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May 27, 2004
Fnord
The Covert Kingdom 
Christian Reconstruction and Dominionist strategists make clear in their writings that homeschooling and Christian academies have been and continue to create the Rightist Christian cadres of the future, enabling them to place ever-increasing numbers of believers in positions of governmental influence. The training of Christian cadres is far more sophisticated than the average liberal realizes. There now stretches a network of dozens of campuses across the nation, each with its strange cultish atmosphere of smiling Christian pod people, most of them clones of Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. But how many outsiders know the depth and specificity of political indoctrination in these schools? For example, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia, a college exclusively for Christian homeschoolers, offers programs in strategic government intelligence, legal training and foreign policy, all with a strict, Bible-based “Christian worldview.” Patrick Henry is so heavily funded by the Christian right it can offer classes below cost. In the Bush administration, seven percent of all internships are handed out to Patrick Henry students, along with many others distributed among similar religious rightist colleges. The Bush administration also recruits from the faculties of these schools, i.e. the appointments of right-wing Christian activist Kay Coles James, former dean of the Pat Robertson School of government, as director of the U.S. office of personnel. What better position than the personnel office from which to recruit more fundamentalists? Scratch any of these supposed academics and you will find a Christian zealot. I know because I have made the mistake of inviting a few of these folks to cocktail parties. One university department head told me he is moving to rural Mississippi where he can better recreate the lifestyle of the antebellum South, and its “Confederate Christian values.” It gets real strange real quick. CounterPunch
May 23, 2004
Sports
The New Minstrel Show: Black Vaudeville With Statistics But unlike the Stepin Fetchits, left with no alternative but to mortgage their dignity for a paycheck, who often suffered tremendously under the weight of tremendous guilt and shame, some of today’s black athletes have unwittingly packaged and sold this nouveau minstrel to Madison Avenue’s highest bidders, selling it as our “culturally authentic” behavior, “keepin’ it real,” as they say. New York Times
May 21, 2004
Thinking
Culture Clash in the South Seas The confrontation was between the members of a long-established cargo cult called the John Frum movement, and a breakaway faction which wants to move with the times and embrace Christianity. Of course the BBC article does not explain who the John Frum cultists are nor does it do justice to the economic situation on the island or explain the genesis of the conflict between the two groups. In fact, it seems to lay the blame at the feet of the cultists instead of the Christians. An excellent article, The Last Cargo Cult goes into great detail about the John Frum cultists and life on the island. Two short excerpts:
John Frum is the son of God, but he’s not Jesus. He’s a black Melanesian, but sometimes a white man – or, according to others, a black American GI. He’s a kastom messiah, come to turn the people of Tanna back to their old ways before the missionaries – but he’s also a universal avatar of change, a successor to Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed. Like Jesus, he’s poised to return – or, perhaps, he’s already here. He’s a volcano god, with an army of the dead who live down in the crater, and a spirit who approaches the men of Tanna when they drink their intoxicating kava and bring their spirits into communion with him. Back in the days of colonial rule when he first appeared, the British thought he was one of the locals dressing up and spouting nonsense to foment rebellion. They arrested a succession of ‘troublemakers’, pillorying them before their community to expose the deception, but the locals knew perfectly well that John Frum was neither this man nor that one. Apart from anything else, he continued to appear. So, a new tactic: anyone who was found to be talking John Frum nonsense was hauled off to jail in Port Vila, the administrative capital over a hundred miles away. But these ‘ringleaders’ became martyrs to the growing religion, and the stories of how John appeared to them in jail are now part of the canon of oral traditions, hymns and revelations of the new religion.
and
But by 1941 there was no doubt that something was going on. A ‘prophet’ named Manehevi from Sulphur Bay had been arrested and tied to a tree for a day by the colonial administration, pour encourager les autres, but John Frum continued to appear. Subsequent witnesses had been deported and imprisoned. Then, big news: a huge detachment of American troops had arrived on the neighbouring island of Santo. Not only had these Americans brought unheard-of amounts of cargo – arms, tanks, boats, food, medicine – but a considerable number of them were black. The centuries of unbroken symmetry between foreigners (white, rich) and locals (black, poor) had been broken, and the black GIs were variously interpreted as descendants of the islanders who’d been kidnapped by plantation owners in the past, or as John Frum’s own detachment of the US army. Messianic fervour gripped Sulphur Bay, and one Sunday morning the new movement came out into the open with a baffling act of civil disobedience which sent shock-waves through the white community. The compulsory attendance at the Presbyterian church was universally ignored; instead, a group of locals walked solemnly into the white-owned trading post and carefully removed every price label from the stock.
