3 Generations of Imbeciles

When he was a high school junior, my dopey brother wrote an application to the Virginia state Governor's School about how Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was his intellectual mentor.  It was a pretty clear declaration of his opposition to civil liberties given that Holmes authored the infamous Buck v. Bell decision that upheld the legality of Virginia's forced sterilization law, ostensibly intended for the intellectually and physically impaired but really used to cull those deemed socially and racially undesirable.

It was even more provocative because he was headed to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the place where Carrie Buck worked as a maid and was raped and impregnated by a male member of the family, only to be sent to a state farm for the mentally enfeebled and ordered to be sterilized.

And because the Governor's School was held in Staunton, site of the DeJarnette Sanitarium and Western State Hospital.  Joseph DeJarnette was the enthusiastic architect of the Virginia sterilization law and program who helped inspire the Nazi eugenics effort.  In 1934, he lobbied the state General Assembly to extend the sterilization law to match the Nazis saying, "The Germans are beating us at our own game and are more progressive than we are."   

The Security Apparatus Relentlessly Supports Genocide

From Alicia Puglionesi's In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire - 

"Today's archaeologists see the Mound Builders' immense popularity as a case study in how genocide and dispossession overwrite Indigenous history.  Lost-race narratives furnished a usable past for proponents of Manifest Destiny, since if Indians overthrew the ancient Phoenician or Celtic kingdoms of the Ohio Valley, it was only fair play that Europeans, heirs to the mantle of civilization, would overthrow the Indians in turn.  These narratives proved so compelling for white Americans that critical archaeologists faced a long battle to debunk them and establish a pre-Colombian history based on their scientific standards.  That battle is by no means over today ...."

Three Generations of Imbeciles Apparently Isn't Sufficient for University of Virginia Medical School

Ewen Cameron - performed barbaric and idiotic experiments in torture that violated the Nuremberg Code (despite his having been at Nuremberg as a psychiatrist) for decades - History of Psychiatry article. So esteemed by his fellow psychiatrists that he was elected president of the American Psychiatric Association, Canadian Psychiatric Association, and inaugural president of the World Psychiatric Association. What a rigorous specialty! 

Wilford Spradlin - interned at McGill in the late 1950s when Cameron was the psychiatry department's most eminent, albeit idiotic, figure. Has co-authored a whole series of risible New Age books on "reverential phenomena." 

Randolph Canterbury - Spradlin Professor of Psychiatry, tells idiotic and offensive anecdotes to an auditorium full of medical school students while participating in the wholesale violation of medical ethics including the deliberate withholding of medical diagnosis (strabismus) and thus care. His actions constituted ritualistic reenactment of the abuses and overweening physician arrogance displayed in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. He thus flagrantly dishonors the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., himself the victim of egregious surveillance and mistreatment. 

Given the pace at which UVa and its medical school get around to acknowledging egregious violations of medical ethics, I would expect some form of token apology in about 70 years.

Wow, I was mistaken - physicians really are intellectually and ethically sophisticated!

Thomas F.X. Noble

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised at how thoroughly bigoted Tom Noble is, given how casually and needlessly he dropped the n-world in classroom conversation. Oh well, I'm sure he made a fine president of the American Church History Association and American Catholic Hisotry Assocation. He's not doing much to dispel stereotypes about anti-intellectualism among religious believers though.

AOC and Juan Peron

I like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and don't understand why the far-right is obsessed with demonizing her, but I was amused that she reasonably got in trouble with progressives for romanticizing Eva Peron. Donald Trump apparently compared her to Peron as portrayed in the musical, and she responded with two tweets quoting her. Progressives were reasonably appalled. Opinion is divided on her degree of complicity, but there is consensus that the Peron regime aided Nazis. As the Washington Post stated:

One thing is for sure, though: her husband, former Argentine president Juan Perón, most definitely aided and abetted Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, who performed horrifying medical experiments on Jews in the camps.

Oh well, I think David Byrne wrote a disco-pop musical about Imelda Marcos, so I guess some non-historians like to romanticize such repressive, authoritarian regimes.

"Eight is Enough" S2.E3 Triangles

Tom takes Nicholas to the local indoor pool to teach him how to swim. They of course remove all of their clothes (swimming indoors in the nude was common for men and boys in the early 20th century) only to run back to the locker room when they learn the pool is coed at that time. Wikipedia says that the practice of men swimming nude had ended by the early '70s with the rise of coed athletic activities, so people watching in 1977 would have gotten the joke even if it seems bizarre now. Never shy about recycling jokes, the show later had Tom taking Nicholas to a "Snow White" movie that turned out to be a porno and David and Nicholas touring an apartment complex that turned out to be for nudists ("I thought going natural meant they didn't allow any junk food!"). In every case, the two enter, followed by a reveal of a sign explaining the true situation, and the pair running back in shock.

"Eight Is Enough" Pilot Episode

- There's a good "Sonny Jurgensen knew when to retire" joke in the opening touch football scene. They later mention George Allen. 

- Mr. Bradford's secretary is played by a different actress than the usual Donna, but she says, "Goodbye, Mr. Bradford" in the same way. 

- David (Mark Hamill) says he dropped out of Cal. It's later mentioned various times that he dropped out of college, but I think this is the only time the particular school is mentioned.