Reheated (10)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives. 

Fringe Theatre. 

Vegan advocate of “militant action” is victim of “militant action” and gets terribly upset.

“The whole thing was designed for social humiliation,” said Keith, speaking Tuesday from her sister’s home in Kansas. “We’re supposed to be against sadism and cruelty and domination, and these people were willing to do this to me.”

Is That Your Hand In My Pocket? 

Playwright Jonathan Holmes thinks he’s radical and heroic. And so you owe him money.

Note how the prospect of reducing coercive taxpayer subsidy is framed rather grandly as “censorship” of artists - and by implication an attack on democracy itself. No other genuine motive could possibly exist. Those who would rather keep a little more of their own earnings and choose for themselves which art forms they indulge are clearly monsters. We’ve heard this pompous guff before of course, as when Hanif Kureishi and the Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington conjured a world in which artistic “dissent” was being “suppressed” by suggestions that artists might actually consider earning a living.

Unlearning Whiteness.

Evidence be damned. Pretentious self-contempt is where it’s at.

Among the teachings on offer are, “racism is an outgrowth of capitalism” and “to ignore race is to be more racist than to acknowledge race. I call it neo-racism.” Ah, very clever. Guilt in all directions. It almost sounds like a trap. And the way to get past small differences in physiology is to continually fixate on small differences in physiology.

There’s more, of course, in the greatest hits.