Ten songs at random from your MP3 collection. Leave ‘em in comments.
- “Your Eyes Are Liars”—Sound Team
- “Run For Cover”—The Dells
- “Let’s Get Small”—Trouble Funk
- “Tennessee emmpp”—Silver Jews
- “No Comply”—The Studio
- “We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling”—Of Montreal
- “There’s A Ghost In My House”—R. Dean Taylor
- “She’s Gone”—NOFX
- “Murder Me Rachel”—The National (I haven’t decided if I hate this band or not. Probably.)
- “We’re All Stress”—The Illuminoids (a super huge mash-up based around Bowie’s vocals on “Starman”, which could make a music box sound awesome)
I’m trying to get all my videos from Vimeo now, because it’s just a lot better layout and quality than YouTube. Let’s see if lazy conformity takes over. It labels it for you and everything, so you don’t have to offend people who are at work or have dial-up and can’t watch videos but are dying to know what they’re missing out on. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as comprehensive, so it’s hard to find stuff.
of Montreal - “Rapture Rapes The Muses” - Debaser - Malmö, Sweden - May 5, 2007 from ofmontreal on Vimeo.
That said, this person had cool shit up.
Wow, this headline reads like something in the Reader’s Digest circa 1970, wedged between articles on why kids don’t appreciate waltzing anymore and how smoking marijuana cigarettes will cause your daughter to become a streetwalker: “Catcalling: creepy or a compliment?” (Via.) The article isn’t nearly so bad, and gives full voice to women who grasp that a man yelling sexual (and insulting or threatening) things at you on the sidewalk is insulting you for being a woman, not complimenting you.
But just like those articles of old from Schlaflyites (”I love getting hooted at on the street, and husbands have a right to rape wives!”), this one is full of women the reader is supposed to take cues from on how to be less of a grumpus pain in the ass who thinks she has dignity worth defending.
On the other hand, some women appreciate the attention in certain cases, like Jessica, a 31-year-old health-care educator in Los Angeles who declined to use her last name to protect her privacy.
“Yeah, it’s objectifying and all, but you know, if I walked down the street and didn’t have men looking me up and down and catcalling, I’d think, ‘Boy, I must really be getting old and dumpy,’ ” she said.
She’s gotten catcalls just walking her parents’ dog in baggy sweats. “I thought it was hysterical, like, ‘Boy, doesn’t take much to impress you, does it?’ “
7PM tonight at MonkeyWrench Books , which is in one of my favorite parts of town, the North Loop area, which is like the hipster central shopping district. If you haven’t come out to a reading yet, try to make it to this one, because that might be the last for awhile.
Another edition of “What’s Cary Tennis been smoking?” He’s been a lot better lately, so there’s not been any reason to write posts wondering about the potency levels of his preferred smoking materials, but today’s column is a doozy. The guy who writes in has a Bible-thumping friend, and the letter writer is an atheist, and they have fun with their contentious differences. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, right?* Now his friend, who teaches at a church school, is being pressured to teach young earth creationism to the kids, and the guy is fixing to do it, after going through a hefty process of convincing himself that he’s really considered the evidence, which is impossible, because honest engagement with the evidence in this case leads to one conclusion—evolution is the reality. I don’t say this lightly. We all have biases and prejudices that color our views and in many cases, the evidence is hazy enough that people can have real disagreements with no real conclusion. This isn’t true in the contentious debate between evolutionary theory and Adam and Eve. Objectively, one side has marshaled an irrefutable amount of evidence and the other is blowing smoke out their asses.
So what his friend is doing is that he already decided to bend over for the bullshit and is looking for a rationalization for it, so he doesn’t have to admit that he’s a wanker. Our letter-writer, however, is livid. He thinks teaching creationism is a form of child abuse, and while I think the term is overheated, I agree that using children in service of whack-a-doodle ideologies is cruel to children, especially in cases where your lies to them could have serious, long-term negative consequences on their job prospects. (The whole classroom, for instance, is automatically seeing any chance of going into sciences plummet through the floor because of this stuff.) Tennis, however, has one of his goofier answers, which is for this friend to dispassionately treat the misuse of these children as if he’s reading a book on anthropology.
So NARAL endorsed Obama, in a move that was sure to create what you laypeople call “controversy”. The bloodletting at their blog comments is disturbing. You’d think they endorsed, oh, McCain or someone anti-choice, when they instead endorsed a pro-choice candidate they’ve had a long and fruitful relationship with.
