One thing I’ve never understood is how so many soi-disant Christians can be so unbelievably ignorant about Christianity. It’s not an incredibly complex religion; indeed, one can gain a very clear understanding of Christ’s teachings by simply reading through the Gospels — you can skip the whole Old Testament if you want.
And yet it often feels to me as if I, who converted from Christianity to Unitarian Universalism thirteen years ago, have read my Bible more recently than a good portion of the most vocal and obnoxious Christians out there. ((Note: This doesn’t apply to the many, many Christians who were listening when their Sunday School teachers covered Matthew 6:5.))
Today’s Christian who doesn’t seem to understand Christianity is Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who is, it goes without saying, a Republican. After getting inaugurated on the 17th, Bentley went to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church where Martin Luther King, Jr., used to reach, and where he organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Well, okay, it takes a bit of chutzpah to speak from King’s pulpit on Martin Luther King Day, but still, I suppose it’s okay. Maybe even a nice bit of symbolism. I mean, a white Governor of Alabama speaking King’s church? It could be good. Healing, even.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, gave a speech from the pulpit of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the pulpit which once belonged to King. That was his first mistake. Few public figures have blended language religious and political with King’s skill, and Bentley is not among them. This became obvious with his second mistake: when he said, “So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.”
Oh, Jesus.
Leave aside the fact that this was Bentley’s first official act as Governor — telling the non-Christian citizens of Alabama that he doesn’t view them as his siblings. Bentley’s statment reflects a radical view of Christianity, one that has little to do with the teachings of some guy named Yeshu’a, who I’m told had a lot to do with its early creation. This Yeshu’a guy had somecrazy ideas of who your true brother is:
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.35 The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
Yes, yes, I know, pedants: Jesus said neighbor, and Bentley never said he wasn’t the neighbor of Alabamaian Jews! He’s just not their brother. He didn’t mean anything by it!
Except, of course, that Bentley’s statement was as much about who his neighbors were as who his brothers in Jesus were. He was speaking as Governor, and saying, flatly, that if you aren’t a Christian, you just aren’t that important to him. Not as important as Christians.
Bentley backtracked, sort of, issuing a statement to (of course) Fox, saying, “If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am sorry. I am sorry if I offended anyone in any way.”
Well, sure, atheists, if you felt disenfranchised, he’s sorry! Hey, Muslims, f you felt like a second-class citizen, he’s sorry! He just meant that you’re not as important to him as Christians. How could that be a problem?
Bentley added, “The governor had intended no offense by his remarks. He is the governor of all the people, Christians, non-Christians alike.” Of course, that’s the problem. Because on a day our nation celebrates the long struggle for racial equality, Bentley made a statement that separated the citizens of his state into two separate classes. It’s quite different from the message of the man who long ago spoke from that pulpit, who once spoke so brilliantly about the day when all of God’s children — including Protestants and Catholics, Jews and gentiles — would be able to join together.
Last night, a few friends and I were discussing what in our culture makes zombies so big right now. My favorite (somewhat tongue in cheek) argument, from Charles, was that it’s about our politics.
“There’s this horrible group of people who just don’t get what America is about. They’re mindlessly destroying everyone and everything. And they’re winning.”
This is the narrative that everyone in the country — the left, the right, and the centrists and apolitical sorts who are repelled by strong partisans — has come to believe in the last 5-10 years, just as zombies have become our favorite national horror monster.
P.S. Of all the amateur zombie walk makeup jobs I saw looking for a photo to go on this post, this one was the most impressive, by which I mean, looks the grossest, so check it out at your own risk.
