davidthompson

Reheated (5)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Freeloading and Snobbery. 

Arts establishment claims to be “suppressed,” sneers at the little people, demands free money.

I’m not convinced that the reduction of taxpayer subsidy for loss-making plays qualifies as “suppression.” And reluctant taxpayers please take note: Despite all the years of providing handouts, you’re now on the side of the oppressor.

Womanier Stuff.

The comedic potential of Women’s Studies newsgroups.

As a result of all this “questioning” and “confronting” of logic perhaps we can look forward to the first feminist computer, which will presumably operate on more “wholistic” non-logical principles. If such a device could be built, I’m confident it would generate answers that are ideologically agreeable, if not actually correct.

Exposure.

Atom bombs and Moon landings. The photographic essays of Michael Light.

One incidental detail… illuminates the unique comic potential of practical nuclear physics. Ted Taylor was a miniaturisation expert involved in many of the early atmospheric experiments. On June 5th, 1952, during the test explosion of a 14 kiloton device in the Nevada Desert, Taylor used a parabolic mirror to focus the bomb’s glare and light his cigarette.

Poke about in the greatest hits.

A Czar, You Say?

TDK thinks you may be interested in this:

Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

Compulsory population control? Compulsory abortion? I’d have guessed that “concluding” such things, even in the passive voice, might hinder a person’s climb to a position of political influence.

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Perhaps you think such totalitarian musings would cast a little doubt on a person’s credibility. Apparently not. 

Related: Infestation.

Woolly

Brace yourselves for some pure essence of Guardian, courtesy of Libby Brooks.

Amid the economic rubble, a revolution is being knitted.

I bet you weren’t expecting that.

Tactile and egalitarian, nourishing and slow, arts and crafts are enjoying a deserved revival in our recession-hit society.

The “nourishing” bit is a nice touch, implying as it does a wholesomeness and moral regeneration to offset all that “economic rubble” business. Yes, it’s true, home-made woollens will set us free and make us warmer, better people. Well, warmer possibly.

This week, the think-tank Demos published a collection of essays exploring the idea of “expressive life.” In the volume, US arts writer Bill Ivey - who coined the phrase - and Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, tease out the prospect of a rebirth of the arts and crafts movement as part of the search for quality of life in a post-consumerist, recession-hit society.

Post-consumerist? Really? Care to bet on that, Libby?

At a moment when laid-off bankers are testifying to the benefits of basket-weaving, a reversion to the reformist aesthetic of John Ruskin and William Morris can feel suitably corrective.

Oh, there’s more.

The reasons for this resurgence are not hard to fathom: we are producers frustrated with never seeing the end product of our efforts; consumers weary of being bullied into buying stuff we don’t need, that is badly made or doesn’t fit.

I’m all in favour of craft. For instance, a professional columnist concerned with her craft, or with basic competence, might hesitate before filing an article in which she baldly asserts that “we” are “frustrated” and “weary,” dressed in ill-fitting clothes, and worse, “bullied into buying stuff we don’t need.” Who is this presumed “we”? How does Libby know what you or I need, or want, or how “bullied” and “weary” we are, if at all? Alas, dear Libby doesn’t reveal the secret of her preternatural knowledge. She does, however, tell us,

You cannot Twitter a cushion cover.

Before delivering the obligatory moral punch line.

Crucially, craft is egalitarian. While some in the Labour party appear bent on resuscitating the canard of meritocracy, which divides the gifted few from the unexceptional mass, craft reminds us of the significance of equality of outcome, rather than of opportunity. Everyone shares the capacity to develop a skill, based on decent teaching, application and time - not raw talent.

Ah. There we go. Equality of outcome, rooted in a knitwear revolution. Any monkey can be taught to knit or whittle, apparently, and this is reassuringly egalitarian, and therefore good. All “we” need is teaching, no “raw talent” required. Raw talent - like its more evil relations, giftedness and genius – is by definition unequally distributed, conspicuous, and thus to be frowned upon. And if Libby should, God forbid, be knocked down by a bus, I’m sure she’d welcome treatment by a surgeon whose skills are, at best, unremarkable. 

