A Failed Grande Experiment
The terrorist attack in Manchester should mark the end of a Grande Experiment.
Sadly, this quote by the mayor of Manchester indicates it won’t be:
“The message that I would want to get over — and this is how the vast majority of people feel — this man was a terrorist, not a Muslim. The worst thing that can happen is that people use this to blame an entire community, the Muslim community.”
I don’t blame all Muslims but it is idiotic not to recognize the role of Islam in the attack. Reportedly the bomber, Salman Abedi, was a devout Muslim, his family were heavily involved in the Muslim community in Manchester and before he went to pieces, he was “angry” about the treatment of Muslims in Libya.
The attack on pop princess Ariana Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” tour performance should shake First World progressivism to its core because Grande is the 23-year-old avatar for the Hollywood limousine liberal set. She got her first break on Broadway in 2008, then moved to Nickelodeon until 2014 and after that began a recording career. I don’t deny that to achieve the success she has that she hasn’t worked hard and has some talent (she isn’t my cup of tea) but there also can be no doubt that she has been coddled and shielded from the real world – she has grown up in show business and due to early “stardom” has led a privileged existence.
In 2005, TMZ posted a video of Lick-Gate in which Grande and some of her compatriots were pictured licking unpurchased donuts as she is overheard saying, "I hate Americans. I hate America." Later she issued an apology for her "poor choice of words" in a statement, saying that she is "extremely proud to be an American" and was simply "upset by how freely we as Americans eat and consume things without giving any thought to the consequences that it has on our health and society as a whole."
Grande is solidly in the Katy Perry School of Foreign Policy and its ““No barriers, no borders, we all just need to co-exist” platform.
In its purest form, this attack represents direct contact between First World progressive lighter than air, Utopian sensibilities and the gritty, violent death cult world of Third World, 7th Century Islamic radicalism. It’s the ultimate clash of oil and water, the effete platitudes of “can’t we just get along” versus the chants of “Death to the Great Satan.” There are no two things more in opposition than the libertinism of the entertainment industry and the fundamentalism of radical Islam.
I’ll stipulate that this isn’t strictly about Islam. If that is true, then what it is about is a war between an uncivilized world taking its cues from the Koran and a civilized world taking its cues from Judeo-Christian traditions (even though more people than ever are walking away from those traditions). First world civilization made it possible for Ariana Grande to hold a global concert tour. In fact, it allows her to exist and a millionaire pop star who parades scantly clothed on a stage and not wrapped in a burka and kept barefoot in a mud hut.
I think it was Pamela Geller who said, "In the battle between the civilized man and the uncivilized man, side with the civilized man." Islam or not, it is not a matter of question that when a man blows himself up with a bomb loaded with shrapnel in a crowded public venue in Manchester, England, that is not an act of a civilized man.
J.R.R. Tolkien captured the proper response to events like Manchester in Aragorn’s speech at the Black Gate:
Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan!
My brothers.
I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.
An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight!
By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXGUNvIFTQw&w=560&h=315]