I wish I could tell you the stories motivating that title, because they are really good stories, and they come both from my own family and the family to which I am an in-law. It’s not that I can’t tell them, but rather that I choose not to, at least not in a public forum like this blog, because at least some of the people involved would be deeply hurt by being so exposed, while others would feel that the act of telling itself meant I was taking sides against them in the conflicts those stories touch upon–which of course means that the people on the other side of that conflict would see in my telling of the tales a declaration of my alliance with them. Then there are the people whose childishness, spitefulness, manipulativeness, dishonesty or whatever–at least from my point of view; because they, I am sure, don’t see themselves that way–would be brought into the light; and they too don’t deserve the inevitably one-sided image of who they are that would emerge were I to name them and tell my version of the stories in which they are involved–because, after all, as the title already tells you, I am not happy about the feelings that have compelled me to put aside for an hour or so the work I have to do so that I can write this.
Neither would telling many of these stories portray me in the most flattering light. In the most recent instance, for example, acting on what turned out to be partial and even completely, and perhaps unintentionally, false information from a source we had no reason to doubt, my wife and I came out swinging in what we thought–not unreasonably, given what we knew–was going to be a huge family fight, and we said some very hurtful things to people who had done nothing to deserve it. Embarrassing, and even humiliating, as that was, however, it’s not the end of the world. Once we understood what had happened, we apologized as quickly as we could, and the people who were willing to accept our apology accepted it. Those who will hold a grudge will hold a grudge, and there’s really nothing we can do about that except realize they would likely have found a grudge to hold no matter what we did. The bad taste of this experience, I am sure, will linger for a while, not least in our own mouths, because in hindsight (of course!) we can see with perfect clarity the moments when–if we’d known what we know now–we could have chosen a different course of action and avoided the whole thing. The bad taste, too, however, will fade–for those who will let it–and this will become yet one more story in the catalogue of stories that makes up not just the family history but that contains the cumulative meaning of the relationships between and among family members.
Such stories–and when, whether, by whom and why they should be told–are at the root of the situation I just described, but the contested nature of such stories is at the heart of every family difficulty I can think of. In my own family, for example–and I can be specific here because these are facts that no one disputes–is the fact that my twin sisters have essentially not spoken, by my count, for more than 15 years; the fact that I have cousins on my mother’s side whom we were not able to see for most of the lives they have lived until now; and the fact that I did not speak to my father for a decade. In each case, the silence that separates or separated the people I have just named was the result of story or, more properly, of the battle between and among the those who controlled the narrative for whose version would win out. The ironic thing, of course, is that silences like those I’ve just described make everyone into losers–not just the people whose silence is at issue, but all those around them who have to negotiate that silence and whose lives within the family are therefore shaped by it.
Neither this movement back and forth between story and silence nor the power struggles that surround it are ever going to stop, not in my family, not in my wife’s family, not in the families of those of you who are reading this; and so I am writing this morning not in protest, not in the hopes of changing things, but because I feel right now, more acutely than I have felt in a long time, the weight of the silences that surround me, that I hold within me, that I stand within; and I feel as well the weight of stories, those that I know–whether I have told them or not–and those that I don’t know, whether I will ever hear them or not. We all carry this weight. Talking about it like this sometimes makes it feel a little lighter.
In the House today, Republicans are arguing for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. A few points:
1) The Republicans want to leave up to 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions without protection.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, up to 129 million Americans (not counting the elderly) have pre-existing conditions that could prevent them from getting health insurance on the individual market. Most of those Americans are getting insurance through their workplaces, but many of those folks are in effect trapped in their jobs by their health, distorting the job market. Up to 30 million simply can’t get health insurance.
Especially in today’s job market, “it’s okay if you can get a job” is not a reasonable response to the problems of people with pre-existing conditions. The Republicans used to have a viable plan to deal with this problem — Romneycare, otherwise known as the individual mandate. But now, for reasons of partisan convenience, the Republicans are passionately opposed to the one good idea they’ve ever had on health care. And as a result, they’re against sick people having affordable insurance coverage that will provide decent care.
Under the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies can’t refuse to help sick people, and can’t drop coverage because someone becomes ill. Republicans want to repeal that protection, and they don’t have any coherent plan to help those people.
