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March 31, 2006
TT: The devil made them do it
Here's a little taste of my next "Sightings" column, which appears biweekly in the "Pursuits" section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:A Colorado teacher was put on leave by her superintendent last month after showing a video of excerpts from "Faust" to one of her classes. Some parents, it seems, didn't want their kids to see an opera about a devil. Around the same time, a principal in Fulton, Mo., cancelled a student production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" when he learned that the play was about witches.
You probably read these stories--then forgot about them. Such skirmishes, after all, are commonplace in postmodern America, where long-simmering cultural resentments can boil over without warning. But what happened to Tresa Waggoner, who got in red-hot water for introducing her students to an opera she calls "a great part of our civilization and Western culture," is more than just another black-and-white tale of blue-nosed intolerance in Red America....
As always, there's lots more where that came from. See for yourself--buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.
Posted March 31, 2006 12:00 PM
