If there’s one person that’s bound to cause round after round of complaining online, it’s Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. She’s fun to make fun of, and, most fun of all, she’s not really in politics anymore. She has absolutely no power. After her election loss to Donald Trump in 2016, God help us all, she sort of vanished. It’s not that she hasn’t been up to anything or trying to help causes, but she stepped out of the spotlight. She doesn’t hold office, and I honestly don’t think she’s looking to do so again. And if there’s one thing any of us can learn from being on the internet: making fun of the powerful is scary. Making fun of people with no power? Well, that’s the most praxis praxis thing you can do. Why go after transphobic republicans when you can relentlessly hound trans women who haven’t looked into the camera and declared that they’re the same sort of communist that you are?
Everyone likes getting dunks in. It’s also not lost on me that Clinton faces heightened scrutiny and ridicule because she’s a woman. It’s easy to try to shove that away and talk about her record and the ways she has caused harm, but… It’s unfortunate fact that famous women receive heightened scrutiny. They become the centers of all evils in the world. Taylor Swift isn’t merely a rich person who should be critiqued for certain endeavors or statements, she becomes a *thing*, a *creature*, something inhuman. There’s an entire swath of the internet possessed by loser rightwing blowhards who are every form of bigotry under the sun. But you know who else loves to engage with bigotry, especially sexism, as long as it’s against the “right” people and so therefore becomes “riteous” bigotry? That’s right. It’s the dirtbag left.
For the podcasters and twitter-warriors, Hilary Clinton isn’t merely a flawed politician who has advocated for both good and horrible policies. She’s the patient-zero of neoliberalism. It’s she rather than Donald Trump that is the true enemy. Why is that? Well, Trump is an asshole. And they like assholes. They pretend that he’s funny. They continue not to take him seriously. They look at the bump in DSA membership during the Trump years and rpetend that means a return to his presidency might be good for the future of socialism in this country. They’re idiots, is what it is. Hilary Clinton, meanwhile, isn’t an out front asshole. She’s cringe. Pokemon go to the polls. She was liked and supported by normies. She likes and supports normies. She was a standard Democrat instead of a socialist. She beat Bernie. I’ve felt the Bern, in 2016, not in my under downstairs. But unlike the dirtbag left, I didn’t let his loss turn me into a contrarian incapable of doing anything but being a jerk on the internet to get dunking points off other terminally online jerks on the internet.
So if Hilary Clinton is this infectious disease, then obviously everything she touches has to be despised, too. She and her daughter Chelsea did a series on influential women and included an interview with Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints. Of course, Twitter took that as proof that Natalie is a “horrible person,” a label they’ve been obsessed with sticking on her for forever, likely because she’s not pro-engaging with all our of base instincts without questioning them. I think comparing her to a disease isn’t accurate. Rather, she’s a magnifying glass. She amplifies the pre-existing biases and hates of certain people.
What another thing from circa-2016 that leftists who hate Hillary Clinton hate? The smash hit musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. On April 3rd of 2024, Hamilton creator and fellow democrat Miranda joined Clinton in a fundraiser for President Biden. The two aim to get Biden re-elected over the disaster that would be another Trump presidency. And of course, the dirtbag left type who hate Clinton and Hamilton, who find both them and Miranda to be “cringe,” got quite annoyed at the announcement of this fundraiser. We got a round of discourse calling Hamilton “neoliberal.”
So I think it’s time we finally deal with Hamilton and the absolute lack of media literacy surrounding it. I’m fed up with the critiques that simply refuse to engage with the actual text of the show. Let’s actually engage with the text.
One - The Problem with Hamilton
One of the most common criticisms you’ll hear about Hamilton is that it’s corny. They’ll talk about how they don’t personally like the songs and the lyrics. It’s too musical theatre to be good rap or whatever. I fundamentally don’t care about that sort of criticism and I find it sort of worthless to the conversation? Not liking something is fine and having opinions about the qualities that cause you not to like it are fine. Some people like the taste of corn. Some people don’t. Sometimes corn is so all invasive in th efood diet that you don’t know you’re eating and loving it. Sometimes you get cornanoid and assume see corn all over the place. Like or don’t like whatever you want. That’s not a real criticism though. That’s just personal taste. And despite what anti-art morons on the internet will tell you, taste cannot be correct. It cannot be high or low. It cannot be objective. True taste is personal. Social taste is fundamentally worthless when it comes to actually evaluating a piece of art for what it is.
