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This controversy is stale, so it almost feels safe to write about it. I’m talking about the New York Post chimp cartoon “some linked to Obama.” For those of you who, like me, don’t read enough newspapers and only find out about current events by accident, and therefore may not know about the cartoon or the controversy, suffice it to say that the New York Post published a cartoon by Sean Delonas that depicted a chimp shot dead by police officers–a reference to the recent news story about the chimpanzee who was shot by police after mauling and disfiguring a Connecticut woman–and one of the police officers says, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” This cartoon offended many people who saw it as a thinly-veiled insult to President Obama, especially disgusting because of its racist implications.
The Post has since issued a sort-of apology, essentially saying that the cartoon was not intended to have any racial component and they were awfully sorry if anyone was genuinely offended, but folks like (the unnamed) Al Sharpton need to get a life and there’s no way they’re apologizing to him, er, them. I’m not a fan of the sort-of apology. You’re either sorry for something, or you’re not. If you didn’t intend to cause offense, and moreover, don’t feel that your actions merited offense, you can feel bad about the situation, even to the point of regretting your actions because seriously-who-needed-that-hassle?-not-you–but there’s not much point in saying you’re sorry unless you’re going to admit to wrongdoing, even if it means lying through your teeth. The sort-of apology says, “I’m sorry that your sensitivity has caused you to become angry with me. Can we get on with life now?” Really, calling it a “sort-of apology” is something of an overstatement. It’s not an apology, just a request to shut up already because you’re tired of dealing with it and would like the whole thing to be over. It’s totally understandable, but it’s kind of cowardly. Moreover, it doesn’t appease anyone who was really offended. It’s just politesse.
What upsets me about this story is that the cartoon really is offensive–to the poor woman who had her face torn off by her friend’s pet. It’s in very poor taste, considering the human suffering involved in the real-life incident. I think the cartoon is tacky. I don’t think it’s racist.
It’s true that I’m white and haven’t ever been the victim of racism, and so it’s possible I’m just not sensitive enough to these things. I don’t know, though. I was a lefty for many years, and I’m pretty well-schooled in Stuff That’s Racist. I know that even stuff that shouldn’t be racist can still be racist, so it’s often better to avoid such stuff than to risk giving offense. I’m not into offending. I know that some folks have said they were not familiar with the old practice of comparing black people to lower primates. My response to this is, “Wow, you’re lucky. Do some people not even have racist grandparents?” My first week in college I heard a fellow student refer to a group of black students as “monkeys” and the girls who were with him just laughed. I think that might have been the first time I’d heard such a blatantly racist remark coming from someone under the age of 75. (And yes, I did go to college in the south, but the racist-remark-spewing-and-laughing-at students in this story were all from northern states, so take that for what it’s worth.) Anyway, my point is that while I haven’t been exposed to much of this stuff firsthand, I realize that while it’s much less common than it used to be, it still goes on. Also, it’s kind of hard to imagine a scenario in which comparing a human being to a monkey (or any animal, really) isn’t offensive, so ignorance of this peculiar aspect of racial history is a lame excuse.
However, in the context of this cartoon, the chimp isn’t meant to represent any human being. The pertinent facts which allow one to “get” this cartoon (as much as one can “get” something that’s only mildly amusing, even without the offensiveness) are these: 1) There was a chimpanzee that went wild in Stamford, Connecticut, and had to be shot dead by police officers. 2) There was an economic stimulus bill passed by Congress that some people thought was really stupid and crazy. 3) A chimp is pretty smart, for an animal, but it’s not nearly as smart as a human, especially when it’s scared and instinct takes over. The cartoon implies–intentionally–that the stimulus bill was so stupid and crazy that it might as well have been written by a scared chimp on a rampage. Ha. Ha. That crazy stimulus bill. However, some folks–a lot of folks, actually, including Al Sharpton–took it as “the stimulus bill was so stupid and crazy that its author–Pres. Obama–must actually be a chimp.”
No, it doesn’t matter that the bill wasn’t actually written by the president (indeed, I think he had hardly anything to do with its formulation, but that’s another story). On that much I agree with folks who took offense to the cartoon. The bill was championed and signed by the president, so he owns it and may as well be the author. I just think it’s overreaching to infer that the chimp in the cartoon is meant to represent the president or any other human being. That completely removes the punchline of the joke (such as it is). You would have to believe that not only was the cartoonist a racist but that he assumed everyone else would be racist enough to understand that the chimp was supposed to be the president–and also, that he didn’t mean to be funny but merely to make a vicious statement about the president and about all black people.