It’s not a crazy choice, or even necessarily a badly timed one. NARAL has long thought of itself as a strategic organization, and I suspect that they think that Obama’s the better bet for beating McCain in November. And beating McCain is more important from a pro-choice perspective than the choice between Obama and Clinton, who have pretty much identical views on reproductive rights. Or maybe they think that an endorsement released now will help hurry up an end to the primary season, so the party can focus its energies on fighting McCain, who has pretty much promised to spike the Supreme Court with justices hostile to women’s rights.
In fact, they said as much in their press release.
NARAL Pro-Choice America PAC is making our endorsement now because every day that passes, Sen. McCain gets a free ride on the issue of choice. That free ride ends today.
It’s about moving onto the next stage, the most important stage: Getting a pro-choice Democrat into the White House.
There’s a scent of sour grapes in the air around the Clinton campaign, and from a feminist perspective, I’m boggled. Sure, I understand that it’s disappointing if “electing a female President” was a major priority for you and that’s getting thwarted. But if you support women’s rights, you need to put your support behind the Democratic nominee, even if it’s Obama and it’s likely to be. McCain can’t even support equal pay for women! He’s going to continue the assault on reproductive rights that the Bush administration started. If you support women, have some pity on us in our fertile years living in red states who sorely need a political break in our direction right now, namely a pro-choice Democrat in the White House. Which Obama is, in case there’s a whiff of doubt created by this needlessly contentious primary season.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the highlight reel of my last reading at Book People.
Amanda Marcotte book reading from Marc Faletti on Vimeo.
It’s a good time! Luckily, for those in Austin who missed the experience the first time around, I’ll be reading at Book Woman tonight at 7PM. Show up and buy some books, yo. Feminist bookstores were the backbone of feminism for a long time, and we’re lucky to have one of the remaining ones in Austin, and they could use the support. I’m sure readers of this blog will find many tempting tomes at Book Woman. I won’t make it out alive with my hands empty, I’m sure. Much to the consternation of those who have to share my living space, because the piles of books around here on my “To Read” list is getting insane.
So I was listening to the latest episode of “On The Media” on Mighty Ponygirl’s suggestion (because they have a great report on the Cult of Ayn Rand and how they’re trying to buy themselves credibility they can’t generate honestly), and I heard this story that I think should be an iconic example of how the Bush administration is both evil and stupid. It’s about the corruption in the Office of Special Counsel, which is a whistleblower protection agency. As you can imagine, the Bush administration is opposed to whistleblowing (and puppies and kittens and sunshine), so they went out and found the craziest asshole wingnut possible to head up this office: Scott Bloch. He did an admirable job of refusing to do the job he was appointed, and in proper BushCo fashion, this exemplar of malfeasance is now facing a cavalcade of subpoenas and general calls for his head. Bloch ran into trouble when he squelched a complaint that came from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, because it turns out they were able to get the FBI to care enough to raid Bloch’s offices, take his computers, and subpoena 17 employees to testify against him. The executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is suggesting that Bloch successfully destroyed the office to the point where it’s easier now to dismantle it and rebuild how the government handles whistleblowers than to salvage the office.
Via. Most of these that get passed around the internet strike me as hoaxes, but sabotabby got this one from an APA publication that seems to have vetted it for authenticity. Unfortunately, this only seems to be one page, so it’s hard to really get a good idea of your score. I don’t wear red nail polish and my seams are never crooked, but I think that’s probably not going to help me much because of the issues regarding church and children.
God, I’m so scared this will turn out to be a forgery, but let’s hope not. I mean, it makes perfect sense that Einstein would have been an atheist, but he’s been held up by religious people as a “good” guy who said all the right things about how god is real and great and the universe is beyond comprehension, that part of me has bought into it. Maybe he issued pandering statements in public but felt differently in private?
But what really makes this letter awesome is that he doesn’t play around.
“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
“No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this,” he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper……
“For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions,” he said.
“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.”
Please let this be true. It’s just so awesome.
A reminder to Americans with short fucking memories.
The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.
I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.
