Thanks, Mr. Savage—you've given me a better title for my ENGL 945 course. Last night (9/5), you made reference to "wackjob moron feminist treehuggers." What an interesting appellation! Henceforth, then, I think I should call my Native Ecofeminist class "Wackjob Moron Feminist Treehugger Squaws." Okay, maybe squaw isn't a word you'd be brazen enough to utter on the radio, but I assume it's an epithet that swims around comfortably in your consciousness.
Several of the main cable news channels are displaying a visual of Hurricane Dean as a marquee in one corner, as it tears through the Caribbean. But sometimes when I'm channel-surfing and not thinking (happens a lot), I suddenly come upon this visual and see at first—gasp—a BREAST. And the hurricane's eye is the NIPPLE. "I do not know what makes me see these things." (Hey, that was iambic pentameter. Cool.)
THE BILL ENGVALL SHOW [TBS; aired tonight (8/14/07)]:
[At a Parents-Teachers Conference:]
BILL: You didn't like to read Jane Austin as a teen[ager], did yu'?
TEACHER: Yes, I did.
BILL: Well, that's just GAY.
[BIG AUDIENCE LAUGH.]
When I read the transcript above to my wife over the phone, expecting a surprise/outrage that mirrored my own, she said instead, "I'd need to know the full context." HUH? Would she have have had less of an ethical dilemma if Bill had said, "That's so Negro" (the teacher was black, BTW) or "You're such a fag"?
Paul Zeise, a beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has created a new round of controversy in the Michael Vick saga by uttering the following on a Pittsburg talk show: "It's really a sad day in this country when . . . Michael Vick would have been better off raping a woman [rather than running a vicious dog-fighting racket] . . . . Had he done that, he probably would have been suspended for [only] four games [rather than a year] and he'd be back on the field." To me, the meat of this new controversy is that several national sports commentators have come to Zeise's defense (e.g., John Fricke), via at least the implication that the current atmosphere of "political correctness" has led to a privileging of wild animals over our own women.
On one important level, these people are right, of course: Kobe Bryant and the legion of athletes charged with rape and spousal abuse have been getting mere hand-slaps from their leagues & teams, as the patriarchal game of wink-wink continues. They should be getting much more severe penalties. However, this issue is really independent of the Michael Vick episode; and the stance above, in its ostensible attempt to be anti-sexist, reveals once again an utter anthropocentrism: i.e., a human (woman) is more important than another animal. I, for one, believe that being instrumental in the violent deaths of many individuals of another species is a greater crime than the sexual abuse of any single member of our one species (whatever the gender). There, I've said it. Zeise, Fricke, et al. are wrong; it is hardly a "sad day," but a positive evolution in the general consciousness, in my mind. What
Of course I'm completely wrong in the "separate issue" thing, but this twist of an admission takes the argument to entirely different level. A major tenet of ecofeminism is that what the patriarchy does to women and "animals" (and to Natives and the environment) comes from the same source, an imperialist White male need to identify and ostracize an Other, including a propensity to commit violence against "her"—to maintain at last a master/slave, Self/Other, civilization/nature hierarchal binary, to reassure the Self of its superior status. What is truly surprising, then, is that these commentators are speaking of the two crimes as if they were fundamentally different things!
I channel-surf too much. I jut saw a before and after pair of pictures, of a woman's eyes, and I thought the "before" looked so much more alive and attractive. What are these cosmetic people thinking? I recall French feminist Hélène's Cixous's assertion that make-up is a way that women "kill" themselves ("ghastly" appearance-wise), under the pressure of a gynocidal patriarchy. But her comment only became real to me now, listening to this discourse that seems from another planet.
For instance: oh, this product gives one those much-cherished "pouty" lips, which "we all" want. All women do?! And what, exactly, are you all pouting about, besides the fact that capitalism has rendered you visual OBJECTS stuck with a bogus aesthetics? (More words I'm hearing right now: "concealer"; "cover up"; "spots"; "punch-up"; "larger pores"; "eraser." It's as if one were ashamed of being a corporeal being, a real animal.)
As an advocate of the developmentally disabled, I despise those comedians who must say "RETARDED" over and over, as part of their limited & relatively talentless shtick: e.g., Carlos Mencia. (And hey, Carlos, no Indian with any self-respect would mock his own race like you mock yours.) I've also noticed, in this decade, that the use of the word "retarded" among the general public—and above all, MY STUDENTS—has become even more blatant. I always stop them in class when they use the word: "you mean 'developmentally disabled?'" Obviously, they're trying to redefine a term in a way that I both resent and deny. Ditto "gay," as my students say: "that's so gay." I ask them: "you mean homosexual, and in an obvious negative connotation?" Nope, they have no clue thereof—things are just "gay"—I guess because, like Paris Hilton, they haven't got outside their six-friend, six-video-game, 600-pop-song, 6,000-word-vocabulary "retarded" lives. Excuse me for my language.