2) The Republicans are voting against letting a real competitive market lower prices.
Beginning in 2014, anyone on the individual market (with or without pre-existing conditions) will have access to Health Insurance Exchanges, where insurance companies will be forced to compete in a clear, easy-to-understand format online for health insurance premiums. Unlike the status quo — where people rarely have the ability to choose between many health plans, and health insurance companies are allowed to do everything they can to misstate their plans’ true costs and benefits — this allows actual competition to flourish and bring down costs.
3) The Republicans are voting to add $230 billion to the deficit.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that repealing the Affordable Care Act will add $230 billion to the deficit just in the next decade — and it would probably be worse the decade after that.
To this, the Republicans claim that the CBO is lying, but their claims don’t stand up to examination.
4) The Republicans are voting to leave 32 million Americans without health insurance. From Ezra Klein:
In 2019, there will be 32 million Americans who don’t have health insurance, but would have had it under reform: There are a lot of questions about how the Affordable Care Act will work in practice, but this is the part we know for certain: Tens of millions more Americans will have health insurance. About half of the newly insured will get coverage through Medicaid, and about half will get it by purchasing subsidized private insurance on the exchanges. But they’ll get it. Under the status quo, they won’t.
5) The Republicans are voting to eliminate the only structure the US has to reduce health care costs.
In the long run, only one things matters to the federal budget deficit, and that’s the increasing costs of health care. Compared to that one item, everything else is small.
It’s much easier to make technical changes to existing legislation than to pass new legislation from scratch (look at how much effort and political capital passing even a very mild and limited health care reform has cost the Democrats). The Affordable Care Act provides that base, and nothing the Republicans have proposed serves the same function with even close to the same scope.
As things now stand, the future of the Affordable Care Act is highly uncertain. Yet, its success is of critical national importance. The reason, paradoxically, is the promise of the very provisions that have been subject to most criticism—those related to cost control. …The bill contains, at least in embryonic form, virtually every idea for cost control that any analyst has come up with:
• The bill retains health savings accounts.
• It adds pilots and demonstration programs to develop accountable care organizations and medical homes.
• It contains provisions to test the practicality of bundled payments and to develop value-based health insurance.
• It contains additional funding for comparative-effectiveness research. It spurs the introduction of health information technology.
• It directly curbs growth of Medicare spending and establishes a commission to recommend further reforms (although the Commission’s powers are undesirably limited).
• It contains a significant expansion of preventive care, although the cost-reducing potential of preventive care is often greatly exaggerated.
This menu includes all available ideas on how to control the growth of health care spending within the next few years. The most practical cost-control strategy that is now available to Congress is to accelerate the implementation of these provisions, not to stymie them.
The vote (which will probably take place tomorrow) is a simple up-or-down vote. You either want the status quo, or you want the Affordable Care Act. No third alternative is being offered by the Republicans. ((On Thursday, the Republicans plan to hold a vote to throw the question to a hodgepodge of committees to come up with alternative plans whenever they get around to it, no deadline attached — in other words, they don’t intend to come up with a serious alternative plan at all.)) And when it comes down to it, every Republican in the House will probably be in favor of more Americans lacking insurance, less rights for sick people, higher deficits, and doing nothing to address skyrocketing health care costs.
The Democrats were doomed in the 2010 election cycle regardless (due to the combined effects of the economy, mid-term voting patterns, and having more vulnerable seats). But there’s reason to believe that they’ve also paid a cost for supporting the Affordable Care Act, especially since the Republicans have lied about its effects at every turn (“death panels,” et al). Nonetheless, it was worth it.
The Affordable Care Act is a compromised and altogether too mild health care reform, but even so it’s enormously better than the status quo. At some point, politics should be about doing long-term good, not just winning short-term elections by any means necessary. But judging by this vote, Republicans have not reached that point.
