By Catherine Rampell Opinion writer June 19
The show must not go on.
So sayeth some of President Trump’s most ardent fans, who spent the past week and a half attempting to shut down a production of “Julius Caesar” with a Trump-like character in the title role.
These Trumpkins — part of a bloc known for mocking political correctness, safe spaces and undue efforts to avoid offending the pwecious feewings of others — deemed the show politically incorrect, unsafe and offensive.
Peaceful protest would be well within their rights. But these illiberal cultural illiterates instead wanted curtains for the offending Elizabethan play.
They stormed the stage at multiple shows, including Sunday evening’s closing performance. They yelled and screamed inside and outside the open-air production — part of the Public Theater’s annual Shakespeare in the Park series — to drown out dialogue they disliked. They threatened violence, sometimes quite graphically.
Some even sent death threats to other productions of Shakespeare and other plays in other parks.
In this, they are more like Caesar’s plebeian partisans than they may realize: “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna,” a member of a murderous mob cries in Act III, Scene 3 of the play, before tearing apart an innocent poet with the bad fortune to bear the same name as a perceived enemy of the state.
The justification for these present-day disruptions and threats is that, at least according to (wrong) right-wing media reports, the production advocates assassination of a Trump-like Roman tyrant. But the only people lately threatening political violence in the name of “Julius Caesar” are those who wanted to shut this play down.
If these reactionaries had actually thought about the play, they’d realize its portrayal of the aftermath of assassination offers the opposite lesson: that “those who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and destroy the very thing they are fighting to save,” as the Public put it in a statement to theatergoers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-card-a:homepage/story&utm_term=.3ccf3c63e157
Yeah. Like Trumpchumps have the wattage to understand Shakespeare.
The show must not go on.
So sayeth some of President Trump’s most ardent fans, who spent the past week and a half attempting to shut down a production of “Julius Caesar” with a Trump-like character in the title role.
These Trumpkins — part of a bloc known for mocking political correctness, safe spaces and undue efforts to avoid offending the pwecious feewings of others — deemed the show politically incorrect, unsafe and offensive.
Peaceful protest would be well within their rights. But these illiberal cultural illiterates instead wanted curtains for the offending Elizabethan play.
They stormed the stage at multiple shows, including Sunday evening’s closing performance. They yelled and screamed inside and outside the open-air production — part of the Public Theater’s annual Shakespeare in the Park series — to drown out dialogue they disliked. They threatened violence, sometimes quite graphically.
Some even sent death threats to other productions of Shakespeare and other plays in other parks.
In this, they are more like Caesar’s plebeian partisans than they may realize: “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna,” a member of a murderous mob cries in Act III, Scene 3 of the play, before tearing apart an innocent poet with the bad fortune to bear the same name as a perceived enemy of the state.
The justification for these present-day disruptions and threats is that, at least according to (wrong) right-wing media reports, the production advocates assassination of a Trump-like Roman tyrant. But the only people lately threatening political violence in the name of “Julius Caesar” are those who wanted to shut this play down.
If these reactionaries had actually thought about the play, they’d realize its portrayal of the aftermath of assassination offers the opposite lesson: that “those who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and destroy the very thing they are fighting to save,” as the Public put it in a statement to theatergoers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-card-a:homepage/story&utm_term=.3ccf3c63e157
Yeah. Like Trumpchumps have the wattage to understand Shakespeare.
