"Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act: Was he right?" No. No, he wasn't. Do shut up now.
Question of the Day
Inspired by Mustang Bobby's earlier post: What is your favorite film (or television miniseries) adaptation of a novel?
(Comic books, graphic novels, fairy tales, children's books, epic poems, plays, short stories etc. are also acceptable source material. Basically, written material that isn't a screenplay.)
Hello Out There
Melissa ended this encouraging post last Friday with the following words:
I believe that the vast majority of people are good—or would be, given the opportunity and the inspiration and the expectation that they aspire to kindness.I may be somewhat less generous than Liss; I might say that many people are good, and the vast majority of people have it in them to do good. But I am very sure that she makes an essential point when she says that what good is done, as well as what evil is done, are very much influenced by what is being done by others, and crucially, by what people feel is expected of them - by their families and friends, in varying proportions, but also by the surrounding culture.
I frequently say of ugly things that nothing happens in a void. But decency doesn't happen in a void, either. There are good people doing good things all over the place, and that goodness has the capacity to be infectious every bit as much as hatred does.
Most people, those who are not true sociopaths, need some permission or even encouragement to do evil, and they get it in many forms from the society around them which devalues many people, which says those lesser people deserve ill-treatment because they threaten all that is "good" merely by being who they are. That is a powerful statement that it's okay to attack some people. If it were true, abusing and even killing those people could be considered by some a public service, even if it is illegal. Heroes are not necessarily expected to be bound by convention, after all, and heroes are most typically presented as men who use violent means to destroy the enemies of good.
But what Liss is saying here is something that I think many of us, even those of us who are aware of how society encourages evil, give less thought to: that a lot of people do less good than they are capable of because they encounter less active, urgent, specific encouragement to do so. We are given rather rote encouragement to certain kinds of charitable acts, generally giving money to very mainstream causes, particularly following disasters, but people have much more to give than just money, and some do not have that.
The media often shows us heroics in mirror form to evil - designated good guys blowing up designated bad guys who are trying to blow up designated good guys. But "do-gooders" on a more human scale are often derided. Individuals becoming activists are painted as cranks, especially if their activism is seen as primarily benefiting those about whom we have already received the message that they are unworthy.
At best, there is a strong cultural narrative encouraging a shrugging, "What are you gonna do?" about correcting social ills, and yet, in the U.S. anyway, when it comes to individual achievement, we are told you can do anything you set your mind to, if you try hard enough. The corollary to that, of course, is that anyone who lives in poverty or almost any other form of misery, just hasn't tried hard enough to overcome it.
So as individuals, all on our own, we can achieve anything which advances our own well-being, but any attempt to improve the way your organization, community or nation works is naive, at best. Ordinary people cannot achieve meaningful change beyond the purely personal, although confoundingly, if they should foolishly make the effort anyway and begin to achieve some measure of success, they may be told that their efforts could destroy society, or the family, or apple pie, so powerful are they. Examined critically, none of that makes any sense. But unexamined, it creates a powerful disincentive to choose to take on responsibility for making your patch of the world a better place.
Most people will largely live up to, or down to, the expectations of those around them. Yes, there are individuals who hold themselves to a higher standard, but chances are they didn't dream up that higher standard entirely on their own, but initially came across it somewhere outside themselves, and adopted it because they found it so much more attractive than the lesser one they saw everywhere else. Chances are, too, that they encountered a great deal of pressure to reduce that higher standard to the local norm. For most of us, it takes a strong, ongoing exposure to a higher standard than we already hold to move us to adopt it, because most of us don't have as great an imagination as those uncommon individuals. Our understanding of how we should act tends to be based on what we see around us. Genuinely believing that we, individually or collectively, are capable of things we have little direct experience of may require uncommon courage, but first it requires a more active and vivid imagination than most of us have, or again, are encouraged to have.
Our human sense of ethics is highly instinctive. We tend to arrive at it by consensus, without directly examining the process. That sensitivity to the group is good and useful in many ways; there can be no altruism without it. It is the lack of examination of the process by which we arrive at our sense of what we should and shouldn't do, of what we should and shouldn't expect of ourselves and one another, which is treacherous. The messages we get, especially from a vast, highly commercial, highly homogenized mass-culture propagation machine about what is of value and how we should act, cannot be assumed to be in our own, much less the larger community's, best interest.
We could balance that innate tendency to align ourselves with the herd by building a consideration of the ethical implications of our actions into our everyday decision-making but most of us don't learn to do that. Many parents, and other adults who have children in their care, who believe themselves to be teaching kids to do the right thing are instead teaching them to do the expected thing. Children are not often encouraged to think ethically; rather they are encouraged to learn to please the authority figures in their lives, having been told that that is doing the right thing. We arrive at adulthood after years of training toward that end. It leaves us terribly vulnerable to doing terrible things while believing we are doing the right thing (even if it doesn't feel quite right), because it is what our boss, our church, our family or friends, whatever social or cultural team we've given our allegiance to, expects of us. This focus on pleasing authority also does not encourage us to consider the effect of our actions on those with less power than we, or even the effect (especially long-term) on those - including ourselves - with less power than that authority.
