Culture

The Satanic Temple is petitioning the City of Boston to fly their newly designed Satanic flag over City Hall. After a court ruled that the city had to fly a Christian group’s flag, the Temple insisted that it also had the right to display its banner during “Satanic Appreciation Week” from July 23 to 29. According to Lucien Greaves, the Temple’s founder, “A public forum that allows for religious expression can either announce a dedication to religious pluralism or it can signal a decline into theocracy by allowing public representatives to dictate limits on the civic capacities of some religious identities by exercising exclusive preference for others.” If Mr.

Cockburn could not be more unnerved. He just happened to catch a clip of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on RuPaul's All Stars Drag Race. Not to be confused with actual drag racing, with cars that blur by quickly, the 100-second-clip, like Pelosi herself, dragged on slowly and painfully. But for once — or twice, this is her second time on the show — Nancy wasn't the most artificially made-up person in the room. What Pelosi told the "queens" was also um, something: My honor to be here, to say to all of you how we proud we are of you. Thank you for the joy and beauty you bring to the world. Your freedom of expression of yourselves in drag is what America is all about. I say that all the time to my friends in drag.

Twenty-nine years ago, Congress held hearings on violent video games that descended into farce. The absurdity was best captured by Senator Joe Lieberman, who at one point pulled out a plastic arcade gun and began waving it at the witnesses (he didn't shoot them, thankfully, lest he have to insert more quarters). Lieberman, who chaired the hearing, said he was deeply concerned about violence in video games. Less so about violence in Iraq, where he voted to send American sons and daughters nine years later. Yet while the hearings have been widely ridiculed, they did give us something valuable. Fearful of government intervention (and of losing health points to Senator Lieberman), the video game industry created the Entertainment Software Rating Board.

Two days after a May 24 elementary school shooting left nineteen children and two teachers dead and another seventeen injured, the wife of Britain’s Prince Harry made an unannounced visit with her camera crew to the Texas town of Uvalde. Vanity Fair said, “She was spotted placing a bouquet of white flowers near a makeshift memorial,” not bothering to rewrite the press copy. Was spotted? In real time during the outing, aggressive publicists at Archewell were shopping and circulating copy and photos to media, getting instant pickup by Yahoo News, People, Elle, and other outlets worldwide. “The forty-year-old Duchess of Sussex — wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a blue baseball cap — reached down with her head bowed,” articles said, one after another.

Cockburn is not a parent, at least so far as his public records are concerned. However, even he knows that taking children to a Pride parade is not the best idea for a family field trip. Heather Tirado Gilligan, the author of this Fatherly article, disagrees. She writes, “Pride Parades and the Pride festivals that follow are noisy and crowded. They’re filled with sights that may be new to kids, like public nudity and kink.” If Gilligan wanted any chance at all for her point to succeed, why would she mention “public nudity” and “kink” in the first two sentences? Taking a kid to a sex parade is like bringing a baby to a gun range: it sounds just a bit like bad parenting.

The trial that captured the attention of the country — or at least a handful of TikTokers — came to an end yesterday. A Virginia jury found that actress Amber Heard defamed her ex-husband Johnny Depp and vice versa. While both parties were held to be liable, Depp was awarded $15 million in damages whereas Heard was only awarded $2 million. It was a major defeat for Heard who expressed her disappointment in a statement shortly after the verdict was read. “I’m heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband,” she said. The “mountain of evidence” Heard is referencing might not have been enough to sway the jury, but it was somehow enough for the Washington Post.

May is Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which if you work for the government or for woke capitalists, you probably already knew. It’s a time, we are told, not only to celebrate the achievements of Asian Americans, but as HR departments and Diversity, Inclusion and Equity offices declare, to help us understand the racism Asian Americans face as “persons of color.” One such example of the many trials and tribulations endured by Asian Americans as objects of micro-aggressive racist behavior is what a 2021 New York Times article referred to as “The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian.’” This apparently occurs when non-Asians misidentify one Asian for another Asian, typically in the workplace.

America is sorting itself out by class and kind, back to blood and political pedigree. The demographic trend favors the so-called red states and the metro nodes inside these dominions. Austin, Reno, and Nashville beckon. Meanwhile, academic towns like Eugene, Chapel Hill, and Burlington draw gentry blues trying to escape crazy and crime but who are not in tune with Tulsa or Fargo. For big-city emigrants, fatigue with misgovernment, ill-spent government largesse, and racial disorder are part of the picture. As much as they are seeking uncrowded real estate, runaways are searching for courts, authorities, teachers, and stable neighbors whom they can trust.