I believe that tomorrow night is the CNN "YouTube" Democratic debate, for which "home youtubers" can send in their video questions for the candidates. Questions you WON'T hear in the debate:
1) What should the government be doing about Silicon Lizard? ["Silicon Lizard" = the title of an old surrealist poem of mine]
2) Please raise your hand if you think all this talk about religion in the primary debates has been a bunch of disingenuous, pandering, hypocritical bullshit. [Assuming no hands are raised, a follow-up question (the one that Larry King asked Paris Hilton!):] What is your favorite passage from the Bible? [Then:] How many minority groups does this passage alienate & ostracize?
3) Would you consider a gay Native American paraplegic as a running mate?
4) Please raise your hand if you really consider George W. Bush to be an illiterate nincumpoop who will certainly be remembered as the worst president in history by far.
5) Tell us what you think—or know—that the candidate to the right of you likes to do in bed, as his/her most lascivious & taboo turn-on. (The candidate on their far right can speculate instead on whether metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.)
6) When did you last beat your significant other?
7) If elected, do you promise never to serve, and to leave the country & never come back? [a paraphrase from somebody else's poem, by I forget who]
8) If you idiot Democrats couldn't even beat George W. Bush in two straight elections, what are you wasting our time for, again? (Shouldn't we select a candidate, at least, whose first name is CHAD?)
9) Given you liberals' great concern for global warming, will you promise to campaign around the country without the use of fossil-fuel transportation? (Hey, it'll work those hips & bellies off o' some of yu'.)
10) Will you PLEASE promise never to end a speech with anything close to "God bless America"? If not, could you define both "God" and "America" in your campaign materials? If no to both, could you please read Dante's Inferno and accustom yourself to the most nether circle of Hades, because that's where I'm telling you to go?
As someone who grew up a poor breed introvert in the "sticks," I spent a lot of time reading the classics on my own—but never hearing anyone pronounce the names of the people I was reading. So through junior high and high school, I thought "Yeats" rhymed with "Keats," and I pronounced the German author of Faust as "GOHTH"—and never lived it down, in my own mind. So I'm particularly sensitive about pronunciation. The following, then, are really complaints about mes semblables et mes frères, to paraphrase Baudelaire:
1) Rush Limbaugh, for instance, had a running commercial blurb a few weeks ago in which he mocked those (of us) who have mocked his grandiloquence. But he pronounced the word "grandELoquent." There's irony for thee, good apothecary.
2) But Michael Savage is (again) my main target of complaint. Since his doctorate is in nutritional science (or nutritional ethnomedicine—there seems some controversy here), you'd think he'd know that the h in "herbal" is silent, but he continually aspirates it when he speaks of formerly being in the "herbal business." This may be some inside joke with himself and long-time listeners; if so, I don't get it. (Like Rush, he also seems to think that emphasizing one syllable of a word overly long is either very funny or otherwise incredibly rhetorically effective. Again, I don't get it.) . . . Also, instead of pronouncing homocide as "HAWMuhside," like most of us, he insists on saying "HOMOside." But this may again be an attempt at humor & political-moral commentary: "Look! I can attack gays even when I'm talking about something else completely!" . . . However, I'm certain that he doesn't know how to pronounce monolingual and proselytize; the first syllables, respectively, are not "MOH" and "PROH." . . . Finally (and this is grammar, not pronunciation), Savage has half-remembered some apocryphal Voltaire this last week or two, having at several points said to us liberals that he "will fight to the death your right to"—well, be stupidly, wackily liberal and wrong. But the original is "defend to the death," of course; Savage's version is syntactic gibberish. (Or the OPPOSITE of what he means: "fight your right"?!)
3) Finally, it's no great shock that the French language has never had a chance in the good ol' USA. Close to home—in South Dakota—French-Indian names that end in -eaux often end up being pronounced as "-ooh" (e.g., Roubideaux; Flandreaux). A vowel shift of sorts, really. But my big gripe in this category involves media pronunciations of Moulin Rouge, especially in the song "Lady Marmalade" from the recent movie about said French placename. Why someone has insisted that they sing "moohLAW(n)" is beyond me, especially since there are also many mainstream media examples of its correct pronunciation. (This includes the actors in the movie itself, one web site claims, although I don't remember myself if this is true. It's another of those movies that my wife made me watch. While that damned bird of hers bit the hell out of me!)