This is where the heart of Shakesville beats most strongly, in examining the messages being driven at us by the larger culture - from the media, from politicians, from religious institutions, from corporations, from the educational system, doing so always through an ethical lens shaped by feminism, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, anti-disablism, anti-fatphobia; providing a place to discuss those messages, and how they affect our lives; encouraging one another to re-examine assumptions we may have based on them; providing encouragement that may not be available elsewhere in our environment to expect more, and to do more, because this is a community which supports and encourages doing good.
I have lived largely apart from other people for a long time, by circumstance rather than by choice, but isolation has nevertheless become my accustomed habitat. I tend to look at the "world of the humans", as I sometimes think of it, as a place very far away. The internet has become my telescope for peering into that world, and has served to draw me back in, in thought if not as an actual, physical presence. I have wandered around the tubes for nearly eight years now, and this is where I have pulled up a chair and made myself comfortable. I have done so because this is the place whose raison d'être makes the most sense to me, and whose company I enjoy keeping, and because Liss has been so welcoming.
I have hesitated somewhat about taking the additional step of becoming an official Shakesville contributor, wondering whether I'm really fit for it. Like many hermits, I'm cranky. Unlike many hermits, I'm also very lethargic. I am not your hardy, wilderness-dwelling hermit, chopping her own firewood and cultivating her own sustenance. I am the less-celebrated mattress-dwelling hermit; on a good day I may manage a little onion-chopping in the pursuit of sustenance before succumbing to fatigue. Both doing and expecting have become foreign to me. I do, however, in my more alert moments, still talk - or type - a good game. The fatigued part of me doesn't want to do more. The cranky part of me doesn't want to expect more. I've done some mild to moderate expecting in my time, and it hasn't gone well.
But doing more and expecting more are contagious, it turns out. Hang around long enough, even virtually, with folks who do that, and you may find yourself doing rather more of whatever it is you can do. Like I said, I intermittently type a good game. So I am doing more of that here at Shakesville, and to save the length of the comment threads, Liss has invited me to start writing my own posts. (Liss didn't actually say, "You know, as long as those comments of yours are, you may as well write your own damn posts." Liss is very polite. But you've seen my comments, right?) So while the idea of being anyone's ally is still strange to me, the idea that neither I nor anyone else has the right to expect better treatment from others than we are willing to extend to them remains the basis for my understanding of all human relationships. I will endeavor to keep that understanding at the fore, and the crankiness aft, in all my participation here.
ETA: Not Quite Daily Teaspoon Report links (also a missing quotation mark).
Where's Mom?
This is a supremely awful article about "parents who shouldn't be allowed on planes" because they are accompanied by "badly behaved" children.
It's terrible because, as so many stories on this topic are, it's poorly written, relying on the truly yawn-inducing conceit of waxing nostalgic about the Good Ol' Days when parents used to control their children. As if grumblebums weren't writing articles about insolent infants on the Transcontinental Rail in 1872.
It's also terrible because, as so many stories on this topic do, it draws no distinction between a child who's genuinely behaving badly and needs correction that isn't being given, and a child who's simply being a child.
During a recent 2-1/2-hour flight from Portland, Maine, to Charlotte, North Carolina, Tom Meador heard nothing but crying.I mean, I don't like being on a plane (or anywhere, really) with a screaming baby any more than anyone else, but there's only so much any parent can do—and, at a certain point, throwing dirty looks in that situation is just a passive-aggressive equivalent of expecting a parent to produce a magic wand or a child-size gag.
"The baby in the back row screamed bloody murder," he remembers. "Its mother did everything she could think of to quiet the baby. She actually was dripping with sweat because you could tell she worried about what it was doing to the other passengers. I think she had reason to worry, too, because there were some very sour fellow passengers."
But I'm not writing about this terrible story because I want to have a conversation about modern parenting or children's behavior. (Really, I don't. So let's not, okay?) I'm writing about it because of the way it is currently being promoted on CNN's front page:
"Bad kids on planes: Where's mom?" asks CNN. As if we don't know. Mom is standing before the firing squad, their magazines loaded with blame and recriminations, awaiting her inevitable fate to the distant sound of gnashing teeth.
Dad, on the other hand, is nowhere to be found. As usual.
He's probably in his den, writing an article about the unruly children who kicked the back of his seat at the movies.
To Kill A Mockingbird at 50
I saw the film first, when it came out in 1962 (it was my first "adult" movie), but I remember reading To Kill A Mockingbird when in junior high school and I have never forgotten it.
