September 2, 2001 -- The first episode of Changing Stages, a PBS series about 20th Century theatre was absolutely perfect.  It didn’t miss a single cliché in its description as visionary progress what was actually the complete dissolution of the theatrical arts in America.  We'll leave aside the ridiculous anti-capitalist reverence with which these idiots treat Death of a Salesman.  We'll forget the fact that the single most produced theatrical drama in history, Our Town by Thornton Wilder, is completely ignored.  (They probably consider it to be bourgoise traditionalist sentimentalism.)

We'll just focus on a couple of the items in the show. 

For example, it described Showboat, the world’s first modern musical, as being a brilliant statement against racism because the central element of the plot had to do with the terrible price paid by a black man and white woman who loved each other.  That angle has become a mantra in this case because Showboat was about a minstrel group – white performers in blackface lampooning negros.  Very politically-incorrect.  The most racist period in American theatrical history.

Liberals have since the Sixties been desperately grasping that plot premise as a protection against charges of racism by the play’s Jewish creators.

You can tell they are lying quite easily.  When was the last time Showboat appeared on a university drama department stage?  When was the last time the film version appeared on network television?  PBS just said it's a classic!  Where the hell is it,then?  Here, I'll give you a simple task to better illustrate the situation. This week, see if you can buy a videotape copy of Walt Disney's wonderful animated film, Song of the South. If you're old enough, you know the one I'm talking about.  The one that features Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit.   After you've done that, you'll understand.  It’s all a liberal scam, folks.  Attribute zero credibility to what they say.  Carefully watch what they actually do.

Next, we were told about the dramatic theatrical breakthroughs during the Great Depression, which by the way is when the roots of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were planted.  Among those dramas celebrated were seditious plays supporting the IWW, or International Workers of the World, a Communist-funded organization dedicated to the destruction of the American republic.  These plays, of course, presented themselves as messages about fairness for those who belonged to unions.  The working man.

Communists thrive in the opportunities generated by economic hard times.  Doors open for them, then.  Think of them as political vultures.  They feed on death.

Next, the program ran the usual PBS attack on what liberals call the “red scare” of the Fifties, the McCarthy hearings.  Featured on the program was a famous play called The Crucible, which in this program symbolically compared the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) to the Salem Witch Trials.

Here’s the truth about McCarthy.  He was right.

The unions, the arts and even the government (including the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration) were riddled with Communist sympathizers and actual agents.  Documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act prove it.  (Read the Gore Secret Files, in this issue of Oregon Magazine)  And Hollywood’s blacklisted writers?  Two years ago, a note from Joseph Stalin to the leadership of the Screenwriter’s Guild was discovered.  It proves direct contact – the receiving of creative instructions for screenplays to be written by those who at that time controlled what was said in American movies.  It is, if reports I have read are accurate, personally signed by Stalin - one of the most murderous butchers to ever exist on the planet.

No book, play, film or TV program about the arts made in the past half century has failed to present those hearings as an example of the worst right-wing fascist witch hunt (remember the Crucible) in American history.  As time has proved, every one of those portrayals, including this latest piece of PBS propaganda, was completely wrong at best and a gigantic lie at worst.  A mammoth coverup.

Naturally, this first episode went on to admire the theatrical champions of homosexuality.  This is an interesting item.  These same liberals despised FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover because of his contributions to anti-Communist efforts like HUAC.  As you saw with Kenneth Starr during the Whitewater investigation, it is the liberal practice to vilify the character of those who do not agree with them politically.  Even women they don't like are butchered -- called trailer trash, or described as being physically ugly.  They attempted to destroy J. Edgar Hoover in this way, as well.  The interesting thing was how they tried to do it.  They promoted the idea that he was a homosexual.

That’s right.  The people who champion homosexuality tried to defame Hoover by portraying him as a cross-dressing homosexual.  And, they did it with more than rumors.  They have done it on television and in films and even on stage where liberal comics have done numerous skits on a Hoover character who in secret dons women’s clothing.  Even if it were true, by their own rules homosexuality and cross-dressing are perfectly okay, and nobody else's business!  Yet these liberals, the ones who loudly denounce criticism of homosexualy as hate speech, use it themselves to defame those whose voice they wish to silence!  Titanic hypocrisy! Double-tongued demagogues!

The whole business is tiresome.  I will watch no more of this series.  It will be what I suspected it would be and what it proved to be during its first segment -– more liberal baloney. Like Ken Burns’ loudly-celebrated liberal paens, it will speak with deep respect of those who promote moral decay, and with contempt for traditional values and sacred beliefs.  It will approve of dung being thrown on portraits of Christian saints, and speak joyously of the animalist beliefs that have given the world necklacing and tens of thousands of children whose arms have been hacked off with machetes.  It will headline baseless charges of sexism against Clarence Thomas and suppress serious charges of rape against Bill Clinton.  It will champion the anti-white ethnic cleansing of Zimbabwe while castigating the farmers who feed that country and provide two million jobs.  It will demand that those who eliminated slavery a hundred and fifty years ago pay reparations to those who capture and sell them to this very day.

(The above comparisons are a payback for being forced to watch that stupid segment from the Crucible.  If narrative symbolism is okay for a flaming liberal playwright, it's fair game for a flaming conservative journalist.)

No, I will not attend the coming episodes of Changing Stages.  They will all consist of  the usual, liberal PBS crap.  And, eventually, these idiots will come to modern theatre, which is as ridiculous as modern classical music.  This drivel will be called art, too. 

I won’t be there when it happens, because I will be happily watching a good John Wayne film.  Unlike Uncle Remus, they haven't managed to suppress him, yet.  (LL).