Should the cartoonist have been savvy enough to predict that some would misinterpret the cartoon? Well, it’s easy enough to say so in hindsight. Perhaps he should have. But I don’t think it’s so far-fetched to say that the cartoonist honestly did not foresee it, and neither did his editors. Some people–a lot of people, actually–can look at a chimp and just see a chimp. It should be heartening that so many people exist, but it’s not.
If the chimp represents the president–or Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, or any of our human elected officials–then the cartoon is worse than racist. It’s saying not only that this person is a chimp–insulting in itself–but that he or she deserves to be shot dead for advancing a particular political agenda. That’s disgusting and morally reprehensible, all racial angles aside. If this chimp represents the president, the cartoon is a thinly-veiled assassination fantasy, which is so sick that it almost makes the racial aspect seem trivial–almost, except that in our society, race is never trivial. The controversy over this cartoon makes that clear enough. Race has a way of inserting itself in everything, even where it should have no significance.
I’m not about to tell anyone how sensitive they “should” be about anything. People feel what they feel, and “You’re too sensitive!” is not a useful statement. But look at this: we live in a world where someone draws a cartoon that references a chimp and an unpopular piece of legislation, and the first thing a lot of white and black people think is, “That chimp represents our black president.” That is sad. Sad and depressing. Coincidentally, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech last week in which he said the United States was a “nation of cowards” about race. Unfortunately, he is right.
Madhousewife is the Political Cartoon Czar for the Obama administration.
I was listening to a podcast about climate change, and it reminded me: I don’t care about climate change. I’m not a climate change naysayer because I don’t know anything about climate change because I just don’t care.
I’ve always been this way. When did they first start talking about global warming? Was I still a liberal then? I don’t remember. What I remember is that back in my college days they were still talking about the hole in the ozone layer. I didn’t care about that either. I know, what a jerk, huh? Yeah, I was hip to reducing, reusing and recycling, but the whole business with the ozone layer, I just never got into it. I was a vegetarian, which I figured was ecologically responsible enough to make up for not caring about the ozone layer. At least I hoped so, because I had all these letters to write for Amnesty International, and there were only so many hours in the day, you know?
And now look at earth and its state of affairs. When was the last time anybody mentioned anything about the ozone layer? I never followed ozone layer news, since, as I just told you, I didn’t care, so I don’t know–did we solve the problem with the ozone layer? As I recall, it had something to do with CFC’s. What were CFC’s? Chloro-flouro-carbons? I thought it had something to do with all the freon in the air conditioners. They used to say aerosol cans made the hole in the ozone bigger, but then it was the air conditioners. I remember, I had just given up using hairspray (for humidity reasons, not reasons of conscience), and I was disappointed to learn there was no moral benefit to my sacrifice. I loved me some air-conditioning, though. Dangit!
So does anybody out there know? About the ozone layer, I mean. Is our ozone layer okay? Do we need to be worried anymore (again)? Did we find out the hole is really not a big deal? Or is it that global climate change is such a bigger deal that it makes all the fuss over the ozone layer just seem silly?
I can tell you one thing. I am not prepared to care about climate change until I find out the truth about the ozone layer. There are still only so many hours in the day, and I have a lot of laundry to do.
(I confess, I am kind of hoping that the ozone layer might still matter and that it has something to do with air conditioning, because then I can feel so awesome about not having air conditioning. Except that I seem to recall the real problem was car air conditioners, and I have a car air conditioner that I use a lot in the summer. Dangit!)
Here’s another question: Do any of you care about global climate change? I’m just curious because I don’t know anyone who talks about global climate change like they care about it. When I was a big knee-jerk liberal, my big issues were poverty and oppression. (Actually, those are still my big issues.) Occasionally I worried about all the garbage we were producing. (Actually, I still worry about that. It’s awful because my family produces more garbage than any other family on our block. It’s embarrassing. Also, I’m afraid that they’ll run out of landfills and they’ll start mistaking my house for one. But now I’ve gone off topic.)
Do YOU care about global climate change? If so, would you mind caring just a teensy bit more so I don’t have to? There are only so many hours in the day, and I seriously have so much laundry to do.
Take my poll!
I had the radio on for a few minutes today, long enough to hear part of a talk show where the host was interviewing some cat from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Now, I didn’t listen for very long because I can think of few things more tedious than a conversation between a religious conservative who thinks religion is an important part of public life and an atheist who thinks religion is the most destructive force in public life. I suppose someone has to have those conversations. I’m just glad it isn’t me, and I’m glad my radio has an “off” button.
But it reminded me that I’ve been missing the atheists at the Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe as of late. They used to meet the last Wednesday of every month, but they haven’t been there for a while. I was curious, so I went looking for them on the internet, and I found out that they now rotate their meeting locations. I know you’re all as relieved as I was to learn that the group hasn’t split up; they’re just broadening their horizons. Maybe they’re collectively trying to lose weight, too, who knows? Anyway, it’s too bad. I’ll kind of miss them. I mean, I could never get much writing done while they were in the cafe because, you know, of all the talking. Groups of people tend to talk. But at least their conversations were interesting–to me, anyway. Because you don’t often see a bunch of atheists getting together to share their secular-ness.
