Last year, wife kitteh and I watched Hamilton. I wrote a review of it here, which included this tidbit.
Last night, we watched Hamilton on Disney+. It is wonderfully done and the cast is very talented. It is also the most thorough petting of the Elite I've ever seen. If a single, non-conformist idea wandered onto that stage, it would die of loneliness. The show is about two hours of nonstop reinforcement of progressive dogmas. The audience laps it up, no doubt believing that they are brave and righteous and, above all, way above all, morally superior. It's nauseating. You want George Carlin or Lenny Bruce or someone, anyone to add a song or two to the thing to tweak the endless, insufferable stream of self-congratulation.
I've thought about it a lot in the intervening time. There was something about it that deeply bothered me. At first, I thought it was the cultural sneering. The premise is a giant, "Neener, neener, neener! Your culture isn't so great. We could have done this, too." That's both obnoxious and false. The founding of America was built upon the English legal system and Judeo-Christian morality. If you lacked either, you would have ended up with something different. A massive, Aztec abattoir, perhaps.
It finally dawned on me what a tremendous missed opportunity it was. For me, it never worked because I knew that given Africa in the 1770s, the thing's basis was childish. I kept thinking how cool it would have been to have written and filmed a musical about those people.
What was it like to have been a leader in 17th and 18th century Africa? What were the moral struggles of the people in charge? If you did research, could you find an emancipation movement there, even a larval one? What conversations do you think happened after another conquest of a neighboring tribe wherein you enslaved thousands?
Deeper still, what would have been the moral basis for any objections to the practice? Good Lord, they enslaved and sold millions of their fellow Africans. I could see some, like Caesar, being ruthless and practical while others had their hearts broken seeing families separated.
Most importantly, such a production would have been exquisitely healing. It would have made the point that we are all fallen, sinful creatures. It would have illustrated in stark detail how all of our leaders from the past have fallen short, sometimes desperately short, of our ideals.
We'd have acknowledged that we are all human. We are all tempted to sin when given power over others. It has nothing to do with race at all.
Think how healing and uniting that would have been. What an opportunity missed! Oh well, there's still time to make a new one.
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| Totally off-topic, the other night, I made sea bass with a garlic, lemon and herb sauce from this recipe. It was spectacular. Both wife kitteh and I practically licked our plates clean. |
1 comment:
The thing about giving the British legal system and "Judeo-Christian Morality" credit for the abolition of slavery, is it doesn't answer the huge question of what took them so long. I mean, "judeo-christian morality" had been in existence for about 1700 years at the point where the Quakers, specifically, decided that abolitionism should be a thing. And the British legal system didn't start doing much about it until the Somerset vs. Stewart case, in 1772. And reading about the fellow who was the prime mover in that case, Granville Sharp, it is pretty clear that the abolitionists were introducing a new ethical ideal to british society, and a large part of that society was fighting them tooth and nail.
I think the abolitionists deserve a hell of a lot of credit for persuading the British Empire to eliminate slavery. I don't think that it was necessarily inevitable that the British were going to be the first major society to do so, and I think it is quite possible that a similar level of effort in any of the other empires at the time could have gotten similar results.
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