Bill's Talking Again

So I was waiting for House to start -- if you haven't caught it yet, that show House on the Fox network, Tuesday nights before NYPD Blue is a lot of fun, mostly because (a) the main character, Dr. House, gets to be so wittily insulting to everyone and (b) it's medical puzzle solving, so it's like a mystery novel and medical show, all in one tidy packet -- it does get all heart-warming at least once in every episode, I have to warn you, but you can do what I do and go get some ice cream during that bit.

Anyway. I'm waiting for House to start and I'm skimming through the channels looking for something to watch and I notice Bill O'Reilly's on. Well. Here's my chance, thinks I. How long can I take?

About six minutes, as it turns out.

He's got this really shiny guest on. A Christian writer who has written some tome about how if you think positive Jesus will give you a shiny life, and lots of money. Or something like that. I'm not sure, because Bill wouldn't actually let him talk about his book much. Bill wanted to talk about how Bill couldn't do much positive thinking because Bill had to fight, yes, FIGHT against the evil secular humanists who wanted to change this country -- this country that used to love Jesus, don't you know, the way the Founding Fathers meant it to -- you know that's how the Founding Fathers wanted it, don't you? he paused to ask the shiny writer of the book about thinking positive thoughts for Jesus.

Gamely the shiny writer grinned a shiny grin and said yes Bill, of course Bill.

They wanted it that way for practical reasons, claims Bill. Because a population that's religious behaves better, says Bill.

Of course, says Shiny Jesus Writer, though, to give him credit, with some hesitation.

Now people, secular people, they want to change this country. And they're wrong and they're bad, says Bill. And they're coming after ME. And I have to fight them. I have to read the BAD EVIL things they write. So I can't think positive thoughts, the way you say I should. Do you think that's wrong? Counsel me! Counsel me!

What Bill is talking about is his great Christmas Crusade. Only, of course, no one is "coming after" Bill. No one's coming after Christmas, either, no matter what Bill and his buddies claim. This whole tempest is one of their own brewing. It would be funny if it weren't (1) stupid and (b) self-fulfulling.

Media Matters does a run-down on the whole thing here:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200412220006

I'd like to just ignore it, and to ignore Bill, and Rush, and Ann Coulter, and the rest of these yapping liars. But their lies become the world that half of America believes is real -- and then it is real.

The teen pregnancy rate thing is a good example -- ask most Americans what's going on with teen pregnancy. Most of them think the rate is increasing, and that it's higher now than it's ever been. The truth, of course, is that the rate is now lower than it's been since the 1950's. (See here for the stats on that: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0193727.html )

But the disinformation squad has been yapping their lies so long that people now believe we've got some sort of teen pregnancy crisis.

Same thing for the War on Drugs -- and Crack Babies -- and the "failing" public schools -- and a number of other issues. By feeding the public a steady diet of lies, key figures created crises that we still are dealing with.

Well, this soi-distant assault on the Christian religion is one that I'd prefer not to see succeed. I happen to like living in a country that has freedom of, and from, religion.

Oh, and by the way? That bit about the Founding Fathers? Bill's wrong on that one, too.

Heh

I'm not sure why this amuses me so much, but last night, while doing some last minute shopping at the Wal-Mart for guinea pig fodder, what did I see in the Christmas aisle but --

A Gingerbread Nativity Scene?

It was a Build-Your-Own Gingerbread Creche, complete with Mary, Joseph, a shepherd, two wooly sheep, and a cute as a bug baby Jesus plus a manger to put him in, also a stable. You and the kiddies build the stable, see, and then you decorate the whole thing, and place it under the tree and --

Well, eat it, I guess.

"I wanna eat Baby Jesus, Mommy!"

"No, I do!"

"All right, all right! We share in this house! Billy, you get Baby Jesus's feet, and Sally, you can eat His belly, and Cindy eats his head."

See, it's better than letting the kiddies build gingerbread houses at Christmas-time, right? Because you know what those represent, don't you?

Supporting the Troops in TX

This one is odd.