I was listening to this story on NPR’s Morning Edition a few days ago about the debate over whether the military should lift its ban on women in combat roles. Currently, women are (obviously) allowed to serve in the military, and might end up in combat, but they aren’t assigned specifically to combat positions. In places like Iraq and Afghanistan, this line is apparently blurred all the time. So there are women in combat right now, but they aren’t getting the career benefits from it.
There are several issues and factors to consider, and people against the whole notion have trotted out the usual excuses. What if women — oh horrors! — got pregnant? What if they decide to leave the military and go raise a family? What if women don’t sign up at all? But, my favorite is this one:
And there are the perennial concerns about unit cohesion. Will allowing women into intense fighting situations undermine the morale of all-male combat units?
Now where have we heard that kind of argument before? Let me see…. OH RIGHT. When we debated Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Oh my, if we let gay people stop hiding their gayness, straight men will feel uncomfortable and it will undermine their morale!
Let me just take a moment to call Bullshit on this argument. Say it with me, people: BULLSHIT.
Just from a military standpoint, anyone who enters the armed forces is trained to do a lot of things that many civilians never even dream of. If you can learn to do this:
“… ground combat, nose-to-nose with the bad guys, living in the mud, eating what’s on your back, no hygiene and no TV.”
And not whine, then you can learn to deal with some ladies in your unit.
But beyond that, I would really like us to get away from all this damn coddling going on. Yes, coddling. A whole chunk of the DADT debate was shaped by this sense that men’s sensibilities are, apparently, just too damn delicate to deal with the possibility that Joe over there might like to look at penises now and then. My advice to these men is: SUCK IT UP.
Even if the men in our military are ill-prepared to deal with the thought of having to serve in combat units with women, that does not mean we should continue to keep women out. It means we need to make the men in the military better people. It means that we have to stop privileging the hurt feelings and, frankly, silly whining of a bunch of backwards-thinking people in general over what is fair and right.
Coddling has never helped anyone, in the end. And, honestly? I’m so tired of everyone having to tiptoe around dudes in order to get shit done in this country. Just do what’s right. If certain of us want to whine and cry about it, treat them like the toddlers they so obviously are.
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 10, 2011 (IPS) – The United Nations, which is trying to reach out to nearly a billion undernourished people, some living in perpetual hunger, is anticipating another food crisis later this year.
And the signs of impending trouble have been there for some time.
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned last week that world market prices for rice, wheat, sugar, barley and meat will remain high or register significant rises in 2011 – perhaps replicating the crisis of 2007-2008. MORE
And its not always a matter of producing food. Its a matter of distribution.
The thing is – as a culture, we’re suspicious of people whose sexual attractions and identities appear to change over time, crossing gender boundaries or causing them to adopt new language to speak about themselves. There is pressure to interpret the past in light of the present — and with a strong heteronormative bent — so that women who have been in same-sex relationships but are currently partnered with men often experience the loss of lesbian fellowship and find that their families and friends are eager to understand their previous partnerships as a “phase” or “experimentation” that they have since “gotten over.”
Women who shift from straight relationships to same-sex relationships, conversely, are often expected to interpret that shift as a “coming out” experience in which they discover, acknowledge, or embrace an aspect of their sexual identity (or a more authentic identity) that has previously been kept a hidden, shameful and secret. This has, indeed, often been the case, historically, and continues to be today as people wrestle with internalized homophobia and social contexts in which being openly non-straight is hazardous to one’s health.
…
The problem is not with what actually happens in women’s lives. Rather, the problem lies in how those experiences get explained through the lens of our understanding about how human sexuality works: i.e., that who we are attracted to (particularly the gender of the people whom we desire) is not only fixed but knowable. And that it fits within the context of the gender binary: one is either attracted to “men” to “women” or to both women and men. And from the time you are aware of your sexual yearnings, you know which category you now and forever fit into.MORE
This one is was posted in the middle of last year but I only recently stumbled on it.Tour Diary Day Four: Rock and Roll is Dead by Amy, who is: 1. guitarist and violinist of rock band Titus Andronicus. .2. singing her own psych-folk songs under the name Solanin. 3. in a two-girl noisy rock band called hilly eye with my friend Catherine. 4. blogs about all this and more.