PZ reports that researchers have discovered a link between HPV and oral cancers in men, justifying another look at vaccinating young men for HPV (which also improves herd immunity). So now, as PZ notes, the religious right is facing a major dilemma. It’s one thing to tolerate thousands of deaths from cervical cancer, which only affects women, in order to show that the wages of sin are death. But the sin of fornication is a much different thing for men and women—which is why the nuts say that a woman who has sex is impure and contaminated, but a man who does has just let his integrity slip a little, which is something you can get back by giving your bus seat up to a few old ladies. Certainly, we don’t need straight men getting physically contaminated for real to show that sex is contaminating, when the only spiritually contaminated party is the woman. That’s why, after all, it’s not a sign of integrity for a man to have sex with a woman before marriage, because you’re fouling up someone else’s virgin.
Anyway, PZ has a question.
A far greater danger.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling paranoid, I think the rumors that voting machines are rigged are floated to distract progressives from old-fashioned voter suppression tactics. I mention this, because there seems to be a trend lately of pushing for voter ID bills that are directly aimed at diverting legal voters from the polls, and now there’s one up in Missouri. I saw a presentation on this at the Texas ACLU conference, and the speaker Nina Perales from MALDEF really impressed upon me how many voters can be purged from a roll using these kinds of tactics. Often the types of ID required to prove citizenship are things that people don’t carry on them, or documents that native born citizens might easily acquire but naturalized citizens don’t have. I’m sure the document requirements vary from law to law, but the general rule of thumb is that it’s about putting obstacles between predominantly Democratic voting blocs and casting a ballot. A lot of people in targeted groups have reasons to want to minimize their contact with officials, so they will be rebuffed easily by the first person who turns them away at the polls, because they’re afraid to fight for their rights.
The voter ID bills are based on a faulty premise, which is that there’s widespread problems of people imitating others to vote. It’s a flimsy excuse, as Shark-Fu notes.
Kudos to Catholics for Choice for putting together a report exposing that Bill Donohue is not who he says he is. He claims to be a defender of Catholics against bigotry, but instead, he’s a right wing shill who mainly focuses on partisan political attacks. Scott Swenson has the story. Here’s a taste.
In a 43-page report released Monday, The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights: Neither Religious, Nor Civil, Catholics for Choice documents a pattern of media and political manipulation by Donahue, his organization, and his supporters. His base of support comes from the most politicized leaders of the Catholic hierarchy, including Cardinal Egan, and a board that reads like a Who’s Who of partisan Republican politics (L. Brent Bozell III, Alan Keyes, Kate O’Beirne, Linda Chavez, Kenneth Whitehead, Lawrence Kudlow, Thomas Monaghan, William Simon, Jr.). Far from protecting Catholics from bigotry, Donahue plays the victim card to advance a narrow, socially conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal political view.
Read the whole thing.
Warning: Shittiness of picture may cause seizures.
This article is well-intentioned, but kind of gave me an uneasy vibe. It’s about a trend I was blissfully unaware of until very recently, when I went out bowling with some friends to a place that plays loud music and videos, and suddenly this song came on—I can’t tell you which one—and like half the people at the bowling alley started to do some kind of line dance. As I stood there appalled, my friends explained that this is some new thing that’s really popular, and later my friend Spinetta emailed out a video of a bunch of middle aged men doing the same dance in kilts….at a wedding of course.
In other words, you can blame the patriarchy for shitty dance crazes, at least in part. The craze for big weddings has created an engulfing need for songs that can get every rhythm-free and shame-laden guest at a wedding onto the floor after a couple of glasses of champagne, and line dancing really fits the bill. As long as weddings have been with us, so have line dances, because everyone can do them and get applause and recognition for it, and doubly so if they are usually considered terrible dancers. Everyone’s just pleased to see them capable of something. This guy spends a lot of time uncomfortably dwelling on how he, white boy from Iowa, looked to hip-hop from a young age to inject some cool and some masculinity into him, but what he fails to realize is that the widespread nature of that desire in this country made the hip-hop-to-gaudy-wedding-music road an inevitability. Who has these big weddings with a strong need for line dancing but the young men like our author here, who listened to NWA on the bus to the Iowa schoolhouse? And with the pressure to both have a picture perfect wedding and to express your “true self”, goofy employments of pop music on the wedding dance floor are de rigeur. I’m not denying that this can sometimes be fun, to watch the old folks shake it to Outkast, but it’s also the source of really goofy dances.
I’m hosting the Book Salon at Firedoglake today from 5-7PM EST. The book in question is Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. The discussion will naturally be around framing, and particularly the right wing’s use of violent metaphors.
