Archives for January 2023

Can we all take a moment to marvel at the courage of Joe Lycett? Imagine the cojones it must take to go on the BBC and make fun of the Tories. How truly stunning and brave. Roll over Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks – there’s a new comedy insurgent in town.

I’m being sarcastic, clearly. And sarcasm, as we know, is the lowest form of wit. Apart, perhaps, from going on the BBC to make fun of the Tories. I honestly cannot think of anything more pedestrian and less amusing than that.

Lycett is being fawned over for his satirical storming of Laura Kuenssberg’s new Sunday morning political show. Boy, he really stuck it to The Man. He pretended to be right wing – what larks! – and said he fully backs Liz Truss. She may be the ‘backwash of the available MPs’, he said, but she always gives ‘great clear answers’.

The usual suspects are lapping it up. They really seem to believe that Lycett’s droll act as an ‘incredibly right-wing’ comic who loves Liz is satire on a par with Swift. He’s become their rebel hero, the beautiful fly in the ointment of the BBC-Tory nexus of power that they think is a real thing but which isn’t.

In truth, this was one of the most risk-free acts of comedy I have ever witnessed. There will be not one negative consequence for Lycett as a result of his Sunday morning Tory-bashing. Because hating the Tories is received opinion among the cultural elites. Poor Laura may have been ticked off with Lycett’s satirical posturing but I guarantee that every BBC bigwig in the control and upstairs will have been chortling along. ‘An ‘incredibly right-wing’ comedian on the BBC? Brilliant!’, they’ll have chuckled.

Indeed, Lycett’s entire schtick relied for its bite on the very fact that an ‘incredibly right-wing’ comic would never even be on the BBC. What a preposterous notion. The humour, for what it was worth, derived precisely from the unlikelihood of such a person appearing on a respectable BBC talkshow. Everyone in the production team, and most people at home, will have smiled knowingly at Lycett’s subtle mockery of such a scenario.

The guffawing middle classes who watch shows like this were all in on the joke. They know that people like Lycett – good, clean members of the cultural establishment – are not right-wing. In playing his opposite, Lycett was actually further ingratiating himself with his own kind – influential cultural players for whom being a Conservative party supporter is such an alien concept that they know instantly it is satire when one of their own claims to be that most curious and risible thing.

Witness the way Lycett kept looking over at Emily Thornberry, the doyenne of bourgeois London leftism. She was his audience of one, the provider of approving laughter to his sarcastic performance as a right-winger. Darling, as if!

Lycett is the anti-Sadowitz. Where comics like Jerry Sadowitz take huge risks – and face huge consequences, like being banned from the Edinburgh Fringe – Lycett stays in the safe, warm territory of elite consensus opinion. Tories bad, Daily Mail awful, Boris a posh lunatic – this is the pool of middle-class opinion every BBC comic now swims in. It’s just dull, I’m afraid. There’s no peril for the comic, and thus no tension, and thus little humour.

Lycett’s comedy is the comedy of received opinion. Comics once bristled at the establishment – think That Was The Week That Was. Now too many of them reproduce establishment ideas repackaged as twee jokes. Expect Lycett to be on the BBC more and more. The director-general will probably have him for tea. ‘Incredibly right-wing – Joe, that was genius.’

I’m serious: these are that good.

On “The Rubin Report,” BlazeTV host Dave Rubin talked about Elon Musk’s hilarious response after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) attempted to shame him over mass layoffs at Twitter.”Shout out to all the workers at Twitter. You all built a vital place for connection and deserved so much better…

About 17 miles away from Mount Rushmore, rests a monument for a Native American hero.  Crazy Horse was the leader of Oglala Lakota who fought in many famous battles of the American Indian Wars, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn where he killed General Custer. He fought to defend Oglala land, but eventually, he brokered a surrender with the government. Born on December 4, 1849, little is known about Crazy Horse’s personal life. Yet he is a famous Native American historical figure, celebrated today by his enormous memorial. That is, once it’s finished. [1]

The Memorial for Crazy Horse

The site in the Black Hills of South Dakota started construction in 1948. The end product is meant to depict Crazy Horse on a horse with his arm outstretched, but for now, his 87-foot face is carved with little shape to the rest of his body and his horse. Once it’s finished, it will be even larger than the presidents on Mount Rushmore. People could still visit the memorial and learn about Crazy Horse’s history. [2]

The unfinished state of the site is due to a few factors:

Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski designed this project. Since his passing in 1982, his family continues to oversee the memorial and the foundation. They stay true to Ziolkowski’s desire to carry on without governmental funding. “He believed you can do anything in this world. Nothing is impossible as long as you’re willing to work hard enough and pay the price,” says Ziolkowski’s wife, Ruth, before she passed in 2014 from cancer. [3] The family doesn’t give up on the monument, as they still follow Ziolkowski’s plan. However, they made slight changes to work with the challenging rock. 

“He always said you had to work with Mother Nature because she’ll beat you every time. So that’s why we’re working with the engineers, and we will be putting bolts in for support, but the bulk of the mountain needs to stand on its own,” says Monique Ziolkowski, the sculptor’s daughter.

Read: 9 Pieces Of Wisdom From Native American Elders Our World Needs To Hear

In 1939, the current chief of the Lakota, Henry Standing Bear, commissioned the monument from Ziolkowski. At that time, Mount Rushmore was almost finished, and Standing Bear wanted a Native American leader memorialized the same way. He chose Ziolkowski because of his famed work on the Mount Rushmore monument. Ziolkowski had reported that Standing Bear told him, “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes also.” However, descendants of Crazy Horse weren’t asked for permission, although Lakota culture demands consensus for these kinds of matters.

“They don’t respect our culture because we didn’t give permission for someone to carve the sacred Black Hills where our burial grounds are,” said Elaine Quiver, a descendant of Crazy Horse. “They were there for us to enjoy and they were there for us to pray. But it wasn’t meant to be carved into images, which is very wrong for all of us. The more I think about it, the more it’s a desecration of our Indian culture. Not just Crazy Horse, but all of us.” [5]

Other critics argue that the humble Crazy Horse wouldn’t want to be memorialized as a giant statue. However, supporters of the project praised the memorial despite the carving, such as the educational heritage museums, the medical training center, the on-site university for Native Americans, and the sponsorship program for Native American high school students. Additionally, many applaud the monument’s valuable history lesson and how it places a Native American hero in the public’s eye.

Read: The Native Americans Celebrated Five Genders

Will the Monument Ever Finish?

While some visitors are unimpressed with the slow progress, some are able to return and see what progress is made. For instance, Bridget Martin from Wisconsin first saw the memorial as a child. “You kind of look forward to it for your kids to come back in 10 years or 20 years and see it finished,” she says.

The memorial remains unfinished and it’s uncertain if it will ever be completed. However, Ruth Ziolkowski had responded to critics who mock the slow progress by quoting her late husband. “He said, ‘Go slowly so you do it right.’ And, I, for one, would like to have it go faster, but there are so many things that you have to do in order to do it right that it takes the time.”

According to the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation’s website, there’s a lot of promise of continued progress in the future, albeit slow progress. For now, the foundation’s mission is “to protect and preserve the culture, tradition, and living heritage of the North American Indians,” and the sculpture is only one of several of their endeavors, alongside the museums, medical training centers, and university. [5] 

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This article originally appeared on The Premier Daily and has been republished here with permission.