FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It's good, and sort of new!

•  Got a hot-off-the-press Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue inspired by the McMinn County Board of Ed pulling Art Spiegelman’s Maus from its schools on the grounds that the rudeness of its depictions of the Holocaust and its fallout are unsuitable to its students. 

Yair Rosenberg, who is the author of one of the dumbest essays on film and TV criticism ever written, takes a look-on-the-bright-side angle on the Maus controversy: surveys suggest Americans know more about the Holocaust than they do about their own democratic processes! For obvious reasons, that’s certainly not unmixed good news; also, just because students know the Holocaust happened and who the major players were doesn’t mean they’ve grasped its full significance, and the rise and spread of eliminationist rhetoric in the United States as directed toward other minorities -- for example, the Latino immigrants whom Fox News sturmers call “poison” -- suggests that not enough of them do. It may be that, as the kids have been encouraged to think of racism as something that's over and done with (because to suggest otherwise is critical race double-plus-ungood), so they consider genocide something that was knocked out when the camps were liberated. 

Also, Maus is not the only book yahoos are currently banning or looking to ban, thanks to the CRT scare and related pathologies -- see here and here just for starters. Conservatives have been freaks about culture war for decades, but the Trump metastasis has upped the ante; once they were content to snarl every once in a while about Tinky Winky or some shit, but now they’re rampaging through reading lists and erasing anything that might give their kids a different way of looking at the world than what they try to beat into them. And heads up, because they never stop at schoolbooks.  

•  Actually there’s a bumper crop of freebies at REBID, including this one about Joe Biden calling that stupid son of a bitch a stupid son of a bitch, so go look around and, if the spirit moves you, subscribe so you can get it all on an ongoing basis. It’s cheap!

•  Rod Dreher, prestige media’s favorite religious maniac, just gets better and better. Here’s the header on my favorite Dreher post of the week:

Mouthy darkskin pussy-hat GRRRRR splurt! But what’s this about “some of her generation are choosing sterilization, because of wokeness”? Turns out this refers to a single alleged instance in the Dreher “Reader” “Mail” that constitutes most of the post, the author of which Dreher has thoughtfully anonymized lest the Woke Mob come after him, sure that’s it wink wink. 

Author’s assistant “Annie” moonlights as a bus driver, see, and she says she knows a family with three college-age girls, one of whom “graduated third in her class of thirteen hundred and was given a scholarship to attend an Ivy League university.” If you’ve ever read a rightwing column, I bet you can already hear the sinister background music! Sure enough:

The other day, Annie told me that there was a family argument because the daughter was going to schedule an appointment at the gynecologist to get her tubes tied. She is twenty-two years old! Her rationale was that the world is too awful and that no more children should be brought into this hellhole.

[Organ sting!]

I have known her daughter since she was eight years old, and for the past fourteen years her mother has told me about her increasingly radical, Leftist views. Starting in high school, the cause was environmentalism, and then being at that Ivy League university, especially during these last two years, the cause has also grown to include the usual diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice and destroy-Western-Civilization bullshit.

Wow -- if she goes to grad school, I reckon she’ll kill herself for Gaia! But wait, there’s more psychosexual just-so storytelling:

Last year, the same daughter made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to have an IUD implanted. Her mother threw a fit, as they have good health insurance; she lamented to me that if she wanted an IUD she could go to any gynecologist in the suburbs for a more hygienic and safer procedure. 

You know how dirty those Planned Parenthoods are, on account of the abortion germs. 

And what’s even more troubling is that the daughter isn’t even sexually active according to her mother (knowing the mother and the daughter, I believe it). Therefore, it wasn’t even for preventing pregnancy but rather for making a statement of solidarity with her “Black” and “Brown” sisters.

We’ve all been to the marches and seen the “PESSARY SOLIDARITY” banners, haven’t we? (I would love to hear this cowboy explain why "Black" and "Brown" are in quotes, too.)

Two years ago, none of the three daughters wished their mother a Happy Mother’s Day, as they considered it an antiquated custom. 

Wow, if only I’d thought of that one whenever I forgot to mail a card! “Sorry I missed your birthday, but you know how I feel about annualism.”

These kids are becoming evil. At least one consolation is that if the daughter gets her tubes tied, that’s the end of that bloodline.

“They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” ‘member that joke?

Now on a more optimistic note, I have attached a Christmas photo from one of my neighbors. The father is the pastor of a local Mennonite church. They have eleven children (they had twelve, but one died shortly after childbirth). They have all been homeschooled, and they are all very sweet and pleasant…

WHICH WAY, WESTERN MAN? Will it be the false god of IUD, or Daddy’s Little Brood Sow? If these clowns ever Benedict Opt out of the internet, I have to say I’ll miss the laughs.