Incoherence is a deliberate strategy in all of this: because it encourages consent to bad ideas by actors on that side & makes the other look snide or condescending, but it also dissipates our resistance in joke-telling & high-fiving on the birb site.
We have to be aware of what the real-world issue is in these cases. Heteronormativity, patriarchy, nuclear families, keeping women servile babymakers (those are parts #1 & 2)
But part #3 is interesting: it's not about the nudity, it never was about the nudity. Saying that it was allows 8 of the 10 school board members to feel comfortable voting to ban Maus. Because that gives them cover to perpetuate a violence that is quite common in the USA. Jewish groups decrying this decision didn't fall for it (or the awful timing of the decison), because they've seen it all before. But northern liberals (of basic Xtn orientation & most likely white) will piss away their frustration in jokes about the rednecks. And then fail to fight, yet again.
And since the Denial of the Shoah is a part of this it's worth recalling Sartre's critique of anti-Semite incoherence -- it's designed so you can't argue against it without tiring yourself out.
If snide jokes were all that was necessary to combat fascism & white supremacy, we would not be on the brink of a truly horrifying disaster, where things could teeter a very wrong way indeed.
That you do -- and this why I like your commentary on these events: I'm holding onto the "double-edged sword" theory of satire.
One edge cuts into the audience for their presumption that the offending behavior comes out of whatever caricature of the South they harbor. That it's just ignorance or stupid rather than purposeful & malicious.
But also that it's every Southerner instead of the same racist white elite that started it all in 1619...
That's what I see going on in your satire, Roy. Twitter fuckbois are just Twitter fuckbois...
"anti-Semite incoherence -- it's designed so you can't argue against it without tiring yourself out."
Yes, yes, yes. Also, with this crowd, coherence is for cucks, because it means you're allowing other people to hold you to some standard of consistency. And Real Men don't allow anyone to hold them to any standard. Open and obvious lying and self-contradiction is a way of asserting that them silly rules can't hold you.
“If snide jokes were all that was necessary to combat fascism & white supremacy, we would not be on the brink of a truly horrifying disaster, where things could teeter a very wrong way indeed.”
An opposition party and honest reporting would help a lot.
So would mutual aid in the South so that their crumbing economies & safety nets do not give rise to white supremacy & fascism.
I think it was William Blake who said "Stagnant pools breed pestilences." The North was all too happy to let those waters lie unstirred after the Civil War...
To overly simplify, they're way too married to life being shit -- may be part of that original sin thing. Do anything good for them, there may be good karma earned, but any appreciation or gratitude, no way. So on that level, it's pointless.
But on the theory that anything progressive is good and should be done, sure, the good thing should be done because it should be done. But not in expectation of anything good coming back from the crackers.
I like to say that look at anything, everything shitty about America and it's got conservatives' fingerprints all over it. But one can say it about Southern honkies, maybe even more so. And now that I think about it, there are two kinds of conservatives: Those living a conservative lifestyle independent of wanting, needing government aid or whatever, and those living such a life for whom it's a source of pride that should be forced on others.
Blake had it right except maybe a little too kind, unless there's a line you're leaving out about those living in those stagnant pools enjoying the pestilence and refuse to give it up.
FTR: I acknowledge that in early twentieth century, before the commies got killed, there was some hardcore progressive labor action, but that's, like, it.
If the good people at MSNBC are any indication, there is a giant and reasonably profitable industry built around histrionically pointing out every damn time the conservatives aren't making sense, like it's the first time ever.
My abiding memory of a slow trip thru the south 50 years ago was how ridiculously green it was – I mean, the kudzu alone...(understand, I'm from out west where the green is just painted on).
My slow trip through the south 50 years ago gives me memories of the blood red Georgia soil. Also Spanish moss, golden orb spiders, and lots of pretty good Key Lime pie. (Detroit to Key West, via mostly back roads because my friend's mom was afraid of driving on the freeways. We saw interesting things.)
I never had a dessert—or a glass of tea—in Maryland or Souther that couldn't have been improved by leaving-out at least one-third of the sugar. To each his own, but especially since developing The Sugar I've cut-down on it and too much makes it impossible to taste anything else.
As do I, but with sugar, or occasionally sugar and a substitute…but still half as sweet as Southern. (… and I try to steer clear of starch those days, though I've found that a few pounds of fat on or off me can make a bigger difference at a particular threshold.)
Jan 28, 2022·edited Jan 28, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
God is this funny!
You must have kin from down thataway.
Let's put stupid people on the Board of Education. That's not a good plan.. (I misspelled " Education" as "Efucation". Pronounced "FU -cation", that's a pretty accurate description! )
Erskine Caldwell got famous writing unbelievably lurid sagas about simple country folk in the thirties. He understood them pretty well I think.