Inside the truck stop, it smells like old hot dogs and gasoline. The guys browse the contents of the tiny magazine rack, which seems to be mostly made up of porn. I see them poring over the cover of a magazine with a naked woman on it, and look away, instinctively feeling that this is not my scene. However, my curiosity gets the better of me, and I walk closer to see what’s going on. My suspicions are confirmed: There’s a naked woman on the cover. But it turns out that I’m wrong in assuming the guys are looking at porn, because the magazine is Rolling Stone.
After the guys have gone back to the van, I peruse the pages of the latest edition. I see a lot of photos of guys playing guitars, and ads for guys who play guitar featuring other guys playing guitars, and a photo of Lady Gaga wearing pasties and not much else. I begin to feel increasingly alienated by this magazine. Once again, I’ve got a suspicion that’s rooted in the back of my mind—that the issue will not contain a single image of a woman holding an instrument of any kind. Perversely, I want to see if I’m correct. The sensation of knowing what I will find is already sad. It’s like discovering a letter in which the guy you’re crushing on declares his love for some other woman, and still, inevitably, reading the whole thing down to the last painful line.
Of course, Rolling Stone contains only one image of a “token” woman holding an instrument. It’s Taylor Swift, dressed in a diamond studded ball gown, holding a matching silver diamond acoustic guitar. Good for her! As America’s large-scale concert industry pretty much collapses around her feet, she’s single-handedly (okay, alongside Justin Bieber) holding down the fort. Other than Taylor, the closest thing I can find to a woman with an instrument in Rolling Stone is a tiny photo of Cat Power holding a microphone at Lilith Fair, the image wedged into a short write-up way at the bottom of the page. There is also a photo of two women in their late thirties or forties called the Wilson Sisters, one of whom is holding something that looks like the neck of a guitar down below her waist. The guitar itself has been cut out of the photo. Besides them, and Lady Gaga, and the naked, airbrushed star of True Blood on the cover, who incidentally, is pictured with a guy grabbing her boob, I can’t find any other women in the whole magazine.This means that Taylor Swift, Cat Power, and the Wilson Sisters are not only the only women that Rolling Stone depicts as musicians, but also the only women that Rolling Stone depicts as wearing clothes.MORE
Portfolio released a report in early December that ranked the “least brainy” cities in America. The cities are listed below; I added some demographics information because Portfolio conveniently left it out.
According to Portfolio, this is the criteria they used to determine where all the dummies are:
Dropped out before high-school graduation (median of $19,405; 0.58 points)
Stopped at high-school diploma (median of $26,894; 0.80 points)
Stopped at associate degree or attended college, but stopped without any degree (median of $32,874; 0.98 points)
Stopped at bachelor’s degree (median of $46,805; 1.40 points)
Earned graduate and/or professional degree (median of $61,287; 1.83 points)
Okay. As someone who lives/works in the McAllen-Edinburg area, has a graduate degree (point #5), earns less than the median income of point #1, and teaches people trying to get to point #3–fuck knows where I fall into Portfolio‘s smartypants ranking system–I just wanted to say that this “report” really, really pisses me off.
All of the Texas areas mentioned are on the US-Mexico border. All of them are poor. Last year, Forbes ranked McAllen-Edinburg and Harlingen-Brownsville as the#1 and #2 poorest areas in the nation, respectively.MORE
This morning I woke up to a local housing project’s message about canceling a workshop on safer sex. The reason? No funding for outside presenters.
Welcome to the most frustrating injustice in sex education: information access and restricted conversations.