My own Firedoglake Book Salon for It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments will be on June 7th. I’m also going to be joining the TPM Cafe round table the week of May 26th to discuss Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
As a single, childless person who intends to stay that way, I have to come out strongly and self-interestedly against giving kids the right to vote. It sounds fair on its surface, but in practice, it’s just giving people extra votes because they have children, since children will vote for whoever they’re told to by their parents most of the time. Let’s face it—those scary men who insist on having 12 children to glorify their mighty cocks satisfy some bizarre religious requirement shouldn’t get 12 times as big a vote as someone like me.
The emergency room at hospitals are surreal places, and I always wonder how people who work there full time deal with it. One broken bottle of salsa on our tile floor, one misplaced foot, one aborted attempt to remove the sliver of glass with tweezers, one sinking realization that the attempts were just pushing it in further, and I find myself face down on a hospital bed with the doctor rolling up one of the bells on my cute new corduroy pants to keep from getting iodine and blood on them while he pulls out the sliver. Now I’m moving slowly and cautiously all along my left side, because not only does my foot hurt, but so does my entire left arm from the tetanus shot. To add to the surreal nature of my afternoon, after we got home, a short thunderstorm dumped giant, ill-formed hail all over our apartment complex, putting a dent in the top of my truck.
The hurry-up-and-wait nature of the E.R. meant I had a chance to finish Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. My mother gave me her copy a long time ago, and I figured with the recent raid on a polygamous cult in Texas, I should bone up on the information about Mormon fundamentalism inside this book. I found the book to be a fair book, empathetic towards why people are drawn to Mormonism and fascinated by the religion’s perseverance while pulling no punches in exposing how the history of the church breeds this conservatism that made the fundamentalists inevitable, along with the sexual abuse they dish out to young people of both sexes.
The ostensible purpose of the book is to chronicle the story of the Lafferty brothers, two men who, angry that the wife of their youngest brother was resisting their attempts to transform their entire family into a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon one, decided to murder her and her baby daughter. The daughter’s death was justified because of her gender; daughters of “bitches” grow up to be forbiddingly independent-minded women as well was the theory, a theory that makes more sense if you really understand the Mormon obsession with lineage. In telling this story, though, Krakauer also tells the story of how the LDS church evolved, especially how the doctrine of polygamy was, at various times, fiercely defended and just as fiercely rejected, depending on the need to either separate the Mormons from the mainstream of America, or to embrace it.*
Have you ever tried to talk someone out of a bad idea? Maybe the person they’re dating is all wrong for them. Or a job change or some economic investment is just going to end in tragedy? If so, you’ve probably gotten a quick lesson in basic psychology. A percentage of people are going to be open-minded and listen to your objections, and if you’re actually right, they’ll consider the evidence and take your advice. Most people will get defensive, however, and refuse to listen. Some people will get so defensive that they’ll actually double down to prove the nay-sayers wrong—they’ll marry that bad boyfriend or put more money into the bad investment. They will, rather than risk the chance that they might get proven wrong and open themselves to a chorus of “I told you sos”, will live in denial about their bad decisions until the last possible moment when it’s becoming clear that they cannot sustain this bad decision any longer.
Now, the thing about this is that everyone does this sometimes. I realize there are a lot of people on the internet who preen like they rarely make bad decisions, and when they do, they recant immediately, but you’ll see that such people rarely offer examples of how this has actually happened in their lives. We all get into the rationalization cycle, some more than others, but we all do it. If you come across someone who claims to be above rationalization or standing by bad choices, that person probably does it more than anyone else, because they’ve got a mistake-free self-image that means they are especially prone to rationalization.
Republicans vote down a resolution that was basically a gimme for puffing up your own ass: Honoring mothers on Mother’s Day.
No, I’m not kidding. Congressional Republicans all tossed in a “yay, mothers!” vote to get it on the record that they officially liked mothers, and then asked for a revote so they could express their true feelings about the be-vagina-ed hellbeasts. (Yes, I read the whole article and am aware that it was childish tactical manuevering, for those eager to leave a comment before you finish the post. Please finish the post before you correct me.) You didn’t think they’re “pro-life” because life and motherhood are sacred, right? At the end of the day, remember this: Bitches are always trying to get away with something, so come out swinging even on the most mundane things. After all, honoring mothers on Mother’s Day started in the U.S. as part of that hippy-dippy peace movement crap, which resulted in women getting the right to vote. So it’s not for nothing that congressional Republicans think first you respect motherhood, and then you’ll be treating women like they’re human.
