HEAVENS TO MERGATROYD! This blog is twenty years old!

Yes the name of this blog was inspired by
one of Snagglepuss's favorite exclamations.

My first blog post was not very inspiring: 

I'm still working out the kinks, come back later, it will be better. Thanks.

Back in those days we thought that George W. Bush was, and ever would be, the worst president of the United States. 

All these years I've been hogging the domain name mcclernan.com for myself, in spite of having many relatives, close and distant, who share the name. But so far nobody has complained.

I recapped the first ten years, back in 2015. Obama was president then, so things were looking up from the Bush years. 

So what's happened since November 2015?

I was blogging pretty heavily from 2015 through 2018, averaging about 300 blog posts per year, more or less. But blogging fell way off in 2019, when I only managed 59 posts and after that only managed 42, 28, 23, 29 and 34 posts each year after that. This year I have 43 posts, counting this one, so far. 

The reason blogging dropped off so much on Heavens to Mergatroyd is at least partly because I started my blog Pinkerite and instead of writing about politics and especially race pseudoscience on this blog, I started writing about those things over on Pinkerite instead.

I see that in 2015 I expressed my admiration for the feminist writer Sady Doyle who since then became Jude Doyle. I mentioned him in January of this year in a blog post on Pinkerite. 

2016 started out on a high note when I moved from Astoria back to Manhattan, to the Upper West Side in a quaint hundred-year-old walkup. Then I moved out thanks to unpleasant neighbors in 2021. 

Trump was elected. I immediately became interested in Canada and in the French language. I had been in Canada once, in 2005, before I started this blog. Since Trump was elected I visited Canada in 2017, 2018,  twice, then not again until January of this year. 

Part of the reason for the gap, I think, was because Biden defeated Trump in 2020, and I didn't feel as much of an urge to get out of the United States during that time. But when Trump was elected again in 2024, I went to Montreal during the inauguration, just to be out of a country full of morons who voted for a rapist fascist disgusting felon psychopath, clearly in the early-mid stages of dementia. 

And of course there was Covid.

In the past ten years I traveled to France and Slovenia.

I've written about learning French quite a few times. Thanks to my French studies I ended up learning more about Peppa Pig and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic than someone my age would ever expect to know. Dear god I know so much about My Little Pony now.

I  also created my own animations in French, but they are pig and pony-free.

I discovered Murderbot, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron. I knew J. D. Vance was a creep in 2016.

I've continued to express my appreciation for the Beatles and in particular for Paul McCartney in the past ten years. 

I've memorialized Earl Rich, a friend of mine who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1997, several times on this blog.

Quite a few people I have known have died in the past ten years. My childhood arch-enemy John Sayers, my young adulthood arch-enemy Laura Garth, my actor friend Tony White, another actor friend Doug Rossi, my college friend Geri Tuckett. And of course my cats, poor Miss Willow and poor Mr. Fuzz. But at least my cats lived about as long as cats normally live, the other people I mentioned here died before their time. Since my cats died, I've switched to caring for plants instead.

Theater-wise, things have been slow. I only managed to eke out one production, Norma Jeanne at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic about Marilyn Monroe in the past ten years, but I've written three solid full-length plays since 2020 and am working on a fourth.

Pete Duel, Judy Carne, Ben Murphy
-----------------------------------------

Here's a funny coincidence - I've written about Pete Duel on this blog - first in 2005, then again in 2015.

And the Pete Duel Memorial Site is still going strong in 2025. The entire series "Alias Smith and Jones" is now available on the Internet Archive.

One of my favorite episodes, "The Root of it All," was quite feminist for 1971. In the episode, Smith and Jones meet a feisty woman played by Judy Carne and another woman played by Victoria Thompson. 

Well Thompson showed up in a playwrights group I was part of for a couple of years in 2022-23. I knew I had seen her name before and after Googling around I discovered she had been in AS&J - but I never got a chance to ask her about the experience. But still, it was a funny coincidence.

In addition to this blog, I've had my blog NYCPlaywrights going since 2010, and Pinkerite since 2018.

TOP TEN POSTS IN THE PAST 10 YEARS

1. Did Brigitte Macron and her first husband appear in an episode of "French in Action" - mystere et boule de gomme! - over 16,000 visits.

2. Move over Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp! - 15.6K visits.

3. Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite and also updated the diagram.) - 4.2K visits.

4. No, Erik Satie did not only eat white foods(!!!) - 2.98K visits.

5. What do the evo-psycho bros think "race" is? (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite). - 2.74K visits.

6. Qui était Jeanne de Bret? - 2.68K visits.

7. #Free Melania - yes I know Melania has only herself to blame for marrying Trump, but my god, you can see what a grotesque psychopath he is in this video. No wonder, according to Trump's biographer Michael Wolff, she hates him. -  2. 22K. visits.

8. RIP MTM - I discussed the death of Mary Tyler Moore. 2.15K visits.

9. Watching Justin Trudeau talk about feminism is the most erotic experience of my life - still undefeated - 1.94 K visits.

10. Manhattan statuary - surprisingly popular at 1.94K visits.

Will I manage to blog for another ten years? Time will tell.

You can read about the history of blogging here.

The House of Blue Rape Culture

oh, those wacky hijinks

I'm a big fan of Tony Kushner, as can been seen over the past almost 20 years of this blog. Although to be completely honest, I'm more a big fan of Angels in America and his screenplay for the movie Lincoln. I'm much less impressed by other Kushner work, but still, he's my favorite living playwright and I almost always enjoy his interviews like this one with the goddess Rachel Maddow.

 

Clearly there's something wrong with me and my taste in theater, because I hate almost every play I see, and over the course of this blog I've trashed the works of Mac Wellman, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Adam Rapp, Tom Stoppard, Chekov, Strindberg and especially Landford Wilson.

