"Boston Museum Strips Visitors of Kimono Photo-Op Due to Racism Complaints" - Seriously?

When I first read the story (here), I thought I might be hallucinating as the result of the amount of painkillers I've had to consume this week. But no, it's accurate. In order to publicise Monet's delightful painting, La Japonaise, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts offered visitors the chance to don a kimono like the one worn by Monet's model (his wife) in the painting. Then a few unspeakable, unmitigated wankers complained, so the Museum - showing all the courage we've come to associate with the Western liberal arts establishment - promptly capitulated. So what exactly were the wankers complaining about?

Apparently, what the museum was encouraging was "cultural appropriation", which, like everything else these days, is, supposedly, a form of racism. Personally, I would have thought that it represented an example of celebrating a different culture - I mean, it's not exactly out of the Rachel Dolezal playbook, is it? But then I'm not some sad, joyless, humourless, hate-filled leftie twassock whose only pleasure in life is finding excuses to feel morally superior to other people. Anyway, I'm confused - do eating sushi and cultivating bonsai trees count as cultural appropriation? And I once dressed up as a sumo wrestler for a fancy dress party on a Nile cruise: is that okay with cultural Marxist dementors or is confinement in a cultural re-education camp watching video lectures by Sir Lenny Henry necessary for me to gain a clean bill of attitudinal health?

What is particularly depressing - and unforgiveable - is the way the museum caved in at the first whiff of mock-outrage. Why not simply tell the potestors (who, by definition, are among the silliest, most footling people on the planet) to rearrange the words "off" and "fuck" into a well-known phrase or saying, and then suggest they do so at the earliest available opportunity? At some stage, somebody in authority simply has to turn round and shout "Grow up!" at these socially inadequate bed-wetters, or, like children who've discovered that the adults in charge of them are severely testesterone-deficient, they'll just keep coming back for more. As Gavin McInnes put it in a recent Taki's Magazine article, "capitulating to the perpetually offended is a thankless task that never ends."

In that same article, McInnes discusses the gadarene rush by various Southern states to disassociate themselves from the Confederate flag, having apparently accepted the central offendotron premise that it's a symbol of racism. This strikes me as crude, ignorant, hysterical bunkum. McInnes is, I think, spot on:

Coming at this from an outsider’s perspective and without hundreds of years of shame to cloud my judgment, the whole thing looks ridiculous. History is written by the victors, and they tell me the Civil War was all about the racist South refusing to abolish slavery. I’m sure this has some truth to it, but it appears that the South just didn’t like being told what to do. I think Lincoln made the war about slavery as a PR stunt and it was really about secession. This act of treason was something many states tried to do. Today, about a third of Texans feel they should have the right to secede. Making the entire four years that killed 620,000 men all about slavery is like saying the 37 million people who died in WWI did so for Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 620,000 is about how many Americans died in all other wars combined. With today’s American population it would be like losing 6 million. In that sense, it’s an American Holocaust. I thought it was verboten to forget those. Soldiers don’t die for ideology. They die for their brothers. I don’t know where liberals get this idea that every private gets to have a brandy with his superiors and discuss the finer points of the war. You go over the hill with your fellow soldiers because you don’t want them to go it alone. That’s not about slavery. As an immigrant, that flag is a symbol of hundreds of thousands of men who died in the most devastating war in America’s history. To remove it from view is to denigrate those soldiers.

You can read the whole of McInnes's article here.

America is indulging in a lot of this sort of nonsense these days. Apart from these two artificially-created non-issues, there was the recent episode in which the former Star Trek actor George Takei (who is of Japanese descent - you'll remember him as Sulu) called US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas "a clown in blackface" who had "abdicated" his status as an African-American because of the distinguished jurist's dissent to the Court's recent gay marriage ruling. One can't help suspecting that America has turned into the breeding-ground for the world's most virulent and intolerant form of political correctness.