Sam Haselby, editor at Aeon Magazine, has a different critique that’s also quite popular. After the report that Miranda and Clinton were going to host a fundraiser, Haselby tweeted: “These two represent the multicultural neoliberalism still among us. What’s multicultural neoliberalism? The concept that no form of capitalism is too iniquitous, no level of inequality too obscene, so long as it is not explicitly racist.” Haselby is the type of person who attacks “wokeism” but from the left, claiming things like DEI and lessening importance of test scores in academic admittance are just the bourgeois doing capitalism. He’s the sort to make fun of liberals for calling the MAGA movement fascist and calling them hysterical in their fear of it, despite, you know, the 2025 plan, Trump’s history, and the stated horrid policy goals of the GOP. He appears to be one of those class reductionist types.
A different guy, Tyler Austin Harper, quote tweeted in agreement with Haselby. He said “The HRC + Lin-Manuel Miranda tag team represents the pinnacle of multicultural neoliberalism Hamilton is the Bible of the multicultural managerial class: replace some old white guys with browns and women while leaving everything else intact and you get [jazz hands] “justice.” You may recognize Harper from his claim that polyamory is the pinnacle of bourgeois individualism. Combing that with this tweet, and it’s pretty easy to guess where he’s coming from: class reductionism and social conservatism that he has to pretend isn’t conservative so he cloaks it in leftist language. But going “omg no polyamorous relationships are icky” is not doing leftism.
Getting annoyed at Harper’s tweet is actually what inspired me to talk about Hamilton, because I’ve seen this critiques for a long time, and they’ve always slightly confused me. Aren’t they plainly not engaging with the text?
Well, there are plenty of people who agree with them. In a very condescending, anti-art, smug article for Current Affairs that I highly disliked reading because, ironically, of its own elitist snobbery, Alex Nichols also criticizes the show for putting people of color in the roles of historically horrible people. After calling it “forced diversity,” he complains that the seeming purpose of that casting was to make it easier for people to enjoy a story about the founding fathers and feel patriotism. Now, despite how godawful that article is, I don’t think it’s without merit. Many people have critiqued the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” narrative that surrounds how the musical paints Hamilton himself. He’s also not the only person to look at how the show skirts around slavery and historical black figures. It seems he’d claim that’s for gross creepy capitalism reasons. Then again, he’s a condescending prick.
In an article for Howl Round, great theatre website by the way, you should spend some time reading articles there, James McMaster points out the feminist issue with Hamilton which likely comes down to a lack of stage time and especially a lack of stage time that wasn’t centered around Hamilton… Well, that is the focus of the show… And Eliza does point out at the end of the musical that she does have her own story that people don’t talk about because people focus on the stories of men… but also it was a choice to have this story focus on the men… It’s a discourse that can go back and forth. It’s interesting. He also asks why there wasn’t any genderbending in the casting. That! Is actually I think the most interesting question I’ve read someone put forth in any criticism of Hamilton, especially in regards to how I’m going to lay out my reading of the show later on. I think some genderbent casting would have made the actual aims of the show easier for people to read.
While praising Hamilton’s depiction of immigration, especially given Miranda’s own Latino identity and the perils and bigotries surrounding Latin immigration in the US, Kylie Umehira goes into detail about how the show glosses over slavery. She talks about how it potrays Hamilton himself as vehemently anti-slavery even thought the historic figure was more ambivalent on the whole thing.
One playwright, Ishmael Reed, hated it so much he wrote a play called The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. As Jeremy Gordon writes, Reed compared having black men play the founding fathers to having Jewish men play Nazis… which is a thing that happens a lot. Gordon says the play was pretty boring, but he enjoyed the contempt that went into its writing as he also delightfully hates Hamilton for reasons.
But over and over the main critique is about the casting of POC in a story about the founding fathers, arguing that it’s attempting to, to borrow a horrible phrase from that Current Affairs article, “blackwash” history. It’s wanting to make things like capitalism and patriotism and the history of America seem fine and wonderful by casting people of color… right? Surely that’s what it’s doing, right? There’s definitely not a clear theatrical convention by which a lot of these criticisms would show a lack of actual engagement with the text as a piece of theatre… right?