There is a sharp contrast between sex education for the socially privileged and sex education for the socially disadvantaged. In my time as a sex educator, I’ve worked with a broad range of populations and anytime I work with minorities, youth or poor people, the only things the organizations want me to talk about are STIs and condoms.
No pleasure. No agency. No risk reduction. Simply: “STIs will mess you up, use a condom or suffer the consequences.” Meanwhile, sororities and universities urge me to broach these topics.
“Sex Toys!”, they say.
“Masturbation!,” they laud.
“Sex positivity and empowerment!,” says the choir.
And they should encourage these conversations. I think everyone can benefit from a little sexual attitude reflexivity. But not everyone is benefiting from this, mostly because of social injustices.MORE
But the country’s unsavory reputation as a one-stop sex shop for lecherous American and European men belies a robust, militant women’s movement and a centuries-old precedent of gender equality.
With that in mind, two women legislators from the GABRIELA Women’s Party are pushing for the creation of a national museum honoring “the heroism, martyrdom and achievements of Filipinas in society.”
Reps. Luzviminda Ilagan and Emerenciana De Jesus are hoping to recognize the achievements of notable women in Philippine history such as Gabriela Silang, a 17th-century revolutionary who led 2,000 Filipinos in battle against the Spanish army, as well as recognizing historic feminist organizations such the Association of Ilonga Feminists, which began fighting for suffrage in 1912.
The museum would be the first of its kind, and an important step in recognizing the oft-forgotten contributions and struggles of women in Philippine society. The nation certainly has no shortage of feminist firebrands and freedom fighters, and today Filipinas continue to fortify the front lines of the country’s most pivotal social justice movements.MORE
Your first look at the cover art for Late Nights & Early Mornings, the much-anticipated first solo album from British soul singer and songwriter Marsha Ambrosius. The Liverpool-born artist was formerly one-half of Floetry, the English neo-soul duo which had hits with “Floetic” and “Say Yes” on both sides of the pond.
…
ROD 2.0: The boys are loving you for the “Far Away” video. For the first video on your solo album, you could have done the usual, bling, fancy house, hot guy. Why this?
MARSHA AMBROSIUS: Thank you so much. One of my very good friends was going through something with his life and his relationship. I just wanted to be a good friend. It was hard to see them go through this with their lives and when they attempted suicide … it was one of the worst things possible. As far as the concept for the video, I just wanted to make it as pure and loving as possible.MORE
The phrase ‘middle class’ gets thrown around a lot, whether we’re looking at articles about the vanishing middle class, conservatives invoking the middle class as justification for some new line of fuckery, or liberals poking at the pedestrian middle class existence. It’s a word that has become so elastic that it almost seems to be without any meaning at all, as I discovered recently when I sat down to try and define it, and challenged others to join me in coming up with a clear picture of what ‘middle class’ is and what it means to be middle class. MORE
First of all, King was a radical. Not the venomous kind that promotes reckless violence against innocent people; quite the opposite. King was a radical in his criticism of the root causes of injustice, and in his brilliantly imaginative vision of a different, more just and humane world. For example, King did not just urge protesters to be non-violent, he urged politicians and governments to be non-violent. In 1968 he took a brave stance against the war in Vietnam, in a speech in New York City’s Riverside Church, that cost him some of his liberal supporters. He criticized the injustices of capitalism: persistent poverty, inadequate aid to workers and the poor, and growing wealth disparity. Let us remember he died demanding not simply integration, but labor rights for striking sanitation workers in Memphis.
Secondly, King was not a king. He was not a superhero who rushed in to singularly rescue black people from the evils of American racism. He acted in concert with others, many others, some of them with longer careers in social justice struggles than himself. There is a famous analogy in King’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, one he used many times, in which he compares his work to that of a pilot guiding a plane. The pilot is important, King concedes. However, that safe journey could not be achieved without the sometimes invisible work of a very skilled and committed ground crew. I might chose a slightly different analogy, but the point is an important one. As Ella Baker was fond of saying, “King didn’t make the movement, the movement made King.”
