January 31, 2011
By Jack Kemp
The new tone of civility the liberals are pursuing apparently includes wishing violent death on Sarah Palin. Recently in Missoula, Montana, an otherwise high quality performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado by the Missoula Children's Theater had the script altered with the approval of the MCT director Curt Olds to call for the beheading of Sarah Palin in the tune "As some Day it May Happen (I've Got a Little List)" and thus singing about her "not being missed," as the Wall St. Journal informs us.
The source of this news was an attendee at the play named Rory Page who poignantly states in a letter to the theater director:
"As a professional you should be ashamed of yourself, the audience should be ashamed of themselves and I am ashamed of myself for not standing up and leaving at that very moment. I would like to see an apology from you not because I want to hinder free-speech but for the hypocrisy this so clearly shows."
Apparently this is what our Bill Ayers-influenced children's educators now believe is the proper subject to teach youngsters to sing along to, not the contemplation of the beheading of some nineteenth century caricatures, but a very real twenty-first century conservative politician. Until Mr. Page took offense, the performance evidently was acceptable in the liberal enclave of Missoula. All this days after the Tucson massacre and not that long after the Virginia Tech shootings -- or the Columbine shootings, for that matter.
I'm sure the wife and family of the late Daniel Pearl, whose death was dramatized in the movie "A Mighty Heart" would also fail to see the humor in this joking about beheading Sarah Palin. And in what way did this performance differ from the Palestinian television show with a Mickey Mouse-like figure urging children to kill Jews for jihad (here and here)?
Any rationalized explanation of the difference between Palestinian television and this Montana Children's Theater performance of the Mikado would be, in fact, an attempt to explain away hatred in the same vein, but with a lower body count used as the spin to convince us that this Mikado was something much more benign. In fact, the Mikado performance in Montana was an early stage cancerous growth and not a benign one.
There is, in fact, a line in that "Little List" song that makes reference to a type of person who we have seen much of recently in liberal circles. The song complains about:
"Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this, and every country but his own"
I could think of a number of people who fit that description, starting with Rep. Jim Moran who went overseas to attack American voters as racists on an Arab television station. As the song, in discussing "apologetic statesmen" in the vaguest of mock names, it concludes with:
"The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you."
The toned down mischievousness of the original wording allows people of all political persuasions to invoke in their minds the name of their opponents in a light, general manner and not turn a musical performance into a call for a specific person's blood in front of an audience which often includes children and perhaps some adults of weak mind. Thus, the original song avoids a resemblance to a tyrant's staged call for assassination(s).
John Edwards was right. There really are two Americas, but not in the way he meant it. As liberals call for divisiveness of the most bloody kind in a children's theater performance (no, it wasn't mere "fun" but a teaching of what is now socially acceptable in that community), it is necessary to shine "the sun, whose rays are all ablaze," to borrow a line from a different song in the Mikado, on this vile biliousness in order to make its influence wane.
