Excerpt:
"Why don't you all just come out and say what you're really thinking?
That’s but a sampling of the big-mad emotions swirling around the fever swamps of social media. So let me summarize: Lizzo played a historic flute nobody outside of James-Madison-fan-boy circles had ever heard of before Tuesday, and that was a societal cataclysm significant enough to distract MAGA-Republican thought leaders from their important work, which at the time was probably being super angry that a Black woman plays Ariel in the upcoming live-action “Little Mermaid” movie.
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Before all the folks upset with Lizzo and the Library of Congress harm our pets’ hearing with their incessant dog whistles, let me say for them what they are actually trying to say: How dare a Black woman who doesn’t conform to our Barbie-doll-inspired standards of beauty play an instrument owned by one of the Founding Fathers.
That’s the point, clearly, and if they’re going to be loathsome about it, the least they could do is have the guts to be honest. Price’s tweet said people like me who thought Lizzo’s performance was cool “degrade our history and then call you racist if you actually value it.” That’s not true. I don’t think for a moment that Price or any of these disingenuous, aggrieved-without-cause people value our history, and I’ll still call them racist.
Trump could shove the flute up his nose and they would cheer
If former President Donald Trump got on stage at one of his rallies, took Madison’s crystal flute and shoved it up his nose while singing “Yankee Doodle,” Ellis and Walsh and Price and the usual choir of online MAGA blatherers would be downright rapturous. They’d call it a beautiful and welcome embrace of our proud Western heritage, or a return to the kind of values America was founded on."
Tremendous amounts of self-owning in the people that went nuts about this. The only healthy adult reaction to this non-event ranges from "Who cares?" to "Good for her." Since the right has degenerated into toddlers screaming in outrage that everyone now gets to play with the toys, well, they had plenty to scream about. Frankly the LOC might well have been trolling them, and they responded predictably.
So, there is blame on both sides? Is that what you are saying? Maybe it was a thought that it would be cool if a talented, popular, classically educated flute player were to play a cool instrument that has been sitting idol for two hundred years got to perform with it. And it was cool, and that is where it should have ended.