Two - Brecht
To truly understand what Hamilton is doing as a text, it might help to know about some theatrical conventions. So let’s talk about a very influential man who wrote some plays I find very tedious but whose theories I respect: Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was a German playwright of The Threepenny Opera fame. When I was in undergrad, our department put on a production of his show Mother Courage & Her Children. You might be thinking: wait, he’s German? Does that mean he has a crazy long German word associated with him? Verfremdungseffekt. The d-effect, ooh. We’re distancing from the work. The idea is that, through reminding people that you’re watching a show, you can get them to engage with the politics of the art. You start asking questions. “Why?”
Let’s go over some ways in which we distance, and talk about how they relate to Hamilton. And we get one at the beginning of each act. In Mother Courage & Her Children, Brecht would start each scene with a heading read out, voiced-over or projected in some way for the audience to hear or see and digest. Those headlines would spell out exactly what’s about to happen. You don’t get surprised by the deaths of her children. You’re told at the start of the scene that that’s what is going to happen. In Hamilton, you get this through Burr’s narration songs. “How does a bastard orphan son of a whore… grow up to be a hero and a scholar? … Enemies destroyed his rep, America forgot him.” So we’re going to see his rise and fall. The characters tell you how they’re going to relate to him. We love him. We fight with him. We die for him. I kill him. Those are the events of the show. Act II starts with Burr saying “How does the bastard orphan… unite the colonies through more debt, fight the other founding fathers ‘til he has to forfeit?” Hamilton’s debt plans are going to succeed, but his political battles are going to destroy him. The lyrics aren’t as detailed or dispassionate as Brecht, but they do spill the future. When we’re spoiled like that, we get just enough distance to ask “Why does that happen” while it’s happening instead of long after we’ve seen the show. So why does Hamilton grow up to be a hero? Well we see he’s obsessed with climbing up. He can’t allow himself to rest. He’s hotheaded. Why did his enemies destroy his rep? Well, he was annoying, and he was an obstacle to their political asperations .How did he unite the colonies through more debt? By becoming a savvier, sleazier political player. Why does he have to forfeit? Because he makes the choice to cheat on his wife, buy his cuck’s silence, and then publish the details when he’s attacked. He’s too obsessed with his political legacy to care deeply about the details of those in his life. When we complain about the founding fathers being whitewashed as heroes… are they? When we’re asked to think about Hamilton’s failures, we have to examine his moral failings. He’s a dick.
You might think that’s a contradiction. The show is clearly still sympathetic to Hamilton. Brecht was a leading figure in what’s known as “epic theatre.” In an article on her website, Alannah Marie talks about one of the central tenants of epic theatre being the contradiction. She compares it to Cubism. The idea is that life is full of contradictions, and by showcasing them, living in them in a play, we present that fact in a frustrating way to an audience. That distances them and forces them to ask *why* things happen how they do. The entire presentation of Hamilton is in a way a contradiction. People of color are presenting a semi-celebration of a group of slave owning racists. That’s a major complaint a lot of people have. You’re meant to ask after the contradiction. Put a pin in that. On the scene level, we also get that. Eliza meets Hamilton and they’re going to be wed. It’s happy. Then Angelica shows how it’s also a tragedy. If we zoom out further, the opening song tells us that America is going to forget Hamilton. But Washington tells him that history is always going to remember his actions. That contradiction is actually central to the show: what stories do we tell? About who and why? We have no control over who tells our story, but we do get to choose whose stories we tell. Does that speak at all to the central complaint people have with the show? That pin is undercooked. It’s not ready to come out yet. We’ll come back to it.
Another way of distancing an audience, reminding us that we’re watching theatre, is through doubling. My favorite use of doubling is in the two-parter Angels in America by Tony Kushner. But you see this a lot in musicals too. Another explicitly political show, Spring Awakening, makes liberal use of this too. The adult roles are split between far fewer actors than there are roles. “All of the adults, no matter their personal kindness, are of the same societal sickness that harms children,” is the argument there. In Hamilton, the actress who plays Peggy, a Schyuler sister, also plays Maria, the woman Hamilton has an affair with. The double casting shows Hamilton’s obsession with those sisters and how he would have slept with any of them at any point. But it also makes you wonder about Maria. Comedienne Katherine Ryan has a funny bit about shouting at the cast during the “Can’t Say No to This” number for how creepy and sexist Hamilton is during it. Peggy is seen as a cute joke that doesn’t matter. Well, let’s combine the two. Maria is a young woman taken advantage of by a powerful man. Peggy is a joke, forgotten by the show. History doesn’t care about Maria. Who tells her story? Who tells Peggy’s story? How do we treat women in history?
