Too white? Too male? Too straight? Too bad - Guest Post by Bill McCusker
Bill McCusker defends the authors and artists whose work helped build civilization
It is an honor to present this guest post by my friend William McCusker, a contributor to World Net Daily (WND). This essay first appeared in WND and with Bill’s encouragement and permission, enjoy it here at Frederick R. Smith Speakes.
Too white? Too male? Too straight? Too bad
When school boards, teachers and librarians cancel “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Huckleberry Finn,” yet soil themselves over others removing a book from grade school libraries just because it shows young boys fellating each other – it might be time for some rational reflection.
In recent years, I have had the opportunity to read Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” Euripides’ plays, Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” and other literary gems. I have listened to the remarkable Renaissance compositions of Palestrina and most of Mozart’s symphonies and concertos. I dusted off a few volumes of my old Time-Life art series and was again astounded by the paintings, sculptures and architectural wonders of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and other Italian Masters. I marveled once more at the works of Monet, Renoir, Manet, Sisley, Pizarro, Gauguin and other French impressionists.
How does one describe this small sample of artistic achievement? Genius? Extraordinary insight into the human condition? Remarkable beauty? Divine inspiration?
Sadly, these masterpieces are increasingly condemned for being the hateful, sexist, racist, homophobic, colonialist, Eurocentric, transphobic, etc. products of dead white men – deserving not praise but scorn, not study but cancellation.
In a recent video, a public school teacher belched self-praise for striking Homer from the literature syllabus. At the University of Pennsylvania, an image of Shakespeare in the English department was replaced with that of a black lesbian poet. Not to be outdone, high schools and colleges nationwide have tossed Shakespeare aside. Dickens, Joyce, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Dante and Goethe don’t stand a chance.
Hollywood has declared that any movie to be considered for the Best Picture Academy Award must now include the requisite numbers of underrepresented people in its production. Actor Richard Dreyfuss said that such a paint-by-numbers scheme imposed on art makes him “want to vomit.” He said artists should not be forced to pander to any group. Refreshing, perhaps, but on how small of an island does Dreyfuss stand?
Looking ahead, will producers, publishers and curators next say “no thanks” to works of art falling short of de rigueur diversity quotas? They already are; see Disney. Looking back, will existing books, scripts and images be altered to comply with preferred racial, gender and gender identity standards? That, too, proceeds apace.
(Hmm … speaking of remaking the past, one wonders what the Philadelphia Flyers did with the Kate Smith statue. An icon one moment, gone the next. Her crime? Singing “God Bless America,” way back when the Flyers were Stanley Cup contenders, about the time Ben Franklin was flying his kite. And she wasn’t even a white guy).
What’s next? Remaking “The Godfather” so that Michael and Fredo are gay? Making the “Mona Lisa” Asian? Retouching a few apostles in da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” so that drag queens have a seat at the table? Giving a little top surgery to a bather or two of Rubens? Using a chisel to turn Michelangelo’s David into a birthing person? It’s becoming very hard to exaggerate.
Imagine shunning a miracle cure because it was invented by a straight white male. Similarly, imagine throwing onto some 21st-century trash heap the priceless legacy of a civilization’s masterworks because they were created by artists belonging to a race, gender, or sexual preference now out of favor.
Instead of canceling them, our new-age philistines should bow down in awe to these masters in appreciation and celebration of the extraordinary gifts they have given to the world’s generations following them.
Too white? Too male? Too straight?
Too frickin’ bad.
Bill McCusker is an author, speaker, and retired business leader. He lives in New Jersey.
The point of all this is to tear western civilization down past it's foundations. They are just getting warmed up I think. They don't care about what people over 30 think about any of this because the target audience for this is young and very impressionable people. THEY know that if they have these peoples minds in their thrall the future is theirs. The quality of society has always been dependent on how well we, supposedly wise, adults pass on truth, beauty, and wisdom to the next generation. This process so essential to the continuity of civilization has had a wrecking ball taken to it by the hijacking of almost all education and its transformation into pure manipulation and mind control. The actual techniques of mind manipulation are part of nearly every public school curriculum now in the form of "social and emotional learning" (SEL they call it) and every other technique in the book. This is the culmination of a century of psychological research into how to manipulate and control the masses. Parents send their precious children into this psychological meat grinder everyday and wonder why they are becoming strangers? Anyway, this is the Kabbalist philosophy of "creative destruction" on full and very effective display. I wish more people could understand that this is the final battle in a war that we seem to be losing. They believe they must destroy everything to build their, Phoenix rising from the ashes, New World Order.
It all started by destroying the tarnished images of the South. I wonder how well these nincompoops will weather the future. Thankfully I won't be around to see how far the little social experiment will go. I think we're in the Twilight Zone when George Floyd is a paragon of virtue and Robert E. Lee is a scumbag. Our silence, driven by the fear of being called a racist, has brought us to a very dark ugly place.