Sorry for the light posting this week (light being a polite euphemism for “non-existent”) but I’ve been totally wrapped up in something reclusive. I’ve been away from the news all week, and when I finally looked at the computer this morning I was astonished to discover two things:
It’s Thursday. I thought it was Tuesday. Do other people lose track of time like that?
They’ve found an Earth-like planet only 20.5 light years away! I’m excited about this. It’s warm, it’s got a certain amount of dim sunlight, it’s the right size — all in all, there is an outstanding possibility that this planet has liquid water, possibly even oceans, possibly even amoebas swimming in those oceans with whom we will be able to communicate a billion years from now once they’ve evolved to the point where they can talk! I’m excited.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 26, 2007, 8:15 am EST
18 Comments »
Here in Virginia the massacre at Tech is all people talk about. I know the rest of the country is paying attention too, but for most of you it’s all rather distant. Horrible shooting in some town you’ve probably never heard of. Unfamiliar names and places. A tragedy on TV.
Here in Virginia it feels closer to home. It is closer to home.
Our local newspaper had a big feature on the front page yesterday about the two local kids who were killed in the attack. One was a volunteer at her high school. One was a dancer. Not anymore.
The rest of the paper is filled with interviews with students who’ve fled Blacksburg to shelter in their parents’ homes. Families recount their stories of frantically trying to contact their kids. People who knew the dead talk about their memories.
In the middle of the paper is a single sheet with “VT” on it in big letters. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with it. Put it in our windows?
People struggle to find meaning in all this. A kid with undiagnosed mental illness. A blood-soaked culture of violence that gave shape to his delusions. A gun lobby that gave him the weapons to act out his vengeance. What it all adds up to is this: It took longer to type that than it does to re-load a 9mm Glock. I got your meaning right here.
The local Korean-Americans are worried about racist backlash. It’s ironic, because when I heard that Cho was a Korean immigrant, my first thought was, “Well, he sure did assimilate thoroughly.” Going postal is such an American thing to do. It’s as American as apple pie and baseball.
Here’s a thought: 183 people were killed in Baghdad on Wednesday, victims of suicide bombings. The Virginia Tech massacre times six. And that’s been going on in Baghdad for years now. The Virginia Tech massacre times a thousand. Meanwhile, the TV anchors are saying that the 32 dead in Blacksburg are “inconceivable.” An inconceivable number.
What must we look like to the rest of the world, howling and tearing our hair like this when 32 of our own die? Poor us! Feel sorry for us! It’s so awful, those young people, dead in the prime of life! I swear to God, it’s a wonder the rest of the world doesn’t gang up on us and drive our bloated self-involved asses off the planet somehow. It would be an intervention.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 19, 2007, 7:30 pm EST
13 Comments »
“The ‘partial-birth’ abortion ban is a political scam but a public relations gold mine.”
The Supreme Court has just voted to uphold a ban on something that doesn’t exist: so-called “partial-birth” abortions. There is no such medical procedure by that name. The whole thing is a boondoggle dreamed up by forced-pregnancy advocates who will stop at nothing to keep women from exercising control over their own bodies. It sounds awful — “partial-birth? yikes!” — and the fake diagrams published by forced-pregnancy advocates to illustrate it look even worse. That’s the whole point, to get people to react emotionally. That way they don’t notice that the actual purpose of the law is something entirely different.
So what is it that’s being banned here? Forced-pregnancy advocates have known all along that if they were honest about what the law actually does, they would run into all kinds of guff. That’s because most Americans don’t share their peculiar obsession with controlling the nation’s uteruses. So they’ve had to lie. They’ve had to pretend that the law bans only one type of rare, late-term abortion. The problem is that the law doesn’t actually do that. The wording of the ban is so half-assed, so broad, so confusing, that it could very well apply to almost all procedures performed as early as the 12th week of pregnancy.
Which, of course, is the point.
The law contains no exception for the sake of a woman’s health — though this shouldn’t surprise you once you understand that the whole purpose here is just to keep females from having any control over their own bodies. From a medical standpoint the language of the ban is such gobbledygook that many doctors, perhaps most, will simply stop performing second-trimester abortions altogether rather than risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the law. It is no accident that the ban has been opposed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which represents more than 90% of ob-gyns, as well as by more than a dozen other major medical groups.
