Man, last week’s episode of This American Life (aka, Radio Programs White People Like) is hard to listen to. I don’t have much to say about it, except that it’s a pretty harsh indictment of the current administration. Some of the behavior described in the (one-sided) reporting–like refusing citizenship to widows of Americans whose husbands died before the paperwork went through–truly boggles the mind.
Mar 052008
From an online chat with Charlotte Allen (remember her?):
Washington: “They Scream, They Swoon. How Dumb Can Blacks Get?” “They Scream, They Swoon. How Dumb Can Men Get?” “They Scream, They Swoon. How Dumb Can Latinos Get?” Ha ha! Very funny. I’m laughing my head off. Inside. Get a clue.Charlotte Allen: Is this a compliment or an insult?
…
New York: Do you think women are aware of the hypocrisy with their anger toward this column? Specifically I refer to the whole litany of TV programs, magazines (like Marie Claire) and society and popular culture as a whole that makes humor at the expense of men everyday. Do you feel the angry responses validated your article?
Charlotte Allen: Very much so. I’ve heard from women with Ivy League degrees complaining that they’re oppressed, female graduates of top law schools complaining that they’re oppressed. C’mon!
Is it possible that this woman seriously doesn’t understand the difference between perpetuating harmful stereotypes about a group that has been historically (and is presently) oppressed, and making fun of those in a position of power?
I mean, I guess it is possible, but I find it much more likely that this is a shameless and disingenuous effort to get Ms. Allen a little more notoriety. I mean, these distinctions are fundamental and obvious ones. People who have actually struggled with injustice, rather than leverage it for a book deal, already understand why going after the powerful is very different from going after the politically- and socially-oppressed.
In a Washington Post Op-Ed, Charlotte Allen seems to think that women are morons:
I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.” No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.
That’s one of the more reasonable paragraphs, incidentally. Now let’s jump to the thrilling conclusion:
So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.
I’m not even going to bother critiquing the details of this… insightful look into the female mind. Suffice it to say that it says much more about its author in particular than it does about her gender generally.
I can only assume that this woman wants to be the next Ann Coulter, and needs something truly ridiculous to jump-start her career as a contrarian anti-feminist pundit. Regardless, I find it somewhat astonishing that the Washington Post would see fit to publish such an antediluvian polemic. Is this really such a vital viewpoint that it needs to be articulated (to use that term generously) in a national newspaper? What’s next, a defense of eugenics written by a self-hating gypsy? I really think that publishing this is a mistake. Not because it sets feminism back by a century (although it’s not exactly progressive), but because it’s unfair, it’s prurient, and (to my eyes) it’s a deeply cynical appeal to prejudices we’d be better off without.
Feb 022008
If you were more interested in the Spygate stuff than the TV-14 stuff, you may be interested to know that Gregg Easterbrook has another column up today, going into a little more detail on why new stories are popping up this week, and what the Patriots are alleged to have done. I dunno, I still find it all a bit ridiculous, but it is interesting to learn a little bit about what’s going on behind the scenes.
Money lines, complete with practically sarcastic note that none of this has been proved (or even hinted at by any direct evidence):
If the Patriots secretly taped the Rams’ walk-through, then stopped the red-zone plays the Rams showed in that walk-through, then won that Super Bowl by three points, then logic says New England materially benefited from cheating in the Super Bowl. If true, this would be the worst sports scandal since the Black Sox.Let’s put that in capital letters: IF TRUE. We don’t yet know if the Super Bowl allegations are true. Then again, we are into only the second day of information going on the record and the league finally answering some questions about the subject.
PS: Do you think there’s any chance that the Pats will use this as anything but competitive fuel tomorrow? My prediction: New England 37, New York 20.
Dec 112007
“Descendant of Davy Crockett, 5, kills 445-lb bear”
I’m not even going to read the story–it couldn’t possibly live up to the title.
Nov 272007
Certainly it would be terribly easy to rush toward some sort of instant judgment based on what we think we all knew about Taylor and the sort of life he once, and for all we know, still led. But really, we know nothing at the moment, and until we do, “may he rest in peace” ought to be the operative phrase for this day.
Still, could anyone honestly say they never saw this coming? You’d have to be blind not to consider Taylor’s checkered past. It was only a few months after he was drafted, when we got something of an inkling of what sort of young man the Redskins were selecting out of the University of Miami with the fifth overall selection in 2004.
Thank you, Mr. Shapiro. Thank you very much.
Oct 052007
Caps’ Semin Still an Unknown Quantity
Kudos to you, unknown Washington Post editor. You made many people giggle.
Aug 122007
This article on the psychological effect of an artificial heart is totally fascinating.
Much of the original artificial heart work was driven by the technological optimism born of the space program. Some of the current work is driven by the idea that our brains and bodies are separate entities. But now, in light of Houghton and other victims of psychological and cognitive trauma after intervention in their bodies, some scientists fear that we are tampering not with a bodily machine but with the human spirit.“We’ve got to understand the organs and systems coming into our lives. We haven’t paid a lot of attention to the psychological or emotional aspects of thinking of ourselves as bodies,” says Arthur Caplan. “People interested in eternal life through body regeneration or organ substitutions” consider humans to be “a brain on top of a complicated bag of water,” he says. “Ship that brain elsewhere, and it would still be you. Not true, exactly. Not that we couldn’t adjust or adapt. But in some subtle ways, our sense of self — who we are — is shaped by our carcasses. Shaped by the containers we drag around.
“People who have their heads frozen to live forever, like Ted Williams — my view is that if you get your head stuck back on something” that isn’t your body, “your identity will be shredded. It isn’t you anymore. It could lead to despair and depression, rather than gratitude that you can live forever. If you find yourself embodied in a different way, your perceptions and awareness of the world would be changed.”
I used to read a lot of fiction that directly or implicitly considered what it means to combine the organic and the inorganic. Though these issues have always been with us, the sophistication and the functionality of the technological measures we take to augment our fragile bodies is making things quite a bit more complicated and interesting.
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