I've read it many, many times, both for teaching it to my Grade 8 English classes and just for the sheer pleasure of the simplicity and depth of the storytelling. I marvel at its gentle tone even as it depicts the horrors and hatred that run through it; the genteel and loving portrayal of desperate people in a small town in Alabama in the 1930's. The film version, masterfully done in black and white, has forever fixed Atticus Finch (who will forever be Gregory Peck) as a hero of both the law and humanity. But it is the children -- Scout, Jem, and Dill (said to be modeled on Ms. Lee's childhood friend, Truman Capote) -- who give the story its wisdom as they observe the mysteries of adulthood and the peculiar rituals of both worlds.Few novels have achieved both the mass popularity and the literary cachet of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The book was originally published in 1960 by J. B. Lippincott and Company (now part of HarperCollins), won a Pulitzer Prize and has not been out of print since. It has sold nearly one million copies a year and in the past five years has been the second-best-selling backlist title in the country, beaten out only by the novel “The Kite Runner.”
Interest in the book intensified after the 2005 film “Capote,” in which Catherine Keener played Ms. Lee, and grew even stronger the next year, when Sandra Bullock played her in “Infamous.”
Sales of the book are especially robust in the South, including Kentucky, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Florida, and in the Midwest, particularly Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
I think I'll read it again.
Cross-posted.
RIP Art Linkletter
I know three things about Art Linkletter, aside from the fact that he lived inside a television for 50 years: He was a Republican, he blamed his daughter's suicide on LSD which prompted endless apocryphal tales told to my generation about how LSD will make you go crazy and jump out a window, and he was married to his wife for an amazing 75 years.
There's more stuff about him here.
Please feel welcome to share what you knew about Art Linkletter—good, bad, or neutral—in comments.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning.]
"So Hitler himself was an active homosexual. And some people wonder, didn't the Germans, didn't the Nazis, persecute homosexuals? And it is true they did; they persecuted effeminate homosexuals. But Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Stormtroopers, they were his enforcers, they were his thugs. And Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough to carry out his orders, but that homosexual solders basically had no limits and the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict on whomever Hitler sent them after. So he surrounded himself, virtually all of the Stormtroopers, the Brownshirts, were male homosexuals."—American Family Association Director of Public Policy Bryan Fischer. I believe he is also a Professor of History at Genius University.
How to Be a Dipshit
Today in Biological Determinism: The cover of the June/July issue of Esquire, the "How to Be a Man" issue, featuring "An Owner's Manual: Your Brain, Your Heart, Your Balls."
Note that the equations boil down to: Intellect = Brain, Emotion = Heart, Body/Masculinity = Balls.
And although my first reaction was that the calculation marginalized trans men, it's no great shakes for cis men who have lost their testicles to injury or disease, either.
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Deeky's Giant Oven Mitts.
Recommended Reading:
[TW] Fannie: Pulling Away the Mask: Is Extermination the End Goal of Anti-Gay Activism?
[TW] Cara: Boys Aged 10 and 11 Convicted of Attempted Rape as Apologists Deny Assault Was Possible
Renee: Dan Savage Does Not Have the Solution
Andy: Report: Senator Ben Nelson to Make Key 'Yes' Vote on 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repeal Amendment
Melissa: The Consequences of Speaking Out
Rana: Cool Robot!
Jorge: Thanks 4 Watching
Leave your links in comments...
APA Proposed DSM-V "Gender Identity Disorder" Revisions: Update
Shaker EastSideKate emails (which I am publishing with her permission) an update to her post here about the American Psychiatric Association's proposed revisions to the Gender Identity Disorder entry in the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V):
Helen's got a couple of posts up at Questioning Transphobia about WPATH's (the professional group that comes up with recommendations for trans-related hoops) response to the whole DSM-V thing. Last night's post had me pretty excited: It sounded like WPATH was going to argue that being trans wasn't a mental illness. This morning's update *with the actual text* of the critique is along the lines of the tepid mess I'd expect.
Not that I'm surprised that a group of allies would try to play things both ways. Particularly a group with WPATH's logo (seriously, folks?).
