Broadway and Dead White Men and the Current Race

Once again we have been shut out of the Pulitzer Prizes, a slight we’re starting to take personally, but in looking over the mostly uninspiring list of this year’s winners we were tentatively pleased to note that someone named Lin-Manuel Miranda won the drama award for a big Broadway hit called “Hamilton.” We haven’t yet seen the show, as we’re located way the hell off Broadway and are a few hundred bucks short of the price of a constantly sold-out ticket, but by all accounts and the snippets we’ve seen on YouTube it’s a hip-hop musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton, so we can’t help but love the idea.

Although we aren’t particularly avid aficionados of the hip-hop genre, save for a cherished 12″ 45-rpm copy of The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and De La Soul’s more hippie-than-hip-hop “Three Feet High and Rising” album with the Johnny Cash samples, and a few other albums that mark us as “old school,” we are huge fans of Alexander Hamilton, the most controversial and under-rated of the Founding Fathers, and we think he’d be pleased to know that after all these years he’s a hip-hop star.

The idea seems counter-intuitive at first, given that Hamilton is a Dead White Male and one of the guys who established the Establishment and created Wall Street and was arguably the man most responsible for laissez-faire American capitalism, and would surely be a Republican freaking out over the national debt if he were alive today, which is pretty much the sum of all the fashionable and hip-hoppy left’s bogeymen. On the other hand, he was born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, he did immigrate to New York City to hustle his way into some sweet gigs, he did prove his bad-ass machismo in the Revolutionary War, he did have some undeniable sex scandals, he did wind up getting fatally shot in a duel over a “dis,” and all those bling-laden and soon-to-be-shot rappers obviously aren’t entirely averse to some red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism no matter how often they vote for Democrats, so there’s definitely some hip-hop material there as well. Call it the internal contradictions of anti-capitalism.

Hamilton was also blameless of America’s original sin of slavery, too, as he never owned slaves and was outspoken in his opposition to the practice and contributed generously to abolitionist causes despite having the rather modest income of a scrupulously honest public servant, so there’s no reason that a hip-hopper can’t embrace him, or any reason to think he might refuse that embrace. Given how Hamilton embraced all sorts of good ideas from all sorts of places, even from the English systems of government and economics that he had urged and fought a revolution against, we don’t think he’d at all resent a mostly Black and Latino and Asian cast trying to find the truth of his dead white male self in what was a pretty much all-white moment in American history. When white people avail themselves of the best ideas of other people’s cultures it’s now derided as “cultural appropriation,” which is one of the dumbest ideas that’s come along since Hamilton’s time, but at least the rest of the world can still help itself to the best what of white people have come up with. Call it the internal contradictions of cultural Marxism.

The once-prestitigious Pulitzer Prize is just the latest wet kiss planted on Miranda’s face by what’s left of the cultural establishment, which has already rewarded him with countless glowing reviews and Tony Awards and a reception at the White House where the First Black President admitted he found the whole idea rather counter-intuitive, but of course there’s lately been a backlash. Nobody’s complaining about “cultural appropriation,” yet, but now some are complaining that Hamilton is still a Dead White Male no matter how hip-hoppy his story might might be, and of course others are noting that he failed to end slavery, and at Salon they’re worried the play’s popularity might prevent Hamilton from being kicked off the $10 bill to make room for a woman or better yet a woman of color and maybe even a trans-gendered woman of color. The ethnic and sexual and otherwise diversification of America’s currency could just as easily be accomplished by kicking the slave-owning and Indian-oppressing President Andrew Jackson off the twenty-note, but Jackson was the founder of the Democratic party and plunged his country into the second-worst depression ever by his populist stand against the Central Bank that Hamilton had championed, so Hamilton might have to settle for a Broadway hit and hip-hop hero status.

Sooner or later a roadshow of “Hamilton” will hit Wichita, and we’ll try to scrape the cost of a ticket, which shouldn’t be three figures by the point. We might not like the show, but we like the idea.