Every Bit as Hobbled

I’ve previously noted the tendency of some academic activists to indulge in wild overstatement, not least those entranced by the Holy Trinity of race, class and gender. As, for instance, when Barbara Barnett, a product of Duke’s infamous English department, claimed that, “20%–25% of college students report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape.” Barnett’s assertions were subsequently debunked by KC Johnson: 

Barnett… thereby [suggests] that college campuses have a rate of sexual assault around 2.5 times higher than the rate of sexual assault, murder, armed robbery and assault combined in Detroit, the U.S. city with the highest murder rate. For those in the reality-based community, FBI figures provide a counterweight to Barnett’s theories: not 20%-25% but instead around .03% of students are victims of rape while in college. Duke’s 2000-2006 figures, which use a much broader reporting standard than the FBI database, indicate that 0.2% of Duke students “report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape.”

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Christina Hoff Sommers spies more academic work in which accuracy appears peripheral to a political agenda:

Consider The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (2008), by the feminist scholar Joni Seager, chair of the Hunter College geography department… One color-coded map illustrates how women are kept “in their place” by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, Niger, and Libya. All are coded with the same shade of green to indicate places where “patriarchal assumptions” operate in “potent combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations.”

Seager’s logic? She notes that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman as his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same low rating on Seager’s charts because, she notes, “State legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001.” Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, that U.S. abortion law is exceptionally liberal among the nations of the world, and that the activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its disagreements.

Among the scholarly lapses discussed is the following nugget, from Nancy K.D. Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law, which includes an historical perspective by Cheryl Ward Smith.

According to Ward:

“The history of women’s abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man’s right thumb. The law became commonly know as ‘The Rule of Thumb.’ These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe.”

Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology - the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.

Not So Goode

Thanks to TDK, I finally got to see Mike Judge’s new animated series, The Goode Family, which follows an environmentally obsessive PC household and their ostentatious concerns. Here are the first three episodes.

Given Judge’s previous creation, King of the Hill, there are inevitably some good moments. There’s an amusing scene involving carrier bag anxiety, and the local overpriced whole food store has an electronic display informing customers of the latest ethical shopping practices, which change in real time. And there are odd flashes of demented ingenuity, as when a visiting Freegan uses his own tears as seasoning. Unfortunately, these moments are spaced much too far apart. What we get instead are misfires like this scene, in which the Goodes fret about the correct way to refer to their black neighbour. There’s a joke lurking in there somewhere, but nobody managed to find it. And that’s pretty much the default setting for the first few episodes.

King of the Hill quickly grew beyond Texan small town caricature and, however grotesque its protagonists could be, they felt both plausible and deserving of some empathy. Comedy emerged from character and didn’t depend entirely on stereotypes, knowing references or the weekly plot contrivance. Viewers soon came to share the producers’ obvious affection for the Hills, despite – or because of - Hank’s unwavering squareness and preoccupation with propane. And while Hank was often stuffy, unadventurous and emotionally repressed, he remained above all an honourable man – something of an oddity in modern animation. The rooting of comedy in character and culture – as opposed to politics - also made possible a collision of surrealism and genuine poignancy. (Peggy’s need for oversized shoes and her subsequent, unwitting friendship with a transvestite springs to mind, or Bill’s near-constant teetering on the brink of despair.)

In contrast, The Goode Family is laboured and affected, as if built by committee from the outside in, with unlikeable characters and a premise that’s somehow both obvious and thin. There’s no evidence yet that Judge or his writers have any sympathy for the Goodes and their self-inflicted predicament, and it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to see them as victims of their own politics or just unrelenting grotesques. The daughter, Bliss, is presented supposedly as a foil for her dysfunctionally PC mother, but the tension on offer is between preening political concern and preening teenage ennui. Perhaps these are teething troubles and The Goode Family will find its footing and become much funnier and less self-conscious. But if so, it needs to improve a hell of a lot, very quickly. Right now, the protagonists seem more suited as secondary characters in a show about someone else, and the air of contrivance leaves the series feeling almost as fake and unappealing as the pretensions it mocks.

