as a tale, a narrative. Peterson reminds us that there is nothing older or more central to human culture than stories. They treat truth as something that grips our lives and shapes us and the world. They recreate us as we hear them and tell them, awakening the inner feeling of adventure as we put ourselves in the place of the heroes of our stories and see the world through their eyes. In the best narratives, the mind and heart are an organic unity. They help us be whole. No wonder, says Peterson, that story is central to the Bible and spiritual traditions that have stood the test of time. Peterson has been influenced by Carl Jung’s deep dive into the narratives that are the stuff of our culture and of our inner lives. Peterson believes that Western culture made a catastrophic blunder in turning away from Jung’s exploration of deep narrative as the key to our psyche. Instead, the West turned to the Deconstructionists’ rejection of any coherent narrative except their own nihilism. To the deconstructionists, we differ so completely in how we read that in the end, no story can unite us. To them, all meanings are entirely in the separate and unrelated minds of the author and reader. When this literary nihilism merged with the political and moral nihilism of Marxism, Wokeism exploded onto the scene, attempting to level every monument and every meaning, to clear the cultural field of everything except their own unaccountable power. Like most readers of American Spectator, Peterson sees in the stunning events of this year’s election evidence of the resurgence of values the wokeists had thought dead and gone. The great narrative of the Bible and of the civilization that built on its foundation is turning out to be stronger than Derrida or Foucault understood. We see ourselves as part of a great story that will not be denied. The Bible begins with stories and doesn’t seriously turn to law until well into its second book. It engages us first. It takes pains through the story to invite us into a law that is godly and inviting. The model of law of the Roman emperors was top-down. Justinian’s code inspired those who wanted all power in their hands and who would use the Biblical narrative only to put a divine enforcer behind to terrorize those who might dare to defy the tyrant’s strong arm. Modern tyrants continue in that mode. But the Biblical narrative was seamlessly integrated with a law that reflected the power of the story. It is a law that lives, that inspires love as well as respect, and that is studied lovingly by every citizen: You shall love the Lord your Lawgiver (the Hebrew word used here is also used in Scripture to mean a human judge) with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your hearts … and you shall teach them to your children. The Bible doesn’t teach a mindless obedience to a larger power. It tells first a long, long story which puts its law in the necessary context: the absolute benevolence of a Supreme Being who shares his very self with a universe upon whom He bestows a freedom like His own. A being so dedicated to love that He gives humans the power to disobey and pain Him radically, just so long as in the end, they could choose to love. About 1900 years ago, a great teacher, Rabbi Akiva, proposed that the overarching principle that integrates God’s revelation — the Torah — is the command in Leviticus to love your neighbor as yourself. As is typical in the Godly freedom of study of the Word, Rabbi Akiva’s student, Ben Azzai, differed with him. He cited another Biblical verse, Genesis 5:1-2: “This is the storybook of Adam’s kind — when G-d created Adam, He made him in the likeness of God, male and female … ” The Bible’s story, Ben Azzai was saying, gives us the grounding that we need to love. Failing to know who we are at core, created out of love by a loving God in His own image, we can easily despair of being able to love even our own lives, let alone someone else. The core gift of the Bible’s story is that of our innate worth, which is not a product of our own effort or choice but is God’s irrevocable gift. We then are challenged by God to use that gift in a way that furthers His story and ours. This is the basis of the kind of law that the Bible generates in societies which are imbued with its message, a law that respects worship and learns from the greatest Lawgiver of all that our freedom is key. With that model of love and respect animating the law, the country so governed can inspire the love and respect of its citizens to strive together, governing themselves for the common weal. We nearly threw this concept of law out in the garbage. It is quite the tale now to add to the great narrative: how a nihilistic and cynical human tyranny could not quench the great story of the Bible or loose its hold on our hearts. Peterson is challenging us to make our lives a part of the great story right now so that we no longer will flirt so closely with disaster, in our private lives or in our life as a nation and as a world. May Peterson go forward from strength to strength as he makes his next 500 recordings. His story and example beckon us to join the great adventure and become fearless acolytes of truth ourselves. READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Big Money and Big Media Lost in 2024 With Trump’s Win, The Law Wins The post Jordan Peterson Sees the Awesome Power of Stories appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an article declaring that transgender activists are in the beginning stages of wondering whether they went too far when they, in essence, adopted a strategy of screaming “Bigot!” at anyone who dared question even one of their precepts. The article comes at a moment when many Democrats are pinning Kamala Harris’ election loss on the narrative that emerged from the famous “Kamala Is For They/Them. President Trump Is For You” campaign ad: that Democrats are at the mercy of ideological radicals, and are less focused on working for everyday Americans. But Strangio and the ACLU…. believe “transitioning” children is of utmost priority and a critical civil right that needs to be protected. In reality, the number of transgender activists who are actually questioning their movement’s tactics — such as deeming it “violence” to “misgender” someone, steamrolling the medical community