Legally, the decision is indefensible. Three lower courts found the ban unconstitutional based on 30 years of precedent. The Supreme Court itself found a similar law unconstitutional in 2000. What’s changed between then and now is that Shrub has packed the Court with right-wing ideologues. Back when Alito was confirmed (the occasion of my original Shaka, when the walls fell post), optimists were saying that the Dark Side still only had four votes on the Court since Kennedy wouldn’t vote to overturn Roe. It’s a moot point now. This Court has made it clear that even if Roe isn’t technically overturned, there are other ways to outlaw abortion.
More information and background:
Posted by Violet under Reproductive Rights, Various and Sundry on April 18, 2007, 7:09 pm EST
27 Comments »
Richard Asshat Hill, manager of Bob Asshat Moates Sports Shop near Richmond, displays a pistol and tickets for the “Bloomberg Gun Giveaway” on Thursday, April 19.
You might think that in the wake of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, a gunshop in the same state would call off plans for a free gun giveaway scheduled for that week. You might think that, but you would be wrong. This, after all, is Virginia.
Despite yesterday’s tragic events at Virginia Tech, a clerk at Bob Moates said the draw would still go ahead. It will underline the unbending adherence of many Virginians to the right to bear arms - the state has been ranked as the second easiest in the country in which to buy guns - in the face of renewed calls for tighter gun control.
The gun giveaway was conceived as an in-your-face response to Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who is suing the two Virginia gunshops for selling firearms illegally. Bloomberg’s complaint is that 90% of the weapons used to commit crimes in New York originate in Virginia and other states, where it’s easy as pie to get yourself a nice killing machine.
The winner of the drawing will receive a Para-Ordnance handgun worth about $900.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 17, 2007, 4:23 pm EST
42 Comments »
This picture appears in the latest online edition of the New York Times. The caption reads, “Virginia Tech students prayed in a church near the university after a shooting rampage.”
I don’t mean to be cruel; I really don’t. I would never say this to one of the traumatized and bereaved people in the picture above. So I’ll just say it to you all, my friendly blog readers:
Why is it that when horrible events occur that demonstrate pretty clearly that if God does exist, She doesn’t give a good goddamn what’s going on down here on earth, people respond by praying? Like after 9-11: people flooded the churches that weekend. I mean, haven’t you just seen evidence that the Big Gal upstairs is not particularly interested?
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 17, 2007, 12:40 am EST
37 Comments »
I just woke up. Called my Mom to say hello and she told me the news.
Holy Shit.
UPDATE: I’ve been reading the comments at the New York Times on this story, and I think I now have proof of something I’ve long suspected: the National Rifle Association imposes an IQ ceiling on all potential members. You have to prove you have an IQ below 100, and preferably below 90, to get in. The NRA people at the NYTimes are saying that these shooting tragedies would never happen if — hold on — every single professor and student on our campuses, and indeed every citizen in the country, were constantly armed with loaded guns.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 16, 2007, 3:59 pm EST
13 Comments »
Queen Mother, Akropong, Ghana.
We haven’t had one in awhile, and it’s time. This will serve as a nice respite between the heavy-duty posts we’ve had recently and the heavy-duty posts we have coming up, assuming I ever get around to writing them.
It’s also a break from the tax thing. For those of you ‘cross the pond, it’s tax filing season here in ‘Murka. Normally taxes are due on April 15th, or the next business day if the 15th falls on the weekend, but occasionally the IRS gets a little wild and crazy and throws in an extra day. Nobody knows why; could be the peyote they like to smoke up there at headquarters. At any rate, this year tax returns are due on Tuesday, April 17th. Every single human being in the United States has spent the past weekend working on their tax returns, which is the sole reason the troll level on the Duke case has been at a manageable level.
But back to the picture: I’m posting this one just because I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit for the past few weeks. I came across it when I was searching for some detailed information on gold jewelry in Ghana. As you know, Ghana is just chock full of gold, so much so that the colonial Brits dubbed it The Gold Coast. Hell of a name for a country, if you ask me, though it certainly got right to the point. Like naming a country “Coal Mine” or “Uranium Deposit.” But hey, why futz around with proper names? You’re a colonial power and you’re there to pillage; just name the country after whatever commodity you’re stealing from it. Simple and to the point.