Uprising

Poking about in the archives, I unearthed the second episode of Vanessa Engle’s excellent documentary series, Lefties. Titled Angry Wimmin, the film traces the rise of radical feminism in a grim Britain of the 1970s. As a record of social history it’s interesting stuff. The revolutionary politics of shoes, for instance, is quaintly entertaining, and the subsequent, post-revolutionary fear of being caught shaving armpits or wearing lipstick may also amuse. Around 6 minutes in, there’s a section on “political lesbianism,” i.e. lesbianism as an ideological duty, irrespective of desire. One of the figures interviewed is Julie Bindel, a Guardian commentator whose subtleties of mind include a belief that “[get] men off the streets” is “a fabulous slogan” and “all women know that if we have not been raped, we are lucky.” In the first clip below, Ms Bindel airs the following reminiscence:

What I could never understand – and I did resent – was [heterosexual feminists] going home to men at night. It just seemed such a contradiction. And often I would get very angry when I would challenge them about this, and they would say, “Well, that’s just the way I am. I just don’t fancy women.” Having no understanding at all of the fact that sexuality is a social construct and that we all make choices depending on the way we want to live and the world we want to see.

What’s striking is Bindel’s adamance. It’s not even open to debate. This, presumably, is how she still sees the world. Sexuality simply is a social construct - it’s a fact - and all human beings can reconfigure their desires in accord with ideology. Though the basis for this claim remains somewhat mysterious. Former activist Lisa Power recalls her own, rather different, experience of sexuality by decree:

It was a bit of a pain because there were all these women who suddenly wanted to be lesbians, but they didn’t actually terribly want to sleep with women. But they sort of felt they ought to, to pay their dues.

Here’s part 1:

Watch Angry Wimmin Part One in News  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Always Aim for the Head

Further to this post on the alleged political subtexts of zombie films, it seems the debate refuses to die.

In The American Prospect, Paul Waldman argues:

[A]t heart, the genre is a progressive one. It’s true that fighting off the zombie horde requires plentiful firearms, no doubt pleasing Second Amendment advocates. And in a zombie movie, government tends to be either ineffectual or completely absent. On the other hand, when the zombie apocalypse comes, capitalism breaks down, too - people aren’t going to be exchanging money for goods and services; they’re just going to break into the hardware store and grab what they need…

But most important, what ensures survival in a zombie story are the progressive ideals of common cause and collective action. A small group of people from varying backgrounds are thrust together and find that they can transcend their differences of age, race, and gender (the typical band of survivors is a veritable United Nations of cultural diversity). They come to understand that if they're going to get out of this with their brains kept securely housed in their skulls and not travelling down some zombie’s gullet, they’ve got to act as though they’re all in it together. Surviving the tide of zombies requires community and mutual responsibility. What could be more progressive than that?

Over at Ace, Mætenloch takes a different view:

Grand Ambitions

Despite that local spot of bother, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still finds time to share his thoughts on more elevated matters. Press TV, the state-sponsored purveyor of “24/7 truth,” quotes approvingly:

In the democracy of the West, the exalted values and the people are ignored, [whereas] the aspiration and origins of the Islamic Revolution are different from those of other revolutions. Because, in the Islamic Republic that rose from the revolution, the object is the realization of Divine aspirations and the commands of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and, consequently, the perfection of humanity.

Those with the stomach for it can witness the ongoing perfecting of humanity here, here and here. Apparently, the process is more stick than carrot. 

Get Them While They’re Soft and Yielding

Zomblog has a new series documenting the quaintly leftwing trappings to be found in leafier parts of Berkeley, California. The first instalment highlights a mosaic made by students of Black Pine Circle School, one of the city’s more exclusive private elementary and middle schools. The mosaic, which runs along the front of the school on Seventh Street, is presumably intended to advertise the values being cultivated inside. It’s the handiwork of children aged 13 and 14.

See if you can spot the curious detail and its surprising prominence.

A closer look reveals an ominous prophesy, in red, bottom left.

Oh, Bea

Caution: rationalisation in progress.

My politics comes from Marxism and feminism; it’s republican, it’s gay and it’s green… The survival of an honours system clothed in royalism and imperialism is a reproach to New Labour’s craven sentiment about pomp and power… That creates a contradiction in moments like this… You ask yourself the question: how can I accept anything from this horrible imperial regime?

Why, it’s former Communist Party member and all-purpose agitated person, Beatrix Campbell. Sorry, Beatrix Campbell, OBE.