“Grease is the word”? Woke is the word, is the word that you heard — now — with a new Grease prequel so politically correct that, remarked one observer, “I’d rather watch my own autopsy.”
Set in 1954, the work nonetheless channels 2024, as Fox News reports:
‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ is a new TV show that serves as a prequel to the original hit film that debuted in the 1970s. The show is set to take place four years before the original but with various messages about identity politics. Its stated purpose is to explore “sexual orientation, gender expression and racial identity.”
The Daily Mail reported Thursday, “Family favorite tunes will be re-sung alongside new musical numbers including one about white supremacy, while the 1950s student population at Rydell High School will be re-filled with a varied mix of LGBT and black high schoolers unseen in the 1978 hit.”
The female led cast reportedly includes “gender nonconforming nonbinary trans actor Ari Notartomaso, who plays Cynthia,” described as “a non-binary tomboy who struggles to fit in alongside her multicultural band mates.”
The new song about White supremacy, ‘In The Club,’ animates rich, White country club members “out of an oil painting to sing about white supremacy.”
“When you’re in the club, we’ve got each other’s backs. As long as you’re not Jewish, Asian, brown or Black, single woman or gay, on the wrong side of they,” the lyric[s] include.
So the Hollywood social engineers certainly have today’s woke activists’ backs, attempting to reinforce through entertainment what the thought police often birth in academia and disseminate via media. As the Daily Mail informs, providing more detail:
The new ‘Pink Ladies’ are all notably multicultural, with Jane being half Puerto Rican, Olivia is Mexican American, Nancy is Japanese American, and Cynthia is queer and non-binary.
Early reviews have not been kind to the woke re-boot, with the Guardian dubbing it ‘The prequel nobody asked for’.
The outlet said the show’s potential qualities are overshadowed by ‘subpar musical numbers and standard-grade streaming TV bloat.’
‘There’s a lot of too vigorous choreography, some cringe-y and underbaked imaginary sequences, and several forgettable songs per episode[.’]
‘Pink Ladies is such a mighty morass of bad ideas that it’s hard to keep it all straight,’ added a scathing review by USA Today.
Man-on-the-street reactions were no kinder. As the aforementioned observer wrote:
Another tweeter asked rhetorically, “So basically they are trying to woke the 50s?”
A different respondent echoed this, opining, “Rewriting history in the name of diversity is lame.”
And in a similar vein, yet another man stated, “How could a prequel to Grease set in the 1950s be ‘more diverse’? When this fails — and it will fall — maybe it’s the producers who need to be a little more ‘self-aware’ about handling a franchise they didn’t create?”
The respondent’s point is that America was at the time close to 90 percent white, and this figure didn’t really begin changing until our new immigration regime — which has caused profound demographic upheaval — took effect in 1968. In the ’50s, people stressed not “diversity” but unity.
Moreover, while evident here is the strategy called intersectionality — the notion that all minority groups’ (non-whites, the “LGBTQ+” crew, etc.) interests intersect in their collective opposition to “whiteness” — the reality is that no matter your race, creed, or color, virtually everyone opposed homosexuality in the ’50s. As for the rest of the now-ubiquitous sexual devolutionary agenda (e.g., “transgenderism”), it was then unimaginable.
What’s more, many minorities have in more recent decades been more likely to oppose this agenda than whites have. Just consider that 70 percent of blacks but only 49 percent of whites voted for California’s Proposition 8, which correctly defined marriage as a man/woman union.
Yet there is method to this madness. Responding to one of the above tweeters, a woman expressed that she wanted see more ’50s culture (message below).
Of course, though, the above Amy won’t actually see “culture from the ’50s” in modern, PC works such as the pink Grease.
That’s the whole idea, too.
One way to get people to accept bizarre new norms is to convince them they’re not new at all. The Left does this via its control of the culture shapers (e.g., entertainment).
In fact, while leftists complain that the “Right,” Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) in particular, is “banning” books, this is pure propaganda. First, as even left-wing CNN reported in 2021, liberal-run libraries have effectively banned works such Little House on the Prairie, Peter Pan, and some Dr. Seuss picture books due to “racist depictions.”
Oh, except that they don’t literally “ban” them.
They “archive” them, relates CNN.
So you can still access them as a “historical artifact.” And your eight-year-old may actually know to do so — if he has a 178 IQ.
So, again, we see that the real difference between Right and Left is that the latter is more feline about matters. Don’t bark at a book — just call it a historical oddity and hide it. Mrrrrrrrrrrawr!
More cleverly still, leftists also will co-opt works. They’ll “sanitize” books by changing the language within them or, in films’ and shows’ case, remake them. Call it the Great Cultural Reset.
And that’s partially what pink Grease is all about. It’s effective, too, because there’s a corollary to George Santayana’s famous saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” To wit:
Those who cannot remember the past’s glory are condemned to not be able to repeat it.