King understood this. We cannot build a movement for social justice by hanging our hopes on a single charismatic leader, no matter how articulate, committed, and brilliant he or she may be (not King and not Obama).
Individuals change their minds, and their loyalties. They get assassinated. Most fundamentally, individuals are only as strong as the collectives and communities that surround them, that keep them safe and honest and grounded and accountable. So, celebrations of King have to go hand in hand with celebrations of the maids and porters students and teachers who struggle tirelessly in what we now term the civil rights movement.MORE
My mother sent me this photo, which was forwarded to her by “this came from my friend in denver who has a friend in maine who has nothing better to do with his time.” I just can’t resist posting it.
Fanfic writer Jade Lennox has great taste — just look at her list of fandoms, which includes Slings and Arrows (my favorite TV show), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (another favorite of mine), Castle Waiting (a wonderful comic book by Linda Medley which I think most Hereville readers would enjoy), Love and Rockets, Wonderfalls, Farscape, Veronica Mars… I have to admit, by “great taste,” I just mean that she (he?) likes a lot of comics and TV that I like.
Anyway, I was thrilled when Jade Lennox recently wrote “Who Needs A Gallows When You Have A Sword?,” a Hereville short story featuring Mirka, Fruma, Zindel, Rochel, Gittel, and a brand-new character, Fruma’s brother Feter Gedalya. It’s well-written and fun to read, and in some ways it parallels thought I’ve had about Hereville characters (I’ve often thought that Mirka would resist the pressure to dress as Queen Esther!).
By the way, if you find the format or font difficult to read, click on the “Hide Creator’s Style” link near the top of the webpage, towards the right, and that should fix things.
Today is World Fair Use Day, which makes it an especially auspicious day to link to some fanfic. My thanks to Jade Lennox, for writing such a terrific story. And to my friend TeaOtter, who requested a Hereville story.
There are just a few thoughts I have about all of this that I wanted to share.
First, Sarah Palin. As Xeni Jardin says, “I try to avoid blogging about Sarah Palin, for the same reasons I’ve tried to avoid blogging about Snooki and Paris Hilton, and feeding any number of garden variety internet trolls. ((That quote bugged me a little bit just because it reinforces the idea that the most frivolous, silly people in our culture are all women, which is all kinds of misogynist. Thus, rather than focusing on Snooki, I would include the entire cast of Jersey Shore, Ashton Kutcher, and former President George W. Bush.)) ” That hasn’t been my policy, but increasingly, I think it ought to be.
I don’t think that her bullseye map was particularly egregious … that sort of thing has become part of the political discourse in our country, for good or ill, and as much as I do tend to think it’s for ill, I also think it’s unfair to hold a half-term governor, failed politician, and trainwreck of a reality TV star personally responsible for the problems in our discourse. Those problems began long before she stumbled, incoherently mumbling, onto the American stage.
I do think that her use of the phrase ‘blood libel’ was particularly unfortunate and ill-thought-out, but come on … it’s Sarah Palin. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. Ezra Klein takes essentially the same tack, saying that while it’s reasonable of her to feel aggrieved at being blamed for a shooting that was almost certainly the fault of untreated mental illness, she squandered almost all of that goodwill trying to make herself the victim, both of the shootings, and, weirdly, of centuries of antisemitic prejudice. Poor Sarah.
As far as discussing angry, violent, political speech in particular, I’ve found myself nodding along with almost everything (the conservative/libertarian) Conor Friedersdorf has written about this. Two of his posts in particular are worth checking out.
First, in Tone Versus Substance, Connor distinguishes between the problems of tone in political speech (the crosshairs, talk of ‘attacking’ the Democrats, that kind of thing) and problems of substance. His argument is essentially that thought much of the focus has been on the tone, we ought to be discussing substance more, particularly overblown and untrue substance.