Anyway, the royal folk in Ghana have always loaded themselves with magnificent gold ornaments, rather the way Russian aristocratic ladies used to cover themselves with diamonds. I was captivated by this picture in particular because it is rare to find a photo where you can see the jewelry in such clear, close detail. Look at the beauty of the stuff! Look at the delicate spidery filigree! And in real life I’ve never seen gold so yellow. That’s probably because in real life I’ve never seen gold so pure.
But it’s not just the jewelry; I love the whole picture. I haven’t been able to find out the lady’s name or the date of the photo; the only information I have is that she is a Queen Mother* in the town of Akropong. She’s so gorgeous, so blooming and radiant. I love her navy and white silk gown, the blue and gold beads in her hair, the glittering gilt filigree of her jewelry. I love the feeling of warmth and humor and beauty emanating from her. It’s a wonderful image.
*”Queen Mother” is an unfortunate but standard translation; really these women are simply Queens Regnant. Akan society has a dual-gender royalty system with a male king and a female queen (the so-called Queen Mother) who is typically not the king’s mother nor his wife; she is just the senior woman in the parallel, female line of royal descent.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 16, 2007, 2:24 am EST
11 Comments »
UPDATE: I wrote this post before seeing the “Update” to Jill’s, in which she reported the comments the AutoAdmit trolls made about her on their own board: “I want to brutally rape that Jill slut,” “I’m 98% sure that she should be raped (even if only in Internet Land),” “So seriously, I think we should start another war with this cunt. She clearly deserves anything XOXO might inflict on her.” Of course that just proves the point of my post, but I wouldn’t call these guys “funny.” No, funny’s not the word. Insane, maybe? Or maybe just normal privileged men chatting about doing what normal privileged men have always done to keep the underclass in line.
What’s it called when the thing that you’re doing disproves exactly what you’re saying?
Over at Feministe I’ve been following the Duke case thread, which has been infested by trolls from AutoAdmit (the home for misogynist racist law students on the web). By the way, I strongly recommend that post as an excellent statement on the case.
Anyway, one of the twit-trolls said a funny thing:
Friendly Intruder Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
“they’re not rich, but you have to realize that being a white man from a middle class suburb IS privileged in American society. maybe you don’t realize that.”
Jesus. Are we still on about “white males”? Still?
Our generation has moved past sexism to a large degree. Fighting a fight that was pretty much won by the late 90s seems like a waste of effort.
Yeah, I know. I don’t get it. I dated a rather extreme feminist for quite awhile and I tried like hell to understand her position. But she went to Yale, so it was difficult for me to feel her discriminated pain.
Notice the nascent MRAism there? He’s jealous of the girlfriend’s success. Guarantee you in 15 years he’ll be a divorced member of Fathers for Justice or something and railing about how the fembots have turned this country into a matriarchy.
But what’s funny is the “our generation has moved past sexism” bit. Do you hear that? Sexism is over! It’s just so last-decade. Friendly Intruder’s generation is beyond it. Which Friendly Intruder has amply demonstrated by his comments throughout the thread:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Violet under MRAs/FRAs, Rape on April 13, 2007, 8:03 pm EST
13 Comments »
I don’t know what sort of bedtime stories most parents tell their children, but here’s one my father told my brother and me when we were little:
“A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.
“Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.”
My Dad, you see, was a Kurt Vonnegut fan.
I grew up on Vonnegut. I started gobbling up his books as soon as I was past the Happy Hollisters stage of reading development. Most people cite Slaughterhouse Five as the definitive Vonnegut novel; as a kid I found Sirens of Titan more compelling. But my favorite is Breakfast of Champions:
When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things on them from airplanes.
Most other countries didn’t have doodley-squat. Many of them weren’t inhabitable anymore. They had too many people and not enough space. They had sold everything that was any good, and there wasn’t anything to eat anymore, and still the people went on fucking all the time.
Fucking was how babies were made.