Now, if Christianity didn't serve the Tanna under colonial rule, why would the Frum cultists think it would be any different the second time around? Read the article. BBC News
May 12, 2004
Beef-a-Real
Florida town changes MLK street name Ben Youmans, who lives on Sixth Avenue, said he opposed renaming the street because of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
“I don’t consider Martin Luther King to be an icon or a hero to be looked up to,” he said. CNN.com
May 5, 2004
Beef-a-Real
“You got messed-up color” He shook his head and exhaled a long defeated sigh. Then he lunged forward and kissed me on the cheek before thundering down the stoop. His mother was down the block, hollering out for him in a tone that suggested he was already up to no good. Tyrone stopped for a moment, looked in her direction, and then lumbered back up the steps. He put his face close to mine and begged in a slow voice so that I would understand clearly, “Just don’t tell my momma you’re white, OK? Please don’t tell her.” Another in an endless supply of well meaning but ultimately offensive "race" articles. Salon.com
May 1, 2004
Music
Irresistible Force I tried playing [Stephin] Merritt a track by the Southern rapper Cee-lo, called “One for the Road,” a dazzling display of verbal ingenuity and wit I thought he might enjoy. Before Cee-lo actually starts rapping, there’s a short introduction, in which, sounding very Southern and very black, he says, “Yeah, mm-mm-mm, yeah that sho’ feel good. Hello, I go by the name of simply Cee-lo Green, how d’ya do? Welcome. I thought I’d seize this opportunity to tell you a little bit more about myself, if you don’t mind. This is my vision, ya know what I’m sayin’? Check me out now.”
Unremarkable and tame, at least it seemed to me, but it was too much for Merritt, who stopped the song after a few seconds of this. “I think it’s shocking that we’re not allowed to play coon songs anymore, but people, both white and black, behave in more vicious caricatures of African-Americans than they had in the 19th century. It’s grotesque. Presumably it’s just a character, and that person doesn’t actually talk that way, but that accent, that vocal presentation, would not have been out of place in the Christy Minstrels.” Dramatic pause to prepare for the inevitable hyperbolic quip, “In fact, it would probably have been considered too tasteless for the Christy Minstrels.” Article notable for its reference to rap as minstrelry. A German student’s paper on a “strange art form that is quite unknown in Germany”, the Minstrel Show. Perhaps Edward P. Christy’s untimely demise is a cautionary tale for those profiting from minstrelry? Salon.com
Music
You Are What You Eat: The pervasive porn industry and what it says about you and your desires But the more important reason, I believe, is that at some level everyone knows that the feminist critique of pornography is about more than pornography. It encompasses a critique of the way “normal” men in this culture have learned to experience sexual pleasure—and the ways in which women and children learn to accommodate that and/or suffer its consequences. That critique is not just a threat to the pornography industry or to the personal collections that men have stashed in their closets, but to everyone. The feminist critique asks a simple but devastating question of men: “Why is this sexually pleasurable to you, and what kind of person does that make you?” And because heterosexual women live with men and men’s sexual desire, those women can’t escape the question—either in terms of the desire of their boyfriends, partners, and husbands, or the way they have come to experience sexuality. That takes us way beyond magazines, movies, and computer screens, to the heart of who we are and how we live sexually and emotionally. That scares people. It probably should scare us. It has always scared me. Robert Jensen, School of Journalism, University of Texas
Music
The Height of Disrespect The most telling attitudinal change from the “movement” years is the absence of any influence of feminism and the open disdain for black women. As the authors put it, “Black females are valued by no one.” The study’s glossary includes six nouns used to describe males: Dog, homeboy, playa, lame, sugar daddy, and payload, another word for sugar daddy.
For women, there are at least 15, none good: Block bender, woo-wop, flip-flop, skeezer, ‘hood rat, ‘ho, and trick all mean promiscuous female. In addition, there are freak, bitch, gold digger, hoochie mama, runner, flipper, shorty, and the more ambiguous wifey. Young women in the interviews also use some of these terms. Visit the study's sponsor and read the Executive Summary (PDF). Village Voice
Music
The Porn Myth For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.
Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices. New York Magazine
Political Animal
A World Beckons After 34 Years: Man stole TV, OKs 18-month transition A Johnston County man imprisoned for almost 34 years for stealing an old woman’s television might finally go free—in another year and a half.
The state Parole Commission has decided to release Junior Allen in October 2005, after job training and work release, and assuming he behaves until then. He beats the odds, makes it to 65 and still gets no social security. Raleigh (NC) News and Observer