So I guess the PC term for atheist is “Freethinker.” That term sort of makes me roll my eyes, but as Freethinkers have been rolling their eyes at the likes of me for centuries, I’ll just suck it up and deal. So these Freethinkers in our fair suburban city have started a community to support secularist people living and raising families in a society greatly influenced by religious beliefs. I think this is very smart of them. I for one don’t know how I would get by without my religious community. All spiritual issues aside, religious communities are very handy things to have, for the purposes of making friends and finding babysitters and receiving practical support in times of need. Also, they give you something to do. But you don’t see a lot of atheist get-togethers, you know? Not like the churches, which are always having barbecues and hosting AA meetings and whatnot. Probably because a) there aren’t as many atheists as there are non-atheists, and therefore, b) atheists have a hard time finding each other, because c) if you find it difficult being an atheist in a non-atheist world, are you really going to bring up the subject in polite company? I wouldn’t.
The atheists at my chocolate cafe were talking about starting a school, last I heard. I think this is an excellent idea. This country needs more Freethinkers united for a common good. I hope to see many Freethinker schools and homeless shelters and 4-H clubs as time goes by. Because once the Freethinkers have carved out their collective niche in society, they can stop boo-hooing about how alone they feel in their rationality. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Seriously, though, organized Freethinkers can only mean more competition in the marketplace of ideas. And that’s good for everyone, wouldn’t you agree?
It was interesting to hear the atheists Freethinkers discuss their obstacles when it comes to forming these coalitions and completing ambitious programs. As one of them said, churches wield great power over religious people because they can always threaten you with hell if you don’t do what they say. (I’m paraphrasing. I promise you the Freethinker said it nicer.) Religious people have the threat of eternal punishment and the promise of eternal reward for doing x, y or z. This Freethinker also said, “Even in groups of atheists, you have people waiting to be told what to do. They’re not all rude and obnoxious like me.” (Haha. We all laughed at his self-deprecating remark. Who says the godless have no sense of humor? Not you. Not anymore.)
They talked about the unique opportunity atheists have to promote greater awareness of a reason-based worldview and how this would not be accomplished by sitting around kvetching about religion, but by doing things that are affirmative and positive. People are turned off when you ridicule others and oversimplify their beliefs. Atheists need to attract people in more positive ways. At this point I marveled at how much like a missionary training session this meeting was turning out to be. Well, that’s the way you do it when you’re in a movement. What do you expect?
Then somebody said, “Well, I’m ready for a eulogy. Who wants to pray?” And we all laughed again, because atheists praying is pretty ironic.
They didn’t pray. Instead they made arrangements to meet again and wished each other Reasonspeed. Or something like that.
So I’ll be missing them, my Freethinking, cocoa-swilling brethren (and sistren). I hope that they find success in their endeavors, but I do wonder how they will overcome the inertia that plagues all too many human beings who otherwise have the best of intentions. Someone at the meeting said that
only 1 percent interested in non-religious philosophy seek out others and get involved in organization, and that atheists need to figure out why this is. Religious organizations have the whole carrot-stick/heaven-hell routine, and people fall into line. Seriously, if other religious people are like me and the religious people I know personally, the flesh is often weak–but where the flesh is weak, the spirit is willing to open up the can of whoop-a** known as Crushing Guilt and keep wailing until the flesh stops making Baby Jesus cry. (Or, you know…Abraham, or somebody…depending on your faith tradition.)
Not that people without religion don’t have guilt, but where are their guilt enablers? Well, perhaps Freethinkers are so awesome, they don’t need guilt enablers. Maybe all they need is Barack Obama. (But what if they’re Republicans? Children could be left behind!) As the self-deprecating Freethinker said, “All we have is reason.” Is reason enough?
So this weekend I took part in a discussion on the Brain, Child website about this essay in the Winter 2008 issue, “Relieving Myself,” by Heather Caliri. Caliri is a writer in San Diego (she also has a blog, which as of this moment I have not yet perused, but here’s the link for your pleasure). Caliri wrote about her experiences with Elimination Communication (EC), or diaper-free parenting. The philosophy, in a nutshell, is this: parents don’t need to depend on diapers, but they can learn to read and respond to their babies’ subtle cues and thus teach their children to have a sense of their own elimination needs and never endure conventional toilet-training hell.
