Personal Musings category archive

Bagels and pimento cheese.

Yums.

Literalist Christians are their own worst advertisement.

In fact, words fail them. Or they fail words. Or something.

Frankly, I think literalists should be required to learn Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, so they could be literature literalists. Maybe then will they get a clue (emphasis added):

The 2011 translation of the New International Version Bible, or NIV, does not change pronouns referring to God, who remains “He” and “the Father.” But it does aim to avoid using “he” or “him” as the default reference to an unspecified person.

(snip)

Before the new translation even hit stores, it drew opposition from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, an organization that believes women should submit to their husbands in the home and only men can hold some leadership roles in the church.

(snip)

At issue is how to translate pronouns that apply to both genders in the ancient Greek and Hebrew texts but have traditionally been translated using masculine forms in English.

(The “Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” could probably better be described as the “keep ’em in the kitchen and bedroom” party.)

Follow the link to see some samples from the text. Some of them are, indeed, awkward, but, really, this is much ado about not much of anything, for God did not spake in Elizabethan English in the first place.

Republicans are fond of saying “The federal government is broke.” I just heard one say it on the Magickal Talking Box.

They don’t admit that they broke it.

How long before Wisconsin Republicans seize the radio and television stations (at least the ones that aren’t already Fox), declare martial law, and announce the coup?

If every shopper returned his or her grocery cart, rather than leaving it in the parking lot, the effort would likely reduce obesity by 9.63%

Spring must be near.

The joggers are in bloom.

The Oldsmobile was a middle-of-the-road middle of the price range car, sort of a Pontiac without any of that GTO pizzazz.

The Oldsmobile is no more. So too is your father’s Republican Party.

I believe that many persons, especially older persons (a demographic that includes me) who consider themselves Republicans (a demographic that excludes me) don’t realize how little today’s Republican Party shares with the Republican Party of their upbringing, the party that included Everett Dirksen, John Heinz, and Edward Brooke, just to mention a few.

I sense a longing for their fathers’s Oldsmobiles among leading members of the professional commentariat, especially the two Davids (Brooks and Broder).

Broder, indeed, has given a name to an condition: High Broderism, a syndrome which includes the willingness to sacrifice moral outcomes on the altar of the appearance of conciliation. As the Booman points out, High Broderism postulates that compromise is a one-way street: Democrats give; Republicans take.

Nothing I have read recently so illustrates how delusional is their faith in the existence of their fathers’ Oldsmobiles than Shaun Mullen’s remembrance of Russell W. Peterson, Republican Governor of Delaware from 1969 to 1973. Shaun’s conclusion:

Russ Peterson was 94 when he died on Monday night at his Wilmington home. It is sadly ironic that as a moderate Republican he would have stood no chance of being nominated today in a state where Christine O’Donnell was the party’s 2010 standard bearer, let alone become an environmental torchbearer for a party that eschews moderation and is an avowed enemy of the environment.

Several years ago, before it became a real prospect, I heard someone propose, “General Motors should just stop making Oldsmobiles and see whether anyone notices.” (Eventually, General Motors did and car buyers didn’t, but that’s another story.)

The Republican Party no longer makes Oldsmobiles and lots of folks still haven’t noticed.

80 Fahrenheits, open windows, and short-sleeve shirts in mid-February are Just Not Right in This Part of the World.

If a bad film is released in 3D, does that make it three times as bad or only half again as bad?

Last night, I saw Neil Sedaka (who is by any standard a great talent and a classy guy) on an Infomercial selling oldies from the 50s and 60s.

He looks like Ed Asner.

But he still sounds like Neil Sedaka.

In Media World, if it snows in Washington, D. C., and New York, New York, it snows all over the world.

I don’t know enough to comment on it. My knowledge of Egyptian history is probably slightly more than that of the average American, what with being trained as a historian, but that delineates the difference between somewhat ignorant and profoundly ignorant. I do know not to base my opinions on anything in Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Jewel of the Nile.

I do recall that, back in the olden days, when computers had tubes and took up entire buildings, an Egyptian medical doctor gave a talk on Egypt to the older grades at my elementary school (the local hospital welcomed immigrant doctors looking earn licenses in the States). At the time, Nasser had been in power for about a decade.

The doctor told us (I’m paraphrasing),

In Egypt, we have democracy, but it’s not like your democracy.

We do not have candidates running against each other. We hold up a candidate for president and say, ‘Do you want him?”

If the people say “No,” we hold up another candidate.

Even then, that sounded fishy to me, so fishy that I remember it almost five decades later.

I’ve learned not to believe what I hear in the news when events are moving quickly on the other side of the world, or even next door. Remember all the lies about New Orleans during the Katrina Army Corps of Engineer Floods–I fell for those and once bitten etc.

It’s not that I think major news organizations are falsifying stuff, but that, in the rush to fill airtime and column inches, they can fall into the trap of relying on guesswork, rumor, and wishful thinking.