A North Texas soldier called up to fight in Iraq has had his son taken away from him and given to his ex-wife, because he's going to be out of the country, apparently, or because he's going to be moving around a lot -- or something. The reporter who wrote the story doesn't bother to make it clear exactly what's at issue.

What is it with these reporters?

http://www.woai.com/news/state/story.aspx?content_id=CC580570-C785-45A8-A52E-C63F6511E741

The reporter says it's got nothing to do with Iraq, that it's because in "recent years, Texas family court judges have been increasingly unwilling to allow children to be moved around the country by a custodial parent." But earlier in the story it was made clear that the kid wasn't being moved around -- he was living with his stepmother in Mineral Wells.

So it sounds like something else is up, at least to me.

Would have been nice if the reporter had bothered to find out what -- and then shared it with us.

Popular Culture -- Seriously

So I was over reading Amanda at Mousewords (a blog I recommend, if you haven’t already come across it – -http://mousewords.blogspot.com/2004/12/otherness.html#comments )

And she recommends someone named Susan Bordo, with a link (which in case you haven’t noticed I haven’t figured out how to do yet, create nifty links) and I hop on over on the link, which takes me to Amazon.com, one of my favorite places, so I’m reading about this Bordo person, and her book, and I get down to the review section, and I find that some guardian of our culture disapproves of Bordo’s books, and gives this as one of the reasons:

“if you take her pop culture writings seriously... you probably watch too much t.v., and seriously at that.”

I heave a heavy sigh. I think of entering a counter-review. Since I haven’t yet read the book (though I did order a copy) I figure it’s not kosher to do that. But can I just take this space to object?

Let me inject, here, in the interests of full-disclosure, that while my doctorate is in comparative literature, with my three areas of specialty being Greek, Roman, and World Literature, and my two languages being Greek and Latin, I have, nonetheless, spent the past six years working in the area of popular culture, and almost all of that in studying, yes, television. During very nearly all of that time, what I have gotten from the, ah, uninitiated is that precise reaction: "You study television shows? That’s stupid."

This despite the fact that the, ah, uninitiated, when I interrogate them, spend about half their lives watching TV.

This despite the fact that, when they’re my students, and I ask them for specific examples for any damn thing, the first examples that spring to their minds come from television shows. (Not, may I note, despite how much they all love Jesus, the Bible. If they knew the Bible the way they know The Apprentice, hey, maybe we would have a Christian Nation.)

So, yes, television is a serious area for study, and I’m studying it seriously. Why? Not necessarily because I like it, although I do like some bits of it – and in fact I do like the bits of it I’m studying (South Park right now, Buffy for the past three years) – but because it is, in fact, the most significant force in our culture. Anyone who doesn’t believe that isn’t paying attention.

Popular culture is our culture.

What else would be culture, may I ask? Does the person who wrote that comment think Shakespeare is shaping people’s lives these days? Or Mozart is?

Certainly some people listen to Mozart. Some people read George Eliot and Chaucer and line up at showings of Aristophanes. I’m one of them. Middlemarch is, in fact, one of my favorite novels on the planet. (Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign among my other top ten.) But most Americans? Most folks’ culture? It’s television slash movies slash pop music.

So yes, we need to be looking at it. And yes, we need to be looking at it seriously.

We seriously need to know why it is that so many American citizens got so seriously turned on by Gibson’s Passion. We seriously need to know what the texts and subtexts were in that movie – as opposed to what the dominate culture is claiming they were. We seriously do need to know what’s going on that so many other Americans are drawn to one kind of vampire film – the kind exemplified in John Carpenter’s Vampires – while others are drawn toward Ann Rice’s Lestat – and others, a third sort of Other – are drawn toward Buffy, and what exactly is going on with the vampires and villains on that show. Here, too, we seriously need to know what the texts/subtexts are – not what they’re supposed to be, what they actually are.

We need to know those things because the texts and subtexts of the popular culture are what form the culture. My students claim to be Christians, most of them. But, as I have said, not one of them could pass a pop quiz on the Bible. They couldn’t tell you anything Christ said at the Sermon on the Mount, or name six of the ten commandments. But every single one of them would make an A+ on a pop culture exam.