It hasn't been all negative, I've said some positive things about the work of Annie Baker, and I loved FUN HOME (the musical based on the comix of Allison Bechdel) and I love Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. 

I am a fan of WAITING FOR GODOT in spite of Beckett having been a misogynnist - his everymen protagonists must never be women, since after all, this is a play about the human condition. I have tickets for tomorrow's performance of the production with Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves.

But I'd say that at best I enjoy only one out of every thirty plays or musicals that I see or read. I like a handful of contemporary plays, plus OUR TOWN and a half-dozen of Shakespeare's best plays: HAMLET, ROMEO & JULIET, KING LEAR, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, AS YOU LIKE IT and HENRY V. And that's pretty much it. It's depressing.

And here we go again. 

I follow Tony Kushner's husband on Bluesky - I almost always like his posts because I agree with his political views - so I reflexively clicked the likey for his post about the Kushner-edited collection of the plays of John Guare: "He's one of our most important, funny, and original playwrights."

And then I made the mistake of reading THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES. You can read it for free on Archive.org.

The play is over fifty years old but here is a SPOILER ALERT anyway.

I like Britannica's summary of the play: "In 1971 Guare earned critical acclaim for The House of Blue Leaves (filmed for television, 1987), a farce about a zookeeper who murders his insane wife after he fails as a songwriter." 

In the Archive.org version of the play the blurbs include one from the leftist magazine The Nation: "full of waggish merriment..."; the Village Voice: "Guare knows there is nothing funnier than the clash between American dreams and the American way of death..."; USA Today: "a woozy, fragile, hilarious little heart-breaker..." 

Although I guess you could defend the humor on the basis of it's funny 'cause it's true - men do murder their wives, insane or not, all the time. And when THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES premiered in 1971, domestic violence wasn't considered an important issue.

Of the six women in the play, four are dead by the end: the crazy wife, two nuns and a deaf "aging film starlet." All defective or unavailable for sex, and so not much value for the men. The starlet's boyfriend mourns her for ten minutes before convincing the hero's mistress to fly away with him. The surviving nun rejects celibacy, and so avoids being offed by Guare. The hero's mistress, while an obvious bitch because she refuses to cook on demand, is at least worth raping.

Of course I knew that rape was considered a hoot back in those days, since Bill Cosby was killing it in 1969, with his hi-larious bit about drugging and raping women. But still, I was amazed to read the hero's monologue:

It's kind of funny, a chimpanzee knocked me in the back and kinked my back out of whack and I went to this health club to work it out and in the steam section with all the steam I got lost and I went into this steam room and there was Bunny—yeah, just towels-I mean you could make a movie out of this, it was so romantic— She couldn't see me and she started talking about the weight she had to take off and the food she had to give up and she started talking about duckling with orange sauce and oysters baked with spinach and shrimps baked in the juice of melted sturgeon eyes which caviar comes from—well, you know me and food and I got so excited and the steam's getting thicker and thicker and I ripped off my towel and kind of raped her... and she was quiet for a long time and then she finally said one of the greatest lines of all time.... She said, "There's a man in here."

There's no "kind of" rape - she doesn't even see him until he's raping her. You see, that's why it's so hysterically funny - she realizes "there's a man in here" because she was just raped by one. 

The Clive Barnes New York Times review of the premier of THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES in 1971 does not mention the rape. Artie is everyman and we are meant to sympathize with him, because straight white men had it the worst in the middle of the twentieth century:

Artie's troubles are manifold: His mistress won't cook for him, his songs are rejected, his wife is as nutty as a Thurber cartoon, his best friend is as crazy as a Feiffer cartoon, and he is invaded by nuns, two of whom are blown up by his son, who clearly has an unfortunate genetic disposition. 

 

Yet Artie keeps on smiling. He believes that one day he will wake up over the rainbow in Los Angeles and find himself as famous as Bob Hope. He keeps on smilingly right until just before the end. 

 

Mr. Guare has a telling way with the karate chop. His black inversions have a Joe Orton air to them, but his tone is all‐American emanating from a mind riotously littered with the detritus of a civilization, its comic books, its radio serials, its movies, indeed all of its advertisements—to steal and adapt Norman Mailer's phrase for itself.

In his review of the 1986 production, Frank Rich says:

By evening's end, Bananas has actually become one of her husband's animals. Bananas likes animals, she has explained, because they're not famous and because they represent to her the buried feelings that her fit-regulating pills usually restrain. Miss Kurtz's metamorphosis brings the theater to a shocked hush. Her slender hands become paws dancing in the air, her voice trails off into a maimed puppy's whimper. As Bananas nuzzles helplessly against her husband, Mr. Guare's inspired image of the all-American loser acquires a metaphorical force as timeless as West's locusts. Where once there was a woman with stars in her eyes, we see a battered mutt, the forgotten underdog that the bright lights of our national fairy tales always pass by...

Then the all-American everyman puts the mad dog down, like Old Yeller. But the play is no longer quite as funny as it was fifteen years before:

Yet a funny thing has happened to ''Blue Leaves'' ...The play no longer seems all that funny, and it's none the worse for the shift in tone. While some of Mr. Guare's jokes are indeed dated remnants of the 60's, his characters and themes have gained the weight and gravity so lacking in his more pretentious recent plays. Time hasn't healed the wounds described in ''Blue Leaves'' - it's deepened them. One still leaves the theater howling at Mr. Guare's vision of losers at sea in a materialistic culture, but the howls are less of laughter than of pain.

He doesn't mention the rape. 

In a recording of that 1986 production by the American Playhouse, now on YouTube  the line "kind of raped her" gets a solid laugh as the character played by Christine Baranski covers her face with her hands. It's extra creepy that it's Frasier's dad confessing to raping Christine Baranski.

