Tags: Celine Dion

Zero Tolerance for Cancel Culture.

On October 5, 2017, The New York Times published shocking allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation. Four months later I hosted a RamsayTalk with the co-author of that piece, Jodi Kantor. She noted that the pendulum had already swung from silence to zero tolerance.

She told a story of a notional office party where the CFO drank too much and made an unwelcome advance to a female colleague. She complained to HR. He was immediately fired, couldn’t get a job, lost his accountant’s license and left his family and life in ruins.

Some would say he deserved all that and more.

Jodi Kantor said, before #MeToo became a movement, and long before she co-wrote She Said, and won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Weinstein story: “Likely all the woman really wanted was an apology.”

Read on…

Quiet, please, there’s a lady on stage.

I’ve always liked Celine Dion’s songs more than I’ve liked Celine Dion.

I’m not sure what it was: too slick, too produced, too perfect.

Then she started cancelling shows claiming she had a rare and mysterious disease. Since 2020 she’s been silent. No new songs, no new shows. Nothing. But…

Not.

Any.

More.

Her performance last Friday at the opening of the Paris Olympic Games, where she belted out Hymne à l’amour, was stunning in its own right.

But when you think how terribly sick she’s been, and still is, those four minutes singing in the rain became a global event.

It used to be that people asked: “Where were you when..?” and they would follow with some tragedy or assassination. The only good-news-version I’ve heard is: “Where were you when the astronauts landed on the moon?” But it’s not far-fetched, even when Ms. Dion’s 15-seconds of fame have already stretched to 40 years, for us to ask: “Where were you when Celine Dion sang in Paris?”

Read on…

“No country for old men.”

Yeats was referring to Ireland when he began Sailing to Byzantium with that line in 1933, and the Coen Brothers used it as the title for their 2007 Western about an old sheriff trying to make sense of a brutal and ambiguous world.

Last week, of course, its meaning had changed again, to “Joe Biden.”

This week it means something else entirely, “Donald Trump.”

We blame old men with money and power for not handing them back when asked nicely. As a result, many don’t. Most don’t. So when an old man with more power than anyone else on earth decides his time has come, the speed and scope of change can be head-spinning.

In the space of two days, Donald Trump is now the halting old man. A convicted felon also found guilty of sexual assault in a separate case, he will now face an opponent who has put dozens of men like him in jail. A …younger…. Black…woman. Can there be a worse nightmare?

Read on…

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