Cockburn has always said that when the going gets tough, the tough gets going…to a bar. But when the going gets tough for giant corporations — in this case, “tough” meaning $50 billion in lost subscriptions for Netflix — companies tend to get going in whatever direction will induce the mob to keep paying for their goods and services. Netflix has done just that by updating its “corporate culture memo” to let employees know they may have to work on material that triggers them. And letting them know if they don’t like it, they can leave. Over the course of the last several months, as he kept searching in a stupor for The Crown in the wee hours, Cockburn began to notice an increase in the amount of Netflix programming featuring in-your-face progressive messaging.

In the wake of comedian Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special The Closer, activists both online and off warned that Chappelle’s jokes about the trans community would lead to real-world harm, even murder. Instead the trans community has struck first by attacking Chappelle onstage. In his special, Chappelle tells the story of a trans person and friend who defended his stand-up material. Chappelle offered his friend career help by having her open for him on stage. Yet after being bullied by the trans mob for supporting Chappelle, his friend committed suicide. Earlier this week, Chappelle himself was physically attacked at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, during a comedy set that saw many famous faces, including Elon Musk and Chris Rock, in the audience.

It’s Cinco de Mayo, and if you so much as think about using this day to indulge in Chili’s Margarita of the Month, I will have you undergoing sensitivity training faster than you can say “extra salt on the rim.” You see, applying a firm image to a person, thing, or group is wrong (even if it means massive profits for our Mexican neighbors by way of 335,000 gallons of tequila consumed on a single May 5). Or at least NASCAR thinks so, as the corporation plays politically correct whack-a-mole with drivers who say things they don’t like. The latest victim of almost-cancel culture is Denny Hamlin. Last Sunday’s race at Talladega Superspeedway ended with Kyle Larson “battling for the win approaching the start-finish line,” reports the Charlotte Observer.

Recently, I came down with a severe case of climate anxiety. Not because I was worried about global warming but because the globe wasn't getting warm enough. It has been an unseasonably cold spring here on the East Coast. As recently as two weeks ago, a winter storm thrashed the Northeast, while last week the temperature here in Virginia kept getting stuck the 50s. Of course, our science-positive betters insist that a single spell of cold weather can't be used to challenge the climate change "consensus." But then they also seize upon every drought, heat wave, wildfire, hurricane, tornado, flood, derecho, hailstorm, rainstorm, power outage, riot, and coup in Myanmar to argue in favor of climate change. So no wonder some are feeling a little on edge.

How do you take your coffee? With cream? Sugar? A splash of white shame? “The unbearable whiteness of coffee” is the click- and race-baiting headline of a Fast Company article that’s making the internet rounds (my innocent online purchase of Chemex coffee filters must have prompted this suggested guilt trip). I really didn’t want my most sacred morning ritual — and bright spot of many afternoons, for that matter — to be added to the list of things I shouldn’t enjoy because it’s racist. So I poured myself a large mug of fortifying Joe — potentially my last — and gripping it tightly, read the dreaded article and did some digging.

Jesus is going to come back and we're going to ask him about The Slap aren't we. He'll be standing there, resplendent in his all his glory, preparing to feed the poor and clothe the naked, when some jamoke on an iPhone will walk up and say, "Did you see this GIF edit where it's totally Timothée Chalamet instead of Chris Rock?" Yes, our long national slapmare has now entered its third week and it shows no sign of breaking. Viral phenomena usually subside pretty quickly but Will Smith's front-hand to Chris Rock at the Oscars has proven to have legs. To show how deep the mania runs, last week I saw an electoral map breaking down which states support Smith versus Rock based on Twitter data.

The New York Times has re-discovered the religious right. In a front-page story, we learn the awful truth that there is a "right-wing political movement powered by divine purpose, whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action." They sing hymns; they pray; they burn candles. They import “their worship of God, with all its intensity, emotion and ambitions, to their political life.” Quite a few support Trump and also protest “against Covid restrictions,” among other unspeakable acts. Once, long ago, I ventured into this dark territory, not armored by the shield of New York Times-style contempt for the deplorables, but like Marlowe heading up river into the Heart of Darkness. It was a hard-won lesson.

It’s the dream of every little girl: Prince Charming rides in on a white horse and asks her to come with him. They gallop off to his castle where he takes her hand, gets down on one knee, and says... “BIPOCs and other marginalized groups face cultural genocide thanks to a patriarchy that encourages heteronormativity and ableism.” To which she sings, “When you microaggress upon a starrrrrrr...” Yes, from out of the “too tone deaf to function” file this week comes the Disney corporation, that peddler of fairytale escapism, which has now gone full woke. Its new business model appears to be as follows: Disney hikes its ticket and merchandise costs, making its theme parks increasingly unaffordable to poor and middle-class families.