A September 2008 review of an Orange County California production entitled ‘House of Blue Leaves’ will leave you blue Paul Hodgins writes:

Almost four decades after it turned its author, John Guare, into a name playwright, “The House of Blue Leaves” seems like both an ossified artifact of the ’60s and creepily relevant to our own troubled times.

I certainly get the "ossified artifact" part, but I'm not sure about the relevance to our own troubled times. Later he says:

In the end, it’s too much – but that, of course, is Guare’s point. The promises, priorities and threats of the modern world have unhinged us, and nobody’s acting sensibly anymore. It’s a warning that’s more urgent now than it was when the play was written.

Why is it "more urgent now?" From what I remember of September 2008, the big issues were the financial crisis and Barack Obama was recently nominated to be the Democratic candidate for president. Neither of those things would seem to have any connection to the issues of this play - but maybe for Hodgins, Obama's nomination was a sign that the whole world had gone insane. 

Looking back, it was a blessed time in comparison to the state of our country now.

Hodgins refers to the protagonist of the play as an "everyman" in spite of the protagonist being a rapist, but then again, why not? If Guare wrote a zany farce based on the rape of Gisele Pelicot by a parade of everymen, would it be much different?

Sheila O'Mally, writing about the 2011 production in Politico also fails to mention the rape and is annoyed that the audience does not react the way she feels they should, because in her opinion, if you don't anticipate this humorous farce ending in murder, you are insane:

I felt the audience resisting Ben Stiller (as the hero) in the part. They laughed at everything he said, whether it was funny or not, seeming to need him to be the clown at their birthday party that they expected. Their laughs were insistent, rather than reactive, almost trying to push him where they wanted him to go. In the final harrowing moment, when it becomes clear what Artie is doing, a couple of people around me gasped. This is a good response, obviously, and appropriate, but based on all that had come before, I felt the audience turn on the play in that moment. They had been expecting a Ben Stiller laugh-riot, and instead they were given this? The play is so hilarious that the ending, which any sane person could see coming from a mile away, hurts. Good. It should hurt. But I felt the resentment in that well-dressed crowd. I felt them withhold their approval.

The 2011 review in Vulture by Scott Brown is the only one I have found so far that mentions the rape monologue, but only in passing:

Hovering in the wings is Artie’s ten-clawed climber of a mistress, the fierce Bunny Lingus (Leigh). (Guare, whatever your overall opinion of him, is one of the great moniker-makers of the postmodern stage.) The pair met when Artie “kind of raped her” in a health-club steam room, and since then, she’s been convinced of his indomitable drive, even as his lingering attachment to his invalid wife has her wondering...

To be fair this was still the early days of the #MeToo movement, before Harvey Weinstein made Hollywood and the theater world realize that maybe it's not a good idea to be casual about rape. Damn I am so mad I missed the reading of A PLAY ABOUT DAVID MAMET WRITING ABOUT HARVEY WEINSTEIN back in June. I hope it comes around again soon.

Brown has an epiphany at the end:

This is a furious play, a vicious and ungenerous play, and we should be made to feel that. I got it in gentle waves, but never in hurricane-force slaps. Perhaps it’s just the passage of time: House was written back when the grand promises of the Great Society and Vatican II were decaying even faster than the Star System of Old Hollywood, and no purposeful revolution could cohere or find secure footing. “When famous people go to sleep at night, it’s us they dream of, Artie,” chants Bunny, without rue or irony, in a kind of lullaby. “The famous ones, they’re the real people. We’re the creatures of their dreams.” A line like that ought to galvanize us, the passive patsies out in the gallery. Instead, I felt a gentle perplexity. Sometimes, sitting out there in the dark, watching these famous people mount a case for the violent, oppressive absurdity of fame, I felt like a creature of their dreams. And I wondered, Inception-like: Who needs to wake up? Me or them? 

 

The flip side of all the famous people who have performed the play are all those community theater actors who have performed the play. It's certain that at least some of them dreamed of greater fame than treading the boards at the Playcrafters Barn Theater. 

Assuming that, like most who've experience the play, apparently, they don't think the protagonist being a rapist makes him any less of an all-American everyman - do they feel targeted by the play as it mocks this old old man - 45! - because he still has dreams of something beyond his day job? 

In the 2024 review of the Playcrafters Barn Theater production Madeline Dudziak writes:

Maybe Guare’s writing just isn’t particularly funny to me. Perhaps the script, like Banana’s moniker, hasn’t aged well, or the other patrons on Saturday were as confused as I was … but it just wasn’t humorous. Sure, a few good one-liners elicited laughs, but in truth, the show was completely depressing. Honestly, when Landuyt (playing "Billy Einhorn") finally arrives and sobs uncontrollably for a few minutes, it makes perfect sense, because it is all simply sad. Even the asides were woeful. Nearly every character had a moment to chat with the audience to let us in on what was going through their heads – a moment of connection, if you will. These flashes of personal insight into the characters could have shifted the dark tone to one slightly funnier, but they simply reiterated how broken all of these people were.

I don’t know what genre I’d lump The House of Blue Leaves into. This production may defy genre altogether, but it’s far from a miss; the entire talented cast performs beautifully, salvaging the sorrowful script, and the set is lovely. The unsettled ending certainly doesn’t clear anything up. But maybe you’re the kind of theatre-goer who doesn’t need closure to your questions.

It's astounding that even in 2024 the rape goes unremarked, as if it is a very minor detail of the story, just an odd little quirk in the protagonist's meet-cute story.

I will be on the lookout for reviews of any future productions of "The House of Blue Leaves." I wonder if they'll leave the rape line in, and if they do, what the critics will say about it - if anything.

Black Woman Genius ~ a call for monologues

I don't think I've ever had a post that was suitable for all three of my websites: this one; the one that critiques race pseudoscience; and the theater one. But today is the day for this first ever cross-over post.

I was especially happy to have another chance to promote Murderbot. 