into saying such insanities as “birthing parent” and “pregnant people,” and calling evil anyone who questions giving little boys estrogen and little girls testosterone (to supposedly turn them into the opposite sex) — is quite small. (WATCH Ellie Gardey Holmes: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 94: Congress’ Bathroom Fight Shows Shift on the Left) In fact, the New York Times was only able to find two transgender activists willing to say so on the record. This is in spite of the fact that the author, Jeremy W. Peters, said he did everything he could to get transgender activists to do so. He explained, “A lot of LGBTQ leaders and advocates didn’t want to say they had concerns because they worried about dividing their movement.” The two people who did express some reservations with the transgender movement’s aggressive tactics to the New York Times were Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of Advocates for Transgender Equality, and Mara Keisling, the funder of the National Center for Transgender Equality. For his part, Heng-Lehtinen said, “We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds…. We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team.” Keisling, meanwhile, said activists had “looked unreasonable” when they called people who opposed allowing men in women’s sporting events bigots. But even as there is an increasing feeling on the Left that things have gone too far in regard to transgender activism, most transgender activists are doubling down. When future member of Congress Sarah McBride, a man who identifies as a woman, agreed to not use the women’s bathroom at the Capitol, many transgender activists decried it as a terrible retreat. LGBTQ publication The Advocate quoted a person who identifies as transgender as responding: “The reaction I am seeing from prominent trans journalists and activists is extremely negative. They are seeing this as a betrayal.” Additionally, the LBGTQ organization GLAAD responded to the whole episode with McBride by asserting that the phrase “biological sex” is a term that is merely used to dehumanize people: The resolution seeks to ban transgender women from using female restrooms inside the Capitol, barring both House members and employees from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex [sic].” “Biological sex” is not an accurate nor a scientific term, but is used by opponents of transgender people to dehumanize them and deny their equal access to society. Others are sending out clarion calls begging the Left to not back away from transgender activism. For instance, columnist Will Bunch wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer last week: “Whether hate-filled TV ads helped elect Trump is no reason to stop fighting for the humanity of 1 million transgender Americans.” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has also gone on a media tour reiterating full support for transgenderism. Beshear vetoed a bill that would have protected minor girls in his state from being injected with testosterone and given mastectomies as part of their parents’ attempts to turn them into men. Last week, he said on Face the Nation, in explaining his veto, “That’s my faith, where I’m taught that all children are children of God, and I wanted to stick up for children who were being picked on.” The ACLU’s Transgender Extremism The ACLU, which has a major role in advancing transgender radicalism, in particular has elucidated total support for the same aggressive tactics on transgenderism. In a podcast episode earlier this month, Cecillia Wang, the organization’s national legal director, focused on transgenderism when explaining her plans for the organization’s efforts to diminish the impact of the Trump administration. Before discussing anything else, she worried about Trump’s proposal to cut off Medicaid funding to hospitals that give children medical interventions to attempt to turn them into the opposite sex. She referred to this as “life-saving medical care.” The ACLU will be before the Supreme Court next month in the case United States v. Skrmetti. The organization decided to send an attorney who identifies as transgender, Chase Strangio, to argue the case. The case concerns a Tennessee law that bans children from receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, phalloplasties, and vaginoplasties. Even many on the Left are questioning the ACLU’s wisdom in taking that case to the Supreme Court, as the 6–3 conservative majority makes it unlikely that the Supreme Court would overturn the circuit court’s ruling. For example, Kate Redburn, an academic fellow at Columbia Law School, told New York Magazine: “It’s understandable to some extent why the case was brought up…. But now the question is, What will the Court do? … I can’t tell the future, but I think the signs are bad.” (READ MORE: DEI Proponents at the University of Michigan Are Panicking but Refusing to Budge) But Strangio and the ACLU are undeterred. They believe “transitioning” children is of utmost priority and a critical civil right that needs to be protected. “The consequences of these 24 state laws banning medical care for trans young people are so drastic and so severe,” she explained to New York Magazine. In the end, it makes more sense for the transgender movement to continue its aggressive tactics. After all, when your movement is founded upon pushing a total lunacy that defies human experience (that some men are secretly women on the inside and vice versa), it turns out that aggressive social control is the only reasonable path toward success. The post Is the Transgender Movement Really Backing Down? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Wicked, the much-anticipated film adaptation of the longest-running Broadway musical is enchanting audiences everywhere garnering close to $200MM in global box office revenue in its first week. The film also has the distinction of delivering the strongest box office opening ever for a screen adaption of a Broadway musical.   