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The Haunting Fear That Somewhere Someone Is Having a Good Time
H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having a good time.” What I know of the real thing suggests to me that Mencken did the Puritans a grave injustice. But there can be no doubt that his quip applies in spades to contemporary liberalism.
Consider the posture of preachiness and horror adopted by pious liberals in the face of the comic call-and-response duet “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which Frank Loesser and his wife Lynne Garland threw together and first performed for their friends at a housewarming party in the Christmas season in 1944, and which MGM inserted in the movie Neptune’s Daughter in 1948 — where, as you can see, Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams did one rendition and Red Skelton and Betty Garrett did another with the roles reversed.
The piece is playful and mildly naughty. You can see why it won an Oscar. It captures the dialectic of courtship perfectly, and one would have to lack a sense of humor altogether not to recognize as much. But if there is one thing that today’s liberals lack, it is a sense of humor and fun. Witness the rewrite of the lyrics and their rendition by Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski:
https://soundcloud.com/lydia-hoglund/its-cold-outside
In the place of mischief, we are given a sermon on consent. What red-blooded American woman would want to have anything to do with the wimpy guy presented in this version? No wonder the girl is so eager to get out the door.
But, as you would expect, the folks at CNN, Time, People, and The Huffington Post are ecstatic. One of the striking features of our time is the attempt to take the eros and flirtation out of sex. I suppose that this explains why liberals embrace prostitution. When you turn the whole thing into a business proposition, there is an implied contract and there is consent (and nothing else).
Published in Culture
Ha!
The modern re-write is prompted by jealousy and denied feelings of inferiority, I think. So much of what’s left from the generation that produced the original reminds us of what confused clods we’ve become. The writers of the new version are like some poor people who act, out of defensiveness, as if poverty is proof of virtue.
No. Don’t. Stop.
No, don’t stop.
No! Don’t Stop!
Are we positive this wasn’t meant to be a parody? It sounds to me like the woman is dawdling, pretending she wants to go when she doesn’t, and the guy is happy to see her leave. I don’t get the impression that he wants her to stay and he’s just not manly enough to suggest it. He’s just indifferent. And it’s my understanding from people who are expert in these things that many younger women are attracted to men who seem uninterested in them.
I heard this stupid thing on Fox last night, and my jaw hit the floor. These people are impossible to parody. It looks for all the world like a conservative spoof of liberals. These are people with way too much free time who spend it searching under every rock for reasons to be irate and put-upon. And they don’t even see themselves.
Re 34
The male’s disinterest needs to be hammed up just a little more, if it is that kind of a parody. A skit based on that interpretation could be very good.
Perhaps even literally so.
Yea. I first saw this article in the local paper and thought “they must be joking.” But alas liberals have no sense of humor. I got a good laugh out of it though.
Zhu Yongxin is an education reformer in China who is widely respected among his peers. He has written extensively about China’s schools, children, and families and the modern history of education reform in China since World War II. His 2014 book, My Vision on Education, is one collection of his essays. His descriptions of modern Chinese teenagers and college students sound strikingly similar to America’s and Western Europe’s young people in terms of casual sex and lifestyle and basic boredom with life and lack of ideological energy.
The common denominator I see is socialism.
Ayn Rand has been pretty well shunned by conservatives because of her atheism. That’s unfortunate because no other modern author describes the debilitating effects of socialism better than Ayn Rand. We are now witnessing globally everything she described. Socialism destroys everything it touches.
Danger Will Robinson. One step further into the scary land of fact, readily available statistics and grounded cultural critique and you will become the most learned member of the Alt-Right in American history.
I read Professor Rahe’s article and listened to the song fully expecting a sermon on consent and other SJW nonsense. After reading your comment I listened to it again. I’m sticking with my original judgement. This is a mildly humorous turning of the tables on the original song.
It. Seems to me that the ultimate goal of this sort of thing is to make men into women so we can finally be “equal”. Not by raising women up, but by forcing men to yield.
The first time I ever heard this song was as a kid. I stayed up late one night to watch SNL and David Johansen (Buster Poindexter if the name doesn’t ring a bell) and Sigourney Weaver did a version. I remembered thinking it was really cool if not realizing exactly what was going on. Spurred by this post I just rewatched it. Johansen is pretty good, but Weaver, whom I like it most everything she’s done, is just not suited for this type of thing. She really falls flat. I wish I had just left it a fond memory.
Yes, just awful.
If it is a parody, it is unwitting.
Weaver was a graduate student in drama at Yale, (as was Meryl Streep), when I was a graduate student in history. I saw them a lot on stage — notably in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Weaver could never do coy.
If true, that would be reassuring. But in the items in the press on all of this, the two are deadly — and I do mean, deadly — serious.
Thanks for the reference. It is terrific.
I really can’t stay (Baby, there’s Trump outside)
I’ve got to go way (Baby, there’s Trump outside)
The election has been (The polls say that you’d drop in)
So Traumatic (I say we get so very dramatic)
My mother will start to worry (Hey beautiful, what’s your hurry)
And other mom will be pacing the floor (Listen to that RIOT mob roar)
So really, I’d better scurry (Beautiful, please don’t hurry)
Well, maybe just a half a toke more (I’ll watch for the cops by the door)
She’s not shunned by me! Reading Atlas Shrugged at age 24 changed me forever.
I’m trying to get my 10-year-old into science fiction, solely for the purpose of having him read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers when he gets to be about 13 -15 years old.
Have him read (or listen on audiobooks) H. Beam Piper. I started reading him when I was 10. Almost all of his stuff is in the public domain and available through Gutenberg or Librivox.
Seawriter
It’s from 2010. It was a simpler time.
“On this side [of the moon], the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.” (That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis).
I spent last winter reading everything the man ever published. There is a kindle version containing 90% of his work available for just a few bucks; I tracked down the rest piecemeal.
This song is the subject of one of my favorite Mark Steyn columns:
http://www.steynonline.com/6690/baby-its-cold-outside
He knows how to write a column, the way the Loessers knew how to write a song.