Any playwrights out there, consider submitting your monologue, the winner gets $100 and anybody from anywhere in the world can submit their work.

NYCPlaywrights seeks monologues on the theme "Black Woman Genius"

NYCPlaywrights seeks monologues.

THE DEADLINE IS SUNDAY NOVEMBER 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM.

The theme is "Black Woman Genius."

In November 2024, NYCPlaywrights began the "Resisting Fascism" project. The winning piece was a monologue, THE 92% by Bryan-Keyth Wilson that highlighted the fact that 92% of Black American women voters did not vote for Trump - and their intelligence and wisdom are increasingly clear.

The murder of Charlie Kirk was horrific, but that does not erase the fact that  he said hateful things like this:

“If we would have said three weeks ago [...] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're comin' out and they're saying it for us! They're comin' out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action.

Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

Kirk dropped out of community college to become a full-time political pundit, while the Black women he attacked graduated from Harvard and  Princeton and Yale.

And so this call for submissions seeks monologues on the theme of Black Woman Genius. 

SEMI-FINALIST SCRIPTS

NYCPlaywrights will select as semi-finalists as many of the scripts that we like and which meet the submission guidelines.

The semi-finalists will be listed on this blog and an excerpt from each monologue (if permission is granted by the playwright) will be displayed in a blog post, one per day, along with any website links or other contact information the author wishes to share. 

The semi-finalist script selections will be announced Sunday, January 4, 2026. 

THE WINNING MONOLOGUE

The winning monologue will be selected from the semi-finalist monologues. The winning monologue will be recorded with an actor and an excerpt of the recording will be posted on NYCPlaywrights.org and on the NYCPlaywrights YouTube channel (if permission is granted by the playwright) along with author and actor contact information, biographies, etc.

The author of the winning monologue will receive an award of $100. 

The award-winner will be announced Sunday, January 18, 2026. Excerpts from the semi-finalist scripts will begin posting that day one monologue per day, and the winning monologue will be posted after all the semi-finalist monologues have been posted.

💡 THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 💡

Failure to follow guidelines will result in your script being rejected.

As always, there is no fee for submissions. 

• The deadline is November 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM EST.

• All rights will remain with the playwright.

• Monologues must be no more than two pages long, using standard 12-point text size and line-spacing.

• Send only one monologue script per author to genius@nycplaywrights.org.

• The monologue script must be submitted by the author of the script, no agents or others may submit. 

• The monologue script submission should be sent by email, with the script itself as a file attached to the email.

• The file format of the monologue script should be .pdf because it will retain your original script formatting.

• Make sure you have your name and your email address on the script.

• Plays can be submitted by anybody, from anywhere in the world but must be primarily in English (a few non-English phrases are acceptable, but the phrases must include English translations in production notes or stage directions.)

• A play that has had a production is acceptable.

• A play that has been published is not acceptable.

• There will be no money awarded for selected scripts except for the winning monologue.

• NYCPlaywrights' decisions are final.

• Any questions email info@nycplaywrights.org

PLEASE NOTE: when you submit your play, you should get an automatic response that says:

***

Thank you for sending your monologue to the NYCPlaywrights “BLACK WOMAN GENIUS” project.

The semi-finalist script selections will be announced Sunday, January 4, 2026.

The award-winner will be announced Sunday, January 18, 2026.

Nancy at NYCPlaywrights

***

If you don't receive the automatic response, email us at info@nycplaywrights.org to check if we received your script.

Please note:

• The monologues must be dramatic - we love facts, but the monologue must not simply be a lecture on some aspect of history or current events. A dramatic monologue should have an emotional impact and often will tell a story. We'd like to see creativity and invention.

• The call for submissions is open to any person, anywhere in the world. 

• Although the theme is Black Woman Genius, the character speaking in the monologue does not necessarily have to be a Black woman.

• Although this is a serious subject, you do not have to be grim. We welcome humor and playfulness, and we are just as interested in hopeful monologues, and anticipating a brighter future as much as we are in the injustices of the past and present.

DATE RECAP

• November 30, 2025 - submission deadline
• January 4, 2026 - semi-finalists announced
• January 18, 2026 - the winning monologue will be announced and then each day an excerpt from one of the semi-finalist monologues will be posted. 

Some genius prompts:

• Ida B. Wells, investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement.
• Aretha Franklin, voted Rolling Stone's greatest singer of all time - "a work of genius" (#2 is Whitney Houston)
• Valerie Brown, the first Black woman animated character on American television, resident genius of  the 1970s cartoon "Josie and the Pussycats"
• Alena Analeigh Wicker, in 2021, became the youngest person to intern for NASA
• Simone Biles, athletic genius
• Wanda Sykes, stand-up comedian, actor and writer
• Angela Davis, philosopher and political activist
• Dr. Ayda Mensah, character performed by Noma Dumezweni, the brilliant team leader and "favorite human" of Murderbot, from the sci-fi books and AppleTV+ series.
• Lorraine Hansberry, the young, gifted and Black playwright
• Kamala Harris, America’s first woman, Black and South Asian vice president, became the Democratic presidential candidate half-way through the 2024 campaign when Biden bowed out. She drew record-breaking crowds during her campaign and accurately predicted that Trump would use the US military against US citizens.

Hudes, or Change: deadbeat dads and allegory

Continuing from the previous post.

I think people in the arts are fascinated by Kathy Chang because she was a big talker. That's the reason why people in the arts and on the Left are fans of Bernie Sanders. He talks big, like the time, during his 2016 presidential campaign, when he told the New York Daily News he wanted to "break up the banks" but when pressed for details on how to do that, he had nothing. Which doesn't seem to bother Sanders fans, which includes Chang's friend Anita King, who never shut up about how corrupt Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were during the 2016 presidential campaign until I unfriended her on Facebook.

While we were still speaking, King attested to the political affinity.