I’ll be honest with you, kids: the first time I heard about EC, around the time my last baby was born, my reaction was, “You have got to be effing kidding me.” (Truly spoken like the woman who personally kicked Kimberly-Clark’s stock through the roof.) My second thought was that it must be awesome for the people who have the patience for such things, but I would never be one of those parents. And you, dear readers, know from careful study of this blog that I am still not one of those parents (and never will be). (I once mentioned something to my step-mother about diaper-free parenting; her response was, “And what are you supposed to do with your other 20 minutes a day?” Haha. Good one, step-mom. I thought she was being generous!) However, I was intrigued by Caliri’s essay because she was clearly not out to persuade anyone else to use EC, merely documenting her own experience, and I thought it was a very insightful, often humorous piece about the nutty stuff we do in the name of good parenting. (Not that EC is inherently nutty, but one can drive oneself nuts with any aspect of parenting.)
I wasn’t entirely surprised, though, that one of the first comments on the discussion page was a slam on Caliri’s hygiene standards and etiquette. Not to give anything away (Sugar Daddy, avert your eyes because there’s a plot spoiler ahead!), but in the final scene Caliri is in a restaurant bathroom with her baby, Lucy, who proceeds to pee in the restroom sink. This has some stylistic resonance, if you’ve invested in the preceding narrative, but some people evidently thought it was just really gross.
Myself, I would be lying if I claimed not to have my own thoughts along the line of, “That’s not something you expect to see in a public restroom (if you’re lucky).” However, my reaction was mitigated by the following:
1. It was a baby.
2. There was running water, not to mention a nearby soap dispenser.
3. After nearly ten years of up-close-and-personal interaction with human waste, not to mention the three years I spent in the People’s Republic of Eugene, there is little that actually shocks me anymore.
4. It’s not like it was my sink.
Just kidding on that last one. Actually, if Caliri were visiting my home and wanted permission to let her baby relieve herself in my bathroom sink, I could hardly refuse her on grounds that my bathroom sink is a holy shrine to cleanliness. But seriously, the fact that I was physically removed from the situation certainly allowed me the emotional distance to take the episode in stride. After all, I’d already survived an earlier scene where Caliri let Lucy do her business by the outside wall of a neighborhood apartment building, sans smelling salts. I actually thought that lifestyle choice a tad more gauche, maybe because I’ve lived in apartment buildings in neighborhoods where people had issues with personal boundaries. But also because I couldn’t envision Caliri hosing the stucco off after the fact. (Certainly not without a handy soap dispenser.) However, no one else on the discussion board mentioned the wall-peeing, only the sink-peeing and how beyond-the-pale it was.
Ordinarily I don’t enjoy being a de facto defender of public urination–not any more than the ACLU enjoys defending those awful neo-Nazis, I’m sure–but my sympathies were with Caliri because she’d written a really interesting essay about an issue much larger than toileting, and her point was getting lost in the collective condemnation of her bathroom manners. Sure, maybe a baby peeing in a public sink is uncool. I won’t try to argue otherwise, because, you know, it’s not a choice I would make. (Then again, trying to save the world one less diaper at a time is obviously not a choice I’ve ever made either.) But I didn’t think it was fair to make that one part of the essay the centerpiece of the conversation, when the article was not about the relative merits of EC, but about Caliri’s own parental hangups and how she got over them. I thought that, as a writer, Caliri would appreciate some feedback on something other than her choice to let the baby pee in the sink.
Alas, ’twas not to be, because people were really, very put-off by the sink-peeing, and also by BC editor Jennifer Niesslein tsk-tsking them for harping on it and making it personal. That led to some people wondering if they were supposed to all pretend they agreed with someone instead of giving their honest opinion(s), and whether tolerance only went one way at Brain, Child–also, whether we were all privileged, self-absorbed white women and whether we were going to silence women’s voices for the sake of niceness. Valid questions, all of them, but in the meantime, poor Caliri’s article was not really being discussed; it was her personal character that was on trial. It made me very grateful that my essay for Brain, Child never made it into the online content. (Not that there was any sink-peeing in that one. Maybe a little nose-picking, but that might not have been in the final edit.)
I’m pretty much done with that discussion, edifying as it was, but some lingering questions remain (for me), so I will put them to you, gentle readers:
1. Am I “out of the mainstream” because my objections to public sink-peeing have more to do with decorum than public health? (I dunno, baby pee + running water + soap = ?) In other words, am I just gross?
2. Do women, as one BC commenter said, equate hard-hitting commentary with rudeness? Do we wish to “make sure everybody ‘feels comfortable’ at the expense of dialogue”?
