Saturday, September 9, 2023

The Security Apparatus Loves White Supremacy

Probably the most racist thing I encountered during my LDS childhood (and there were many) was the time we went to Youth Conference at Gettysburg College when I was 16.  Instead of touring the sites and monuments of the battle like any reasonable youth group, we only went to the battlefield to play a silly and offensive game of "Lamanites vs. Nephites" in which we reenacted some supposed battle in which the wicked and cursed dark-skinned ancestors of the indigenous peoples of the Americas killed their more righteous and still-white kinspeople.  That's right - we play-acted some mythic battle of a ludicrous cult of white supremacy on the very ground in which the US Army courageously battled to stop the advances of a cause of white supremacy, losing thousands of men in the process.

It was even more absurd than the time two years earlier when we had to watch a silly pageant depicting such events on the hill where Joseph Smith claimed to have received gold plates from the prophet-warrior turned angel Moroni, who was the last representative of that supposed group of white Israelites to not be killed by their savage, dark-skinned brethren. 

Saturday, September 2, 2023

The Great Atlantic and Pacific Athletic Conference

 It's great that the ACC Basketball Tournament will finally be properly honoring Jason Kidd and Phil Chenier as ACC Legends.

Sunday, August 27, 2023

The Party for Your Right to Fight

 Smithsonian magazine with a great article about the pride of the East Bay, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and its co-founder Huey P. Newton.

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Peak '70s

 I saw the end of a "McMillan and Wife" episode (thanks, Roku channels!) in which an earthquake revealed a skeleton in the chimney of Rock Hudson and Susan St. James's San Francisco home.  Richard Dawson guest starred as an American who was impersonating a British insurance claims adjuster in order to steal Greek emeralds hidden in the chimney. 

Monday, July 17, 2023

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Go Bears!

 Agnes Callard (of course, she's a Chicago grad and Berkeley PhD) eviscerates tourism -

"The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-case-against-travel

Why do anti-intellectuals endlessly promote anti-intellectualism when we all know that it is the most fundamental form of bigotry and the American disgrace?


Sunday, May 7, 2023

Eight IS Enough to Fill Our Lives with Love

 I've been watching "Eight Is Enough" episodes being shown in marathon form on one of the Roku channels.  It's a show that I was vaguely aware of when I was a little kid from ads on ABC and Willie Aames and Adam Rich kind of being third-tier teen and kid idols, although I never watched a second of the show, probably because it was on past my bedtime.

It's actually pretty good, better than I would have supposed.  It's a very light family drama (I think some episodes might actually have a laugh track).  It sometimes has elements of melodrama, although it isn't really a soap opera in a traditional sense in that there is absolutely no villain.  It probably hearkens back to the earliest days of TV as well as radio and family dramas such as "Mama" (which featured "Eight" star Dick Van Patten) and the original "The Goldbergs."  It's also very clearly from the late '70s and early '80s with references to disco and later designer jeans.  Several episodes deal with equal rights for women, with some resistance from the men in the family, and one concerns a high school girl wanting to go on the pill.