The explanation of all this is that it was a tactical move to bring the House to a standstill. But was it purely a coincidence that they took a stand against mothers?
From Roy, I found this great study that shows that the sexual assault rate at the University of New Hampshire saw a decline from 1988 until 2000, and then it held steady after that. The reason for the decline appears to be more education and better services.
Overall, UNH has found that the number of unwanted sexual experiences on campus declined significantly from 1988 to 2000, during which time the university established a crisis center and put a number of prevention programs in place. However, there has been little change since 2000 — prompting a need for more creative, broad-based responses, said Victoria Banyard, an associate professor of psychology and a co-author.
I find this interesting, because the reduction in the rape rate that’s been national and somewhat continuous ever since feminists made rape a big issue shows that the primary criticism feminists have—that ours is a “rape culture”, i.e. that rape is a product of a culture that is tolerant or even approving of it—was right, and when you change the culture, you change the rate of rape.
Ten songs at random, leave yours in comments.
- “Who Are You/Time To Die”—Void
- “Spit Shine Your Black Clouds”—The Blood Brothers
- “Re-Make/Re-Model”—Roxy Music
- “Shake Our Trees”—Rosebuds
- “I Love You”—The Pipettes
- “See Through”—Guana Batz
- “Mr. X”—Pauline Murray
- “I Know There’s An Answer”—Sonic Youth (Beach Boys cover)
- “Surfin’ Chihuahua”—Rat Holic
- “I’m Not Afraid”—Shimura Curves
I remember a number of years going to the Austin Museum of Art to see a show about rock and roll in art (read: lots of Mapplethorpe), and it seemed that not just a couple of the artists represented had a thing for Roxy Music. I should have guessed. They had that Art School appeal, of course, but it was still funny seeing how well that worked out for them. If you like Roxy Music, that marks you as a certain kind of pretentious geek. Of which there are many.
Like the band that named themselves after this song:
And this scene made me a sucker for this movie:
I don’t know if I can really pull through to be super-blogger tonight. I just had my mind blown by a summer blockbuster, which is not something that happens to me very much. But Iron Man? Dude, I am ashamed to say this, but I’m probably going to be one of those people who goes to see the action movie again within a week of seeing it the first time.
Oh man, Abstinence Clearinghouse has started a blog, presumably so people can write about all the sex they’re not having. It’s brilliant, like almost like it’s a parody, except it’s not. I loved this post.
Virginity is an asset that holds its value well.
Well, actually, as an asset, virginity ranks below toilet paper in terms of holding value, because after you use the toilet paper, it’s still there. But virginity is gone the second you make use of your “property”. If an asset is utterly demolished to non-existence after one use, it’s not really an asset by any real measure.
And if you hang onto your virginity, unlike other assets, it pretty much is guaranteed to lose its value over time. Though it’s a result of unfair prejudice, the reality is that the older the virgin, the more people tend to classify the virginity as a social awkwardness to outright weirdness. Most virgins over a certain age feel their virginity is an albatross. Even if you’re holding onto it for religious reasons, there’s a point where you choice drifts from “cute example of religious devotion” to “eccentricity bordering on antisocial levels of self-righteousness, perhaps masking deep insecurities”.
I suspect the Abstinence Clearinghouse folks think the way to get around this is for women (who these messages are mainly aimed at) to marry when they’re really young, so that they don’t get a whole bunch of job skills and independent ideas and therefore escape hatches before the fateful day. But that’s just a guess; I suppose we’ll have to keep reading to find out the whole story.
Marc filmed my reading at Book People and reduced it to a 5 minute taster recap. Enjoy! And yes, that’s all hi-def and totally not YouTube.
On the horrid article itself (instead of just the jaw-dropping quote), which isn’t technically about the casual cruelty that men inflicted on women in the conservative-romanticized utopia of the 50s, well, Lance Mannion has the long takedown that this article deserves. It’s by Michael Wolff and he at least does the nation a favor and shows that yep, The Village is more worried about politician’s sex lives than about what the public cares about, which is policy and leadership.
Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.
Wow, lest you think the culture portrayed on “Mad Men” is exaggerated, it seems it might be smoothed over to protect our delicate nerves instead.
