Posted under art & fluff & weirdness
What the hell were we thinking in the1980s?
I was discussing this song with a young friend who missed the 1980s entirely, and this video left hir very confused. I couldn’t explain it. Did we think this was a daring or profound statement about–something? Anything? (Monkeys?) WTF???
Posted under American history & wankers & weirdness
Weepy demagogue Glenn Beck
Paying attention to weepy demagogue Glenn Beck is akin to giving oxygen to a house fire–no good will come of it, and you’ll probably make it worse. I was cross enough about his appropriation of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 (and only in part because it was my birthday)–but his comments on President Barack Obama’s supposed “liberation theology” bear a little commentary. I’m surprised that more people haven’t commented on this already–so here goes:
My theory is that this is Beck’s stealth strategy for calling Obama a Marxist or socialist. Not that I think most of his followers get that–he’s dressing up his ideas in inteleckshual-sounding phrases that are designed more to deflect deep thought than inspire curiosity and further research. Finally today, Tim Rutten in the L.A. Times tells us what liberation theology actually is, and why it’s so stupid to accuse Obama of being one of its acolytes:
Liberation theology is a movement that took shape in the late 1950s and ’60s among Latin American Catholic thinkers, foremost among them the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who coined the term. The other “founders” were the Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo; the Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino, who has spent most of his career in El Salvador; and the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff. (These are hardly shadowy figures; Gutierrez, for example, is the O’Hara Professor of Theology at Notre Dame.)
Their common position was that social injustice is a form of violence arising from sin. They urged the poor — and those acting in solidarity with them — to reflect on Scripture from the perspective of the poor. To that end, some argued that certain facets of Marxist analysis, particularly those having to do with social class, could be helpful. None of this is particularly mysterious, nor does it have anything to do with Obama. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone touched by liberation theology proposing anything like his Wall Street bailout.
Word. But for the full-on Beck-a-palooza roundup, head on over to our friends at Religion in American History. Continue Reading »
Posted under American history & local news & unhappy endings & wankers & weirdness
Well, you’ve probably heard that “Senator” Wonderbread won his primary, which means that I can no longer refer to him as never having won a vote. And it wasn’t even close! Andrew Romanoff called to offer his congratulations less than an hour after the polls closed. Being able to outspend your opponent by nearly 4-1 has its advantages, kids! Oh well–the guy who is liklier to beat him in November, GOP insurgent candidate Ken Buck, also won his primary narrowly against Jane Norton. Possible lessons of the Colorado primary? It looks like the GOPers are more likely to favor insurgencies, whereas there’s enough Dems satisfied with their incumbents (I know–go figure!) that they’re sticking with the status quo. (Remember, the two sitting senators to lose their primaries were Republican Bob Bennett in Utah, and Democrat-turned-Republican-turned Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, so we’ll count him as a half-Republican who didn’t have the confidence of Penna. Dems, and for good reason.) Continue Reading »
Posted under Gender & childhood & class & happy endings & weirdness & women's history
Some of you easterners probably saw this on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning already, but if you’ve got a spare 20 minutes and you’re so inclined, take a look at Daphne Merkin’s essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called “My Life in Therapy.” She writes really thoughtfully about her experience of therapy, and wonders what (after 40 years) it’s done for her. Part of the problem, she notes, is that psychoanalysis and its offshoots tends to be an end in itself without fixed goals or an endpoint, unlike a consultation with an allopath or a dentist to fix a specific problem. You have a toothache, or a bodily pain? The doctor will diagnose it and make you feel better. The psychoanalyst’s approach isn’t always diagnostic, and even when a problem is identified, what a patient should do about it isn’t always clear. Merkin writes about going to yet another therapist. Would this one help her? And how would she even know if his approach was helping?