Bernie Sanders has something in common with my ex - they were both, at least for periods of time in their lives, deadbeat dads. Sanders' ex-girlfriend and child ended up receiving welfare, although Sanders, a white man with a college degree could certainly have found a job that paid well enough to support his kid. But, like my ex, Sanders preferred to devote himself to politics. 

Unlike my ex, Sanders eventually found himself a living-wage career through politics. Although I will say, there are few people who live to see their fondest dream come true, like my ex did when marijuana began to be legalized all around the United States.

Chang may be considered a performance artist, but her art was almost always in the language of politics. For example:

I am running on a platform of complete social transformation.

The problems we are faced with today: crime, unemployment,

poverty, battered women, abused children, pollution,

environmental degradation, national insolvency, and budget

deficits, and so on, cannot be solved within the present

economic and political framework, because that framework

is in itself the fundamental problem and the cause of all the other

problems. The present government is so corrupt and tied

up with anti-democratic procedures that it cannot reform

itself. The only way to reform the system is to simply

dissolve the system and start all over with a great national

conference to create a new society...

"...simply dissolve the system and start all over with a great national conference to create a new society."

It's perfect that sentence contains "simply." 

Hudes' play includes Kathy/Jenn's death, which is not shown on stage, and then later one of the characters has a magic realism moment with an apparition of Jenn, during which Jenn says some Kathy Chang style things. Huldes also directly quotes Chang:

RUBY: Jenn should have held up. Occupy would've been her moment. I dug up one of her old banners: "In case of financial collapse, party in the streets!" 

It's true that Occupy was a lot like Chang: a big-talking public nuisance that did nothing to actually improve the lives of others. But got a lot of attention.

But indirectly thanks to Chang, I came to rely on the very real social safety net that had existed for fifty years, because the Democratic Party made it happen, through boring old non-revolutionary politics. The same Democratic Party that many Bernie Sanders supporters disparage as identical to Republicans.

That is why I dislike the use of Chang and her death as a symbol for hope and for positive social change. I believe Chang killed herself, at age 46, because the rewards for her performances were fading and she did not want to, or could not do anything else. And because no goddam person in her life would help her with her dental problems. 

Fun fact: dental care is part of Obamacare, which exists thanks to the Democratic Party. But the far Left hates Obama for not achieving the completely socialized healthcare of their dreams, so they don't care how many lives were saved by Obamacare. 

So really you could say Occupy was Kathy Chang's moment, since Obamacare first appeared in 2010, just ahead of Occupy in 2011. She could have partied at Occupy without tooth decay.

Chang did not only do protests, she was involved in theater, at least to the extent that she had performed in a production of "The Year of the Dragon" written by her then-husband Frank Chin, a fairly well-known playwright. Her response to the end of their 5-year marriage was to try to kill herself.

Chin and Chang in performance 1978

And Chang wrote a play which was performed and videotaped in 1991. It's called The Transformation and it's as allegorical as a medieval morality play. There's Uncle Sam, there's a character representing third-world poverty, there's Mother Nature, the Military-Industrial Complex, etc. It has all the coherence and self-discipline of her speeches, that is, very little. 

But it's interesting that she wrote it and I'm impressed she got anybody to perform it. I've watched it and the basic plot starts from the clash of these various Humors but then evolves into sex bringing characters together and by the end of the play the cast is semi-naked and chanting and dancing in a circle.

At the end of the play, Chang displays her extremely romanticized view of pre-Industrial Native American society.

MOTHER EARTH 

 

Think back. Think back. Before the Europeans landed. There are no skyscrapers and streets. No highways and electric wires. No, just trees and forests everywhere. Forest full of wild animals. Coyotes. Dear. Bear. Bobcats. Wolves. Natives. Lenni Lenape. Algonquin.  Hopi. Cherokee. Chippewa. The streams are jumping with fish. You hunt with bow and arrows. No guns. You live off fruits and berries and herbs. You grow corn and squash and peas. You worship the earth and are careful not to bite the hand that feeds you. You don't squander my resources.

I don't know if Chang was completely ignorant of the fact that pre-European contact North America was not a peaceable vegetarian kingdom, and that indigenous people ate meat, sometimes human meat and warred against each other plenty without the aid of guns, or if she just doesn't care. But what she is advocating is "going back in time" to this Garden of Eden fantasy.

If Chang had not killed herself, she would be 72 years old now. If she hadn't killed herself when she did, the way she did, I doubt people in the arts would care about her. 

My ex wrote on his blog:

Kathy killed herself on the University of Pennsylvania campus in 1996. Visually and physically like the Buddhist monks of Vietnam, she poured gasoline over herself and her robes and set herself on fire. The political effect was unlike that of the monks. The world did not sit up and take notice. The country did not erupt into revolution.

My ex seems to believe Chang's rhetoric, that she killed herself in that way to bring on the Revolution, and he mourns that she did not achieve her goal.  

I think she killed herself that way so that people would remember her, and in that she has been wildly successful. Being included in a play by a Pulitzer-prize winner is probably her greatest success yet.

More about that in the next post.

Speaking of Obama

One of the best presidents of all time. The opposite of that evil freak Trump

YAY OBAMA!

Will this Canadian lawlessness never end?

Canada is a country so lacking in real scandals that their news media has to get its scandals anywhere it can. It's especially a problem since Canadian media looks south and sees that Donald Trump probably breaks the law more in a typical week than Justin Trudeau has done in his lifetime.

I really think that the press holds good people who are politicians - like Trudeau and Hillary Clinton and Obama and Macron - to a much higher standard than assholes like Trump. 

Anyway, so the Canadian media takes any little thing they can and blows it up into a scandal.

The latest is that Trudeau ate a chocolate bar during a Conservative filibuster.

Just stop, Canada. Count your blessings and stop.

The problem with Rose Twitter

I've been a life-long liberal and often criticize the Right and Far Right and Alt-Right - and their enablers like Steven Pinker - on this blog.

