The last of the informal series of locked posts should appear shortly. I’ve been struggling to find the perfect hook, and it just jumped up my nose. Ouch.
You get some people talking about how the PC Police are ruining everybody’s fun, eventually they’ll lament the fact the Little Black Sambo has been flushed down the memory hole. The disappearance of Little Black Sambo is, to these people, a symbol of all that’s wrong with society today.
An example? Of course I have an example, but you’ll need backstory.
Sadly, No! has an article up poking fun at conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel, who has a new piece castigating Disney for portraying Tinkerbell in tights and a cloak instead of her traditional micro-minidress. PC run amok, amirite? Anyway, a S,N! commenter reposts one of Schlussel’s commenters’ comments:
I live in San Diego, Ca., the Wife and I took our six year old granddaughte to see Disney on Ice, this past fri. 10-9-09, and the first one out on the ice was Tinkerbell, she was wearing her little tiny mini skirt and her great big smile, waving to all the kids, my granddaughter has also seen Disneys Song of the South, and when I find it I will also read to her Little Black Sambo. Have no fear Debbie the righteous will win out.
(Do you think the commenter is even trying to veil his racism? Is it possible he thinks he’s speaking in code? Hell, is it possible that the commenter honestly believes he isn’t racist? Anyway.)
So I think it’s clear that this commenter believes Sambo has become a rare commodity, hidden away from prying eyes. Like I say, the book has become a standard for Ant-PC types to rally around, because it was one of the earliest casualities of the do-gooders.
And yet there are two editions available for order from Amazon right now.
And yet there are over 1000 American libraries with copies of the book available right now.
And yet there are 10 copies of the book available in the San Diego public library system right now.
And yet anybody with a San Diego library card can view the book for free online right now!
For a forbidden book, it sure is widely available.
So I’m left to wonder, do none of the people using Sambo as a symbol of PC perfidy know how to find a book? Or do they just not care about finding out whether claims are true before repeating them? And of those two options, which would be more damning?
Seriously, I have no idea. I know he can’t mean what the words literally suggest, because that’s just fucking stupid.
See this Videogum article with embedded clip, because it’s not worth linking directly to the YouTube video.
So the existence of the Mean Joe Greene Coke commercial proves that there was racial harmony in 1979? A schmaltzy Kodak commercial made up of home movies (or, more likely, professionally produced footage shot to resemble home movies) and stock footage from the 1950s proves…something?
Deranged as the man is, he must think he’s saying something meaningful. That is, he must think that he’s not just babbling–even if his monologue is intentionally a string of buzzwords, he must intend for those buzzwords to be meaningful to his audience. Whether he believe the message to be true or not is irrelevant; he’s a demagogue, so he must intend for his words to be received as truth by his viewers. The question is, what does he think that received truth is?
(Discussing the rhetoric of demagogues requires convolution. Ugh.)
Anyone with a cursory knowledge of recent history and the definitions of common words will immediately realize that the literal meaning of his speech is bullshit. Even if we grant that Beck’s audience aren’t the sharpest tools on the Island of Misfit Tools, we must allow that many of them are at least aware of stuff like the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, clashes over the Establishment Clause, gay liberation, et fucking cetera during the period in which American were allegedly unified. We must also allow that they understand the word “united” to mean something like “in broad agreement, generally in a single accord” and the word “Americans” to mean “all citizens of the USA”.
Clearly, I think, Beck intends for his audience to interpret his speech using not the historical facts and denotational definitions of the words he uses; he’s assuming that his audience will interpret him using Story instead of history and connotations instead of denotations. So the question is: when Beck says those words, what does his audience hear?
My assumption about what Beck intends to communicate to his audience is embarrassingly by-the-book, which means there’s a good chance I too am falling prey to Story instead of performing reality-based analysis. I’ll share it anyway:
Glenn Beck is asking his audience to remember, and to cherish, and to long for, a time when they were exposed to a single cultural narrative, a narrative which was shaped to appeal more-or-less directly to them. Questions of race relations were consigned to Very Special Episodes, feminists were talk-show guests once every six weeks; they may have been something the audience knew existed, maybe something that was A Serious Problem Worth Considering, but they were still cordoned off into their own little areas within but not really part of the major narrative. The only culture Beck’s audience encountered was roughly their own, interrupted occasionally by outsiders who were at all times clearly marked as ambassadors on a tour of the mainstream.[1]
People like to talk about how the culture has fractured. That, of course, is bullshit; there’s been no fracturing, there’s only been the end-of-invisibility of numerous other cultures that were always there culturing. If Adam had been the only soap-box philosopher in the square for thirty years, the appearance of Bob and Carol on their own soap-boxes doesn’t diminish (or enhance) the legitimacy of Adam’s pontifications. It does, however, mean that Adamites are now forced to react to the existence of Bob and Carol and to the existence of the Bobists and Carolinians who are now visiting the square instead of, I don’t know, hanging around the docks. Metaphors are hard.
I submit that if you were to give a typical Beck audience member a pop quiz, they would correctly identify the existence of the various civil rights movements during the entire latter half of the 20th century, and they would correctly claim that black culture has existed since before the 1950s. They know these facts, I’d bet on it.
But they were also able to live most of their lives without being unexpectedly exposed to these facts when consuming culture. They were able to live as if Americans were united, because they only saw unity or safely distanced examples of disunity. Well, today we have 400 TV channels instead of four, and enough people both have money and identify with nonwhite, nonstraight, nonchristian, inclusive-or nonmainstream cultures that advertisers are willing to pander to them, too.
