Welcome to the month of March! This month, I will be taking a two-week research trip to Lincoln, Oregon, in order to conduct oral history interviews with, and read through the personal archives of, faculty at the Oregon Extension. This work (fingers crossed) will provide the backbone of primary source material for my thesis on the early years of the program and its context in American countercultural, religious, and educational history.
Meanwhile, one of the alumni of the OE is a scholar of American religious history and author of numerous books on the subject of Evangelicalism in American life. One of his more recent books, God in the White House, charts the history of faith and the office of the Presidency during the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, you can listen to him discuss faith and politics with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.
On Tuesday night I had this dream in which I was debating politics with a conservative journalist who kept referring to President Obama as “the black president.” I got really irritated with this, and kept trying to patiently explain to him that while it was acceptable to describe Obama as “the first black president” (although he actually identifies as biracial) it was not acceptable to refer to him as The Black President, as if that was his title. Because this implied that Obama is not the American president, but some shadow leader who doesn’t serve the entire country.
In the dream I was totally articulate (you know how you are in dreams?), and yet this reporter would just not listen to me. So I picked up a fork from the table at which we were sitting and threw it so hard that I impaled it in the reporter’s thigh.
Then, when he still refused to accept my argument, I did it again.
I’m not particularly proud of the fact that my most satisfying dreams are about making flawless rhetorical arguments and stabbing right-wingers with dinnerware. Hanna says if these are the kind of dreams I’m having, I might have to go sleep on the couch. But in my defense, walking home from class on Tuesday night, just before bed, I was listening to this Fresh Air story on the CPAC conference and the new face of American conservatism.
Now there’s a lot that I find upsetting in this report, not least of which the fact that the center of gravity in right-wing politics seems to have shifted to the libertarian right of George W. Bush. And they’re talking crazy-talk.
But the dream fantasy about the dinner fork was, I think, inspired by this bit about Sarah Palin.
GROSS: So I should mention Sarah Palin. Where is she now on the conservative movement? Where does she fit? How much influence does she have? Or maybe influence isn’t even the right word. How much faith do people have in her, like?
Mr. WEIGEL: Well, tea party activists and conservatives have a lot of faith in her for different reasons. Tea party activists respect her because they think she’s one of them, and conservatives like the way she’s attacked by the media.
They – Palin spent a lot of time, recently, attacking media figures who use what she calls the R-word to describe the developmentally disabled. You know, that’s not a political quest that makes sense, but activists who are very oppositional and think that there’s a big infrastructure out to get them, really respect her for that. So she’s not as much a leader as somebody they identify with.
So let me be clear here. Using the word “retarded” to talk about developmentally disabled folks, or as a slang word for “stupid” (“that’s retarded”) is an issue. One that activists whose blogs I read have been raising for quite some time, and one I also believe Palin is within her rights to talk about.
The thing is, I would take her much more seriously if she (and the conservatives who identify with her) too me and my people seriously when we raise issues about how language has real-world consequences. Like when we talk about God language, or the use of casual use of words like “rape” and “gay,” calling grown women “girls,” or parents “breeders.” Feminists and other activists on the left have been talking for decades about how language matters. And we’ve been consistently derided as being too fucking serious for our own good. We’ve been accused of being “the language police” and laughed out of town for being “politically correct” (which has mysteriously turned from an inclusive goal to strive toward into something legalistic to be avoided at all costs).
So it’s really, really hard for me to take Palin & co. seriously when they suddenly decide they’re all about defending certain folks against marginalization through language. Not because I don’t agree with them (on this particular point, if nothing else), but because it never mattered to them until now, and I have yet to see them take that personal revelation about the importance of language and realize how others might have the same experience over different words. A little bit of empathy will get you a long way, people. Go away and exercise those muscles, and then come back and talk to me.
This week, I bring you two segments from NPR’s Talk of the Nation and On the Media that I listened to last week while entering metadata at Northeastern. First up, we have author Ethan Watters discussing his book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.
I really like hearing medical professionals place illness and healing in cultural context: while physical and mental suffering is undeniably real, so often the way distress manifests itself is shaped by the time and place in which those suffering are located (much like, kofkof, sexual orientation and gender identity/expression).
Likewise, Johnathan Metzl, author of the new book The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease charts the evolution of schizophrenia through the latter half of the twentieth century from being a disease of white female passivity to being associated with male aggression (and diagnosed disproportionately in African American men).