And then there was my feeling that I better not get in too deep. I was wary by this point of the alacrity with which I attached to shrinks, each and every one of them, as if I suspended my usual vigilant powers of critical judgment in their presence merely because they wore the badge of their profession. The truth of the matter was that in more than 40 years of therapy (the only person I knew who may have been at it longer than me was Woody Allen, who once offered me his own analyst), I never developed a set of criteria by which to assess the skill of a given therapist, the way you would assess a dentist or a plumber.Other than a presentable degree of intelligence and an office that didn’t set off aesthetic alarms — I tended to prefer genteelly shabby interiors to overly well-appointed ones, although I was wary of therapists who exhibited a Collyer Brothers-like inability to throw anything away — I wasn’t sure what made for a good one. I never felt entitled to look at them as members of a service profession, which is what, underneath all the crisscrossing of need and wishfulness, they essentially were. The sense of urgency that generally took me into a new shrink’s office was more conducive to seeing myself as the one being evaluated rather than the evaluator. Was I a good-enough patient? Would this latest psychiatrist (I saw mostly M.D.’s) like me and want to take me on? Or would he/she write me off as impossibly disturbed under my cloak of normalcy?
I knew I wasn’t the most promising candidate — I was, in fact, a prime example of what is referred to within the profession as a “difficult” patient, what with my clamorous ways, disregard for boundaries and serial treatments — but perhaps this time, after so many disappointments, I would get lucky. Somewhere out there, sitting in a smaller or larger office on Central Park West or the Upper East Side, tucked behind a waiting area furnished with a suitably arty poster or two, a couple of chairs and old copies of The New Yorker and National Geographic Traveler, was a practitioner who would not only understand my lifelong sorrow and anger in an empathic (but not unduly soppy) fashion but also be able to relieve me of them. Just as some people believe in the idea of soul mates, I held fast to the conviction that my perfect therapeutic match was out there. If only I looked hard enough I would find this person, and then the demons that haunted me— my love/hate relationship with my difficult mother (who has been dead now for four years), my self-torturing and intransigently avoidant attitude toward my work, my abiding sense of aloneness and seeming inability to sustain a romantic relationship and, above all, my lapses into severe depression — would become, with my therapist’s help, easier to manage.
Merkin doesn’t address gender issues in her article, but throughout I couldn’t help but see her problem as a gendered one. Why should she feel like her therapist was someone she needed to please, someone from whom she couldn’t demand results, however modestly or vaguely defined? Continue Reading »
Posted under American history & unhappy endings & weirdness
Garry Wills dishes about an off-the-record dinner President Barack Obama had with Wills and eight other “presidential historians” about how history might guide him in his presidency. He notes that he is now breaking “a silence I have observed for over a year, against my better judgment. . . . I have argued elsewhere that the imposition of secrecy to insure that the president gets “candid advice” is a cover for something else—making sure that what is said about the people’s business does not reach the people. But I went along this time, since the president said that he wanted this dinner to be a continuing thing, and I thought that revealing its first contents would jeopardize the continuation of a project that might be a source of information for him.” Wills continues, rather cattishly: But there has been no follow up on the first dinner, and certainly no sign that he learned anything from it. The only thing achieved has been the silencing of the main point the dinner guests tried to make—that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson. At least four or five of the nine stressed this. Nothing else rose to this level of seriousness or repeated concern. Continue Reading »
Posted under American history & happy endings & local news & wankers & weirdness
Triple suicide at fifteen paces!
Here’s your free laugh of the day, friends. I bring you the return of Colorado’s crazziest Republican politician yet, Tom Tancredo!
Former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo issued an ultimatum Thursday to both Republican gubernatorial candidates: Drop out of the race or I will jump in as a third-party candidate.
Tancredo’s entry as an American Constitution Party candidate likely would create a GOP implosion, splitting the vote in the general election and handing a win to Democrats.
Campaigns for Dan Maes and Scott McInnis said the Republican candidates intended to remain in the race. Continue Reading »
Posted under childhood & jobs & students & technoskepticism & weirdness
Unsound methods
Is it possible that “helicopter parents” are just responding to incredibly needy and dependent children? (Is it possible that some children shouldn’t be sent away to college, but continue to live at home while they study?)
