What Will's Watching: Hamilton

This is a broadcast version of the theatrical production of Hamilton. That is, they recorded a showing or two and then did a third closed showing with cameras on stage for closeups. Last year we enjoyed a similar production of Newsies. Though we're no fan of rap, and the songs sometimes feel clunky to us, there's no denying the clever lyrics and rhymes of writer, director and star, Lin Manuel Miranda. 3/4

No matter, for the Daily Mail tells us, as expected:

Calls have been made to 'cancel Hamilton' just days after the Broadway musical's streaming debut on Disney+, after a renewed focus on it's lead character, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. The show, created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, portrays Hamilton as a 'young, scrappy, and hungry' immigrant and someone who was passionate about the abolition of slavery. However, in light of recent Black Lives Matter protests, the story has now come under greater scrutiny - with some pointing out that Hamilton was a slave trader.

Hamilton to 2020: Cancel This

This blog would not be the first to point out that the cancellers are going to cancel Hamilton.

They have no choice, Hamilton was a founding father and a slave owner who ran a counting house in the Caribbean. 

Hamilton was Washington's aide-de-camp during the Revolution, the most important Federalist advocate, a realist who said America should be allied with the mother country, a military thinker who called for a strong navy and small army, and the first Secretary of the Treasury who set the nation's finances right. Hamilton was probably the greatest American never to be president.

We mention this becuase Oldest Daughter loves Hamilton, and the Disney live action version comes out today. As reader(s) can imagine, we've heard the soundtrack many, many times. While it's mostly hip-hop, let's give writer Lin Manuel-Miranda points for even thinking of making a rap-musical about a founding father. Whatever one thinks of the genre, that in itself is genius. He also wrote this, which is just brilliant:

Politics and Art

So Mike Pence went to see Hamilton, he got booed and then the cast cluttered up the stage and made some big, self important statement.

Yawn...you're really not that important guys.

We all have opinions and they seep into your art regardless. Some people make political art and its brilliant. All in the Family was certainly political art and brilliant. It had a certain honesty to it and even challenged its own beliefs. Family Ties was not expressly political though a running gag was hippy parents   Steve and Elise Keaton raising a Reagan-ite conservative son, Alex. Not once was Alex mocked or made to be the bad guy. Heck, the only political mocking occurred when Steve and Elise tried to revive their old hippy lives; Elise singing folk songs to an indifferent audience or Steven;s disastrous production of his 60's era play, and I swear I'm not making this up, 'A Draft Card for the Burning'.

As noted above, we can't keep politics out of our art even if we try. I don't try. My last novel To Survive the Earth, is the most political thing I've ever written. You know who Sarah Jane Wayne is, right? And yes, I think women with guns is hot.

That said, I've always worked hard to keep blatant political bias out of my books. Democrats like thrillers and alt-history two. This is a review of Operation Arctic Storm:

I was leery when I first saw this book because I thought it was going to be another one of those teabagger right wing fantasies where Democrats, Muslims and other minorities are bad and only the white GOP has any common sense and guts to prosecute a war against the Russians, but to my surprise this author has decided to forego all that right wing junk that permeates novels like this and concentrate on telling a great story.

That would have been too easy