This is certainly the case in the blogosphere, left, right, and middle. Andrew Sullivan’s giddiness over the Green Revolution in Iran, which petered out to nothing, amply illustrates this. (Indeed, a friend of mine with Iranian friends tells me that they have told her that the level of repression in Iran is now far greater than it has been in years.)

Sullivan’s changing his website’s banner to green as a show of solidarity had little effect on guns and beatings half a world away.

In reporting fast-moving events, an unverified twit may be worse than no twit at all.

Nevertheless, I know enough about American history to pretty much agree with the Rude One: our history of supporting dictators in the name of realpolitik has repeatedly come back to bite us in the behind and that laying low and letting events run their course is probably the best policy for the United States (Warning: Rudeness at link).

For an unusual perspective on events in Egypt, see the Linux Outlaws special podcast. It’s weighted towards reviewing the influence of “new media” and the internet in events in Egypt (two Linux geeks podcasting internationally via Skype and an internet connection–what else would you expect?). It also provides some international perspective Americans are unlikely to get first-hand, as one of the podcasters is from the U. K. and the other is from Germany.

The discussion of Egypt starts about 13 minutes into the broadcast.

A couple of evenings ago, I watched Charlie Chan in Egypt, from 1935. A few weeks ago, I watched Charlie Chan in London, from a couple of years earlier. (I’ve been a mystery fan since I bought my first Perry Mason Pocketbook for 35 cents in Thalheimer’s Department Store in Richmond. I understand that Thalheimer’s is long gone.)

There were some interesting contrasts between them. (We shall leave aside any debate over whether the Charlie Chan series was inherently bigoted; I shall observe only that Keye Luke did not think so.)

In Charlie Chan in London, several of the characters display disdain and contempt for (and in the case of one maid, fear of) Chan because he is of Chinese ancestry, though many of them, especially the officials who know that Chan is an Inspector of Police, treat him quite normally. For the time, it was a rather bold statement about bigotry, for the audience’s sympathy was certainly with Chan.

Charlie Chan in Egypt is set against the background of an archaeological expedition exploring an Egyptian tomb, as were many B movie thrillers of the 30s. Remember that the discovery of the tomb of King Tut and the rumors of a curse were recent history; thrillers set against tales of Egyptian exploration and artifacts were all the rage.

The “comic relief” in Charlie Chan in Egypt was provided by Stepin Fetchit, who played a driver for the expedition.

What struck me was not so much the character that Stepin Fetchit portrayed (it was his typical burlesque of white folks’ idea of black folks: dimwitted, fearful, superstitious, and ignorant–see his bio linked above), but how shoddily his character was treated by the other mostly American and British characters.

True, the Egyptian characters fit common stereotypes of the day–inconsequential subservient workers and lackeys for the Brits and the Yanks, but, even in the film, they were treated with at minimum brusque courtesy and, in the case of the police, the druggist, and the doctor, with quite normal courtesy.

Indeed, in the cast of characters, Fetchit’s was the only one without even a name, having just a nickname (“Snowshoes”).

Throughout the file, his character was treated with the harshest discourtesy and abruptness. His employers did not request (and a request from your boss is still an order), they ordered, and in the nastiest tones. The contrast with the treatment of the Egyptian servants (properly, the actors, including a young Rita Hayworth, who played Egyptians; there probably wasn’t an actual Egyptian with 4,000 miles of the sound stage) shocked.

And here’s the point of this rambling post:

“Snowshoes” was irrelevant to the plot. He was the comic relief. His mistreatment did not advance the story.

Rather, the differential treatment given him was likely not even noticed by the white American movie-going audience.

It was considered the normal and proper way to treat black folks.

It still was by many when I was growing up (fortunately not by my parents).

And there are those who want those days to return.

And that stinks.

On the Media takes a look at government use of leaks and the effects of mendacious government leaks on persons’ lives. From the website:

Brooke takes us on a walk down bad memory lane when it comes to the media and inaccurate sources.

Follow the link above to listen or read the transcript or listen here (MP3):

A snippet:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The stakes can even be higher than that. Yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for centrifuges, hidden biological weapons labs in the Iraqi desert, all sanctioned leaks or official statements, all policy-driven, all wrong, formed the pretext for going to war. And it has been forever thus.

CLIP: PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: My fellow Americans, as President and Commander-in-Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.

[END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Gulf of Tonkin – epically bad official information. It’s exactly like bad food, sometimes deliberately poisoned, sometimes spoiled by accident or happenstance. And it should be treated like food, with some knowledge of its provenance and nutritional value, consumed only after judicious prodding and a good long sniff, because you need it to live but the bad stuff can kill you.

I remember Johnson’s lie statement about the Gulf of Tonkin attack and I remember my teen-aged boy reaction:

The U. S. Marines will show them!

Well, the U. S. Marines and Army and Navy and Air Force did not show them, and in the process of not showing them hundreds of thousands of persons died and were maimed. Friends of mine were scarred irreparably.