And for the sake of science,
3. Do you prefer your dialogue hard-hitting, or comfortable? Are you by any chance a woman?
I’ve been meaning to blog about this story out of McMinnville, Oregon, for quite some time, but I haven’t because it makes me so angry and because anger tends to make me verbose, I just haven’t had time. There is a lot more to the story than the above linked article includes, but in a nutshell, two seventh-grade boys in McMinnville are being prosecuted for swatting girls’ bottoms at their school. Originally the the district attorney, Bradley Berry, charged them with several felony counts of sex abuse. They were arrested, went to jail (enduring the attendant humiliations thereof, e.g. strip searches), and hauled into court in shackles. The felony charges have since been dropped, but there are still several misdemeanor sex abuse charges against them, all imprisonable and registerable offenses–”registerable” meaning that they would be required to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.
My first question here is “What the hell goes on in McMinnville?” Not actual sex abuse, apparently, because they obviously have enough time on their hands to pursue frivolous cases like this one. Now, I don’t believe schools should look the other way while the boy students slap the buttocks of the girl students. Buttocks should not be swatted with impunity on school grounds. That’s just inappropriate. Such behavior should be subject to discipline of the school and the parental variety. Any chuckling thereover should be done privately and with due discretion. But seriously, folks–sex abuse? Criminal investigation? Prison time? Lifetime sex-offender registry? Really?
I can appreciate the embarrassment and discomfort suffered by a girl whose bottom was touched without her express permission. Goodness knows I hope to raise my own sons with a greater sense of decorum and chivalry. I also don’t want any punks slapping my girls’ butts, whether they ask for it or not. But I also don’t want to raise any of my children in a world that confuses immature, hormone-informed horseplay among children with sex abuse. My husband has already informed me that if this had been the environment when he was growing up, he would be rotting in prison. Nothing my husband tells me about his youth gives me particular hope for the future. But I digress.
DA Berry says that his office takes sexual abuse of children very seriously, but this can’t possibly be true. If it were true, he’d be spending some taxpayer dollars putting actual predators behind bars instead of prosecuting two ill-mannered teenage boys. (For what it’s worth, this informally-organized “Butt-Slap Day” had male and female participants slapping one another’s butts, but all of the alleged victims, i.e. those who complained about said butt-slapping, were female.) He wouldn’t be forcing them to undergo psychosexual evaluations, characterizing them as perverts for engaging in behavior that, while rude and undesirable, falls well within the boundaries of normal for adolescent boys.
I’m not trying to excuse what the boys did. What I think is especially sad is that instead of being able to use this incident as an opportunity to give their sons some lessons in gentlemanly deportment, the parents have been forced to defend them and their actions against overzealous prosecution. What will the boys learn from this experience, except that they are the victims? Probably they won’t be slapping any more girls’ butts, but most likely their restraint will be due less to an enhanced respect for others’ personal space than an appreciation of, and resentment over, the fact that they are helpless at the hands of nutjobs in high places.
* This case is scheduled to have a hearing this afternoon, at which time the remaining charges could possibly be dropped.
So I just read the new Newsweek article on Angelina Jolie. I have to say, I don’t have strong feelings about most celebrities. All I can say about Angelina Jolie is that I admire her humanitarian work and the fact that she actually does something worthy of attention besides be a beautiful movie star–and also, that she is one of the most stunningly gorgeous women I’ve ever seen. I don’t think my husband shares my admiration in that last respect. I seem to recall that he thinks Angelina Jolie smells bad. But be that as it may, I don’t have particularly strong feelings about her being a gorgeous humanitarian, except for the general “good for her” sentiment. So I almost didn’t read the Newsweek article because I think Newsweek has too many articles about celebrities. But I was nursing the baby and I didn’t feel like reading about Gaza because, obviously, I am a hypocrite. So I read about Angelina Jolie.
And you know what? I came away from the experience being much more impressed with Angelina Jolie as a human being. At the same time, however, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at how over-the-top Angelina Jolie-loving it was. Seriously, is this woman just Mother Theresa and Gandhi and Joan of Arc and Jesus all rolled into one superhumanly attractive package? I expect the author will be founding Church of the Immaculate Angelina Jolie sometime in the near future. And if that is the case, do you think people will still complain about separation of church and state? Just wondering.
So President Bush says we need to start building nuclear power plants again. You know what I say to that? Bring it on, Thermoman!
Truly, I have never understood the American left’s squeamishness about nuclear power, in light of the fact that the French have been using nuclear power with great success for many years. I thought everything the French did was right. The French have the right ideas about war, sex, family leave, affordable child care, underage drinking, and how many vacation days you need per year–but the one thing they’re wrong about is nuclear power. And possibly Jerry Lewis. I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I’m a Republican.
I know what you’re thinking. “Sure, Madhousewife, it’s all well and good that you want to Frenchify the country with that nuclear power, but are you willing to let them build one of those radioactive deals in your back yard? HMMMMMM?”