The doubling also manages to do some of the spoiling for the show. The actor who sings that he dies for Hamilton in the opening number plays both Laurens and Hamilton’s son. Surprise surprise, both of them die. Phillip dies in a duel defending his father’s honor and legacy. What about Laurens? In the play, the letter sent detailing Laurens’s death says, “On Tuesday the 27th my son was killed in a gunfight with British troops retreating from South Carolina. The war was already over. As you know, John dreamed of emancipating and recruiting 3000 men for the first all-black military regiment. His dream of freedom for these men dies with him.” Now, how is that dying for Hamilton? Well, Hamilton the historical figure? Can it be about the actor playing Hamilton? Even if Lin-Manuel isn’t black, to be non-white is to not have a good time in America’s past. But what if it is about Hamilton? Or, rather, the metaphor of Hamilton? Is Laurens a statement on the unending bloodshed Hamilton helped escalate, the knowledge that the revolution will cause people we love to die for our ideals including in pointless fights?
One thing a lot of people mistakenly thing is pointless is the existence of the reference. You see a lot of lyrics in musical theatre referencing other pieces of theatre. Six has the suddenly Seymour line about Jane Seymour that I find very cute. Hamilton isn’t without these moments. “You have to be carefully taught if you talk you’re gonna get shot” is a reference to South Pacific and how bigotry is taught. Fear and deference to authority is equated to racism. “The model of a modern major-general, the venerable virginian veteran whose men are all…” is a reference to The Pirates of Penzanse by Gilbert & Sullivan. Who are they? Writers of a quite racist operetta called The Mikado. There are a bunch of reference to other songs, musical and not. So… are they pointless? Why am I talking about them in the Brecht section? Well, theatre references themselves act as a reminder you’re watching theatre. “Hey, isn’t that…?” Suddenly, you’re distanced a bit. You’re asking questions. You’re thinking about how it engages with texts modern and classic. “This is a piece of art that exists in this world and in the context of all that came before it.” Kamala Harris would smile and nod at a reference and say, “Damn right you didn’t fall out of a coconut tree.”
One of the most popular methods of distancing is through historification. You’re commenting on current events through telling a story of the past. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is one of the easiest examples. The Salem Witch trials were the McCarthy Trials. Hamilton is set during the American Revolution and then the period of early governance in the immediate aftermath. As lin-Manuel Miranda himself says, “This is a story about America then, told by America today.” Not to contradict Mr. Miranda on his own show, but he has it backwards. This is a story about America today, told by America then.
Three - The Story of Today
So. Is Hamilton telling the story of the founding fathers? On the surface. But… not really. The casting of people of color as the mythic figures of the American Revolution isn’t a coincidence. The show continuously talks about legacy. About who tells what stories. When you’re in elementary school, you get the myths of the founding fathers. We treat the American “greats” like Greek Gods, masculine figures to be revered, whose faults can be mentioned but must never *be* the story. They *are* the American dream. When we tell a somewhat sanitized story of the founding fathers, are we actually telling a story about them as people who once existed or are we telling a story about the mythology surrounding them, about the metaphors of America?
Let’s go back to that contradiction everyone complains about. A black man plays Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner partially famous for sexually assaulting the human beings he treated as his property. Instinctively, that feels gross. So why do it?
By casting people of color as American Revolutionaries, by referencing Black culture, rap, and hiphop, by using the musical language of rap & hiphop, the show is directly connecting contemporary Americans of color, American immigrants, to the founding fathers. The most prominent role played by a white person is King George, the genocidal, crazy, oppressive force that must be resisted. Black and brown Americans are up against a government that oppresses them. Through its consistent engagement with alienation, Hamilton is saying that the struggles of non-white Americans are analogous to those of the revolutionaries. It is a mythic struggle. Broadway’s audience are predominately rich white people.”This is a story you are primed to enjoy and embrace. Now we will distance you from it, and cast black and brown bodies in the roels you so long to empathize with.”
