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.