Honestly? After being told that my children’s autism was probably caused by everything from immunizations to cord-clamping to lavender-scented baby soap to whole grains–I’m just not that scared of anything anymore. Maybe a little radioactivity would be good for us. And we could all afford air-conditioning! Everyone wins!
Ordinarily I like to do these things in threes, but I have laundry calling me. Happy Thursday.
So today marks the first day of TV Turn-off Week, and my children’s school is again pressuring us to observe this period of Lent by sending home their little slips of paper whereupon we should mark the days our child(ren) do not watch television and which we mustn’t forget to turn in to the school at the end of the week so that…actually, I forget why we need to turn it back in. There might be some kind of certificate involved. Whatever. It isn’t that I disdain the worthy goal of watching less (or no) television. I think television is a cesspool. It’s degraded our culture and our public discourse. All people, including myself, should watch less television, except for those people who are already watching no television. They should continue to watch the same amount of television, i..e. none, because it’s impossible to watch less than none. Unless twenty minutes of vigorous aerobic activity counts as less than none, in which case they should do that, too. Unless they have a physical impairment that prevents them from engaging in aerobic activity, in which case they should read a book or switch to diet soda or something. I don’t care.
Obviously, TV Turn-off Week is not mandatory. It’s merely a suggestion, coming from the the folks at the Center for Screen-Time Awareness–an enthusiastic, guilt-inducing suggestion, sure, but you know me, I have no problem with guilt trips, even when they’re laid on thick, even when they’re laid on me. Guilt is a powerful motivator. (Also underrated: Fear of Hellfire.) I don’t think certificates do much of anything, but I guess I’m not opposed to those, either–except all that paperwork does have an environmental impact, so never mind. Screw certificates! This is what bugs me–and I admit that it’s pretty lame, as irritants go, but here it is anyway:
It’s all well and good for the school to throw its support behind TV Turn-off Week, but I wish there were more to it than merely not participating in one particular activity (make that “activity”). It’s always good to abstain from TV, but I don’t know that it does much good to make a big deal out of abstaining from TV unless you take note of how the abstinence affects how you live. I’d prefer it if they asked kids to write down what they do with their time during a typical week, then ask them to do it again during TV Turn-off Week (when, theoretically, they would not be watching any–or as much–TV). That would make it seem like more of a learning experience rather than just another deprivation. As it is, I’m somewhat annoyed by the “rules” of the game (according to the literature our school gave us). Nothing on a television set is kosher, be it broadcast or videotape/DVD or whatever. Movies watched in a movie theater are okay, though–not because big-screen-movie-watching is any less passive than little-screen-movie-watching, but because this is TV Turn-off Week, not Movie Theater Avoidance Week. As for video games and recreational computer usage goes, “Ask your parents.” Oh, you bet they will.
So my son already hates this idea, which is funny because he doesn’t watch that much television in the first place. Just telling him he can’t do something, though, makes him want to do it more. Then there’s Elvis, who, while he’s certainly cut down on his Monsters, Inc. habit, still has to watch some little-screen entertainment during the day or I will go freaking nuts. (He doesn’t play video games or use computers recreationally, and taking him to a movie theater would be Missing The Point Entirely.) To be sure, his Non-TV-Watching Activity Log would be sport lots of interesting pastimes, most of them involving sharp objects, sticky food substances, and that giant mudhole in the backyard–but as the responsible adult in the house, I take the liberty of deciding when his dance card is full, if you catch my meaning.
Anyway, I think TV Turn-off Week is more properly observed during May sweeps. People who turn their TV’s off in April are wusses!
But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,–Matthew 23:5
‘Twas a moderate kerfuffle recently when Portland Police Chief Rosie Sizer suggested dropping the college requirement for entry-level police officers. Her reasoning was that they needed to expand their applicant pool, and more specifically, that they wanted to get more minority and female applicants. Well, a few people got huffy over the suggestion that lowering standards leads to more minorities and women (though fewer people seem to have a problem with this concept when it’s taken for granted rather than explicitly stated–but that’s neither here nor there). Mostly, though, people were put off by the idea that police officers don’t need college educations. Police work is apparently just too hard and complicated for someone with only a high school diploma.
Well, I learn something new every day. I had no idea police academy applicants were required to have a college education, in Oregon or elsewhere. I knew that many police officers did have college educations, but I didn’t realize it was required. Actually, in Portland applicants are only required to have a two-year associate’s degree. That’s because they have already lowered the educational requirements once before, in the 1990’s, I think. No offense to our boys (and girls) in blue, but this just rather boggles my mind. I understand, I think, the complexities of police work. I just can’t imagine that college would teach you thing one about them. It seems to me that while police officers require specialized training–and perhaps more of that than they currently receive–requiring a bachelor’s degree is a little overkill.
