Yeah, but it goes back much further than the past two weeks

Cultural appropriation and exploration at its worst: Paul Simon fends off a furious Lady Smith Black Mambazo band.

Glenn Reynolds:

ANALYSIS: TRUE.  This obsession with ‘cultural appropriation’ is leading us down a very dark path. “The idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ sums up everything rotten in today’s intensifying politics of identity. It’s fuelled by the borderline racist idea that to mix cultures is bad. It isn’t only yoga that’s getting it in its supple neck from these new cultural purists: white rappers like Iggy Azalea are slammed for appropriating black culture; students have been banned from wearing sombreros lest Mexicans feel mocked; non-black celebs who try out the cornrow hairstyle can expect to be Twitch-hunted by mobs of these new cultural purists who think black people and white people should stick to their own cultural camps.”

So, how long has this bullshit been going on? At least as far back as 1985, when college kids harassed and disrupted Paul Simon as he tried to bring the music of “Graceland” to his concerts. The feigned outrage was over the “cultural exploitation” of the South African band Lady Smith  Black Mambazo and African rhythms in general. Poor Paul tried explaining to these hecklers that music has always grown and developed by the incorporation of one form into another, but  he was shouted down and the disruptions continued; until summer vacation came around

Never mind that, years later, the leader of Lady Smith told NPR in an interview how grateful he was to his “great friend” Paul Simon for bringing them out of the semi-obscurity of South Africa and onto world tours, where they got rich.

Never mind that the music these idiots so admired, British rock and roll and its derivative, American rock and roll, was inspired when British musicians like Mick Jagger heard the music of black Americans on BBC radio (at a time when US stations wouldn’t play it) and incorporated blues and black rock rhythms into what they were just starting to do.

None of that matters to fools – the only consolation is that the idiots of the 1980s spawned the children of today, and they can all go to hell together.

Now here’s a trooper

From Greenwich Time’s on-line front page (so no secrets exposed here, thank you very much).

On Sunday at 8 p.m., Arlene Mark, 75, of 74 Harbor Drive, hit a stone wall at Indian Head Road. She was charged with DWI and given a ticket for failure to maintain lane. She was released on $260 bail and told to appear in court on Dec. 7.

Lots of people get in trouble with alcohol and cars, God bless them, but at 75? You go, girl!

Judging from her residence, she can probably have a chauffeur drive her around while without a license. Still, while we can all feel sorry for anyone in this predicament, it would be well to heed the words of my great-grandfather, who often told told his heirs: “Remember, children, the poor have their troubles as well as the rich”.

74 Harbor Drive, Belle Haven

No more real estate til Monday – Greenwich MLS has shut down for the holiday

Those of you (all of you, except for Walt) who come here for real estate news, you have the next few days to watch football and throw drumsticks at your relatives. Over here, we’ll just have to find other sources of amusement.

UPDATE: Too many hurt feelings associated with these pictures, so I’m taking them down. Sometimes (often?) what I think is funny is not at all funny to the targets. I’ll see if I can’t find an appropriate picture of someone who does not live in Greenwich.

UPDATE II: Aha! Here’s a picture Walt took at the Junior League’s annual Christmas dance. Who knew the ladies could be such fun?

Germany, 1930. I suppose now I’ll receive angry emails from the grandchildren

 

 

Condo sale Steamboat Road

603 Steamboat, Unit 1, $1.2 million. Owner paid $1.340 for it in 2003 after it had started at $1.650 and lingered for almost a year. She took a better approach than that seller: listed it for $1 million, sold it in a bidding war after just 17 days for the aforesaid $1.2. A loss, certainly, but she got out of it almost immediately when she was ready to move on, and having exposed it to the market got multiple bids which produced, it’s reasonable to assume, its current market value. She could have received the same price a year from now by pricing it higher and then slowly reducing it, but this was cleaner, and faster.

Very, very nice old house, by the way.

Democratic operatives with bylines

Newly released Clinton emails show CNN reporter coordinated tweets with State Department.

A CNN reporter who was recently suspended for two weeks for violating the network’s editorial guidelines showed up in a new trove of State Department emails released on Tuesday in which she appears to have coordinated social media posts with a top Hillary Clinton State Department aide during the former secretary of state’s Jan. 23, 2013 Senate testimony about the Benghazi attacks.

The emails, which were released to the website Gawker, show that Elise Labott, a foreign affairs reporter at CNN, took guidance from Clinton aide Philippe Reines by posting a tweet criticizing Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for asking Clinton tough questions during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attacks.

Labott also coordinated with Reines to post a favorable quote from Clinton’s testimony, which she gave just a week before she left office.

Come on, there hasn’t been a reporter here in years

 

Change the language, change the thinking – or that’s what they’re trying, anyway

 

First they came after the term “illegal alien”, presumably to satisfy the Martian contingency, and we had “illegal immigrants“. Now Hillary has apologized for calling them that, and vowed to call them “dreamers” instead. 

Here’s a concise summary of the difference between an alien and an immigrant:

Outdated dictionaries define “dreamer” as “a person who is unpractical or idealistic.” Not in the new Democratic land of America, where illegal aliens  crossing our borders are being neither unpractical nor idealistic in their hope to remain – Obama has promised them that, and intends to fulfill his promise, legal niceties (and our country) be damned.

All of this is just part of the continuing effort to destroy the plain meaning of words, so that they will mean whatever the ruling party says they mean.

The country has already been shamed out of referring to Muslim terrorists” and even the most conservative of politicians now call them “radical Islamists”. Even that’s too much for the Democrats, who last week released an ad denouncing Republicans for using the term, and for implying that Muslim terrorists have anything to do with Islam.

Bizarro World. Or, better, a Gaslight world (featuring that great Franco-Irish actress, Ingrid Bergman).