This is even more prominent coming from Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda readily admits to his spiritual connection to Hamilton. They’re both writers who work themselves near to death. They’re obsessed with legacy. They’re vaguely progressive. Miranda may not be an immigrant, but he does hail from Peurto Rico, a US territory that often gets treated as lesser both by white Americans and by the government itself. Peurto Rico does not have representation in our government, just as the colonies had no representation under King George. I don’t know if Miranda intended for that connection, but it is there. He has lived his life under a government which does not treat him, his family, or people who look like him with the equality and goodness that they claim to. The American government is not always the sweet and benevolent lover. It can often by abusive.
The story of America yesterday as told by America today.
The show premiered before the George Floyd protests in 2020. While obviously that means the show can’t be about those protests, they’re obviously not the first of their kind. Racist police violence against Black people has been a long part of American history. A great solo show, Twilight, Los Angeles, is about the riots following the events with Rodney King. The show was still being written and improved during the Ferguson protests following the shooting of Michael Brown.
Hamilton argues that there has already been bloodshed with the Boston Massacre. In America today, there’s also already been bloodshed. There have been rivers of it.
Four - The Room Where Reading Didn’t Happen
I’m really interested in this trend of people reading Hamilton as endorsing the founding fathers, of trying to whitewash them, and of the casting being a cheap ploy at identity politics. Now, that last I find particularly concerning. As I talked about in my video on the musical Head Over Heels, there is a segment of the left which wholly rejects identity politics and representation completely. It’s a sort of kneejerk reaction to things not being explicitly about class. What if these people just want to continue the current power systems for the most part? I like to think it’s a sort of fear response to that. But. There’s also a chance it hides something dirtier and meaner. It could be class reductionism. I find that tendency stupid but at least it isn’t the next step further which is social reactionarism disguised in leftist language. Look at the Communist Part of Britain putting out its anti-trans article pretending to be trans is “bourgeois decadence.” There are leftists who are against marriage equality, ones who are pro-Chinese and Iranian conservatism. The professor whose tweet I mentioned earlier first came on my radar with an annoying set of tweets calling polyamory bourgeois decadence. But these types can’t stand to be called conservatives, so they pretend their social reactionarism is based leftist blackpilling. “LMAO you want Disney to have gay characters? What a cucked consoomer.” Yes, these types also tend to be on the dirtbag left, the sorts who call Noah Schnapp the f-slur or regularly use the r-slur. They need everything to be about class because they’re asocial assholes who would otherwise be rightfully shunned for their cruelty.
But let’s briefly talk about representation. I’d never seen a happily ever after sort of fairytale featuring queer people until I saw Head Over Heels and it changed my life. I sobbed out of hope. One of my classmates on that trip had a similar reaction to seeing Bonnie Milligan playing Pamela. Pamela is the prettiest person in the entire world in that film and that’s never questioned, it’s never a joke. It’s a fact. And Bonnie Milligan is plus-sized. If you listened to my colleague talk about what seeing that meant to her as a plus sized actress working in a superficial industry, I guarantee you wounld’t be able to roll your eyes at the power of representation again. “Haha you keep getting tricked by Disney,” they say when people care about Disney including significant queer representation. But what and who the most powerful media corporation in America chooses to share on their platforms matters. Children are going to watch Disney movies. They deserve to see themselves in their happy ever afters. If you want to scoff at that, I wonder about you.
The theatre world, like most of the entertainment industry and most of America at large, has not been great at social politics and representation. It doesn’t help when this is a hellish industry to break into in the first place. Trust me when I say you do not want to know the numbers on how many playwrights and composers there are compared to the amount of opportunities there are for new work in this country. Most of us have to make our own opportunities. The statistics are worse for getting your work on Broadway. There are even more thousands of actors vying for roles. How we’ve managed to go so many years and we’re still having people discovering the power of representation on those stages… Well.
But I’m also concerned about the lack of deep engagement with Hamilton. It’s a trend with media comprehension writ large. “This is my gut, initial reaction to this thing. I will hold it for all time.” The label of pretension, as far as claiming that whenever someone puts a lot of meaning into something, is just another attempt at nihilism. It’s refusing to engage with text and insisting that there’s only one correct reading: your shallow one. “It’s not that deep.” That’s because you threw away the shovel. And it’s fine to toss the shovel when you’re satisfied with the hole, but you can’t then turn around and claim that no shovel can mine deeper into the earth than yours.