I'm tired of these immigrants to the grand ol' U.S.A. who refuse to assimilate. You know who I mean. For instance, there's this town in Nebraska I drive through on the way to my wive's in SoDak: since it dubs itself the "Swedish Capital of Nebraska," many of its business signs sport the foreign word, Valkommen. (This may be some code word to new illegal Swedes, for all I know, still sneaking in by the buggy-load . . . from Minnesota?) Let's ASSIMILATE, people! We didn't let you into this country so that you could cling to the antique foreigner ways of your ethnic isolationism—which, from what I hear on the talk radio, consist mainly of sexual and socialist perversions.
A new poll out today (regarding Romney's candidacy) says that a good third of Americans don't believe that Mormons are Christian; another third do; and another third don't know/aren't sure. This correlates well with my own experience with college undergraduates, who—Christian or not—have little notion of the history of (even Western) religion. Thus I often get comments from well-meaning Protestants that not only are Mormons a wacko non-Christian sect-of-a-nut-job, but so are—Catholics! (And never mind any knowledge of the history of Protestantism.) Maybe I'm thankful that I don't get so many student essays quoting the Bible as their only source anymore—but maybe not: this new generation of Christian irrationalists seems to have acquired its entire ideology from parents and conservative media—and they have little idea of the actual tenets of whatever sect they adhere to, short of "I'm anti-abortion," "I hate faggots/queers," and "I'm 'agin' all that evolution-monkey talk." (Recall that, at the recent Republican presidential-candidate debate, when asked who DIDN'T believe in evolution, three of the ten old-white-males actually raised their shaky, Bible-toting hands.)
Likewise, my students also have written me, on occasion, that the Lakota Sun Dance is an inhumane cruelty of a ritual—usually the same students who claim that The Passion of the Christ is one dang fine edifying movie. . . . (I remember that at least one Christian web site was selling commemorative "spikes"—to be worn around the neck—during this movie's heyday; I also recall that I didn't buy one, however tempted. [Wait, my wife did buy me a cheap "facsimile" thereof for my birthday or Christmas—it was "so kewl."])
My wife keeps telling me what ugly birds Turkey Vultures are. "The eye of the beholder," etc., and an anthropocentric projection of human valuations regarding baldness, and wrinkles, et al. Having watched this species all my life—in flight, and yes, even scavenging on the ground—I find these birds to be one of the most "beautiful" in the world. (The birds in the photo are performing the morning ritual of drying their wings out, under a sun that will also create the thermals upon which they will eventually take flight.)
Oh, of course the cartoon blurbs per se involve a satire on that warped ideal of female beauty perpetrated by the pop media. ("Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" is the fairly famous line uttered by a brunette "vixen" in a long-running shampoo commercial [late 1980's?].)
There is an unconscious Zeitgeist working among the young, a general intuition that not only is Western Civilization no longer "quite right," but the planet itself is in dire straits.Last night [4/23/07] Michael Savage brought up a news story about a fellow who lopped off his own penis in a London public venue—which Savage perceived as a literal manifestation of a larger "truth," that is, support for his own frequent harangue against contemporary Britain as emasculated, as a pathetic after-lingering of a once great (because macho-aggressive) Empire. Well, from a postcolonial point of view, I'd consider this a good thing!? But I have to admit that Savage does perform, at times, some intriguing figurative thinking of this sort.
But what does he see, then, in Columbine and VA Tech? What do these events "say" about us Americans? Cho's ethnicity aside (though Savage can never let that be), Savage's answer has been predictable: these slaughters are symptomatic, of course, of an over-liberal/indulgent society going to hell in a handcart, bereft of any solid religious and moral grounding. (But again, I even consider this current relativistic "plight" to be a good thing, by and large, at least in contrast to a monocultural theocracy.) And yet I'd still read the school-shootings phenomenon only slightly differently, in a more "ecological" fashion, if you will. (Think lemmings.) I believe that there is an unconscious Zeitgeist working among the young, a general intuition that not only is Western Civilization no longer "quite right," but the planet itself is in dire straits. What future, then? Ergo a pandemic turn to depressant drugs, suicide, school shootings—violence directed both inward and outward, towards a "thinning out" of a "botched" species? This despair may even be exemplified in our retreatist last-gasp immersion in the virtual realities of the web and video games. . . . Hmmm: at last, my reading may be even more pessimistic than Savage's.
