Culture

Recently, Demi Lovato has been feeling more feminine. The singer and actress a few days ago told “Spout Podcast” host Tamara Dhiaan that when it comes to pronouns, she’s “adopted she/her again.” Lovato, who came out as nonbinary in 2021, explained her decision: “I’m such a fluid person.” “Fluid” would be one word to describe Lovato, whose Instagram profile since April has read “They/them/she/her.” Cue the confusion from even woke media, though podcaster Dhiaan followed up the interview with this very helpful clarifying tweet: “For the record: Demi Lovato did NOT say she is abandoning they/them as her pronouns, she simply said she is adding she/her.” The Washington Post also chimed in to help make sense of this very important celebrity announcement.

Color Cockburn shocked that the medical establishment is once again enforcing political correctness. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recently issued a letter begging the World Health Organization to rename the highly contagious monkeypox virus. Why? They were concerned the word “monkeypox” was offensive to minorities. Cockburn — and Twitter for that matter — know this is a misalignment of priorities. Some names are purely innocent and playing PC police is not the job of the NYC Department of Health. Also why is it that New York authorities hear “monkeypox” and immediately think about black and brown people? Physician, heal thyself! And how far are we supposed to take this?

Sex and gender were supposed to be allies in the identitarian march of the feminist left. But gender, it appears, keeps butting up against the reality of sex. "I will say this and everyone's gonna hate me,” singer Macy Gray recently told Piers Morgan, “but as a woman, just because you go change your (body) parts, doesn't make you a woman, sorry.” (She subsequently apologized for her comments.) Bette Midler also elicited censure for her recent tweet: "WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name!" (She later qualified that her comments were not intended to be “transphobic.”) Women, generations of feminists have been telling us, are supposed to be powerful. They’re supposed to be capable.

For some of us, Charlie Rose serves the same function as Proust’s madeleine. His eponymous public television interview program, which began airing in 1991, was a fixture of the pre-millennium media landscape, a halcyon age in which newspapers carried the news, Amazon was a mere purveyor of books, and “woke” referred to a state of wakefulness rather than political correctness. Such nostalgia augurs well for the carefully managed reemergence of the disgraced broadcaster, who has ended his exile with new conversations thrown up on his website, charlierose.com. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Five years ago, Rose — by then, also the co-host of CBS This Morning — first became the subject of sexual misconduct allegations.

While Cockburn already covered the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard verdict a month ago (live from the courthouse!), he notes that Ms. Heard hasn’t moved on. She's since resurfaced, with her lawyers attempting to throw out the ruling against her or declare a mistrial on the basis of a single juror, Juror Fifteen, supposedly being fraudulent. On Wednesday, Judge Penney Azcarate issued her decision: no. Azcarate wrote: Juror Fifteen was vetted by the Court on the record and met the statutory requirements for service. Fifteen was vetted by the Court on the record and met the statutory requirements for service. The parties also questioned the jury panel for a full day and informed the Court that the jury panel was acceptable.

Last week marked the 246th birthday of the United States. This year also marks, according to Lieutenant General Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation, when we “question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.” As reported in late June by NBC, all branches of the military are falling short of their 2022 recruiting goals. The Army, for instance, has met only 40 percent of its enlisted recruitment target for the fiscal year, which for the military services ends on September 30. Those in the Pentagon tasked with attracting candidates have listed reasons they are struggling to meet their mission: lack of eligibility, Covid restrictions putting a damper on outreach, competition from a robust civilian employment market, and a lack of a desire to serve.

The Eragon fantasy series I enjoyed as a child isn’t very good, but one aspect of its magic system is pretty interesting. Wizards use magic by speaking in an enchanted language, but the literal meaning of the words trumps the magician’s intent. A single word mispronounced during the blessing of an infant turns the child into a “shield against misfortune” rather than one “shielded against misfortune.” The child grows up to lead a hellish life, haunted by an irresistible compulsion to take the suffering of others upon herself. This is the stuff of fantasy precisely because it’s not how language actually works. People get tongue-tied. They use terms that have different meanings in different contexts. They open their word-hoards and pull out the wrong ones. It happens.