Okay, okay, so it’s not like we think there are legions of fans out there waiting with baited breath for the forth installment of our 100 movie quotes endeavor (see parts one, two, and three for a refresher), but still: we apologize for the fact that we are delaying the post for another week. Hanna has been working industriously all week transcribing the terrible handwriting of ninteenth-century medical photographers and her wrist has become (as they would have said back then) overstrained. It needs bedrest and a cold compress. And a day or two away from typing — even fun typing.
So instead I bring you a few movie-related links that will hopefully brighten your weekend, and Hanna has volunteered to augment my ramblings with some deftly-chosen youtube clips (minimal typing required). So here we go.
If you’re looking for list-type things to read, wander on over to debontherocks @ Blogher, who put up a post this week of her nominations for “the Opposite Oscars,” where “we could call out the performances and films that aspired for greatness, but turned out to not even be worth the popcorn required to survive them.” While I am not particularly partisan in terms of the films she nominates (most of which I have not seen), I enjoyed this description of the ceremony:
Nominees could attend in their jeans or yoga pants, grab a boxed lunch from the folding table by the door, and wait expectantly to see who was dubbed worst. The loser could then tell off the people who led them to that bad performance, they could nurse their wounds, or just apologize. “I needed the money to pay a bad IRS debt/lift-tuck the twins after breastfeeding the real twins/buy back a digital video camera I inadvertently left in a South Beach hotel room,” they would say. And we might understand, or we might cluck and boo, but at least we’d have resolution.
debontherocks would probably appreciate (if she has not already read) what might just be the best movie review of the year, to date. Actually, I’m quite sure it’s the best movie review I’ve read several years running. Although I feel a bit diminished, as a human being, for writing that since it’s a total pan of a film that I haven’t even seen, the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day. Sady Doyle @ The Guardian writes:
The cumulative effect of Valentine’s Day is to make you feel that all human emotions are shameful. Have you ever been sad about a break-up? Had a crush on someone? Wanted your ex-lover back? Been happy to meet somebody promising? Wanted to have sex? You are terrible. You are feeling the same emotions portrayed in the movie Valentine’s Day. And these emotions, Valentine’s Day confirms, are cheap, and disgusting. For they make you like the characters in this movie.
I mean, wow. That’s quality panning.
If this is really the effect of Valentine’s Day then it deserves to be panned. Because, you know what? Human emotions aren’t shameful. And any movie that makes us feel they are is a disservice to the craft. In fact, I’m a firm believer in movies doing quite the opposite: giving us space in which to witness and experience human emotions (light, dark, and all the shades between) without embarrassment. For example, here’s some quality romance, brought to you by the team who were also responsible for that near-perfection of a film, Love Actually.
(Hanna says I am required to warn you that tissues will be needed to watch this scene.)
I will love John Hannah forever for this scene (well, and for his character in The Mummy, but this primarily since it was the first role I ever saw him in, and he made me cry).
Speaking of things that have made me cry recently (I didn’t realize this post was going to be so teary, but there we are — I promise to end with something more ebullient!), Terry Gross recently interviewed Colin Firth about his Oscar-nominated role in A Single Man.
This, like Valentine’s Day, is a film which I have neither seen nor heard very much about, but which after listening to said interview I fear I might never be able to watch. Not, however, because I fear it sucks, but because I fear it does not. In fact, I fear it is brilliant. It is the story of a professor who, in the opening scenes of the film, loses his lover in a car accident, and who struggles to go on living in the aftermath of that loss. Terry Gross plays, toward the beginning of the Fresh Air interview, the scene in which Firth’s character recieves word that his lover is dead. The audio alone was enough to make me tear up, sitting there at my desk at work.
Firth, in the interview, likens the story to Joan Didion’s memoir describing the loss of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, which I likewise know I would love and also know I may never have the strength to read. (For those of you who are tempted to think there’s some enobling purpose to suffering, go read Jonathan Romain’s recent commentary at the Guardian: “Let’s be very clear: there is no divine purpose in suffering whatsoever.”)
And because I can’t possibly leave you all on a note of such existential despair, here’s Colin the Sex God from the aforementioned Love Actually exploring the wilds of Milwaukee with a blackpack full of condoms and an openness to cross-cultural experiences.
Hanna reports there is an urban legend that Kris Marshall refused his paycheck for filming this scene on the grounds that it was just too much fun to count as actual work. I leave it to y’all to decide whether that’s true or not.
Have a good weekend. We’ll be back next Saturday with more movie fun (and possibly even some movie quotes!)
I’ve been commuting more alone lately, since Hanna and I switched schedules due to the advent of the new semester and Hanna’s new job at the Countway Medical Library), and because of that and also because of metadata entry at Northeastern, I’ve been listening to a lot more NPR than I have had the chance to for a while. Last week, I happened to catch this segment on Talk of the Nation regarding the American military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gay and lesbian service members.
