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“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”

Last updated on: August 29, 2017 at 3:34 pm by Dan Peterson

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold” 2017-08-29T15:34:46-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A scene from the last phase of Ragnarök, after Surtr has engulfed the world with fire. Emil Doepler’s illustration (ca. 1905) apparently represents the burning of Ásgarðr or Asgard. (Wikimedia CC)

This is pretty funny:

“Thor: The Dark World Comedy Central Loki Promos”

***

But this may not be a joke:

“Trans-Age is Now a Thing?”

(Thanks — I guess — to Doug Ealy for bringing it to my attention.)

Here’s some other material on the story:

“‘I’ve gone back to being a child’: Husband and father-of-seven, 52, leaves his wife and kids to live as a transgender SIX-YEAR-OLD girl named Stefonknee”

Something from two years ago:

The Trans-Aged Deserve Equal Rights, Too

And this:

“Trans-Gendered, Trans-Raced, Trans-Abled, Trans-Aged, Trans-Specied Solipsists”

Does anybody know whether this is real? It seems too outlandish to be true, but, on the other hand, I haven’t yet seen evidence that it’s not.

What a wonderful world!

This is also relevant:

“Forcing Transgender Ideology on Kindergartens”

And, as a bonus, I toss this in, too (beware of vulgar language):

“Activist Demands Reparations for All ‘Fat, Black’ Women”

***

A relevant item that was published in the Deseret News:

“Latter-day Saints — beware the false god of ‘history'”

***

I really liked this article in the Weekly Standard from two weeks ago, written by the magazine’s editor:

“Playing Defense”

It expresses some of my feelings about the Trump administration.

I’ll give credit where credit is due, though. As I’ve said before, I love the elevation of Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States. And there have been some other good things. From what I hear, for example, the federal response to Hurricane Harvey has been quite well orchestrated — in contrast to some other relatively recent efforts by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and similar groups. If so, I’m happy.

***

In other political (or quasi-political) news, this didn’t please me:

“Orpheum Theatre pulls summer movie over racial concerns”

It reminds me of some efforts a few years back to ban Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer because Mark Twain used language — notably, the “N-word” — that is very much disapproved and out of fashion nowadays.

“Huck Finn: Controversy over removing the ‘N word’ from Mark Twain novel”

“Cutting N-word from Twain is not censorship”

“A Few Words In Defense of the N-Word, in the Novels of Mark Twain”

“Censoring Mark Twain’s ‘n-words’ is unacceptable”

“Don’t censor Mark Twain’s N word”

The irony is that Mark Twain was, for his day and place, strikingly sympathetic to the humanity of black people.

And there’s an irony about attempts to ban Gone with the Wind on racial grounds: In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first black American to win an Academy Award (“Best Supporting Actress”) for her role in the movie.

David O. Selznick, head of MGM Studios, asked that McDaniel be permitted to attend the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind, but Georgia’s segregation laws made that impossible. As a result, Clark Gable threatened to boycott the festivities unless McDaniel were allowed to attend, but she convinced him to attend anyway. And then, when she died of breast cancer at only 57 (in 1952), she was refused burial in Hollywood Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard (the final resting place of such stars as Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino) because it had a rule against accepting the remains of black people for burial.

I become quite uneasy at attempts to erase the past — whether by dismantling statues or censoring literature — and to make everything politically correct and bland.

It’s important to know that people haven’t always thought the way that we do. That’s one of the reasons to read works from other cultures and other periods. Doing so expands the mind. Beowulf wasn’t a metrosexual. Miss Elizabeth Bennett wasn’t an aspiring corporate lawyer. Iago isn’t a good role model for community relationships. Achilles and Odysseus thought a little differently than most of us do today. But it’s worthwhile trying to think ourselves into their worlds.

L. P. Hartley’s immortal line is always worth keeping in mind: “”The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

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