Culture Warriors category archive

Words fail me.

Lies and lying liars.

Hunter Smith wonders at the culture of fear that has turned playgrounds into padded paddocks and at the frequent fear fads. I can’t say I agree with everything he says, but I do think it’s worth a read. A snippet:

No one wants to unnecessarily put children in harm’s way, but in our rush to protect them we sometimes gloss over what constitutes real risk. Seat belt and helmet laws are enacted because evidence suggests they decrease the likelihood of injury or death in an accident. However, similar evidence is seldom provided when playgrounds and schools are made ostensibly safer. In fact — unless there is a corn chopper* involved — these changes address unfounded fears more than actual dangers. The result is school administrators and parents patting themselves on the back for solving a problem that wasn’t there. Now they’ve created a new problem: a sterilized environment where children passively learn to fear everything.

This mindset extends well beyond the playground. Our country is plagued by a culture of fear. Politicians, talking heads, religious leaders, and bloggers all agree we are doomed, they only disagree on the means of our demise.

I know that the playground at my elementary school would not pass muster today, as no shredded tires were within miles of it and the swings had seats, not slings.

____________________

*We had one of those. I think my brother may still have it. You drop the ears of corn in the top, turn the crank, and the corn kernels come out one shoot and the stripped cob out another.

Via Job’s Anger.

It’s the best catch there is.

In the Roanoke Times, the Rev. Kirk A. Ballin, retired Unitarian minister, looks at American history and sees what most Americans deny through silence and a few would defend through arms:

This is because the history of the United States is really a two-track history. One track grows out of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Freedom, equity and justice for all are fundamental to this historical genesis.

The other track of U.S. history, however, stands in stark and disturbing contrast to the idealism of the one rooted in freedom, equity and justice. This other track of U.S. history is rooted in oppression, exploitation, persecution, enslavement and murder.

It is history marked by the violent, exploitive (sic) and dehumanizing treatment of groups of people who were different from the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant establishment of the early United States.

. . . meets All the News that Fits.

Via Job’s Anger.

I’ve noted many times how, in news reports of gun deaths, guns seem to just go off all on their ownsome, without the interference of some human agency to cause their triggers to be engaged. It’s not just guns, folks.

In a much longer post about perception and perspective in reporting the events in Ferguson, Missouri, Mikhail Lyubansky gives a telling example–telling in its pettiness–of how the framing of an event affects reporting and consequent perception of it.

A few days ago, high school students in my local community were holding a rally outside the high school to protest the grand jury decisions in the police shooting deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The rally, which was approved by school officials, was designed to take place on school grounds but spilled over to the street in front of the school. While the students were on the street, a woman attempted to drive a car through the group of students [see video]. Students responded by hitting the car and apparently did some damage to the glass. The event was reported by the local newspaper:

Some of them [students] walked into Crescent Drive in front of the school. As that occurred, a vehicle travelled through the crowd. At least one of the students struck the vehicle’s window and caused damage to the glass, according to police, who were called to the scene.

Notice how the article places the damage to the car in the foreground. The car was not driven through the group of students, it just somehow “travelled through the crowd” — the passive voice. But when it comes to the damage to the car, it didn’t just happen. Rather “one of the students struck the vehicle’s window” — the active voice.

Do read the rest, and remember to read the news with several grains of salt.

Afterthought:

I take no responsibility for the Psychology Today blogger’s ignorance of basic grammar.

“Car traveled” is active voice, even though it is obfuscatory, in that it attributes agency to the car, which is a mechanical device without agency.

In the Bangor Daily News, Wayne E. Reilly reports on a debate that took place a century ago about whether women should be allowed to vote. It’s fascinating. Here’s a snippet:

Women’s ever-changing dress styles, including slightly shorter, tighter skirts that inhibited movement, had become mixed up with one of the great questions of the Progressive Era.