… remarks about death panels communicated an untruth: the notion that Barack Obama’s health care reform effort sought to empower a panel of bureaucrats who’d sit in judgment about whether an old person’s life would be saved or not. That is the sort of thing we ought to find objectionable, even if the substance is communicated in the most dry language imaginable, because were it true, radicalism would be an appropriate response. “They’re going to start killing old people? We’ve got to stop this!”
I’d add that the same thing is true about those who talk about Barack Obama instituting a socialist dictatorship, about him being Kenyan and not eligible to hold the presidency, and about him ‘hating America.’ All of these are untrue, and what’s more obviously untrue. I have a hard time believing that any more than a tiny percentage of those who repeat these claims actually literally believe them to be true. And yet, if they were true, as Connor says, radical response would be appropriate! If we’re talking about an nascent dictator, a foreigner who’s infiltrated the government, seized the reigns of power and is trying to deliberately destroy America … hell, sign me up! I’ll fight in that war! Sic Semper Tyrannis! ((Similarly, if there really is a holocaust of the unborn going on in America, then picking up a gun to end it makes a kind of sense. That was basically Scott Roeder‘s train of thought. But overwhelmingly, the people who keep saying that they believe in the holocaust of the unborn don’t actually believe in violent solutions. There’s a reason.))
But I don’t believe that. And neither do the people who say this shit. And neither, unless you’re extraordinarily gullible, do you. Sadly, at any given moment, there are a number of extraordinarily gullible people listening, and if they do believe this, then picking up a gun isn’t entirely wrong. The people who said it were, “just funnin’.” They, “didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” And that’s true. But maybe from now on out we could try to not fabricate blatantly untrue (and scary) shit about our opponents, even if it’s fun.
His second post discusses the charges that both sides of the political spectrum make about the other, accusing them of being worse when it comes to extreme rhetoric. I believe that the Right is much worse than the Left when it comes to this, but then, I’m a leftist. Of course I believe that. Connor’s point is that that kind of accusation and analysis goes on all the time, and he suggests a solution:
Folks on the right think leftists don’t confront the indefensible speech uttered by their side. And vice-versa.
So why don’t the folks at The Corner enter into a bargain with a prominent blogger on the left. What do you say, Matt Yglesias or Kevin Drum or Jonathan Chait? Here’s how it would work. Every day for a week, Monday through Friday, The Corner’s designated blogger could draft one post for publication on the left-leaning blog. The catch? They’d be limited to offering five direct quotations per day of lefties engaged in indefensible rhetoric, however they define it (in context, of course).
In return, the liberal interlocutor could publish the equivalent post at The Corner. And every day for a week, the participants would have to read one another’s five examples for that day, and decide whether to acknowledge that they’re indefensible and assert that the source should apologize if he or she hasn’t done so… or else defend the remark(s).
Maybe I’m wrong. But I suspect that Yglesias, Drum, and Chait would all be game for this sort of exchange. And that it wouldn’t be approved at The Corner in a million years.
Why do you think that is?
My instinct on this matches his. Does yours? Every time this sort of thing gets brought up, the left trots out a list of objectionable quotes from prominent conservatives, nationally syndicated pundits, and elected officials, and the right responds with quotes from a number of actors and some academics I’ve never heard of. Rather than playing that game over and over and over, I’d like to see this tried. I’ve got no problem publicly upbraiding Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore … I wonder if Jonah Goldberg will publicly upbraid Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
The final quote comes from The Onion’s American Voices Article, “Tucson Keeps Church Protesters Away,” about the efforts to keep the Westboro Baptist Church people away from the funerals of those killed at the shootings.
“I’m a big fan of the First Amendment and the rule of law and everything, but what if, just this once, the FBI and the Tucson police went to the movies for a couple hours while we tuned these bastards up with pipes?”
You know, guys when we discuss avoiding violent rhetoric … well … you might want to look at that.
EDIT: Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
Alas USA is not a multiparty system so each party only has to seem more desirable than the other one.…