"Politics makes artists stupid."

Let's check out the part of the Wall Street Journal we can all read. They've got a piece by my favorite Wall Street Journal writer, Terry Teachout, about the play -- shudder -- "My Name Is Rachel Corrie":

It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like [co-writer and director Alan] Rickman himself, ought to know better.

So why don't they?...

"My Name Is Rachel Corrie," by contrast, is a scrappy, one-sided monologue consisting of nothing but the fugitive observations of a young woman who, like so many idealists, treated her emotions as facts. "I am disappointed," she declares, "that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world." To mistake such jejune disillusion for profundity and turn it into the climax of a full-length play is an act of piety, not artistry.