So, yes, we ought to be studying television seriously. We ought to be teaching classes in Buffy and the Survivor and the Simpsons and Sex in the City – you’re damn straight we ought to.

Not only is popular culture a serious field of study, I’d say it might be the most serious field of study happening in English right now.

I'm just saying.

Freedom of Religion?

Apparently only for certain religions.

Over half over Americans, it seems, think we ought to be restricting the rights of Muslim-Americans.

The survey, "conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims’ civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6729916/

And this is interesting: " Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim-Americans."

Watching Faux News & Bill O'Reilly, listening to Rush, and going to church -- they correlate with making you anti-American.

Or at least ignorant about civil rights.

Pretty interesting.

Choose the Blue

Here's a site that tells you what companies donate to which party.

Just in case you're interested.

http://www.choosetheblue.com/main.php

I was interested to find out that both Borders and Barnes & Noble give lots of money to the Democrats.

What is it about being literate that makes you liberal?

Or is that question too easy?

Violence in the Media

A good editorial in the NYTimes today, by Frank Rich, about the failure of the media to do its job: which I do think is at the root of a lot of our current problems.

Of course, at the root of *that* problem is that the media's actual job is to make money, not be a free press. Not sure how we go about solving that, in a country where the true religion is capitalism.

Anyway, the thesis of Rich's editorial is that the country isn't, in fact, anti-Christian, no matter what Gibson, Dobson and Falwell and their buddies would have you believe -- it's just being reported that way by a media that is more interested in creating a professional wresting atmosphere, in order to boost ratings, than in getting at what is actually happening in the nation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/arts/19rich.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

This strikes me as acurate: but, unfortunately, what then happens is that folk who are *only* getting their data from Faux News, Bill O'Reilly, Rush and Gibson and the ilk, tend to believe the version of the world they see presented to them via those venues --and, by believing that world, they create that world. Or so claims the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

That's what makes me nervous.

1984

Just in case you were wondering...

Bush wants you to know, when we're talking about war? We're talking about peace.

And we need to destroy the village to save it.

And truth is a lie.

In case you were wondering.

http://www.hud.gov/news/speeches/presremarks.cfm

(Via Fredrick at BeatBushBlog http://home.earthlink.net/~fsrhine/)

Who's to Blame? Not U.S.!

So Rush and his ilk, responding to the International Red Cross's work investigating what happened at Abu Ghraib have decided that -- who was to blame?

The International Committee for the Red Cross, of course.

Why is the ICRC to blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib?

Because they pointed out that Americans were torturing people, and this (pointing it out, not the actual torture) was a bad thing.

Obviously exposing the torture must mean they (a) hate America and are (b) therefore a leftist organization.

I mean, if you are engaged in Winger-think, that is.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/outrage?pid=2054

Okay, See...

Right, then.

No sooner do I post that below then I get an email from my intrepid reporter in the field (you know who you are), the one who keeps me updated on the activities of the local fundies -- and she's got another fine story: a traumatized young girl who came to her in tears because her brother the fundie preacher has told her that her dog (oh yes, her dog) is going to go to hell when he dies.

Dogs go to hell, says this guy.

Because they don't have souls, that's why.

So of course they can't be saved by OUR LORD. Amen brother.

So of course it's straight into the burning lake of fire for all eternity.

Can I get a save me Jesus!

Yes, that dawg is gonna burn!

And unless you wanna burn with him, sistah --!

He tells this to his kid sister.

Ai.

He also tells her, by the way, that it's in the Bible that black people and white people can't get married. Bet I know what verse he cited for that one.

Do you see what I'm talking about here?

I mean, I'm trying to love the fundies here in Arkansas. I swear I am...

Thinking About Us

Anti-Christian? Me?

Some comments lately have caused me to have a look at my site as a whole, and I can see how people could gain the impression that I’m anti-Christian.

I’m not – let me say that, just for clarity.