The strange history of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the position of queer service members as openly closeted (is that the best way to describe it?) is probably not unfamiliar to y’all. The good news: I was impressed with the number of eloquent military folks who phoned into the show supporting the repeal and affirming that a person’s sexual orientation has no bearing on their ability to serve. Several spoke in no uncertain terms about the burden of responsibility should not be placed on queer folks, but upon the military structure for disciplining and educating folks who exhibit homophobic behavior.
The piece I actually want to comment (rant?) a little about in this post is the commentary of retired Lt. Col. Bob McGinnis, who was part of the task force that originally studied the issue in 1993. What he circled around, and didn’t quite actually say in several exchanges, was that he’s squeeked out by the idea of non-straight folks sharing dorms and showers with straight folks of the same sex.
I really don’t understand this. Or rather, I don’t understand how the solution of segregating folks by sexual orientation for sleeping arrangements makes sense to anyone. You feel uncomfortable around people who might find you sexually attractive? Okay, everyone’s allowed their own subjective experience. But what I find fascinating is that these folks don’t seem to understand that regardless of whether they know they move through a world of diverse sexual orientations they do: this is not about allowing non-straight folks to serve in the military. This is about allowing non-straight folks who already serve to be honest about their orientation without fear of official reprisal. Do guys like Lt. Col. McGinnis not understand that they shared dorms and showers with gay and bi men when they were active soldiers? Do they not understand that they share their swimming pool locker room, sauna, spa, with non-straight guys in various states of undress? I’m just . . . baffled.
I wonder, sometimes, if we grew up in a culture with more casual, non-sexualized nudity whether this would just not present as much of a problem. In America, so many people seem to think naked automatically equals “nekkid,” or nakedness in a sexual context. We strictly segregate men and women, boys and girls, from one another in any situation that might lead to nudity, the assumption being that only in homosocial space (among folks of the same sex/gender) can you be protected from the gaze of those who find you erotic (the idea that it’s good to have protection from that, as if it’s something harmful — even for adults — is also a particular cultural assumption). Nudity can be neutral. Physical closeness can be neutral. Only in the modern, relatively privileged world of the industrialized West have been been able to afford to segregate such activities as washing, dressing, sleeping (and even love-making!) in spaces of literal privacy. In the past, cultures have had to negotiate customs of “privacy” that supported the need of couples to have intimacy even within conditions of severe overcrowding. We might do well to consider how they did so, and how we might adapt some of these expectations to our world, with its fluid understanding of sexual orientation and gender (people!! there is no–nada-none!! feasible way we could provide separate facilities for every sub-group of human beings categorized by sex, gender, or sexual orientation. So we’re gonna have to learn how to be secure in our bodies and minds without being surrounded by folks whose bodies and minds work (or whose bodies we imagine work) precisely the same way as ours.
Last Monday, I spent seven hours at Northeastern entering metadata (“information about information”) into the Greenstone database for my scrapbook digitization project. Since this only really required the left side of my brain, I entertained the right side of my brain by listening to podcasts, NPR programming, and other miscellaneous audio programs. Here’s some of what I listened to.
I started out with the latest podcast from RhRealityCheck (25 minutes), which included a interesting interview with author Laura Scott, who is doing a survey/book/documentary project about couples who remain “childless by choice.” As Hanna remarked, do we really need a whole website to support the decision not to have kids? But she had some thoughtful observations and thankfully did not come across as defensive or hateful of children, which in my experience many people who identify themselves as “childfree” or “childless by choice” do — especially in the anonymous spaces of the internet.
Then came the week’s episode on Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me which included a great riff by the panelists on the new Twilight movie, New Moon, out in theatres this week: Who’s Carl This Time? (9 minutes)
From On the Media’s November 20 show came Online and Isolated? (7 minutes, transcript after the jump):
Social scientists have long suspected that the internet contributes to our growing isolation. But Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, set out to test that assumption. He says they found that Americans aren’t as isolated as we thought and that being active on the internet might actually help prevent social isolation.
Is the conservative right undergoing a transformation? Journalist David Weigel thinks so. Weigel covers the Republican party for the online magazine The Washington Independent, where he’s written about tea party protests, anti-health care activists, the “birther” movement and the recent Values Voter summit.
Weigel formerly covered national politics for the libertarian magazine Reason. He’s also written for Slate, Time.com and The Nation.
And finally, writer Lenore Skenazy @ Free-Range Kids posted a lecture on free-range parenting she gave at Yale University’s Zigler Center. Skenazy talks about the insane levels of parental fear about letting children explore the world (1 hour video).
the feminist librarian 