"It was still not too late to begin, but Jeeter did not have a mule, and he did not have the credit to purchase seed-cotton and guano at the stores. Up until this year, he had lived in the hope that something would happen at the last moment to provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He could still look forward to the following year when he could perhaps raise a crop of cotton, but it was an anticipation not so keen as it once had been. He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason. He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life."
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
I am from rural Ohio. I worsh up in the crick. My friends in Kentucky
I find the whole McMinn County thing deeply disturbing. I grew up in a community with many Holocaust survivors. I look at McMinn as just one more step toward erasing the Holocaust from American memory. It's a path that leads inexorably to Holocaust denial, which is what the Nazi wannabes have been reaching for for decades.
Nearly half of U.S. respondents in a recent poll could not name a single Nazi concentration camp. We're in deep trouble when the guy with the "Camp Auschwitz" shirt knows more about the Holocaust than half the population.
As someone who likely lost relatives there, I'm embarrassed at not knowing enough about the exclusively exterminating camps, e. g. Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek that didn't have labour camps associated with them, pure death-factories with almost no survivors at all.
The McMinn school board has vowed to find an age appropriate book about the Holocaust to replace “Maus,” one without cuss words, naked mice, Nazis, corpses, ovens… They’ll be announcing their choice as soon as Jim Davis writes it.
Just FYI: From McMinnville to Dayton, TN (site of the Scopes Trial) is about 60 miles due southeast as the crow flies, or 68 miles by car--you have to go around a mountain.
“Not saying that there is not important material, I’ve read it and read through all of it and the parts it talks about the father, the father is the guy that went through the Holocaust, I really enjoyed, I liked it,”
Must be a matter of taste, my grandparents didn't mention enjoying it so much...
Sometimes I think you over-do it a bit (almost, but not quite to the point of some sort of reverse... something). Then my best bud from Baltimore says, "nah, that's about right."
Oh, jeez, Roy. First, didn't think I'd ever have any use for these leftover sets and costumes from "Li'l Abner" but I can repurpose the Jubilation T. Cornpone statue for chairman Moogly. Otherwise, I am destroyed by two stage directions and a line. Taking minutes on the back of a coal shovel! BLACKOUT in close proximity to "The Boondocks." The line: Thass thet trans-sexualism ol’ Rod Dreher tol’ us about when he come through heah sellin’ armbands!
Somebody on Twitter summed it up this way -- the current conservative position is:
1. Disney movies don’t have enough romance
2. Young people aren’t having enough sex to reproduce themselves
3. But the mice in Maus shouldn’t be naked
If this were really the only away to be taken, this hellhole wouldn't be in so much danger, would it?
If you can figure out WHAT the takeaway is supposed to be, you're a smarter person than I am. Just incoherence in the service of ideology.
Incoherence is a deliberate strategy in all of this: because it encourages consent to bad ideas by actors on that side & makes the other look snide or condescending, but it also dissipates our resistance in joke-telling & high-fiving on the birb site.
We have to be aware of what the real-world issue is in these cases. Heteronormativity, patriarchy, nuclear families, keeping women servile babymakers (those are parts #1 & 2)
But part #3 is interesting: it's not about the nudity, it never was about the nudity. Saying that it was allows 8 of the 10 school board members to feel comfortable voting to ban Maus. Because that gives them cover to perpetuate a violence that is quite common in the USA. Jewish groups decrying this decision didn't fall for it (or the awful timing of the decison), because they've seen it all before. But northern liberals (of basic Xtn orientation & most likely white) will piss away their frustration in jokes about the rednecks. And then fail to fight, yet again.
And since the Denial of the Shoah is a part of this it's worth recalling Sartre's critique of anti-Semite incoherence -- it's designed so you can't argue against it without tiring yourself out.
If snide jokes were all that was necessary to combat fascism & white supremacy, we would not be on the brink of a truly horrifying disaster, where things could teeter a very wrong way indeed.
Fortunately I have the snide jokes covered so y'all can go do combat.
That you do -- and this why I like your commentary on these events: I'm holding onto the "double-edged sword" theory of satire.
One edge cuts into the audience for their presumption that the offending behavior comes out of whatever caricature of the South they harbor. That it's just ignorance or stupid rather than purposeful & malicious.
But also that it's every Southerner instead of the same racist white elite that started it all in 1619...
That's what I see going on in your satire, Roy. Twitter fuckbois are just Twitter fuckbois...
"anti-Semite incoherence -- it's designed so you can't argue against it without tiring yourself out."
Yes, yes, yes. Also, with this crowd, coherence is for cucks, because it means you're allowing other people to hold you to some standard of consistency. And Real Men don't allow anyone to hold them to any standard. Open and obvious lying and self-contradiction is a way of asserting that them silly rules can't hold you.
“If snide jokes were all that was necessary to combat fascism & white supremacy, we would not be on the brink of a truly horrifying disaster, where things could teeter a very wrong way indeed.”
An opposition party and honest reporting would help a lot.
