Tonight, Saturday, I'll be back on "The Greg Gutfeld Show" for a full hour, joining Greg, Kat Timpf, Tyrus and Pete Hegseth coast to coast across America on Fox News at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific. I always enjoy it, so I hope you'll tune in. Shortly before that, I'll be here with a Nobel Prize-themed edition of Mark at the Movies.
Ahead of that a couple of footnotes on the last week:
~I mentioned on television yesterday that the Democrats have much greater success slicing and dicing the First Amendment than they do the Second - because gun ownership is real and concrete and the confiscation and banning of actual things is easier to grasp than the incremental shriveling of something abstract such as freedom of expression. But it is striking how the assault on the latter has accelerated ever since, in the wake of the church shooting in Charleston, the Democrat-media complex forced the banishing of the Confederate flag and even of reruns of "Dukes of Hazzard". In two years we've progressed from taking down the Confederate flag to toppling Civil War statuary - and now the removal of a monument to America's first great songwriter, Stephen Foster. That last saddens me.
The object is to unmoor Americans from their entire inheritance - because a citizenry so unmoored is that much more pliable and ripe for anything the social engineers wish to inculcate. As I wrote a week ago:
Ever since all this statue-toppling business began earlier in the summer, I find I can't stop bursting into "Waiting For The Robert E Lee". Does anyone else have that problem? I can't recall even thinking of it for a couple of decades, but you may have noticed I broke into "Way down on the levee/In old Alabammy" on Tucker Carlson last night, and on Rush the week before. Don't ask me why - although, as a general proposition, whenever the cultural totalitarians attempt to torch even the most minor artifact, it generally behooves us to put it into heavy rotation (see, e.g., my frequent performances of "Kung Fu Fighting" since the Isle of Wight coppers designated performances thereof as a hate crime).
With that in mind, on Monday, introducing me at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis for the Center of the American Experiment, Howard Root referenced the NFL controversy and said the only person I'd "take a knee" for would be the Queen. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Mark Steyn Club Founding Member Joseph Huber's comment last weekend on The Jazz Singer:
No one took a knee (except Jolson).
So I dropped to one knee at the Guthrie and gave it the full Mammy (see top right). Afterwards, talking to some theatregoers, I found a line of song suddenly popped into my head, accompanied by jazz hands:
Nobody's singin' bout my Mammy...
And I thought: What the hell is that from? And eventually I remembered: It's from a novelty song I haven't heard since my childhood, written by Irwin Levine and L Russell Brown, who had a monster smash with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree" and a few lesser hits through the Seventies. The premise is this: Al Jolson comes back to life and discovers the music scene has changed somewhat. The closing moments, as he pines for his missing Mammy, are oddly affecting. Enjoy:
There used to be a zillion Jolson impersonators, but the longest-lasting and all-time greatest soundalike is the guy singing there, from Hull in northern England: Clive Baldwin.
The hostility to any cultural artifact incompatible with contemporary sensibilities is not only deeply totalitarian but ultimately supremely moronizing. You'll recall that halfwit Massachusetts librarian who rejected a gift of books from Melania Trump because Dr Seuss is racist. She got that ahistorical idiocy from The School Library Journal:
She points out that the Cat in the Hat, perhaps Seuss' most famous character, is based on minstrel stereotypes. 'The Cat's physical appearance, including the Cat's oversized top hat, floppy bow tie, white gloves, and frequently open mouth, mirrors actual blackface performers.'
No, he doesn't - unless you're unhinged to the point of insanity.
[INSANITY UPDATE: The Seuss museum in Massachusetts has canceled its Children's Literature Festival and is replacing its mural.]
By the way, if a black cat with a floppy bow tie is now a "blackface performer" and "minstrel stereotype", then my own cat Marvin is the most racist feline on the planet and should follow up our last CD with an album of Marvin Sings Mammy Songs. Here's a close-up from the cover of our Feline Groovy: Songs for Swingin' Cats:
Appalling! Are Marvin and I also banned from Massachusetts school libraries? Happily, Feline Groovy has lots of five-star reviews at Amazon, and for the moment remains legally available on CD - or, for instant gratification, via digital download from Amazon or iTunes. But my racist cat will be going the way of that Stephen Foster statue any day now...
~Tomorrow, Sunday, we'll have another Mark Steyn Club video bonus in our occasional series of me reading poetry - before all the poems are banned. Tomorrow's is a corker.
If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club and you disagree with me on any of this historico-cultural erasure, then have at it in our comments section. We have fun in The Mark Steyn Club: you can join for the full year or, lest you suspect it's some dodgy Internet scam by a sleazy fly-by-night Canuck snakeoil salesman, sign up for an experimental three months. For more info, please see here - and don't forget our new gift membership.