I like Christians – actual Christians*. I spend a lot of time lurking on Christian websites, for instance. And I’m a big fan of Jesus himself, his philosophy and his teachings. The Sermon on the Mount is one of my favorite pieces of wisdom literature.

What I’m opposed to is hatred and ignorance.

Frequently those do attach to religion – not always the Christian religion, of course. There are ignorant and hateful Jews, ignorant and hateful Muslims, ignorant and hateful (I suppose – I haven’t actually met any) Unitarians out there. I just happen to live in an area of the country where I am surrounded by a large number of ignorant and hateful fundamentalist Christians.

And, thanks to the recent election, lots of ignorant and hateful Right-Wing Christians are putting their opinions forth into public view – attempting to force the rest of the country to adhere to their ignorant and frequently hateful worldviews.

I don’t see it as anti-Christian for me to object to that. I see it as anti-hate, and anti-ignorance.

Specifically, for instance, when some fundamentalist Christian says that because he or she believes that God created the world in seven days six thousand years ago therefore the public school system that my tax dollars pay for should teach an ignorant “alternative” theory called “intelligent design,” I don’t see it as anti-Christian to object to that. I see it as anti-ignorance.

When some fundamentalist Christian says she needs to persecute a seven-year-old child because her backwater religion teaches her that gay people are evil, I don’t see it as anti-Christian to object to that. I see it as anti-hate.

I suppose I should seek more balance on the site. I would, if people would start doing more intelligent and kind things.

What's up with people, anyway?






*The Christians I know and like, btw, the ones I admit I think of as “real” Christians, aren’t hanging around obsessing over gay people and evolution and who’s having abortions or using what kind of birth control or saying “damn” too often. The real Christians are too busy making a difference in the world to fiddle with trivia like that.

Maybe I should post about some of them.

Bad Words! Bad!

I'm not sure what the point of this news story is -- since it's called "weird news," I can only assume that the writer of the story think it's weird that these words should be included in the OED. That tells me that the writer of the story has no idea what the OED is or what it's for.

The story states, with no commentary, that a "prestigious dictionary," to wit, the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, has added more "than 2,000 new and revised word entries," and then goes on to tell us that some of these entries included words from what the writer calls "hip-hop," such as "crack ho" and "thugged out."

http://www.ncbuy.com/news/2004-12-15/1011323.html

I'm assuming the writer expects us to be scandalized by this. How dare a "prestigious dictionary" include, well, words used by black people in it! Doesn't a "prestigious dictionary" know that black people's words aren't real words?

The writer is ignorant, obviously, of the purpose of this particular prestigious dictionary, which is and always has been to record and define every word in use in the English language -- yes, even those used by African-American people. Heavens.

Sisyphus is a Happy Man

I’m grading final exams this week, always a depressing experience.

Teaching is a Sisyphean experience at best: each semester, there we are at the bottom of the hill in the grim dark underworld, and we labor to shove that rock upwards. Each semester, that sucker careens back down again, despite all we can do. Camus says Sisyphus is a happy man, and mostly, you know, we are, we professors. It’s deeply engaging, deeply hopeless work, and we really love it.

Only not so much during exam week, when we see how badly we have failed.

I made the mistake of asking my American Lit students to define Worldview Conflict on their exams. I knew it was a mistake when I did it, too.

We all have worldview conflicts, as I’m sure you all know: these occur when we believe two mutually exclusive things. Which we all do.

American Christians, for instance, to take a fairly obvious example, believe both that they should not worship wealth (because it says so right there in the Bible: You cannot serve both God and Mammon; and a rich man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven; and so forth); and that they should be capitalists, who do worship wealth.

American Christians have no problem living with this worldview conflict – they have no trouble driving their Hummers to church on Sunday, as I have often observed.

Or – to use the example we noted in class – American Quakers, back in the early 19th century, had no problem both believing that slavery was wrong and that they should sell slaves. That was a worldview conflict, but one they had no trouble dealing with. Worldview one: slavery is wrong. Worldview two: It is right to make a profit, and slavery is profitable.