Most police bureaus that require applicants to be college educated require only a two-year degree, or comparable number of college credits, and while this seems to me a reasonable requirement, I don’t know that it should be absolutely necessary. I don’t say this because I think cops are just a bunch of big lugs with guns. I say it because I think our society has blown the intrinsic value of a college education completely out of proportion.
It’s true that these days you “have” to have a college degree to get a decent job, but that isn’t because college has become more relevant to real life but because people have come to equate “college-educated” not only with “smart” but also “competent.” That a person was able to get through four years of college and emerge triumphant does say something about that person–but one could probably say the same thing about a person without requiring them to take out thousands of dollars in loans and spend hundreds of hours studying things that not only don’t interest them but serve no practical purpose in terms of their career goals. I understand the value of a liberal arts education. I favor a liberal arts education for all people. I just think it wouldn’t be the end of the world if people got that liberal arts background in, say, high school, and then were free to start their adult lives and pursue meaningful careers right away, without having to jump through the college hoop first. Unless, of course, they want to.
There was an excellent article in Forbes magazine a few months ago about this very subject. When I first read this article, I thought, “Well, it’s about freaking time someone else besides me said this!” (Specifically, someone with the cache to write an article for Forbes magazine.) I have long believed that a college education, while it does have intrinsic value, is not valuable for everyone.
And, no, I’m not talking about the unwashed masses who don’t need Shakespeare in order to bus tables or drive long-haul trucks more effectively. I’m talking about people like my sister, who has frequently lamented that she was not “smart” enough to go to college and hence is “only” a licensed cosmetologist. Never mind the fact that she actually has a marketable skill that has enabled her to earn money for her family while providing full-time care for her children. Never mind that she has enough brains and organizational skills to run a profitable scrapbooking business in addition to her home salon. These days the conventional wisdom is if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, you’re automatically a lesser job candidate (and dumb for not going to college).
I’m talking about people like my high school chum Mark, one of those graduating-with-honors types who did well on his SAT and seemed destined for a successful college career–because that’s what good students did. He ended up at UCLA, his first choice. Unfortunately, it turned out that he hated college and had absolutely no idea what he wanted to major in. After five or six years he ended up with a bachelor’s in economics–I think. It doesn’t really matter because today he makes furniture. He’s good at it, and he likes it, and he did not need to suffer through five-plus years of college to get where he is now. I reckon if he had it to do over again, he would opt to go straight into an apprenticeship rather than languish several years studying and writing papers and taking tests on things he had no interest in and which ultimately served him no practical purpose.
It isn’t that a college education has to have a direct bearing on your future career in order to be valuable. It’s that you have to get something out of it in order for it to be valuable, and a person ought to be able to bypass college and not be made to feel like he’s wasting his intelligence, or worse, his life. Obviously some careers require (quite properly) several years of post-secondary education. Most skilled jobs require some formal training (sometimes necessarily beyond high school), but do they really have to require a four-year liberal arts degree on top of it all?
I enjoyed college, and it enriched my life tremendously. I still think, though, that the education proved more relevant to my current stint as a mother and housewife (“The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven”) than it did to my brief career as a journalist. One of my best friends has a master’s degree in journalism. She works in public relations. I’ve never taken a journalism class in my life, but I got a job temping (the destiny for many an English major who opted not to go into teaching) at a newspaper and ended up writing for it. Everything I know about journalism and the publishing business I learned on the job, and I could have just as easily learned it straight out of high school as I did after college. Not (necessarily) because any trained monkey could do it, but because I was bright and had good writing skills. I’m sure I could have learned many of the same things by majoring in journalism, but who cares? Or rather, why should anyone care?
A while back there was an article in the Oregonian about the pros and cons of public toilets. Apparently Portland is considering putting in some fancy, hi-tech public potties downtown, so that visitors will stop pretending to be customers at Nordstrom’s just so they can pee. The newspaper article was about all the problems that Seattle has been having with its public toilets, which they’re (vague, impersonal “they”) are thinking of tearing out because they’ve just turned out to be more trouble than they’re worth. (“They” in this instance being the toilets, not the nebulous powers-that-be–although it might properly refer to both. Who knows? I’m not from Seattle.)
I won’t detail all those problems. You can use your imaginations. Suffice it to say that downtown Seattle has apparently seen an increase in human waste on its fair streets, not to mention more vandalism and oh yeah, crime. (Then there’s that little issue of the automatic doors malfunctioning on occasion. Let’s say I’m happy to be a fake Nordstrom’s customer in Portland.)
This article did manage to surprise me in one respect. I had no idea that
Seventy years ago, clean, comfortable and well-marked, public toilets dotted streets in every major American city. But urban decay, crime and shifting budget priorities took them away. In 1945, New York City’s subways had 1,676 restrooms. By the end of the century, 78 remained.