Occasionally, when I’m musing over the fate of my own novelistic characters, I imagine myself in the cocktail lounge of the Midland City Holiday Inn, wearing dark glasses as I quietly observe the people I’ve invented. Me, the Creator of the Universe.
I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark of the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again…
The bartender took several anxious looks in my direction. All he could see were the leaks over my eyes. I did not worry about his asking me to leave the establishment. I had created him, after all…
And he went on staring at me, even though I wanted to stop him now. Here was the thing about my control over the characters I created: I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubberbands.
So I made the green telephone in back of the bar ring. Harold Newcomb Wilbur answered it, but he kept his eyes on me. I had to think fast about who was on the other end of the telephone. I put the first most decorated veteran in Midland City on the other end. He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension. He got his medals in the war in Viet Nam. He had also fought yellow robots who ran on rice.
The robots are a reference to a short story by Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s fictional alter ego, who also wrote the Zog story quoted above.
Trout’s son, Leon Trotsky Trout, is the ghostly narrator of Galapagos, one of Vonnegut’s finest late novels. It’s a million years in the future and the only remaining humans have evolved into seal-like creatures with flippers.
There is another human defect which the Law of Natural Selection has yet to remedy: When people of today have full bellies, they are exactly like their ancestors of a million years ago: very slow to acknowledge any awful troubles they may be in. Then is when they forget to keep a sharp lookout for sharks and whales.
This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.
So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.
For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America’s and Europe’s forests by acid rain, say, might really be.
Yes, there was some unexamined sexism, especially in his earlier work. This was no doubt because a) he was born in 1922, and b) his relationship with his own mother was traumatic, to say the least. But he learned. He was too smart not to — and too much of an iconoclast to shrink from deconstructing his own prejudices. Compare Player Piano (1952) to Galapagos (1985) or Bluebeard (1987) to see just how far he came.
In the past few years, I was cheered to see that he’d taken to using gender-neutral language in his interviews and speeches. He made a point of saying women’s liberation was an excellent thing. To those of you with mixed chromosomes and/or pale skin it probably seems silly that I should care about such things, but if you have mixed chromosomes and/or pale skin you’ve probably never had the painful experience of discovering that your childhood hero thinks people like you are inferior.
So it’s nice that Vonnegut learned that women are not inferior.
And now he’s gone, sucked into the wriggling blue tunnel to the afterlife. Hi ho.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 13, 2007, 1:33 pm EST
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Imus has been fired! How can this be? Stories like this never have happy endings; instead the asshat in question does a little mea culpa in public, announces that he’ll be seeking some kind of consciousness-raising therapy (preferably from the group he’s been insulting), and then goes right back to raking in zillions of dollars.
Who would have thought this story would actually turn out right?
“There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society,” CBS President and Chief Executive Officer Leslie Moonves said in announcing the decision. “That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision.”
Actually I suspect that what weighed most heavily on CBS’s collective mind was advertising revenue, but whatever. The fact is that the President and CEO of CBS is publicly referring to the problems of young women of color as if they actually mattered. Maybe I’m hallucinating. Maybe I failed to wash out the chai pot thoroughly enough and some kind of hallucinogenic mold is in my tea.
“Something happened in the last week around America,” Monroe said. “It’s not just what the radio host did. America said enough is enough. America said we don’t want this kind of conversation, we don’t want this kind of vitriol, especially with teenagers.”
Definitely hallucinating. Note to self: try Brillo pads.
The way the coverage of this thing has evolved is fascinating. A few days ago, when I started trying to get a handle on the story, I was dismayed by the myopia of the mainstream media. “Racism” they kept saying, “racist slur,” “racially-charged.” Yes, the remarks were completely racist, but there was virtually no mention of sexism, of misogyny, and of the particularly virulent form of racist sexism that has consistently kept black women at the very bottom of the all-American sandwich of race, class, and gender. For chrissake, Imus called the women “nappy-headed hos.” Was the “hos” part okay?
The blogosphere, of course, was all over it: Imus Protest! Unruly-Haired Hater, Black Women: First Dissed, Now Disappeared, and Why Imus Has To Go were a few particularly excellent posts.
