Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War. It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified. The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation. The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play. …
Category: culture
Bunk
One of the downsides to the information super highway is the amount of bunk that disseminates faster than ever before. It has always been with us, though, so we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s the fault of the internet. All the internet does is make this nonsense available faster, in more formats, and about more things than ever before, but the basic impulse has not changed since, well, forever.
Consider one of the earliest bits of nonsense that still gets some juice from time to time: Nero played while Rome burned.
Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, C.E.…
Any Time They Want
I sometimes wonder who Rush Limbaugh is speaking to anymore, but the evidence suggests someone tunes in. I wonder how many think it’s a comedy show, sort of a political version of an old Andrew Dice-Clay routine. (Remember him? No? Well, there’s hope after all.)
In the wake of Rush’s remarks about Sandra Fluke he has been losing sponsors, a few Republican politicians have been condemning him, and everyone seems to want to keep as far from him as possible. No one but a few academics are talking about this in historical terms, though, and I think that’s a mistake. Because this is so typically male-dominant behavior, the kind that feminists— the ones Rush has had it in for lo these past decades— point to when describing cultural oppression that someone should be raising a banner and saying “See? …
Meltdown
I considered writing something about the recent primaries in Michigan and Arizona, in advance of Super Tuesday, but things have become so mind-numbingly bizarre I’m not sure I’d have anything relevant to say, at least not about this particular election cycle. As a personal observation, I’d like to say that any of the Republican candidates still vying for the nomination disturb me. Romney is the least noxious, but that’s hardly a reason to vote for someone (and yet, we often do). I don’t find him as objectionable as the other three, and in another era he would probably be a half-way decent president. …
Narratives and the American Landscape
I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.
At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American. Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.…
New Look, Errata, and a Policy Statement
I’ve seen some blogs that change their look every month. Frankly, it’s too much bother, but once in a while…
So, here’s a new look. I’ve noted a few comments about the difficulty of reading white-on-black (or pale blue-on-dark blue, etc), so I found one that reverses that and reads pretty well. I’ve also found one that allows me to put my own images in the header, and that I may change more regularly, but for the foreseeable future, this is what the Muse is going to look like.
I suppose I should make a few other comments to go along with that.…
Moyers & Haidt On Moral Psychology
I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.
Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.…
Where The Rubber Meets The Road (Womb)
Congress is holdings hearings on President Obama’s mandate that insurance companies cover contraception for employees of religious institutions. His earlier initiative, that such institutions pay for it themselves through their employee insurance plans, was met with outrage over a presumed infringement of religious liberty. He made what I, at least, consider an admirable compromise, sidestepping the primary complaint by mandating that the insurance companies pick up the costs. However, that didn’t satisfy congressional Republicans and religious conservatives.
Hearings were held.
Representative Issa of California held a panel to discuss the issue comprised entirely of men. All his witnesses were men.…
About How I See It
This pretty much sums up my feelings about the subject.
This was polite. The way I’d say it would be, smoke whatever you want, but don’t blow the smoke up my ass. It may be psychically carcinogenic.…
Trust In Your Message?
There’s an aspect of this flap over Obama’s insistence that health care policies offered by institutions with religious affiliation cover birth control that I don’t see many people discussing. All the posturing over how this is anti-religious and a blatant slap at religious freedom, blah blah, is both predictable and irrelevant. For one, it’s not. For one thing, it doesn’t even approach the kind of infringement of a basic freedom that Bush’s infamous “gag rule” on abortion information represented, which Obama overturned.
But there is a common link between both that Bush-era ruling and the current stance taken by the Catholic bishops. …