Seventy-eight! Who knew there were that many public toilets in New York City?
I’m joking. What surprised me is that there were ever so many public toilets to begin with. To me it just seemed a no-brainer that public toilets would inevitably bring crime and filth. In the words of Sid the Sloth, “Humans. Are. Disgusting.” If city planners were tempting the basest elements of society with their shiny, convenient outhouses, it must have been because people had gotten dumber. I dunno, maybe I figured citizens in the ’40s could just hold it better than contemporary folks. (They were the Greatest Generation, after all.) But no, apparently people in the ’40s were just more civilized and genteel. (And you thought senior citizens were just cranky because they had no prescription drug coverage.)
So then I thought, gee, what has changed since 1945? There are more homeless people on the streets now, and there is more drug use and hence more crime (at least that is the conventional wisdom, or was the last time I checked). And I wondered, what would it take to make the public safe for public toilets again? Any thoughts, armchair sociologists?
My favorite part of the article was where they pointed out that Americans are prissier than people in other countries, who don’t insist on so much privacy when they do their business. Which is, I guess, why all their drug deals go down in those hip, flashy discos you see on Alias, instead of in the public loos. So it’s true. We really are tackier.
I sometimes listen to Laura Ingraham’s radio show, not because I particularly enjoy it (eh), but because it’s on right before Dennis Prager on the same station. Up to now I have been largely indifferent to her as a talk show host and as a political commentator. Today I caught the last hour of her show, and she was talking about America Ferrera’s comment at the Film Independent’s Spirit Awards ceremony. During one of those inane chit-chats presenters have with each other before announcing the award already, Zach Braff asked America if she had anything in common with the country she was named for and she said, “America is supposedly the land of the free–or at least it will be in 2008.” (Ha ha–get it?) Whatever.
So this annoyed Laura Ingraham, who went off on America Ferrera, saying something along the lines of yes, America is the land of the free, it’s the land where fat and ugly people can star in their own TV shows. Then she went on to say that America (Ferrera) should stick to commenting on things like Shoney’s breakfast buffet. (And subsequently apologized for any unintended implication that there was anything wrong with Shoney’s or the people who ate there.) I’m sorry I don’t have Laura Ingraham’s exact words, but I promise you I gave you the exact flavor of them.
Just a few things:
1. This is just over-the-top rude.
2. America Ferrera is neither fat nor ugly. Supposedly her character on Ugly Betty is–(don’t know, haven’t watched it, heard it was very funny)–but Laura Ingraham definitely didn’t say our country was a place where a perfectly attractive young woman can play a fat and ugly person on TV.
3. If America Ferrera were fat and ugly, this is totally irrelevant to what she said to Zach Braff, or what she implied about the current administration.
4. Why does a negative reaction to something a woman says or does have to involve a personal attack on her appearance? If Laura Ingraham wanted to say America Ferrera was dumb and didn’t make very good jokes, that would have been less despicable. Men get called dumb all the time. It’s a lazy argument, and it’s insulting, but not quite as lazy and insulting as “You’re ugly.”
“I think George Bush is a bad president.”
“Oh yeah? Well, you’re ugly!”
“Bill Clinton made unwanted sexual advances toward me.”
“Yeah, right. You’re ugly!”
“Section 102.112, Florida Statutes, provides that the county canvassing board must certify the county returns by 5 PM on the 7th day following the general election. The performance of this duty is mandatory; there are no exceptions provided in the law.”
“You’re ugly! And who the hell does your make-up?”
I won’t even go into all the lovely comments that have been made about Hillary Clinton over the last 15 years. There are just too many to choose from.
With the exception of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, I can’t recall any instances of men getting this same treatment. Yes, they have their looks cariactured by political cartoonists, but that’s different. People walk up to mall kiosks and pay someone to cariacture their looks all the time. Is it really too much to expect that you can state an opinion or make a bad joke and not be called ugly? Even when people call a man dumb, it’s usually accompanied by a pertinent explanation of how exactly the cat is dumb. There is no connection between someone’s political beliefs (or false assertions) and her appearance. When you call your opponent ugly, it is just gratuitously mean and immature. I expect this sort of thing from Ann Coulter–no, wait, I take that back. I expect Ann Coulter to be gratuitously mean but also funny.* Laura Ingraham was mean and not funny and not clever this morning. I officially don’t like her.
* Speaking of Ann Coulter, in her book Slander the big svelte hypocrite took liberals to task for this very behavior (insulting a woman’s looks). She said something about it being horrible or horrific, and then a few short years later we find her snarking over Cindy Sheehan’s thighs. (Wait, that sounds kinky. Never mind.) So much for the high road.
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