“Where I come from, we believe all sorts of things that aren’t True.” – The Wizard of Oz, from the motion picture Wicked.
I recently watched the movie Wicked and wasn’t surprised by how transparent and utterly progressive it was intended to be. Sadly, the folks responsible for such a noxious gas cloud of Woke toxicity got it all backward. Instead of skewering the “intolerant”, they put a fork in their agenda in a way that indicates it is done.
I know what you’re thinking. How is it that only now could I have seen this vapid waste of celluloid? To be fair, I was getting over losing my pet rock and consumed with why my mood ring always remains inky black.
Back to Wicked. How could such an overt attempt at capturing progressive wokeness through music, songs, and choreography go wrong? It misses the mark so badly, precisely because those who wrote it live in an alternative reality where they throw rhetorical darts at random without looking, and in this case, they struck a real target, not an imaginary one.
You may recall the movie, Forrest Gump. Conservatives rightly applauded the film’s lead character for his irrepressible personality and singular unwillingness to accept limitations. For us, that movie confirmed a long-standing tenant of conservatism, that success is a byproduct of effort and determination.
The makers of Forrest Gump were outraged by this interpretation of the character. To them he was a victim of his disabilities, thrust by accident into some of the twentieth century’s most momentous events. Events, to them, he was powerless to affect. To conservatives he was neither powerless nor disabled. Forrest was an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances from which he produced phenomenal results.
Gump was a fearless, relentless and an always optimistic example of the American spirit. Liberals believe there’s nothing exceptional about America and thus Gump’s achievements were accidental, rather than exceptional.
Unlike Forrest Gump, Wicked creates an absolute nightmarish woke world in which every color of the rainbow is represented, every sexuality and gender affirmed. The unmistakable purposefulness of its casting is to affirm the woke motto of, “All are welcome.” There’s even an albino in the movie; I think her name is Ariane Grande.
They are so committed to their ideology that Munchkins, so named because of their diminutive stature, are grown in height to be only slightly less tall than other characters.
Truth is, not all are welcome. Despite the multi-racial, multi-sexual make-up of the cast, the film insists it’s about intolerance. About accepting a green-skinned witch played by an African American actress. As the story progresses, it becomes about the repression of magical talking animals. Animals who are losing their voices to segregation and imprisonment.
Sound familiar? The Left’s great mantra of victimization is on display in the sadness of Elphaba, the green hued witch, and the silencing of dissent as expressed by the lessening vocalization of the animals.
Unfortunately, none of this makes sense. The cast itself, by its very multicultural manufacture, is incapable of the intolerance theme. If Wicked’s society is so radiant in its black, white, brown, Asian, Hispanic, able-bodied, and handicapable characters, why would any skin color be objectionable? If the population is so diverse, why would they stifle dissent? They are for dissent. They are dissent. Or are they?
So blatant are the writers behind this tripe the first notable talking animal to fall is Dr. Dillamond, a history professor at Shiz University, who happens to be a goat. A goat, how original. A scapegoat, get it?
The quote by the Wizard of Oz at the beginning of this essay is the real truth of the Left. They believe all kinds of things are true that are clearly false. Boys can be girls. Countries do not need borders. Waste and fraud are both necessary and acceptable. The law applies to others. Hate the rich and the big one, tolerance means supporting anyone with whom you agree.
To me it is utterly inescapable that Dr. Dillamond and even Elphaba are avatars of conservatism and common sense. These two characters see injustice and when neither can be co-opted by their Woke masters, they rebel. They live in a society and under a government based on lies.
We’ve lived in this all too real world without the aid of a tornado for transport. During Covid we were lied to about everything from its sources to the efficacy of its cure. When we questioned the Wizard of Fauci we were canceled, deplatformed and silenced.
We saw our president accused of election interference by the very people interfering in our election. That president was attacked from all sides because he had the gall to be the one thing they despise the most, he wasn’t one of them.
He was harried and those in power sought to imprison him, not for actual wrongdoing but because he was a symbol of hope. An entire government trying to crush, not a green-skinned witch, but an orange-skinned usurper.
A man who they deemed so dangerous to their consolidated power, influence, and wealth they would rather see dead than in the White House.
That is the real story of Wicked.
It’s an allegory of the rise and fall of Progressive “wokeness”. Even if unintentionally, so that makes it Wicked right.
Stephen Piccirillo © 2025
