Rediscovering Courage

“When cowardice is made respectable, its followers are without number both from among the weak and the strong; it easily becomes a fashion.” —Eric Hoffer

Today, there is little doubt that cowardice — more often than not couched as a “reasonable” response to the demands of hateful, hysterical leftists — is not only respectable but very much in fashion.

In Memphis, the Orpheum Theater announced it will end a 34-year-old tradition of “Gone With the Wind” summertime screenings due to “specific inquiries from patrons.” In a statement, the theater company explained, “As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.”

The hyper-sensitive local population to which the theater refers are ostensibly black Americans, who comprise approximately 64% of Memphis’ total population. Yet like most things progressive, the narrative doesn’t align with reality: A 2014 YouGov survey taken on the 75th anniversary of the picture revealed that 73% of black Americans rated the movie as great, very good or good. Nonetheless, Orpheum Theatre Group president Brett Batterson insisted the move was “about the Orpheum wanting to be inclusive and welcoming to all of Memphis.”

Both Batterson and a large majority of the theater’s board members are white, and all of them apparently miss the searing irony: Their insufferably paternalistic presumption that they know what’s best for black Americans resembles that of antebellum slave masters. Moreover their exhortations of inclusivity and welcome-ness are nothing more than fashionable cowardice.

They are joined — or is that topped — by the cowards at California’s San Domenico School, who have decided their 167-year-oldexistence as a Dominican Catholic institution needed an “update” requiring the removal of approximately 162 Catholic icons and statues. The head of San Domenico’s board of trustees, Amy Skewes-Cox, again issued boilerplate progressive bromides to justify censorship. “If you walk on the campus and the first thing you confront is three or four statues of St. Dominic or St. Francis, it could be alienating for that other religion, and we didn’t want to further that feeling.”

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