The very thought of pessimism, by the way, always makes me think of Schopenhauer—who would put all this yap about British & American "character" in its proper perspective (Quot. of the Day):National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country.
--Schopenhauer
I have nothing original to add regarding the whole Imus/"nappy headed ho's" controversy—except by noting how frequently Imus was actually defended, in backdoor fashion, on the call-in talk shows, by white callers who inevitably began, "What Imus said is reprehensible, BUT . . . ." (e.g., hey, it's a 1st-Amendment free speech issue; hey, black rappers use this language, too; etc.). It's just scary how it immediately became a black-and-white blame-game issue; furthermore, it's hard to imagine, in this context, that the timing of the announcement of the Duke soccer players' innocence was coincidental.
Predictably, the initial outrage against Imus was also widely sounded on national sports talk radio, including in the guise of none other than Jim Rome. But Rome should recall his own 1994 ESPN-talk-show escapade, in which he continually questioned NFL quarterback Jim Everett's bravery in the pocket by insisting on calling him "Chris" (as in Chris Evert, the female tennis player) to his face. (A physical melee ensued.) This is a much more subtle example of misogyny than Imus's, no doubt, but isn't teasing a fellow by calling him a woman's name an implicit demeaning of women, too, and homophobic besides? "Translation: "You're a woman! Effeminate! Weak! Cowardly! Not a real ['manly'] man!" Is it any wonder that Everett jumped him immediately? (Not to reinforce some macho attitude, but heck, I'm pretty sure Chrissy Evert coulda takin' Romie out, too.)
If you let your mind roam free—like the "buffalo"—you can hear Thin Lizzy's old 1976 tune "Cowboy Song" as a precursor to the movie Brokeback Mountain. Yes, it's ostensibly about yearning for a "certain female," but most of the lyrics have homoeroticism written all over them.
The "frisky" first chorus is as follows: Roll me over and turn me around—
Let me keep spinnin' 'til I hit the ground—
Roll me over and let me go,
Running free with the buffalo—
The second verse begins—I was took in Texas—I did not know her name—
Lord, all these southern girls seem the same—
Hmmm. "Pretty cold"?! Most telling are the closing stanzas (symptomatically[?] omitted on most of the web versions of the lyrics!):[spoken:] Roll me over—
And I'll turn around—
And I'll move my fingers
Up and down—up and down—
It's okay, amigo—
Just let me go—
Ridin' in the rodeo.
[sung:] Roll me over and turn me around—
Let me keep spinnin' till I hit the ground—
Roll me over and let me go—
Ride me in the rodeo—
Roll me over and set me free—
The cowboy's life is the life for me.
It was curious to listen in on how the John Ameche vs. Tim Hardaway flap played out a few weeks ago on sports-talk radio. Ameche had just "come out of the closet" after having retired from the NBA; fellow NBA alumnus Hardaway, when asked about the possibility of a gay teammate, said, "I hate gay people."
As expected, Hardaway's remark was lambasted nearly unanimously by ESPN, Fox Sports, and local-affiliate radio-heads—with good reason, of course. But what strikes me as curious about the whole affair is how disingenuous, even hypocritical, this whole chorus seemed, given the day-to-day blatant macho heterosexism that characterizes most of the "talent" in the syndicated sports talk media. The interminable adolescents-in-an-alley sexist wink-wink double entendres about women, the frequent admonishments to "man up" and to "show you got a pair," come across finally as desperate appeals of "Look at me! I'm a manly man (though I may well be in sports 'journalism' because I wasn't even 'man' enough to make the high school varsity team)!" The shtick on ESPN's morning show between Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic—the former casting himself as a metrosexual "sissy man," much to Golic's consciously exaggerated manly-man chagrin—may seem to be an exception, but it ultimately only reinforces the heterosexist ideology. But the heterosexism really deconstructs itself in the banter between many a radio-sports-talk-show team, as their interchange becomes "embarrassingly" (to them, if they were conscious of it) "homosocial"—to use Eve Sedgwick's term—even homoerotic. (A welcome exception: at least Dan Patrick can be consciously self-ironic about it.)
Of course, this is just one manifestation of sports fandom as the great homosocial outlet for the American male. . . . Come now, we don't look forward so desperately to next Saturday afternoon w/ a six-pack and the boys just because Whatsamatta U. is playing South-South-Central Missouri State, do we? Hey, and if it's football, we get to watch other men throw their bodies against each other. Woo-hoo! "Go—uh—Big Red!" . . .
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