Anyway, I ask the students, on these exams, to define the terms and to give examples.

They absolutely refuse to define worldview conflict as “holding two conflicting worldviews at the same time.” No: they insist upon defining it as “when someone goes against what he believes.”

So it’s not the guy believes X and he believes Y at the same time and those things conflict; no, it’s the guy believes X but then he goes ahead and does Y.

Even though this is manifestly not the case in the examples we have studied, or in the examples they then go ahead and give me.

Why? Because that would be to admit that such a thing is possible – that people could think two ways at once. And these students, at least half of them, don’t want that to be true.

Why does this bother them?

I’ve been trying to figure that one out for a while now. I think it’s attached to their love of code ethics, and their desire for simplicity.

Which makes sense, when we look at the rhetoric of the Red-Staters. (And the students who refuse to define the term correctly are, in fact, the conservative students in the class.) They want this Simple Worldview. They adhere to the Nuance-is-for-Girls way of thinking. They love the code-ethic way of dealing with situations.

It doesn’t match reality, true – but that is, apparently, a price they are willing to live with.

Reality not being, after all, a commodity they are much interested in dealing with.

An excellent Point

Brandon over at bad christian makes a really good point:

He's arguing it's not that we want the Rightest (heh, I like that mispelling, think I'll leave it) it's not that we want the Right-Wing/Fundie Christians to actually secede to Alabama the way they keep threatening to -- which, you know, I don't.

http://blog.badchristian.com/blogs/index.php/2004/12/14/what_progressives_want#comments

I don't agree with a lot of the things these fundies believe. It puzzles me that anyone who's been awake and aware could believe some of them -- that wives should submit (by which, at least here in Arkie, we seem to mean "give up your own free will") to their husbands, for instance, and that any sane God would think that was a good idea.

But, on the other hand, I don't want to put them in camps, or blow them up, or send them straight to a burning lake of fire for all eternity because they think these things. I don't even particularly want them to go away. It's sort of nice, sometimes, that they're around to tell my six year old she's going to burn in hell if she goes Trick-or-Treating, because then, you know, we get to have a Teaching Moment.

All I want is what Brandon wants: these folk to admit that this is our country too. We have a right to our worldview and our belief system, and to go about our living our lives without constant harassment from them and theirs; we have a right to a school system that actually teaches actual knowledge, and not their propaganda -- not history classes, for instance, that lie about what happened in early America, or science classes that pretend Intelligent Design is a viable theory. We have a right to espouse our moral values without being constantly told we're evil for having those values -- for instance, my daughter shouldn't have to lie about whether she went trick-or-treating to avoid being hassled at school.

Yeah, and world peace. I'm with Brandon on wanting that one too.

Fundies on the March

Well, they told us they would. So it’s not a shock.

They’ve got a bill to ban all abortions in SD in the works, except those where the mother’s life is in danger “or she might suffer irreparable harm” – apparently a little repairable harm is no big deal – and they’ve been dumbing down sex ed for years now and now they’re going after evolution in both Kansas and Missouri. Because, you know, Fundamentalist Christians want it that way.

And, after all, this is their country, right? The rest of us can just shut up and sit down.

In 1999, the Kansas board voted to erase any mention of evolution from the state science curriculum, opening the door for the teaching of creationism. That was reversed in 2001, after three board members who supported the move were defeated in a Republican primary. Kathy Martin, a newly elected member of the board who favors teaching alternatives to evolution, said the board would probably take a different route this time, like introducing the teaching of "intelligent design," a theory that holds that the development of the universe and earth was guided at each step by an "intelligent agent."

(snip)

State Representative Cynthia Davis of Missouri prefiled two bills for the next session of the Legislature that she said "reflect what people want." One would remove the state's requirement that all forms of contraception and their potential health effects be taught in schools, leaving the focus on abstinence. Another would require publishers that sell biology textbooks to Missouri to include at least one chapter with alternative theories to evolution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/national/13states.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

Not gonna be happy, the Fundies, until they’ve turned this into a theocracy.

And anyone who thinks that’s not their plan isn’t paying attention.