Skip to main content

Popularly Wicked Political Satire

Amy and I were privledged to go see the "Broadway Across America" performance of the musical hit Wicked at the Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake last week. This is a charming retelling of the Frank Baum classic, The Wizard of Oz, that fills us in on the details of the relationship between Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, and Glinda, the good witch of the north.

Like its inspiration, Wicked is a political satire masked as a fantasy musical. Where the original was a parody of government meddling with the prices of silver and gold. (Dorothy's slippers are silver in the book, and the name of the magical place, Oz, is the abbreviation for the word ounce.)

In this telling of the story, the wizard isn't so wonderful. In fact, he makes up false enemies of Oz to build fear to make him appear "wonderful." Glinda is also not quite as "good" as her title would have her. Though she is not a bad witch, she is not completely innocent either. Elphaba is not wicked at all, but is made to appear so, along with all of the talking animals in Oz, to further the political agenda of the Wizard. I couldn't help but think of George Bush's claims the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion a few years back as I watched the show.

Listen to the lyrics in this video clip, and you'll get a bit of a sense of whereof I speak.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Agregate Demand and the US Savings Rate

In my last post, I touched on the differences between the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig von Mises. Immediately aftward, I was directed to this story in the New York Times. It seems that americans are saving more instead of spending the their money on consumer goods. Up until this downturn, about 70% of the US Economy was consumer spending, and in 2005, the US Savings rate was negative 2.7%. The "stimulus" is supposed to stimulate spending to get money moving again. But it isn't happening as planned. Folks are saving for down payments because they don't expect to get zero down home mortgages; they're saving to replenish their decimated retirement and college funds. The austrians believe that the best way to "fix" the economy is to allow the "malinvestment" created by the false signals in the economy (from the open market ops and deficit spending) to be liquidated and the resources repurposed into better investments. It...
Post a Comment
Read more

Haiti Adoption Story

Most of us have seen or read stories of adoptions of Haitian children following the earthquake last month. Some of the stories have had a positive slant (the charity has saved children...) other's have had a negative slant (the "missionaries" who kidnapped and tried to smuggle 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic). At a family gathering yesterday, my wife heard a story about a couple that was "finally" able to adopt a child they've been trying to adopt for about 4 years. As the story was related to me, this couple had originally been matched with this child about 4 years ago, but the adoption was cancelled when the parents of the child took her back and parented her themselves. After about three years of caring for the child, the natural parents returned her to the orphanage because both of them had been diagnosed with tuberculosis; a death sentence in Haiti. (Mortality for untreated TB is about 67%.) The adoption was finalized just befo...
3 comments
Read more

Keynes vs. Mises -- Whose Theory Will Rule

When I was in high school I was one of those geeky - nerdy kids. This was the late 1970's and calculators were just coming on the market, so I had a Texas Instruments SR-50A in a pouch on my belt and a slide-rule in my shirt pocket. If the PC had existed back then, I would have been a prototypical computer geek. One of my favorite classes was Vocational Electronics. One day during my Junior year the instructor gave us a lab assignment involving resonant circuits. We were to build a tank circuit with an inductor and a capacitor in parallel, calculate the frequency the circuit should resonate at, then measure the voltage across the circuit as we varied the frequency to see if the formula actually worked. There were two of us working on the lab. I finished the lab quickly; Mike, well, not so quickly. While I waited for him to finish the assignment, I started experimenting with values of capacitor outside the range from the assignment. As I got farther and farther and farther away fro...
Post a Comment
Read more