When you claim that Hamilton simply wants to keep the same systems as we currently have but to paint the people in charge in different colors, you’re refusing to engage with the text. Maybe that’s partially through a lack of exposure and literacy in theatre. Maybe it’s a kneejerk reaction amongst some on the left to reject anything that gets popular amongst the normies or, more specifically, amongst normie liberals. Through its Brechtian elements, Hamilton is clearly advocating for a change in the system. It’s calling out racism. “The white supremacist elements of the current American system of governance are directly analogous to to the British Empire and its repression of the colonies.” The protest movement led by people of color to change the system is compared to mythology of the founding fathers.
But maybe the problem comes from that contradiction. The founding fathers were not good people. They owned slaves. They were not great to women. They abandoned their allies. They devolved into petty infighting. Washington’s lack of commitment to ideology, the show argues, ultimately hurt the union. Hamilton was a self-obsessed sex creep. That contradiction is uncomfortable to hold while watching a Broadway show with bright colors, explosive dance numbers, and catchy music. That uncomfortable feeling is the point. But it’s easier to dismiss it as a mistake than it is to deal with it.
Because dealing with it forces us to talk about the contemporary revolution and how its leaders too will not be infallible. Their cause is good, but that does not mean they are without fault. The goal is good, but that does not mean its execution will dodge inflicting any harm. We know what America is like. When we see the end of the show and think through our history as a country, examine all of our faults, we see that the revolution did not bring about the bright future they thought it did. For that to be a metaphor to contemporary movements is to say that the systems we build might too fail to reach the promises of the dreams that drive them. When you look at the dirtbag left, it’s rife with misogyny, homophobia, and ableism. Supporting liberation does not mean you hold only pure beliefs. But to critique the revolution is to shatter it in some people’s minds. They view their systems as so fragile, any critique becomes the enemy itself. Hamilton is both pro-revolution and anti-revolution. Your desire for freedom might cause needless bloodshed as it did with Laurens. Your promise of freedom may still result in systemic suffering if you are not careful as is the American legacy of slavery. An obsession with legacy may be your undoing as it was with Hamilton.
And because that’s uncomfortable, people reject that reading entirely. And I don’t mean they consider it and then throw it away. I mean they refuse to acknowledge that reading at all. There must be no purpose to the casting and the references and the Brechtian elements beyond the most shallow observations. When The Menu critiqued the violence of the revolution, people decided to pretend it was merely a shallow “eat the rich” sort of movie with no message beyond that. You don’t have to agree with these messages or this interpretation, but to reject their existence is simply a refusal to engage with art. It’s anti-art. Maybe that’s merely inheriting the USSR’s anti-art poliicies. Maybe it’s part of the evangelical urge to reject culture that gets some on the left labeling all culture as a “distraction” from the movement.
Hamilton takes advantage of a young woman. Are there any tendencies like that in segments that claim to be revolutionary and working for the left? Well, alleged sex cult PSL exists and alleged sex creep Caleb Maupin exists. Are there socialist revolutions that haven’t resulted in utopia? Yeah, all of them. But despite its promises of economic freedom, China is still a homophobic and sexist country. It places those reactionary social beliefs in its laws. Like the founding fathers, the Chinese have built an imperfect system that causes harm to people. Is part of the problem that Hamilton places so much emphasis on keeping track of money? Well, look at the DSA. They’re in the midst of a horrid budget crisis. At time of writing, there’s a vicious debate amongst members about how to handle their deficit and whether or not socialism means union busting is okay when you claim it’s for the benefit of the movement to harm workers. Are there problems with isolationist tendencies? How often do you hear complaints about how we’re spending money on other countries instead of solving problems at home. Surely, if we ignore the world, all its problems will go away. Russia will stop being aggressive to its neighbors. China will stop its blustering in the South China Sea. We are no more immune to being in error than anyone else.
But critiquing ourselves is hard. It feels painful. So why not just pretend anything that critiques us is evil and stupid. That might be the dumber move, the move that shuts us off from improvement and from engaging deeper with art, but it’s a tad bit easier.
Hamilton is a fun show. I don’t care if you think the music is corny. But if you’re going to critique it, and I think critique and conversation are beautiful things, then you’ve got to get better at reading. You’ve got to read too deep into things. Because a lot of conversation around art has devolved into refusing to engage with it in order to score whatever angry political points you can. And that’s just sad.
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