Just how tone-deaf are America’s great entertainers?
Featured in the Grammy Awards this weekend was an appeal by the Recording Academy asking President Donald Trump could they please have some more money ( http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/musicians-ask-trump-for-money-help-after-grammys-bashing/article/2614639 ).
Amazing. You go on national TV and express your loathing for the president, for the people who support him (that would be us), and then try to panhandle them for money. “You dirty racist xenophobic biggit! Would you please help us out?” Not an approach which most people would find effective.
The Academy honcho invoked “our collective responsibility”–“our?”–for using the arts to unite America. When they’re not calling us “deplorables” and “Nazis,” etc.
You have to go all the way back to the Old Testament to find a less persuasive argument. In 1 Kings Chapter 12, Rehoboam, the son of King Solomon, seeking to persuade the ten tribes in rebellion against him to come back into his kingdom, proposed to the people, “My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions” (v. 14). Nice pitch, Rehoboam. Didn’t quite win them over with that, did you?
Rehoboam had the makings of a modern American music celebrity.