Oooh, the "BLACKFACE" Mary Poppins Scandal

In one of the most ridiculous examples of playing the race card, a professor actually called attention to himself...

By crusading against the Julie Andrews 1964 "Mary Poppins" movie.

SHE A RACIST!

MARY POPPINS A RACIST!

JULIE ANDREWS A RACIST, YO!

LET'S BAN THIS MOVIE! IT IS SO OFFENSIVE!!

I can only guess at the motive behind such a bone-headed race card game: FAME.

Throw in a bit of the sanctimonious liberalism that Phil Ochs liked to satirize.

Right, professor. Sing: "LOVE ME, LOVE ME, LOVE ME, I'M A LIBERAL."

White guilt from Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, showing that in very, very white OREGON, (Linfield College) the plight of the Black Man is taken seriously?

Hell, Daniel's parents took equality so seriously, the mother's name was equalized with the father's. LOVE them hyphenated names. What happens when and if Pollack-Pelzner has a kid and the kid gets married? How LONG can hyphenated names get? Especially when you also add: champion-of-the-downtrodden-black-people.

Pollack-Pelzner seems to be one of those publish-or-perish poodle patoots. Since he couldn't quite get Scarecrow Press or some other dopey company to lose money on a long, tedious tome on the racial crimes of Hollywood, he tried something easier.

You remember the impotent line, "There will be a letter in the Times about this!"

Yes, The Sincere, Concerned, Sensitive, Offended Professor wrote a piece that the New York Times trembled and swallowed:

"Mary Poppins, and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface."

Shameful. Utterly shameful.

Oh, how PROUD Linfield College must be for their FAMOUS PROFESSOR.

He got his shivering whine published in THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Being a scholar, he didn't stop with the shameful 1964 Disney movie, which SEEMED to be championing the LOWER CLASS working people of England who, like the nannies of rich people who read the New York Times, get their hands and faces smudged while doing the dirty work.

No, being a professor (with nothing much to do except teach one or two classes a day and be an asshole the rest of the time), Pollack-Pelzner dove deeply into the original P.L. Travers books, sniffing around for the woman's obvious vicious intent on humiliating black people.

\ Apparently there was nothing that made him spit out his Starbucks Latte in the original book, but how about a sequel published in 1943, the obscure "Mary Poppins Opens The Door?"

In that one, a housemaid shouts at a chimney sweep: ‘Don’t touch me, you black heathen.’

This is around the same time that Larry Fine, in a Three Stooges short, saw Moe get hit in the face with a bottle of ink and shouted "Mammy!"

This was only a few years after The Marx Brothers ended "Room Service" by singing "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" and Groucho chiming in with "Yeah Man, Sho' Nuff!"

We're talking about light-hearted, if ignorant joking in days before PC humorlessness took over. In England, land of Mary Poppins, goofy joking about brown-faced people, Jews, Asians and others, was common right through the 60's and 70's, as fans of Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan certainly know.

So what, exactly, is the point of Professor Cream Cheese jumping on the publicity over a new Mary Poppins movie to gasp in horror, and nearly poke holes through the patched elbows of his suit, over the 1964 version?

"I don’t like hearing that something I loved and that something that was important to me in my childhood might be more troubling than I assumed."

That's what he told the London Daily Mail when they questioned his idiotic piece in the New York Times. I guess this guy isn't so good with a quip. He's only good if he sits down and writes and re-writes, in his copious spare time, a piece of verbose drivel for the trembling "Gray Lady" as the New York Times is often called. That's GRAY LADY, which is a tepid mix of black and white, but being GRAY, tries so hard not to OFFEND anyone black or white.

Since it's VERY PC to call white people "LILY WHITE" or "VANILLA," let's do THAT, and applaud that VANILLA professor and show his LILY WHITE face, and shout, "THANK GOD FOR OREGON and THE NEW YORK TIMES."

And by all that's good and holy, let's make sure Disney's 1964 "Mary Poppins" movie is NEVER shown on TV again, and that libraries will BURN every P.L. Travers book.