But I also have a problem with the Far Left.

As much as I would like to believe that only the Right has a problem with living in their own Bizarro World, it's undeniable that the Far Left is almost as bad.

This was underlined for me when I encountered so many supporters of Bernie Sanders who were completely unconcerned about the practical, real-world conditions that might prevent Sanders from achieving all their socialist dreams, should he be elected. They seemed to assume Sanders would simply wave a magic wand and all Republican opposition, to things like single-payer healthcare, would disappear, unlike that loser Obama, who was not sufficiently able to magically alter time and space enough to please Berniebros and their handmaidens.

And they often became enraged with anyone who had the bad form to point out the practical real world problems.

But long before Berniebros it was clear to me that the Far Left would never find acceptable any person capable of winning enough votes to become president of the United States. 

And here is a member of Rose Twitter (socialists on Twitter who indicate their position with a red rose icon) to illustrate my point exactly.

UPDATE: except, apparently, John Quincy Adams. But I am sure that had Elizabeth and the other  Berniebros & handmaidens been around during the JQ Adams presidency they would not be content that he simply "opposed" slavery, they would be asking why he didn't immediately, successfully abolish slavery upon becoming president. 

More pix of 21st century men

This cafeteria is where the infamous Cordon Bleu incident occurred. Please note the sign above Macron.

Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie

So many adorable pix of Trudeau & Obama - this is one of my favorites

Very recent Macron pic shared by his official photographer on Instagram

Young Obama

Speaking of 21st Century men - Obama was such a cutie in college.

Nice pix of 21st Century Men

It's nice to remember that there are plenty of men who are not misogynist creeps in the world, and sometimes they even hold the reigns of power. That must really bug the misogynist creeps who believe that the best path to success for a man is to treat women as lesser beings.

I posted the photos below not only because I admire the subjects but because I think the photos stand on their own aesthetic merits.

Nice to remember we once had a president who could run. This was taken by Obama's official photographer Pete Souza.

This recent one of Justin Trudeau is very cool - if I hadn't known it was taken by official Trudeau photographer Adam Scotti I might not have guessed the subject's identity. 

Very nice composition by official Macron photographer Soazig de la Moissonnière. She can be seen working in the documentary about Macron's presidential campaign Les coulisses de la victoire.

Claire Lehmann & Jordan Peterson & other Quilletters

Dummies understand each other. That's why we see alt-right Claire Lehmann supporting wacko alt-right Jordan Peterson, on the "Conservatism" Youtube channel.

I have developed a strong aversion to the Australian dialect and it must be due to Lehmann. I used to think the dialect was charming when I heard Steve Irwin speak.

Here is Jordan Peterson in Time Magazine explaining his genius theory on why "Frozen" is propaganda:

INTERVIEWER

In your new book 12 Rules For Life, you’re very critical of Frozen. Why do you call it “deeply propagandistic”? 

PETERSON

It attempted to write a modern fable that was a counter-narrative to a classic story like, let’s say, Sleeping Beauty — but with no understanding whatsoever of the underlying archetypal dynamics. You could say that Sleeping Beauty was raised out of her unconsciousness via a delivering male. Another way of reading the story is that unconsciousness requires active consciousness as an antidote. And the unconsciousness is symbolized in that particular story by femininity and active consciousness by masculinity. I could hardly sit through Frozen. There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Oh my god. The Mary Sue has a good response:

 Peterson tips his hand and reveals that he seems to be angry because Frozen has a plot twist.

Isn’t the darkness and the light in Elsa, who has the power to freeze things, for good or ill? 

The most propagandistic element of Frozen was the transformation of the prince at the beginning of the story who was a perfectly good guy, into a villain with no character development whatsoever about three-quarters of the way to the ending. 

He was a villain the whole time! He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing! 

That’s how it turned out in the end, but there was no indication of that at the beginning. 

That’s good story craft — not tipping your hand. Like The Crying Game. 

It’s certainly possible that I’m wrong about Frozen, although I don’t think so. 

I’m sorry. This is just the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. First off, he totally dodged Luscombe’s question about Elsa, because she is rather obviously correct that Frozen looks at both the light and darkness of having power—especially female power in a world that is afraid of it. 

But then we get this gem about Prince Hans: “There was no indication of that in the beginning.” First of all, did we watch the same movie? Sure, the hints were subtle—but like, by children’s movie standards. Did Jordan Peterson really watch the “We finish each other’s … sandwiches!” sequence and interpret it as an earnest, deadly serious indication of true love? 

By this logic, all murder mysteries ever written are vile propaganda. The Sixth Sense is a PSA. Macbeth is a Maoist poster. M. Night Shymalan is the one true propagandist of our age. 

Now, all that said, I would certainly agree that Frozen, like pretty much all works of art, does have an artistic and a moral point of view. (As George Orwell famously said, all art is in some sense propaganda.) But I will never stop giggling at the idea that it is uniquely propagandistic among all of Disney’s animated films, just because Prince Hans turns out to be evil and the story wasn’t around when the last woolly mammoth died. Come on, now.

It's already clear that Claire Lehmann is not an especially bright individual and, perhaps as a result, she's placing her bets on patriarchy reasserting itself over feminism, possibly led by Jordan Peterson. Anybody who hasn't already concluded that Peterson is a clown is just... slow. There's no way around it.

The only possible way Quillette can survive is if Lehmann is the recipient of wingnut welfare because it's not only transparently an alt-right publication, just one step up from Lehmann's former employer Rebel Media, it has a ridiculously amateurish and right-wing line-up of writers.

Currently on Quillette's front page:

• Saloni Dattani - MSc student in behaviour genetics at the University of London

• Jack Staples-Butler - recent History graduate, unemployed receptionist

• Matthew Blackwell - currently completing a BA in Economics and Anthropology at The University of Queensland.