“Mrs. Huntington believed that the woman who had such a narrow skirt that she had to be lifted into a wagon was not fit to vote,” the correspondent for the Commercial reported. Getting into a wagon, of course, was a far more important exercise a century ago than it is today.

It’s a light-hearted little column, but illustrates well the utter bullshit that persons tell themselves–and others–to justify their prejudices.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Laurie Essig takes on the myth makers, in this case, those whose myths support and perpetuate racism. Here’s a bit:

Mass incarceration and the resulting policing practices in this country assume Black guilt. But none of this could occur without the racial innocence of Whites. Within the myth of the Black male beast lies the story of the innocent White victim, the delicate Flora running away from the newly freed (and therefore dangerous) Gus.

This uniquely American creation myth– writ not with lightening but a gender binary that marked White women as victims, Black men as dangerous, Black women as excessively sexual and White men as heroic saviors– planted the seed for everything we are seeing today. And therein lies the real danger for not bringing what feminist theory calls an “intersectional analysis” to the history we are witnessing.

An intersectional analysis insists that this is not just about the construction of Black men as beasts, but White women as needing saving by White men and Black women as never innocent.

What the Booman said.

One of the aspects of privilege is that those who have it think it’s nothing special.

Werner Herzog’s Bear points out that history matters.

When I was an undergraduate, a long time ago, I did not join a fraternity. I never quite figured out why I should pay dues to get drunk, when I could get drunk quite nicely on my own, thank you very much. As far as I could tell from my seat in the bleachers, getting drunk and molesting women was what fraternities were all about.

After graduation, I did a year of graduate work at Mr. Jefferson’s University. One of the traditions was for a fraternity to burn a random car in “Mad Bowl” during some campus celebration I forget the name of.

Consequently, I am confident that this will work out as intended.

Also, pigs, wings.

Afterthought:

AFAIC, the whole United States “Greek” system should be abolished. Doing so will not expunge evil from this world, but it will end a little bit of institutionalized evil.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

Greek leaders at San Diego State University have announced that they were suspending all fraternity parties and social functions indefinitely after a weekend that not only involved taunting people protesting sexual assault, but also the seventh sexual assault at a fraternity house since the semester began in September, U-T San Diego reports.

The InterFraternity Council admitted that the fraternity members who pelted participants in Friday’s Take Back the Night protest against sexual assault with eggs and waved dildos at them behaved in a manner that did “not reflect the values of the Greek community at SDSU.”

The fact is that this does, indeed, reflect the “values of the Greek community,” and not just at SDSU.

This has been another episode of watch what they do, not what they say.

Colossal Brit ex-pat poseur twits.

The dark side of the self-image of the United States as a “nation of immigrants” is the racism and bigotry that underlies the history of America’s immigration policies.

As I discussed at tonight’s DL, the less white the immigrant stream, the more restrictive the immigration “policies.”

If freedom races through America’s bloodstream, racism courses through its lymph system.

Ask me nicely, I’ll tell you what I really think.

Bruce Maiman, writing at the Sacramento Bee, considers the case of some kids who were punished for omitting the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. After reminding readers that the punishments were prima facie illegal, he reminds us that things are not always what think they are, including the Pledge:

In 1890, a magazine publisher was selling flags to schools as a premium to solicit subscriptions. When sales declined the following year, the publisher concocted the idea of using the quadricentennial of Christopher Columbus reaching the Americas to revive the flag effort, complete with flag salutes and pledge recitations in schools nationwide. Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister, was commissioned to write the pledge, which first appeared in The Youth’s Companion on Sept. 8, 1892:

(snip)

“The United States of America” was added in 1923, then the words “under God” in 1954 – which Bellamy’s family descendants strongly protested. But our lawmakers decided this would somehow be a fantastic response to the perceived threat of those godless commies in Soviet Russia.

Typical, isn’t it? What many believe was about religion and patriotism was really about three dubious American obsessions: money, politics and the empty symbolic gesture.