I no longer believe that solutions invariably lie with the fist.

Nor do I believe that politicians are necessarily truthful, though some are more truthful than others.

What happened?

I grew up.

On the topic of the military, our national leadership on either side of the aisle still thinks like teen-aged boys.

Case in point.

A couple of season ago, the TV show Bones had a Muslim character as an intern in the lab.

In the story line, he masqueraded as an immigrant, affecting an accent, fearing that to reveal that he in fact was a native-born fully Americanized religiously-observant Muslim would be too difficult in the workplace.

Such a masquerade in the face of the virulent bigotry of some against all Muslims because of the actions of a few Muslims seemed unfortunately most plausible. Indeed, given the implausible plots of the Bones series, it was one of the more plausible narratives of that sequence of shows.

Clarence Page writes in the Chicago Tribune (follow the link for the full column):

“Maybe we need a Muslim version of ‘The Cosby Show,'” she (Katie Couric–ed.) said. “I know that sounds crazy. But ‘The Cosby Show’ did so much to change attitudes about African-Americans in this country, and I think sometimes people are afraid of things they don’t understand.”

She’s right. A black TV family like Bill Cosby’s Huxtables — or a Hispanic-American family like, say, George Lopez’s show — might not seem like such a big deal anymore, now that a real-life black family occupies the White House. But back in the 1980s, “The Cosby Show” was the decade’s biggest TV hit and is even credited with changing the way a lot of us black Americans viewed ourselves and our perceptions of opportunity in America’s mainstream.

Some critics still complain that “The Cosby Show” was too good, that it’s well-off family headed by a doctor and a lawyer was too far removed from the lives that most black people lived. But, more important in my view was the larger message: The American Dream is not for whites only.

Imagine the exploding wingnut heads if this were actually to take place.

American Idol is the Gong Show with no sense of humor.

I tend to think that compromise is generally a good thing, so long as there are not clear moral issues on one or the other side. Half a loaf and all that.

But exceptions exist.

Here is an example of a case in which failure to compromise will ultimately benefit the common good and, indeed, all of society:

Walt Disney Co.’s ABC, last in the ratings among the big broadcast networks this season, has been unable to renew its most-popular drama “Desperate Housewives” because of pay demands by three of the show’s stars.

I urge both parties to stand firm and resist conciliation.

Clarence Page discusses the recent silly attempt to bowdlerize Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Twain was a man of his time who rose above his Southern heritage to reject the bigotry and prejudice of his upbringing. And even though the Civil War ended outright slavery when Twain was a young man, explicit and outspoken bigotry, prejudice, and racial oppression were accepted in the public discourse long after Twain’s death.

Page comments:

As a black kid who read “Huck” in a mostly white classroom with a white teacher, I know the unsettling startling pain of seeing the N-word used so casually in print. But I also am eternally grateful to our teacher for helping us to talk about it. She helped us to appreciate the book’s genius of language, vision and, most memorable, its quietly subversive satirical cleverness. It skewers the immorality of white supremacy that it so vividly portrays.

Young Huck’s moral compass is warped by his drunken, brutal father and the culture in which Huck was raised, as his casual use of the N-word illustrates. Escaping his father, he unexpectedly teams up with the slave Jim. He feels guilty at first about helping his neighbor’s “property” escape. Yet as he gets to know Jim and his desire to rescue his wife and children, the slave becomes a better father figure than the one Huck left behind. To me, the book is that rare classic that I not only praise but still enjoy reading.

Huckleberry Finn, despite the burlesque humor, is a novel of transcendence, of Huck’s realizing that the beliefs he was brought up with were evil.

The discomfort that Huck Finn causes today says more about the persistance of those same beliefs in our society than it does about Twain’s honest confronting of them, counched as it was in the common speech of his time, in the pages of a book.

Two examples today:

• Rich folks in Philly are trying to shut down a restaurant that has been in operation years longer than the building they occupy has existed.
• Folks in southside Virginia don’t want the Navy to use its airport (which it admittedly hasn’t been using) because they don’t like the sound of planes. Trainees have been flying to Florida to use an airport there (fuel conservation and costs anyone?).

Regarding the former, well, the arrogance of the well-heeled who are such delicate flowers of privilege that they are willing to destroy a popular business and put persons out of work because they are miffed by the sight and sound of the hoi polloi. Words fail me.

Regarding the latter, even though it is true that the military sometimes uses “military necessity” and “training purposes” to excuse lax and improper and even illegal practices (Google “benzene camp lejeune“), but, in this case, I mean, really. It is an airport, for Pete’s sake. It’s there to port air. Grow up.

Aside:

At dinner last night, some of the young whippersnappers revealed that they had never heard a sonic boom. Apparently, there was one in the area about a year ago caused by a natural phenomenon which resulted in a bit of consternation.

Back in the olden days of men of iron and ships of wood titanium, used to hear them all the time.