1. Today was the week of the school play, and I’ve basically been working non-stop all week up until last night. The good news is that the kids pulled it out and really did a great job with the show. The bad news is that I now have to try to make up all the other work that I’ve had to put on hold.

2. Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of story. There are stories that are intended to present a certain idea or message, and are well-written enough that they successfully present it. There are stories which are too poorly written to present a coherent idea at all, whatever the intent of their creators. And then there are stories which are intended to present a certain idea, but which, if fact, consistently and effectively present a different idea.

Having spent several months working with it, I think West Side Story is an example of the latter. The intended message appears to be standard Boomer utopianism: dangers of intolerance, racism, ‘hate’, etc. But looking at the events of the story, the real message is that naive idealism in the face of delicate and complicated situations leads to disaster.

3. I might do a longer post on it, but essentially every bad thing that happens in the story, apart from the enmity between the gangs, happens because Tony and Maria subordinate all other concerns to their idealistic romance. This leads to Tony stupidly trying to stop the rumble by just talking to Bernardo, which obviously would never work, even if he hadn’t tried to do it when the other man is already keyed up for a fight. The result is both Riff and Bernardo get killed, the latter by Tony himself. From there, the situation spirals ever further out of control.

The consistent pattern is that Tony and Maria (especially the later) fail to respect the difficulties of their situation, resulting in disaster which ought to have been completely predictable (e.g. the outcome of Anita’s mission to Jets territory).

4. Though, on second thought, this fits with the core theme of Romeo and Juliet, which is the sins of the parents being visited upon their children. In that one, everything that goes wrong happens because of the feud between Montague and Capulet. This results in the titular couple choosing to hide their infatuation from their respective parents and try to navigate the difficulties of love on their own. Both version – Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story – are essentially about the younger generation suffering due to the failures of the older generation.

5. On that note, I think “failure to respect circumstances” might be a good way to sum up modern leftism, or what I above called ‘boomer utopianism’: this idea that the problem is ‘hate’ and that the answer is simply to be better, to ‘find a better way of living’, and so on. Pretending that a complex, difficult situation is easy because you “can’t see the problem.” Sort of a variation of Chesterton’s gate: if you don’t see the problem, you can’t offer a solution.

How many people, watching West Side Story, consider the real difficulties of the situation? That, on the one hand, you have the Puerto Ricans, who came to America looking for a better life, only to face resentment and discrimination; but on the other, you have the Jets, who are troubled boys living in a rough neighborhood trying to force some sense of meaning out of their lives, only to have it be further complicated by an influx of people from an alien culture. It’s not a simple situation that can be solved by tolerance and understanding, because each side necessarily makes life harder for the other, not by doing anything in particular, but just by being what they are.

This is one reason why I would argue that WSS actually has a more tragic and downbeat ending than Romeo and Juliet: because unlike the original play, the causes of the conflict are still present and active at the end.

6. Thought that came on the way to Mass today:

God made the world such that no creature can reach its full potential unless it submits to obedience to a higher creature.

This is what we call ‘order:’ rational correction for the excesses of a creature’s natural tendencies. This whether we’re talking about tending a garden so that the plants don’t kill each other or ruling a nation so as to maintain the common good.

7. And a delightfully mean joke I heard recently:

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”