George Case's Blog, page 5

The continued reckoning with anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and other strains of racism has tended to see beneficiaries of privilege and victims of prejudice as fixed classes throughout North American history. If you don’t currently meet the modern criteria of disadvantage, neither do your ancestors; if your ancestors were particularly mistreated by a racist majority, then so […]

The prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency has got me thinking about a pair of books by the American writer Morris Berman, Dark Ages America:  The Final Phase of Empire (2006) and The Twilight of American Culture (2000).  When I first read them years ago, I thought some of Berman’s pessimism was overstated – […]

The games of the DCLXVI Olympiad were opened in the host city of Hell last night, in a nightmarish ceremony that could have been directed by Hieronymus Bosch – and, indeed, was. A stirring chorus of “It’s a Small World After All” began the spectacle, sung by 20000 unbaptized children as they were roasted on […]

Assassination attempt or not, the time to change anyone’s mind about Donald Trump has long passed.  Since 2016 his supporters have been convinced he is the man to Make America Great Again, and since 2020 they’ve been confident that his electoral loss to Joe Biden was engineered by foul means.  Over the same period, his […]

We all aspire to good taste and high standards, and occasionally reach them. But our public or collective notions of artistic quality are sometimes very different from our personal preferences.  To illustrate, I’ve contrasted the following lists of “Greatest” versus “Favorite” works, based on the ideals of an imaginary but plausible individual (certainly not me). […]

Another day, another protest against drag events.  Across numerous jurisdictions in Canada and the US, news reports now regularly tell of demonstrators picketing or disrupting schools and libraries where drag artists have scheduled readings to children.  In St. Catharines, Ontario, the public library’s Drag Queen Story Time was interrupted by a handful of angry objectors; […]

In the ever-expanding lexicon of over- and misused words, justice deserves a special entry. We routinely hear of the need for social justice, while protesters often demand justice in particular legal cases (“No justice, no peace”), and Justice is even a popular name given to baby boys and girls. DC Comics’ Justice League of crime […]

In 2021 the transgender actor Elliot (nee Ellen) Page was featured on the cover of Time magazine, an achievement no longer quite as significant as it was in 1960 or 1992 but still, presumably, a boost to the transgender cause. About the same time, the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue featured a transgender model, Leyna […]

As a lifelong Beatles fan, I’m well aware that the 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night has an esteemed place in the band’s legacy: a filmed document of Beatlemania at its glorious height, and a surprise artistic triumph that demonstrated the Beatles’ unstoppable conquest of all media. It’s routinely cited as a cinema classic, and […]

I once read an essay in a special edition of Life magazine on the history of rock ‘n’ roll, wherein the writer, discussing 1960s music, paid tribute to “the detonation that was Aretha Franklin.”  Aretha was the Queen of Soul and an influential artist, but was her career really so explosive?  This kind of hyperbole […]