• William C. Vaillancourt - a recent graduate, majored in Poli-sci and history. Prior to Quillette on his resume he lists Independent Journalism Review, which was founded by a Republican operative and peddled a conspiracy theory about Obama.

• Nick Ottens - one of the very few legit, informed & not obviously right-wing authors

• Genevieve Weynerowski - a copywriter - fan of Pinker, Sam Harris, Jonathan Kay

• Brad Cran - poet - based on his Twitter feed loves women who hate feminists: Lehmann, Sommers, Cathy Young, Bari Weiss

• Lisa Marchiano - "Jungian analyst" who likes to retweet Jordan Peterson and Quillette articles

• Brandon J. Weichert - right-wing MAGAt.

• Kirio Birks - a postgraduate student with B.A. in Philosophy 

• S. A. Dance - teaches high school, also writes for right-wing The Federalist

• Michael Shermer - hereditarian, New Atheist creep

• Nicola Wright - writes and edits content for LibertyWorks a right-wing Australian rag

• David Johnson is an independent writer from the UK with a degree in Philosophy and a Master’s degree in IT.  Writes a blog under the name of David Hansard...  Right-winger

• Elio Martino - a provisional psychologist, whose only writing credits appear to be hereditarian twaddle for Quillette

• Stuart Reges - Principal Lecturer at the University of Washington where he manages the introductory computer science classes

Basically anybody who works cheap and supports the hereditarian or alt-right view of the world (and those are in agreement more often than not) will be published by Quillette, which presumably pays very little.

Also of the sixteen writers above, only four are women, and that's a huge improvement over its gender ratio from a month ago. Of those, one, Nicola Wright is a hard-core right-winger, one is Pinker's #1 fan-girl (Saloni Dattani) and the other two were probably just thrilled to be published anywhere.

When Lehmann was still working for Rebel Media she wrote a piece in Quillette defending Trump voters:

Depending on how you spin it, however, low information people might also be less prone to rationalization and high information people might be more vulnerable to ad hoc hypothesizing. Being high in intelligence or a need for cognition does not automatically indicate that one is high in rationality. Nor does it tell us much about a person’s practical wisdom.

I think Claire Lehmann has lots of empathy for low-information people. She just better hope she gets a plutocratic sugar daddy to support her amateur alt-right apologetics.

And now a message for Jordan Peterson:

Ayn Rand & Steven Pinker

One of those discussing my work re: Steven Pinker over at Steve Sailer's column at Unz, "PhysicistDave" went off-topic to talk about my commentary about Ayn Rand.

Ms. McLernan has a psychologically interesting (negative) fixation on Ayn Rand, which results in some (unintentionally) funny remarks. E.g., 

One of the useful aspects of Ayn Rand is that she hid nothing of what she thought – thanks to her own inability to dissemble (which I suspect is the result of her undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome)…

Note: McLernan is attacking Rand because of Rand’s supposed inability to lie. Alas, anyone who is aware of the details of the famous Rand/Branden affair (as McLernan is) knows that Rand was capable of lying through her teeth. (I suppose McLernan would claim that Rand was not very good at it!)

What a bizarre thing to believe - that I attacked Ayn Rand because of her inability to lie. Who would believe that about even their worst enemy? They attack people for their honesty.

And how do I "attack" her? By suggesting she had Asperger's? 

Right-wing racists really do think differently from the rest of us.

The entire remark I made about Rand's inability to dissemble is here:

One of the useful aspects of Ayn Rand is that she hid nothing of what she thought - thanks to her own inability to dissemble (which I suspect is the result of her undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome) combined with her publisher's disinclination to edit Atlas Shrugged for fear of a Rand tantrum resulting in the loss of income, we get a pure unfiltered hit of the belief that: 

(quoting Corey Robin here)

a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.

Boy howdy, is that the essence of the Rand world-view. And because she was such a bad novelist, not only is the world of Atlas Shrugged ugly, brutish and dull, as the result of the tyranny of the worser men over the better, but the worser men themselves are ugly, brutish and dull.

PhysicistDave mentions my play with a Rand character, DARK MARKET. 

Thanks to the Trump administration I dropped that play, for now anyway. The bad decisions of Alan Greenspan influenced in part by Ayn Rand seemed like a big deal during the Obama administration, but they seem like nothing compared to the treasonous insanity of the Trump administration, so it doesn't seem worth talking about right now. Once the Trump administration is over... hopefully soon...

Anyway as far as Ayn Rand's inability to lie: she could not dissemble about her "premises." And dissembling is not the precise same thing as lying.

But also as these statements from September 1968 make clear, Rand had help when lying about her affair with Branden - including from Alan Greenspan. It's my understanding that after this letter she refused to talk about Nathaniel Branden at all. So she'd hardly have an opportunity to lie, alone and off-the-cuff, about the Branden affair.

I certainly did write a lot about Ayn Rand on this blog for a period of a couple of years, but for the past almost two months my fixation is on Steven Pinker and his connections to the alt-right, which very much includes his connection to Steve Sailer.

While looking at other comments on Sailer's post, I was amused to see echoes of what others, including me have been saying:

Yes I agree that Pinker is crafty about where he stops defending honest people by name, and switches to a broad-based blanket-defence, simply arguing for allowing honest discussion of all viewpoints. So for example he was willing to defend Lawrence Summers by name, but only would defend Jason Richwine and James Watson in a general sense. So, yes, he does scamper away when the SJW lynch-parties get truly fierce. Is that smart or cowardly, or a little bit of both?

I believe the mot juste is "weaselly."

The most telling aspect of Pinker's denial that he agrees with racialists about black intelligence, I think, is that he never explains why he thinks the racialists are wrong. It's a pretty important issue, you'd think he would address it. Instead he consistently pivots to talking about the meanies who criticize, for instance, The Bell Curve, for its racism.