And gradually the mainstream coverage started to get a tiny bit better. I think the turning point was when the Rutgers women themselves put the issue of sexism front and center:
Some of them wiped away tears as their coach, C. Vivian Stringer, criticized Imus for “racist and sexist remarks that are deplorable, despicable, abominable and unconscionable.”
…”It is more than the Rutgers women’s basketball team. It is all women’s athletes. It is all women,” said Stringer, the third-winningest women’s basketball coach of all time who has taken three teams to the Final Four.
A few days ago, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were decrying Imus’s racism. Now they’re careful to say “racism and sexism.” An improvement, for sure, though that brings up the question of why in the hell those two men were the media go-to figures in the first place. As Betty Bayé wrote in a terrific column today:
How deep is the bias? Just look at whom the media sought out when the Imus story broke.
Did they ring up the president or the women of Spelman College? Did they call Johnnetta Cole, Julianne Malveaux, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Callie Crossley, Vanessa Williams, Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove, Shirley Franklin, Mae Jameson, Condoleezza Rice, Kathleen Cleaver, Pearl Cleage, Susan Taylor, Renita Weems, Jill Nelson, Sheryl Swoopes or any of the legions of accomplished black women who could bring historical and political context to the harm of calling young women hos?
No. Black women were insulted, but the media rushed to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
Are black women wearing burkas? Are they so invisible that they don’t even get to speak first about their own pain?
Jill Nelson had made the same point on the WIMN Online blog a couple of days ago:
It’s astounding that in the media conversation surrounding Don Imus’ characterization of the 10 members of Rutger’s women’s basketball team as “nappy headed ho’s,” Black women - other than those Imus imagines - are virtually invisible. Even when we’re the ones being dissed and dogged, when it comes to analyzing the situation, no one much gives a damn what we have to say.
For a brief hallucinogenic moment here, we can imagine otherwise.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 12, 2007, 8:53 pm EST
11 Comments »
Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. II, by Georgia O’Keeffe.
Objectively superior to The Sopranos.
So yesterday I was perusing the news and a giant phosphorescent mushroom cloud of inspiration hit me. I’ll tell you what it was after I tell you what was in the news.
Two things:
Thing One: A headline saying, and I quote verbatim, “Don’t you wish the Sopranos would never end?”
Seeing as I’ve never even seen the Sopranos, my natural reaction to this rhetorical question was, “oh for chrissake, get a fucking life.”
Actually I lie: I have seen the first three minutes of one episode of the Sopranos, which was mostly just some kind of opening credits sequence. I saw those three minutes because some guy had told me that the Sopranos was the greatest thing on television, the greatest thing that had ever been on television, that it was in fact the ne plus ultra of human artistic achievement. That if you could somehow combine Mozart’s Requiem and the Venus de Milo and Shakespeare and a Hokusai woodcut and Gilgamesh and everything Georgia O’Keeffe ever painted it still wouldn’t be as good as the Sopranos, which was better than all those things put together times a billion. You have to watch it, he told me.
So I found out when the show was on and made plans to actually turn on my television and sit in front of it at the appointed hour. (I don’t normally watch TV, as my faithful readers may recall.) I turned it on, and what did I see? Nekked women with boob jobs. The entire opening sequence involved naked women with boob jobs, and I mean really naked ’cause this was HBO and the raison d’etre of HBO’s original programming department is to show naked women on TV, and these fully-naked women were being pronged by fully-dressed fat middle-aged men. The naked women looked like perfectly groomed and silicon-inflated porn stars. Their boobs bounced and their rumps bounced while the fully-dressed middle-aged ugly-ass men pronged them. Then the first scene started and it was set in a strip club, apparently, where more pornified women walked around with naked bouncing boobies while fully-dressed middle-aged ugly-ass men said things like “bada bing” to each other.
I turned off the television.
Later on the guy who’d recommended this masterpiece asked me if I’d watched the show. No, I told him; I’m not really into the whole naked-women-with-boob-jobs and porn-type sex scenes kinda thang.
“Oh,” he said, “you just have to screen that stuff out. That’s not really the point of the show.”
“Screen it out?” I asked.
“Yeah, you know. All the episodes are like that. It’s just wallpaper.”