Mobile phones and the erasure of long-distance charges has enabled this kind of codependence, or whatever you want to call it. I also completely understand the urge to answer the phone when a child is calling. When I was in college, it never dawned on me to call my parents with every question or concern that popped into my head, and not just because it cost more money than it does now. I was happy to be away from home and my parents–even if it meant screwing up or not taking care of myself as I probably should have. Continue Reading »
Posted under American history & Gender & jobs & weirdness & women's history
Gee, I wish we were relevant!
A young, dissertating historian of the integration of the U.S. military, Tanya L. Roth, attended the West Point Summer Seminar in Military History this year, and has written a three-part series in which she describes some of her experiences, and discusses the tensions between “traditional” (e.g. strategy/operations/tactics) historians, and the “war and society”-types. In part III, she offers some thoughts on being what she calls the “token ‘Where are the Women?’ person.” One of the West Point Seminar’s great features is that the students get out of the classroom and take some tours of Eastern battlefields:
As we concluded our staff ride of Gettysburg about halfway through the seminar, the program leaders asked us each to share how we thought the staff ride experiences could help us in our teaching and research. When it was my turn, I broke it into two parts: as an American historian, I said, I thought there were a lot of things I could incorporate into my teaching, whether in surveys or upper-level classes. I think that this intensive study of a specific battle adds something to the experience of learning about big wars in American history.
But as a women’s historian, I continued, the staff ride experience had seemed utterly useless. After all, we dealt with only combatants’ experiences – and unless you want to talk about cross-dressing women serving as soldiers, then we’re essentially dealing with male experiences in the staff ride environment. All of the women were either in Gettysburg or behind the Confederate and Union lines as camp followers – and those were experiences we largely ignored, aside from a brief discussion of the impact of the battle on the local Gettysburg environs and people (in the aftermath).
I was pretty blunt. Note that I did not say that I found the experience completely useless – simply that from a women’s history perspective, the staff ride (as it had been conducted) was useless. Sure, I was going for impact with that statement. My main point was that gender was never a category of analysis during the staff ride, despite what I saw as a number of opportunities we had to discuss gender – not to mention the fact that when you’re talking about combat, gender analysis is always a useful tool (in my opinion).
Roth continues:
What I realized by that weekend was that the topic of gender and women in particular made people fairly uncomfortable. Continue Reading »
Posted under American history & Bodily modification & Dolls & GLBTQ & Gender & art & childhood & technoskepticism & the body & unhappy endings & wankers & weirdness & women's history
This creepy doll by Hans Bellmer, 1935
I can’t let the coincidence of this pass me by, since we’re talking about dolls and the objectification of girls’ and women’s bodies again. Squadratomagico has a great post up on the off-label hormonal engineering of baby girl fetuses who have tested positive for (gasp!) Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which means that they frequently have ambiguous genitalia, may possess a strong interest in softball, and “as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role.”
(Well, what thinking woman doesn’t agree with that last bit? Seriously: if you dig scrubbing crusty surfaces and wiping snotty noses and bums, that should be a symptom of clinical depression, not normative behavior in any adult, male or female. Most of us do that junk because we don’t want the state condemning our houses and taking our kids away.)
Click immediately on this link to join the discussion. I left a comment over there, so I’ll be following that thread. Something else I didn’t mention in my comment is the odd equation of childhood behavior with adult predisposition for motherhood among these alleged sufferers of CAH: “As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.” What a stupid way to think about children or the importance of play. Continue Reading »
Posted under American history & GLBTQ & Gender & Intersectionality & O Canada & art & book reviews & childhood & class & fluff & jobs & race & unhappy endings & wankers & weirdness & women's history
It’s Stampede season here, friends, and we’re all excited about rodeo days and the world’s largest Independence Day rodeo, right here in Potterville! Heck’s’a'poppin’.