There is a story Gore Vidal tells about J.F.K.: having sex in the bath, he liked to suddenly push a woman’s head back underwater, causing her to fight for air, just as he was about to climax.
The one thing about feminism that amazes me is that things changed so fast that we forgot how bad things really were.
Of course, the rest of the story (not the post, but the Vanity Fair article) is unmitigated bullshit, so this might be as well. Let’s hope so.
Secular and religious schlock: Separated at birth.
As much as I’d like to puzzle over why evangelical Christianity does so well by putting out mediocre pop culture products to compete with the larger world—why do people take the imitations over the real thing?—the answer seems obvious enough to me. Could it be that Christian pop culture really isn’t significantly worse than the steady drumbeat of mediocre product put out by the secular entertainment industry? I mean, you look at the pop culture ripped off described in this article and the resounding realization is that it’s not like Christians are really going to make the products more mediocre as a rule.
At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt (”Friends don’t let friends go to hell”). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk’d, called Prank 3:16.
And if they are more mediocre, then they’re closer to the baseline of mediocrity that defines the initial products, a mediocrity that is central to profitability. Mediocre pop culture and fundamentalist Christianity are a perfect marriage, because the dimwittery of America that finds thinking and developing tastes too hard—the people who would have liked Creed, Christian messages or not—is fundamentalist Christianity’s audience.
I have a response piece up at RH Reality Check to Matt Taibbi’s article about John Hagee’s church, and it’s clear to me that as odd as the megachurches are—especially when they have speaking in tongues and demon explusion, as Hagee’s church does—they also gain popularity from having a really good grasp of the American middlebrow mediocrity culture that maximizes audiences so easily. The Rush Hour movies, American Idol albums, dinner at Chili’s, and embracing your inner child at Hagee’s church all inhabit that area of of mindless posing as engagement that marks this culture. Christian pop culture isn’t odd, but the most natural thing in the world. It’s something that I really realized after going to karaoke a few times where someone inevitably sings the Carrie Underwood song “Jesus Take The Wheel“. Is this mainstream schlock or Christian schlock? Both, and the two are firmly intertwined and not as easily separated as this article implies they can be.
You want to read a book that will make you uncomfortably reexamine the kind of rhetoric you use, right down to your choice of metaphors? Well, if you don’t, you should: Jeffrey Feldman’s new book Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. It’s a convincing argument that the right wing punditry has adopted a violence stance, tone, and choice of words and media battles that undermines the concept of deliberative democracy. And while deliberative democracy can be unbelievably frustrating for liberals, a step back shows that it does work in our favor, because slowly over time, Americans have really become a more liberal (read: gentle, considerate people).
I can hear the bristling, but think about it. Liberals, for instance, have won the ideological war about equality. Conservatives have to find another way to frame issues when they’re arguing against equality, and thus have created empty concepts like “abortion is murder” or “reverse racism”. Those phrases burn, but it’s wise to remember that they’ve been forced into a dishonest territory because liberals have won the argument over equality. Conservatives can’t win in a fair debate where all sides present their views to be hashed out in the public forum, and they clearly know it, because instead of submitting themselves to the debate, the right wing pundits have instead turned to fear-mongering and reimagining our objectively peaceful country as a war zone. Think of how the gun control debate goes down, an example Feldman turns to early in the book. There’s not much of an honest debate about gun control in this country, because right wingers skip the facts and go straight for the mythologizing about how every Republican man is besieged by a bunch of gun-wielding maniacs, attacking him in airports and fast food joints, and even coming into his home to rape his wife, and if he wasn’t able to periodically litter the landscape with bullets, it would be worse. That this doesn’t reflect reality seems inconsequential to this image, probably because the image of violence has so much power over reason.
Image from Gretchen Schermerhorn.
So, this Ecuadorian politician named Maria Soledad Vela has tried to write women’s right to sexual pleasure into the nation’s constitution. From what I understand, the law is just about laying the groundwork for public policies that acknowledge that women are sexual agents, not just wombs on feet. And everything that would follow—good education, reproductive rights, etc. Perhaps that’s why so many male politicians are throwing first class hissy fits. One claimed that this meant mandatory orgasm provision. (Oh noes!) Another suggested that the legislation is like life in prison. I had an imagine of a man with a woman strapped spread eagle to his face like a feedbag, but that’s the only way I could really see this as a prison.