Wallpaper. Remember Soylent Green, how the future was a world where women were referred to as “furniture”?
Right.
Thing Two: Don Imus said a racist sexist thing, which is apparently his modus operandi, which brings me to the burning question that must rear its head in the minds of all thoughtful humans when the subject of Don Imus comes up: why does this man have a career? (Second most burningest question: what’s with the hat?)
I had never heard of Don Imus until a few years ago, when I learned that he was a Big Shot Radio Personality. One of the Biggest! And I’d never heard of him. Anyway, not long after I’d learned of his existence, I actually spotted him on TV. I’m pretty sure this was around the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, because that’s the last time I was turning on the TV with any regularity. One morning I turned on MSNBC, and lo and behold, it was the Imus Show. I thought, “Hey, that’s the Big Shot Radio Personality that I’d never heard of until recently and who I now know is important!”
Now, there’s really nothing quite as exciting as a radio show on TV — the thrill of the headphones! the glamour of the soundproof booth! — but the Imus show was even better than most. The man himself was wearing, improbably enough, a gigantic cowboy hat, presumably to protect him from the harsh prairie weather there in the studio. He was hunched over his microphone, his face just buried in the thing like it was a goddamn feedbag tied on his head, droning in a monotone. He plugged a book. He plugged something else. He did an ad — an actual on-air ad, like the old days of TV when Johnny or Ed or Jack would hold up the sponsor’s product and encourage viewers to consume said wondrous item.
The whole thing was so scintillating that I had to switch to C-SPAN for a while just to get my heart rate under control.
Anyway, I learned later that I’d missed Imus in his glory. Sometimes, I was told, he’s actually animated, and engages in deeply offensive adolescent hijinks with his on-air minions. This, apparently, is the source of his enormous popularity. In other words, his is a Morning Zoo show.
Remember Morning Zoos? They may still have them for all I know. Back in the 70s and 80s,* when for reasons beyond my control I was occasionally forced to listen to the radio in the mornings, it was popular for radio stations to have several Professional Zany People host the morning rush-hour show, during which time they would engage in Zany Antics and say Zany Things, along with delivering the news and weather (preferably Zanified). Sound effects, such as bicycle horns and whoopie cushions, played a large role. The whole thing was geared to the intellectual and emotional maturity level of a 13-year-old boy. (*Drive-time radio shows were also popular before the 70s, but I don’t think they were called Morning Zoos. Dead sex fiend Colonel Hogan got his start in the 60s as a morning radio personality.)
Which almost brings me to my point, though not before I quickly digress to remark on two minor revelations connected to the benighted years when I was forced to listen to the Morning Zoo. The first revelation is that I don’t think I’m human. Seriously, I don’t think I’m the same species. Humans, it seems, are such social animals that they love nothing better than to hear the sound of other people’s voices, even the voices of bloviating morons with whoopie cushions whom they don’t even know personally. It’s comforting to the humans somehow. It makes them feel cheerful as they drive to work, just part of the group out on a foraging expedition in the jungle there, chattering as they look for bananas and carrion while the class clown honks on his bicycle horn and whoopie cushion. As for me, when I wake up in the morning and have to haul my ass to work in rush-hour traffic on five hours sleep, there is pretty much nothing I want less than to have to listen to the sound of bloviating morons with whoopie cushions. Maybe I’m descended from orangutans.
The other minor revelation that came to me during the Morning Zoo years, which really no longer matters anymore, is that the man I’d married while in a psychotic fugue state had the intellectual and emotional maturity of a 13-year-old boy. He liked the Morning Zoo. I haven’t seen him in years, though, so for all I know he’s Nelson Mandela now.
And with that cue I finally wind my way back to my point, the mushroom cloud that started the essay, which is this: popular culture is all geared towards 13-year-old boys. Now I admit this is not a new inspiration, since I basically think this all the time, but the conjunction of news items yesterday made it seem particularly obvious. I know I’ve only got two data points here — the Sopranos and Don Imus — but I’m sure if you think about it you’ll realize I’m right. Nekked boobies, fart jokes, and blowing shit up. That’s popular culture.