One of the most Pulitzer Prizer-worthy reads we’ve come across about Hamilton lately was written by The Weekly Standard’s excellent Noemi Emery, who wondered “What Would Hamilton Do” as she recalled how he swung the presidential election of 1800 to longstanding political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who championed an agrarian and aristocratic notion of individual liberty at odds with his own vision of an urban and classless notion of individual, because the alternative was Aaron Burr. Although Burr’s stated political views were far closer to Hamilton’s than were Jefferson’s, Hamilton’s personal political and professional dealings with Burr in New York City with had convinced him the alternative was “unprincipled both as a public and private man … for or against nothing but as it suits his interests or ambition,” and that “no agreement with him could be relied upon,” and that his presidency “would disgrace our country abroad,” and despite his own admitted failings he went with the flawed man who at least showed some indications of a sense of moral restraint. There was a best-selling novel by left-wing nutcase Gore Vidal about Burr, who luckily escaped two treason trials and shot Hamilton in the most cowardly way, but his life doesn’t offer the same lessons as the flawed but more admirable Hamilton.

— Bud Norman

A Blast From the Past

The youngsters among you might not appreciate the irony of Bob Woodward’s recent feud with the Obama administration. You really had to be there back in the early ‘70s, those halcyon days of the Watergate scandal when the Woodward legend was born, to fully savor its deliciousness.

Woodward was a superstar back then, famed as the late night cop reporter for the Washington Post who covered a third-rate burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters and teamed with Carl Bernstein to doggedly pursue it all the way to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The left reviled Nixon with a red-hot hatred that is difficult to describe today, although it might be likened to Bush-hatred exacerbated by an all-out culture war between the hippies and squares, and thus Woodward was revered with an equal passion by the left for his heroic role in bringing in at long last bringing down their favorite villain. “All the President’s Men,” Woodward’s and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate scandal, became a runaway best-seller. The hit movie starred the famously handsome Robert Redford as Woodward. A Pulitzer Prize and other plaudits were lavished on the duo, and Woodward and Bernstein both enjoyed a celebrity that had never before been attained by mere newspaper scribes. Journalism schools saw a sudden surge in enrollments, and a generation of reporters set out to win the same kind of scandal-driven fame.

Like all legends it was rather overblown, ignoring the role that other reporters and especially the congressional investigating committees played in forcing Nixon’s resignation, and subsequent revelations about the identity of the anonymous sourced dubbed “Deep Throat” have given rise to a revisionist account about his motives. Still, it was true to the extent that Woodward had done an impressive job of reporting, and Woodward would henceforth be referred to as a “journalistic icon.” He continued to do solid work over the decades, focusing on his daily duties as a Post editor and his meticulously researched books about the passing administrations while the rest of the press tried to duplicate his past glories by digging up the hot scandal, and although he would sometimes uncover something embarrassing to a Democrat or flattering to a Republican he retained his reputation as a reliably liberal reporter.

Until now, at least. While meticulously researching “The Price of Politics,” a book about the Obama administration’s dealings with the congressional Republicans over budget matters, Woodward learned from his sources that the idea for a “sequester” had originated at the White House. The revelation attracted little notice at the time of the book’s publication, but now that President Barack Obama is jetting around the country to blame the Republicans for the impending budget cuts that have resulted the claim is suddenly the source of much controversy. Woodward stood by his story even after an indignant White House denial, then further offended the administration by insisting that the earlier deal struck by the administration did not include the tax hikes the president now insists on. White House press secretary Jay Carney went so far as to call Woodward’s allegation “willfully wrong,” the most serious allegation that can be made against a journalist. Not backing down, Woodward has become increasingly critical of the president’s handling of the sequester issue, even going on the left-wing MSNBC network’s “Morning Joe” program to describe Obama’s budgetary threats to withdraw an aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf as “a kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time.”

This presents a dilemma for the press, which much choose between two heroes, but we suspect that most reporters will opt for Obama’s version. That story features villainous Republicans, and besides, Watergate was a long time ago and Obama has done more for their side lately.

Woodward’s latest scoop probably won’t bring down another presidency, we’re sad to say, and certainly won’t make its way to the silver screen, where Woodward would undoubtedly be portrayed by a more homely actor, but it does seem to have complicated Obama’s efforts to blame the latest mess on his opponents. For that Woodward deserves another round of applause, this time from the right, and perhaps some grudging acknowledgment that his earlier work was more about a pursuit of the truth rather than just partisan politics.

— Bud Norman