Leftwing Crazies And Their Climate Of Hate, Radicalism And Intolerance

[Silver]

“Julius Caesar” Unleashes Right-wing Rage at Art, Liberals, and NYC

.....wingnuts went wild because The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park — as venerable and well-loved a theatrical institution as exists in America — was presenting a version of Julius Caesar in modern dress, with Caesar done up to look like Donald Trump.

Since you can read the big words in this column, you probably already know that modern-dress productions of classics are exceedingly common, that making Caesar a modern politician such as the American President (including, as was done at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater in 2011, Barack Obama) — is standard operating procedure, and that Caesar’s assassination is portrayed by Shakespeare as a Bad Thing, which makes the problems the conspirators were hoping to fix even worse.

But the Republican “base” doesn’t know any of that, so conservatives portrayed the play to them as an invention of Godless New York City Liberals to incite violence against Trump, leading naturally to the shooting of Steve Scalise.

Trying to reason with them is futile. Politics they might, if cornered, discuss semi-rationally, but art drives them absolutely insane. They know there’s some kind of power in in, but they don’t know how to control it — and they certainly don’t know how to make it. That’s why whenever they talk about “culture” it inevitably turns into “culture war” — because their only possible relationship to is adversarial and violent.

You and I might see a top Shakespeare company’s production of a Shakespeare play as something that brings pleasure and maybe an insight into life; but these guys only see it as a threat to be neutralized. That’s why, when the controversy rose, Kyle Smith of National Review exulted, “Lefty Actors Are Beginning to Fear Donald Trump”; conservatives see works of art, not as experiences to engage and learn from, but the way they see everything else: as something to dominate and force to their will.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/06/19/...s-and-nyc/