Not all pro-lifers are happy with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. In a column at the Washington Post, former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson acknowledges that Roe was “poorly argued,” but says he is “more comfortable with the gradualism” recommended by Chief Justice John Roberts. Gerson ends even more soberly: “The abortion debate — with all its tragic complexities — has been returned to the realm of democracy. And there is little evidence our democracy is prepared for it.” Why? Because the “GOP has become captive to an ideology of power.” Anyone who has been following Gerson over the years will not be surprised by these comments.

The political arena is hotter than ever with fights raging over rights and freedoms and all that good American stuff. But one topic missing from these debates only gets the attention it deserves for about a week every year each July: the right to keep and bear fireworks. It's a right heavily restricted in sixteen states and straight-up illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, home of the Boston Tea Party, that act of defiance that sparked our patriotic tradition of blowing things up. In the Pennsylvania Wilds — the romantic name a tourism agency gave to the hick region of the state where I reside — things go boom year-round.

I’m Facebook friends with a woman who has been in Democratic Party politics since we attended high school together. Since then, she’s worked for power politicians, (unsuccessfully) run for office, and played a central role in the public takedown of an elected official. She has a degree from an Ivy League institution, as does her husband, who works in finance. Hers is the quintessential lifestyle of the urban elites. And boy, do I mean elite. There are vacations to Italy and the UK, foodstagramming at prominent eateries and bars in major cities, shows on Broadway, and weekend excursions to country estates. There’s the constant churn of attendance at upper-crust city events at beautiful historic locations. And that’s just since the economy started tanking earlier this year.

The nation is entering a Galilean moment. Public and private authorities stubbornly pursue make-believe about race, ethnic loyalties, families, men and women, and civic adhesion. They deny the limits of nature. It’s not the first time that human vanity has taken a run at truth and punished those who don’t fall into line. To avoid prison in 1633, the astronomer and polymath Galileo recanted his defense of Copernicus’s discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. “And yet it moves,” Galileo is reputed to have said later, and bitterly, silenced by haughty thought examiners.

It would be too much to say that wokeness lost Roe for progressives. There is of course a contingent in American politics and the population at large that views abortion as murder or murder-adjacent, and this is the camp that has, for the time being, gotten its way. But if you’re looking to sort out how the ostensibly pro-choice side got complacent enough to let the right to choose get overturned, look no further than the sorry state of contemporary feminism. If even so-called feminists think the typical American woman has it too easy, what hope is there for the fight for women’s rights?

There's a well-done, nasty piece of filmmaking available on Hulu right now called Pistol, ostensibly a Sex Pistols biopic but so much more. The series is only partially about the Pistols themselves and more about the post-war Britain that formed them. Pistol seems to suggest that all that anger and despair was going to have to come out somewhere, either repressed and hidden, crunched deep down inside, or allowed to lance out as "music," more screaming than lyrical. I wonder if America isn't somewhere similar. Post-war Britain was a terrible place to grow up.

Sunday was Juneteenth, a day named in honor of an event that took place on June Nine-teenth (see what they did there?) but is being observed this year on June Twent-ieth (see what they didn't do there?). The name of this holiday is one of its least confusing attributes. Despite being identified as a nearly 160-year-old celebration — it commemorates June 19, 1865, when the last slaves in Texas were informed of their freedom — it was only recognized as a federal holiday last year. By President Joe Biden. Why making Juneteenth a federal holiday didn’t occur to Barack Obama, our nation’s first black president, and why Biden coincidentally chose to make it one following the 2020 riots surrounding George Floyd’s death, is a mystery for the ages.

Three black college students were arrested for shoplifting, and a culture war erupted at Oberlin College in Ohio. After six years of legal wrangling, ultra-liberal Oberlin recently lost, and now owes $33 million in damages to the surviving white people (two additional plaintiffs died of old age while the trial dragged on) who own the bakery it defamed over racial issues. It was 2016 and Donald Trump had just been elected president. Everyone was certain that Trump's victory was the End of Democracy and was anxious to claim their victimhood in the New Order. Enter Oberlin College, arguably the most socially liberal school in America.