But why? Do 13-year-old boys have that much power? They don’t, obviously. They don’t buy anything because they have no money. They don’t run the TV networks or the ad agencies, unless they can somehow work that in during recess from middle school, which I very much doubt.
Unless…the men who run the TV networks and the ad agencies and the film companies and the porn chains and basically just about everything in the universe — unless deep down they’re really just 13-year-old boys! Arrested development. Intellectual and emotional maturity at the Quentin Tarantino level, or maybe slightly higher.
You think? I think.
Of course I know not all popular culture is nekked boobies and fart jokes. Some tiny proportion (probably the stuff my mom watches on PBS) is actually kind of like art. There are even movies that aim for truth and beauty, that try to say something or ask something important about the world, and to do so at a high level of aesthetic achievement. I think they’re called “chick flicks.”
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry, Recommended on April 10, 2007, 10:04 am EST
31 Comments »
I’m overjoyed that the British sailors have been released. I’m not surprised at all that they were bullied while in captivity, though we can at least be glad they weren’t physically harmed. That said, here’s something I’ve been gnawing over for the past several days: why is it that the existence of Guantanamo Bay (and Abu Ghraib, for that matter) justifies any mistreatment that unfriendly nations might wish to mete out to captive soldiers from the U.S. or our allies?
Of course we all know that it does justify it, effectively; here in the U.S. people have been pointing out for several years now that our treatment of enemy captives has put every single U.S. soldier at risk for the same. That’s how the world works: you torture our captives, we’ll torture yours. And that governments behave that way is unsurprising, since governments are evil. All governments, even the ones that on balance do good. It’s something to do with institutionalism and the way actions that would be considered heinous crimes if committed by individuals become “policy” when committed by states.
But what I’m wondering is why normal people also take that line: that anything meted out to U.S. or British captives is perfectly justified because of Guantanamo. For example, read through this BBC forum where people are expressing their opinions on the release of the British sailors. Notice how many people say that, in essence, the British sailors had much worse coming to them because of Guantanamo. And this theme has been sounded repeatedly in the BBC forums throughout the crisis, people saying, “well, so what? Guantanamo!” How does that actually work inside a person’s mind?
Because: George W. Bush is a corrupt dictator and is served by sadists who have instituted illegal imprisonment and torture,
Therefore: a working-class British subject who happened to decide to make a career in the Royal Navy deserves to be illegally imprisoned and tortured.
As I said, I expect governments to use that kind of logic. But normal people? It’s frightening.
Posted by Violet under War on April 6, 2007, 10:18 pm EST
9 Comments »
Could somebody please muzzle President Asshat? And his friend, Captain Kangaroo?
From the Globe and Mail:
The Iranian prisoner crisis revealed a widening schism between Britain and the United States Sunday as U.S. leaders called for tough action and British officials confirmed that they are trying to free their 15 imprisoned sailors by quietly reaching a compromise with Tehran…
But Britain’s delicate diplomatic efforts were set back by U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a statement Saturday in which he characterized the imprisoned sailors as “hostages” — a phrase that Britain has been carefully avoiding to prevent the crisis from becoming a broader political or military conflict…
Other U.S. officials have been even less amenable to the British approach. John Bolton, who until recently was Mr. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, has appeared on British TV describing the British approach as “pathetic.”
You know, every time Captain Kangaroo opens his mouth I find myself puzzling again over the fact that he’s no longer at the U.N. Why? Such diplomatic talent, such a silver tongue! That’s the problem with our government right there, that we’re not using brilliant people like Kangaroo where they could really do some good.
Posted by Violet under Just Impeach the Stupid Freak on April 2, 2007, 5:30 am EST
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Wodaabe man preparing for charm dance, Niger.
Image by Carol Beckwith & Angela Fisher.
Read this lovely piece by Amanda Jones about her visit to the Wodaabe in Niger. The Wodaabe fascinate me — they’re the ones with the male beauty pageants — as do their close neighbors, the Tuareg (they’re the ones whose men wear veils). Anyway, not to spoil, but read Jones’ story and tell me what you would have done when you got the “handshake.” Me, I would have been in the bushes.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on April 2, 2007, 3:15 am EST
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