To Adamites, it looks like cultural unity has been destroyed even though they know the facts that prove it never existed in the first place. The only thing that has been destroyed is the illusion of unity, but it appears illusions matter more than reality to most people.[2] And Glenn Beck know that. And that pisses me off.
Still, this theory seems way too pat, way too much like something a liberal blogger would theorize, and that makes me suspicious. Alternative thoughts?
[1]Or as refugees seeking mainstream asylum; there could be some disturbing implications in that Mean Joe Greene Coke commercial, a genuine game jersey being considerably more valuable than a bottle of Coca-Cola but perhaps equal in value to a soda plus the beneficence of a white boy to a scary black man. I am intentionally over-reading here, duh, but it is intriguing.[1a]
[1a] It is not, however, over-reading to point out that the entire fucking point of the commercial is that the scary black man turns out not to be scary after all. When your culture is capable of producing and praising product whose message is, “See? Those people aren’t so bad after all,” then you’re still a long way from unity and only a dumb-ass would claim such product as proof of such. A dumb-ass like Glenn Beck.
[2] Definitely most people. Not just Beck’s audience, not just conservatives, not just any single group. Illusions seem to determine the way most people live, and probably have always lived their lives; it’s somehow easier to see the Story than what’s right there in front of you. Hell, even Jesus hinted at it with the eyes and motes thing.
But then they go and get him incomprehensibly wrong, so wrong that I was actually shocked and appalled.
Bats is piloting the Batplanejetshuttle into a low-orbital dogfight, and minor characters Hawk and Dove are tagging along. The two backup characters are squabbling in the backseat, generally being overgrown brats, and Batman delivers an aside to the camera:
Those two make me glad I’m an only child.
!!!
Batman is an only child because his parents were gunned down outside a theater, leaving him to grow up alone and lonely, accompanied only by his desire for revenge (and a butler). There’s not one damned thing Bruce Wayne would be more glad of than having a younger brother. That fact is so deeply ingrained in the character, in our unconscious understanding of the character, that it can’t be violated even in the delightfully light and campy Brave and the Bold cartoon without jarring a viewer who’s only half paying attention.
Um. Iraq? Afghanistan? They’re still happening, you know.
I guess if they could tap Henry Kissinger then nothing’s impossible, but still. Must’ve been a pretty slow year for peace.
It will be fun to watch the wingnuts froth, though.
So last night I was working the desk. A student came in and took a long look at our Banned Books Week display and came up, visibly shaken. We started talking about the display and about BBW in general, and I tried to calm him down a little by explaining that very few of the BBW books were ever actually removed from any libraries. He wanted to go over individual titles, so I pulled out the handy booklet and we did.
The book that shocked him most was To Kill a Mockingbird. We looked it up and found:
Retained in the English curriculum by the Cherry Hill, N.J. Board of Education (2007). A resident had objected to the novel’s depiction of how blacks are treated by members of a racist white community in an Alabama town during the Depression. The resident feared the book would upset black children reading it.
I agreed with the student that this seemed like weak reasoning, but I also suggested that maybe black people might be legitimately uncomfortable reading the book, especially because of the lack of agency given them by the author.[1,2]
We talked a while longer and the guy’s friends showed up to study. He was still shaken, and he told his friends about all the small-minded censors in the world.[3] “They even tried to ban To Kill a Mockingbird,” he said, “because it was racist!”
His friend erupted. “Racist!?! The whole point of the book is that racism is bad! It’s ridiculous. Those people are never satisfied.”
Quite.
[1] Seriously, doesn’t it strike anyone else as weird that, in the book generally regarded as the classic work of American anti-racist literature, all the black people are pretty much MacGuffins and window-dressing?
[2] I’ve given up on trying to explain to straight white men how certain words can hurt, and that, no, you really can’t just decide to not give them power over you. Eventually you can sort of numb yourself to them, but that’s a lot to expect of a tenth-grader.
[3] There are about 350000000 Americans. There were about 530 challenges last year. Yeah.
No, it’s not amazing that you haven’t heard of this study, not if you’ve been paying attention.
Drouin, Michelle and Claire Davis. “R u txting? Is the use of text speak hurting your literacy?” Journal of Literacy Research. Vol.41(1), Jan 2009, pp. 46-67.
ABSTRACT: Recent negative media attention surrounding the use of text speak (shorthand abbreviations of words such as gr8 for “great”) and the potentially detrimental effects of text speak on literacy prompted this study of texting and literacy in 80 college students. Thirty-four text speak users and 46 nontext speak users were assessed on their proficiency and familiarity with text speak as well as their standardized literacy levels and misspellings of common text speak words. Results showed that while text speak users were more proficient with the vocabulary, both groups showed familiarity with text speak. More important, there were no significant differences between the two groups in standardized literacy scores or misspellings of common text speak words. Thus, our analyses showed that the use of text speak is not related to low literacy performance. Nonetheless,more than half of the college students in this sample, texters and nontexters alike, indicated that they thought text speak was hindering their ability to remember standard English. These conflicting findings are discussed within a framework of future directions for research.
Hey, let’s pull out one of the money sentences and add some emphasis!
Thus, our analyses showed that the use of text speak is not related to low literacy performance.
So it’s not surprising that you haven’t heard of this study, because the only texting-related studies you hear about are the ones that can be used in jeremiads against new media. And because of that, we get results like this:
Nonetheless,more than half of the college students in this sample, texters and nontexters alike, indicated that they thought text speak was hindering their ability to remember standard English.
Tell them that texting makes ‘em stupid and they’ll think that texting is making them stupid, even if it ain’t. This narrative needs smashing.