Today in Trailblazing and Misogyny: Photos of the Day
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on a state trip to Asia right now, and, as I was looking through the news photographs of her visit, I was struck once again by the images of her with women, in the kind of photo we don't usually (ever) see of our secretaries of state, but have seen everywhere Clinton travels:
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2nd R) says goodbye to a group of Chinese women activists after discussing progress and ongoing challenges in Beijing on May 26, 2010. [Getty Images.]And I was struck once again by the images of her with men, sticking out amongst the darkly colored suits with her brightly-colored blazer (I see you hiding back there, too, Lady in White Blazer behind Dude in Periwinkle Tie!):
China's Vice Premier Wang Qishan (front row 5th from L), U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (dark green), U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke (front row 1st from L), U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (front row 3rd from L), U.S. Federal reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke (second row 4th from L) and other delegates pose for a group photo ahead of the opening ceremony of the China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogue May 24, 2010 in Beijing, China. [Getty Images.]And I was struck once again by how comfortable she looks at events with children (and their educators), where our "statesmen" usually look so stiff and awkward and uncomfortable, undermining (if unintentionally) whatever pledges they've made to prioritize children's welfare and education:
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, center in 2nd row, poses for photos alongside Chinese State Councilor Liu Yandong, 3rd right in 2nd row, and American and Chinese students after watching a performance at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing Tuesday, May 25, 2010. [AP Photo.]And I was interested to see this image of Clinton, again with Chinese State Councilor Liu Yandong at the Performing Arts Center:
—because of this image:
Care of Getty Images, who also recently brought us the lipstick-on-the-straw image. And it was considered such an awesome shot, that AP had to get an identical one.
Aside from invoking other memorable "Look—disembodied ladyfeetz!" images like this one, are you fucking kidding me with the phallic boom mic inserted between two women's lower halves?!
I know the whole boom-microphone-in-the-image is kind of a "thing," especially in political photography, but you'll note that in none of those images are the notable people pictured robbed of their individual identity, disembodied to maximize focus on their gender, and then separated by the boom mic pictured as if rising in between them.
Of course, all of the political figures in those images are men.
I don't for a moment believe that there wasn't a single person along the path from photographer to photo editor to publisher, at either photo agency, who didn't notice the unfortunate implications of the above image.
Yeah, it's a "little thing," but it is the pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable "little stuff" that creates the foundation of a sexist culture on which the big stuff is dependent for its survival. It's the little things, the constant drumbeat of inequality and objectification, that inure us to increasingly horrible acts and attitudes toward women.
It is a particular pinch to see a woman who travels the globe addressing that big stuff casually diminished in such a petty way.
Damn Dems
The proposed repeal of DADT continues to be a clusterfuck, as misogynist wankstain and former Reaganite Democratic Senator Jim Webb says he sees "no reason for the political process to pre-empt" the Pentagon's readiness for the repeal.
Meanwhile, Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine says she will back a repeal of DADT. Good for her.
Always nice to see the Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Feel the Homomentum!
Americans' Acceptance of Gay Relations Crosses 50% Threshold: "Americans' support for the moral acceptability of gay and lesbian relations crossed the symbolic 50% threshold in 2010. ... Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, conducted each May, documents a gradual increase in public acceptance of gay relations since about 2006. However, the change is seen almost exclusively among men, and particularly men younger than 50."
All right. Way to go, dudez!
It's difficult for me to believe that "acceptance of gay relations" is only just now passing the positive threshold, because, geez, get it together, America. Damn. But my persistent, impatient mystification with endemic bigotry notwithstanding, this is an important milestone. Even among self-identified conservatives, there has been a 5-point increase in support of gay relationships since 2006.
It's really rather remarkable that we've crossed this threshold without federally mandated marriage equality. To put it into perspective, interracial marriage was supported by only 28% of Americans when it was legalized by Loving vs. Virgina in 1968, and support did not cross the positive threshold until 1991.
(And there are STILL holdouts.)
Apart from anything else, this number is important because no longer can any politician ever again cloak hir craven refusal to support gay equality behind the excuse that a majority of Americans believe homosexuality is immoral.
They don't.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker SugarLeigh as a follow-up to yesterday's QotD: If you were going to write your memoirs, what would the title be?
Obviously, I've got to go with I'm Not Offended—I'm Contemptuous!: The Totally True Stories of a Feisty Fat Feminist.
Speaking of Bipartipoop…
Obama's afternoon tea with Senate Republicans appears to be the impetus for his splendid new border proposal: You scratch my SCOTUS nominee; I'll scratch your costly and demonstrably ineffective exercise in racism down by the border. Or something.
Obama called on Republicans to … support his Supreme Court pick, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, and join him to advance immigration reform and energy and climate change legislation.And then when Obama promised 1,200 troops, McCain immediately criticized it as insufficient. Because THAT'S WHAT REPUBLICANS DO.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Obama that he must first secure the border with Mexico before Republicans will support a comprehensive reform package, according to GOP lawmakers in the meeting.
And because Obama has some kind of pavlovian pander response to Republican mendacity, he will almost certainly spend next week figuring out how to win over the coveted pro-Rand Paul vote.
Obama told Republicans that we would be willing to meet them halfway or 75 percent of the way on some of the big issues remaining on his agenda.No comment.
When they pressed him to support specific GOP-favored proposals, he repeatedly said he is constrained because of pressure from his party’s liberal base.
