The last few days have been rich with ironies.
The Mayorette of Seattle tweets "It is unconstitutional and illegal to send the military to Seattle," when you just know, if you were to ask her, she totally supports the Union having taken up arms against the Confederate States.
Or how about the anarchists of Chaz enacting strict controls on who comes in and out. No open borders there!—and you better have good i.d. on you, just like at a polling place … There's nothing anarchists are more keen on than personal i.d. cards.
Here is another irony, one that, so far as I'm aware, nobody but me has noticed, though I'll allow it's a very small and obscure one.
HBO Max has announced they are withdrawing the movie Gone with the Wind from their lists, although only temporarily. The movie, a company spokesreptile explained, quote, "will return with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions."
In other words, whereas you used to get just a movie, now you get a movie prefaced with a lecture telling you the correct opinion to have about it.
In the coming Utopia of righteous thinking there will be no such thing as just sitting down to be entertained. You will first have to have your attitude properly adjusted.
All right, Derb, all right, so where's the irony?
Here it comes; and as I said, it's a very little one.
We are of course undergoing a cultural revolution. The archetype and template for all cultural revolutions in our time is the one that convulsed Communist China from 1966 to 1976.
A lead player in that cultural revolution was Jiang Qing, the much-younger fourth wife of Mao Tse-tung. This lady distinguished herself as one of the loudest, shrillest, busiest, cruellest, most vindictive of all the propagandists and persecutors through all the most violent and terroristic phases of that cultural revolution.
Before marrying Mao, Jiang Qing had had a brief career as a minor movie actress in 1930s Shanghai. She fancied herself a connoisseur of the performing arts, and was particularly fond of Hollywood movies. Once Mao had taken power and she could get anything she wanted, she spent a lot of time watching movies. (As, by the way, did Stalin.)
Do you know what Jiang Qing's favorite Hollywood movie was? See if you can guess.