On one hand, it is a very adult story which satirizes political corruption, personal ambition, and prejudice. Loosely inspired by Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked was conceived as a prequel to L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), on which the legendary film The Wizard of Oz  (1939) is based. Maguire’s Wicked depicts an elaborate backstory in which Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West,  was friends with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, while the two women were university students. Starring pop star Ariana Grande as Glinda, and Broadway actress and singer Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, Wicked is a visual and emotional masterpiece with stand-out performances by the two leads along with the marvelous presence of Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard.  Directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians), Wicked was filmed in two segments with Part Two scheduled for release in November 2025. (READ MORE from Leonora Cravotta: AI Snake Oil: Separating Hype From Reality in Artificial Intelligence) The film opens with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, proclaiming the death of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, to the citizens of Munchkinland.  Following these remarks, a young woman in the crowd asks Glinda to confirm a rumor that she and Elphaba were once friends. While Glinda tries to downplay their relationship by saying that their paths crossed, this exchange serves as the vehicle for the recounting of how she and Elphaba became acquainted as students at Shiz University, a school for would-be sorcerers. The film provides a detailed portrait of Elphaba’s painful early childhood where she was rejected by her father and ridiculed by other children for her green complexion. Although Elphaba was deeply hurt by the way others treated her for being different, she soon became cognizant that she possessed an ability to move objects with her mind. It is this magical power that served as the catalyst for both her successful academic career at Shiz and her unlikely friendship with the beautiful, superficial but ambitious Glinda. Wicked’s blockbuster performance at the box office is not surprising given the incredible popularity of the long-standing Broadway production which debuted in 2003, and the public’s familiarity with the show’s signature songs including “Popular,” “I’m Not That Girl,” and “Defying Gravity.” Moreover, the decision to cast Grande and Erivo, who are both blessed with magnificent singing voices, was also critical to the film’s runaway success. Furthermore, having the two stars record the songs live instead of looping the vocals in later additionally enhances the cinematic experience. Wicked pays homage to the original Broadway production by including a scene showcasing the singing talents of Idina Menzel, the original Elphaba, and Kristen Chenoweth, the original Glinda. Wicked is also peppered with references to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). For instance we witness Grande as Glinda arriving in Munchkinland via a pink bubble just as Billie Burke did in the classic movie. There are other more subliminal references such as the scene where Elphaba while a student at Shiz inadvertently turns over a vase filled with poppies and puts the whole class to sleep. This scene recalls Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film, attempting to circumvent Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion’s journey to the Emerald City by sprinkling their path with poppies. The Politics of Wicked The story further honors The Wizard of Oz legacy by embedding political messaging into the plotline. Since its initial publication, L. Frank Baum’s novel has been described as a political allegory with Dorothy representing everyman, the Scarecrow the agricultural worker, the Tinman the industrial worker, and of course the Wizard representing the U.S. president and Emerald City, Washington D.C. When Baum’s book was published in 1900, William McKinley was president. McKinley would die the following year as a result of an infection from an assassination attempt by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. The death of McKinley ,who was very popular at the time, only reinforces the immense power of the political machine and the ultimate humanness of those serving as its representatives. Interestingly enough, when Gregory Maguire published his novel in 1995, Bill Clinton was president, yet because George W. Bush was president in 2003 when the Broadway production was launched, critics interpreted the story as satirizing Bush. The Wizard as played by Jeff Goldbum is also a parody of  the contemporary president of one’s choosing. Although production wrapped on the film in January 2024 when Joe Biden was president and the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for the 2024 Presidential Election, liberals are already reading anti-Donald Trump messaging into the film. While the movie has several political references, perhaps the most compelling is Shiz University’s decision to discriminate against animals by forbidding them from serving as university instructors and physically locking them up in cages. Not surprisingly, Elphaba sees a parallel between the hardships she experienced as a result of her green skin and the silencing and othering of the animal professors. Consequently, she takes up their cause, a decision which ultimately puts her at odds with Madame Morrible and the Wizard. (READ MORE: Follow The Washington Trail: New Cloak and Dagger Mystery Lampoons DC Corruption) Wicked captivates audiences because like The Wizard of Oz, it has multilayer appeal. On one hand, it is a very adult story which satirizes political corruption, personal ambition, and prejudice. The film also raises existential questions such as whether people are born evil or become evil as a result of their life experience. On the other hand, Wicked is also appropriate for older children in that it celebrates the friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, two very different individuals.  Children benefit from the teachable moment that not only is it important to be tolerant of those who look or act differently from us, but that these differences enhance and enrich friendships. I highly recommend Wicked as a fantastically entertaining, intelligent production. I am already looking forward to Part Two. The post <i>Wicked</i> Bewitches and Beguiles at the Box Office appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.