But isn't it nice that I can find common ground on at least this one thing with people I agree with about nothing else?

I discover more about Canada: meet Tabatha Southey & Jonathan Kay's mom

I didn't even know who Justin Trudeau was until he came to the United States in early 2016 and such a big deal was made about his bromance with Obama. But even that barely registered. It was sort of like, oh, I guess they have a new Prime Minister in Canada now and he's young and handsome and gets along well with the President.

It took the election of Donald Trump to really make me appreciate Canada and Justin Trudeau.

There were so many things I didn't know about Canada until the past year. For instance, the capital is Ottawa, not Toronto. Did you know that? If you're like most Americans, you didn't. Here are Americans being asked who Justin Trudeau is right after he was elected.

So of course I had no idea who Tabatha Southey was.

While researching Steve Pinker's connections to the alt-right I came to realize that Quillette, which he frequently linked to from Twitter (although at this point not since January 31), was not only frequently running pro-evolutionary psychology articles but was running evo-psycho articles by people who not only believe in the innate intellectual inferiority of blacks, but in some cases believe that black people are also more innately criminal than other "races." Those people happen to be American college professors specializing in Criminal Justice. Some of them had also appeared on alt-right Stefan Molyneux's Youtube channel. A couple of their articles for Quillette have been reposted at white supremacist American Renaissance.

So my antennae have been out for Quillette content on Twitter, and when I came across Tabatha Southey's comment,  festooned with a Great Auk, I naturally Liked and Retweeted it. And naturally got into arguments with people who attacked her on the thread. But for all I knew she was just some random person with good taste.

And even when Jonathan Kay (who I knew of only because he ghost-wrote Justin Trudeau's "Common Ground") and his fellow Quillette author Debrah Soh, (whom I had also never heard of prior to this string of events) were freaking out about Southey's remark about Quillette, days later, I still wasn't clued in.

Then I Googled her. Turns out she's a big fucking deal in the Canadian literary scene. And has been for at least over a decade. So big that according to Kay, Ezra Levant even attacked her on Sun News (the video is unfortunately no longer available.) And she in turn has written about Levant. I'm surprised I didn't read that piece, because I was Googling for stories about Levant at that time in connection with the awful events of Charlottesville.

And now I realize I have already linked to an article by Southey on this blog on January 28, a piece in Maclean's which asks the immortal question: Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man's smart person?

Which Hackette's hacks are still mad about.

Jonathan Kay sniffed that the Effin Birds project isn't funny but actually it is. I don't think Kay has much of a sense of humor though. Southey made good use of his Tweet.

In turns out that Kay is pretty vicious: he told people to block me on Twitter saying I was "Not right above the shoulders" in response to my pointing out that Quillette provides wingnut welfare to hacks. Although since he is a three-time (so far) author at Quillette, I don't suppose his response was exactly a calm and disinterested assessment of my rightness above the shoulders.

I posted that on my Twitter and asked if he's always been that vicious. I was told he was like his mother, a Canadian right-winger, except she is "even worse." 

This is Kay's mother. No surprise she's a fan of Christina "Koch hack" Sommers and Jordan "lobster man" Peterson.

I sure have learned a lot about Canadians in the past year.

Anyway, back to Southey - in spite of Kay's comment she is still quite funny. The funniest I've found so far is from a couple of years ago. I LOL'd.

For a while when I was a little girl, my older brother and I made a lot of underwear jokes. We were like the George Burns and Gracie Allen of undergarments, only loud, and our routines were mostly just one of us saying the word "underwear," and the other one laughing; anyone else saying the word "underwear" could easily set us off as well.
Getting us dressed in the morning took forever. Trips to the laundromat were so gleeful, it was like the dryers emitted laughing gas. Finally, my poor mother reached the end of her knicker-quip tether, and this is what she did: One Saturday morning she took all the underwear in the house: mine, my brother's, hers and my dad's Y-fronts – a cotton comedy cornerstone right there – and she put them all on my parents' bed and basically said, "You have until sundown, go nuts." And that's what we did, and then, almost miraculously, we were done with underwear. 

And so I'm going to offer the world a chance to do much the same now. World, you have one week to make Hot Justin Trudeau jokes, and enjoy sexy-world-leader innuendo with impunity. Please make the most of this week and then, come Nov. 1, let's be done with this. 

You want to say, "Whoa, I'd respect his arctic sovereignty," this is your moment.
Dying to shout, "Man, I'd enter that into my Hansard," when images of Justin Trudeau come on the TV screen at your local bar, you go right ahead. 

Any journalists thinking of asking, "Hey, soon-to-be-prime mister, did it hurt when you fell from heaven, and do you feel that the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affected your rate of descent?" at Mr. Trudeau's next press conference, this is your time. 

Want to comment, "I know he's prime minister but he's welcome to be chief of my staff" on the next news article you see speculating about the Trudeau cabinet picks, by all means, do so now. 

Ditto "I'd like to be first past his post," and "I'll bet that's a right honourable member."

Although perhaps my laugh was partly out of guilt since I have been known to say that Justin Trudeau can eat my poutine any time.

And this piece about Damore is brilliant.

While he’s hardly alone, Damore’s laborious effort provides indisputable evidence of the attitudes that many women in STEM face. When a woman submits her resume, she knows it may be read by a Damore. When she negotiates a raise—an arena in which she’s damned if she does and, as the Google memo explains, too innately high in “agreeableness” if she doesn’t—she weighs the possibility that she’s negotiating with a Damore. When a woman takes maternity leave, she wonders how many of her colleagues are Damores, dismissing her as someone innately lacking the “drive for status.” 

Damores are everywhere. Great flocks of Damores perch in their offices—or worse, on the corner of your desk when you’re up to your neck in stack traces—depositing their opinions on IQ differences on passersby and filling the air with their cry of “Women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.”