They may say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.
So would mutual aid in the South so that their crumbing economies & safety nets do not give rise to white supremacy & fascism.
I think it was William Blake who said "Stagnant pools breed pestilences." The North was all too happy to let those waters lie unstirred after the Civil War...
Gotta disagree.
To overly simplify, they're way too married to life being shit -- may be part of that original sin thing. Do anything good for them, there may be good karma earned, but any appreciation or gratitude, no way. So on that level, it's pointless.
But on the theory that anything progressive is good and should be done, sure, the good thing should be done because it should be done. But not in expectation of anything good coming back from the crackers.
I like to say that look at anything, everything shitty about America and it's got conservatives' fingerprints all over it. But one can say it about Southern honkies, maybe even more so. And now that I think about it, there are two kinds of conservatives: Those living a conservative lifestyle independent of wanting, needing government aid or whatever, and those living such a life for whom it's a source of pride that should be forced on others.
Blake had it right except maybe a little too kind, unless there's a line you're leaving out about those living in those stagnant pools enjoying the pestilence and refuse to give it up.
FTR: I acknowledge that in early twentieth century, before the commies got killed, there was some hardcore progressive labor action, but that's, like, it.
According to Slavoj Žižek, all ideology contains a pit of absolutely indissoluble ugly incoherence at its center. He calls it the "sinthome."
1A. Candy bits and cartoon characters should look more like hookers.
Only the clueless expect conservatives to make sense…
As Roy has well documented, there’s no such need.
If the good people at MSNBC are any indication, there is a giant and reasonably profitable industry built around histrionically pointing out every damn time the conservatives aren't making sense, like it's the first time ever.
Hilarious as always. Now I want one of Dreher's armbands.
If they really wanted to do something about the discomfort of students, they'd get rid of Regents exams.
That armband gonna cost ya...
My abiding memory of a slow trip thru the south 50 years ago was how ridiculously green it was – I mean, the kudzu alone...(understand, I'm from out west where the green is just painted on).
My slow trip through the south 50 years ago gives me memories of the blood red Georgia soil. Also Spanish moss, golden orb spiders, and lots of pretty good Key Lime pie. (Detroit to Key West, via mostly back roads because my friend's mom was afraid of driving on the freeways. We saw interesting things.)
I never had a dessert—or a glass of tea—in Maryland or Souther that couldn't have been improved by leaving-out at least one-third of the sugar. To each his own, but especially since developing The Sugar I've cut-down on it and too much makes it impossible to taste anything else.
As a Damn Yankee, with The Sugar no less, I either make my own sweet tea with sugar substitutes or do half-and-half (sweet/un-sweet).
As do I, but with sugar, or occasionally sugar and a substitute…but still half as sweet as Southern. (… and I try to steer clear of starch those days, though I've found that a few pounds of fat on or off me can make a bigger difference at a particular threshold.)
Dreher selling armbands to the benighted population of Bug Crick is the only time he ever intentionally observed the "six feet" distancing guidelines.
If Dreher ever stops by, Jezebel is gonna need a bigger shovel. Dude's not exactly known for being concise.
God is this funny!
You must have kin from down thataway.
Let's put stupid people on the Board of Education. That's not a good plan.. (I misspelled " Education" as "Efucation". Pronounced "FU -cation", that's a pretty accurate description! )
Erskine Caldwell got famous writing unbelievably lurid sagas about simple country folk in the thirties. He understood them pretty well I think.
"It was still not too late to begin, but Jeeter did not have a mule, and he did not have the credit to purchase seed-cotton and guano at the stores. Up until this year, he had lived in the hope that something would happen at the last moment to provide a mule and credit, but now it seemed to him that there was no use hoping for anything any more. He could still look forward to the following year when he could perhaps raise a crop of cotton, but it was an anticipation not so keen as it once had been. He had felt himself sink lower and lower, his condition fall further and further, year after year, until now his trust in God and the land was at the stage where further disappointment might easily cause him to lose his mind and reason. He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life."
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
I am from rural Ohio. I worsh up in the crick. My friends in Kentucky
wash up in the creek.
Damn dude. I sometimes think I'm the most depressed person I know, but then I read you.
I have to admit: I have known Southerners and I have been south, but I get most of it from Al Capp.
Natcherly!
https://youtu.be/EEzWuT1RyQk
Git outa heer! Guffaw!
'Ivan has nothin, Ivan has always had nothing, Ivanwill always have nothing.' —pithy muzhik saying.
I find the whole McMinn County thing deeply disturbing. I grew up in a community with many Holocaust survivors. I look at McMinn as just one more step toward erasing the Holocaust from American memory. It's a path that leads inexorably to Holocaust denial, which is what the Nazi wannabes have been reaching for for decades.
Nearly half of U.S. respondents in a recent poll could not name a single Nazi concentration camp. We're in deep trouble when the guy with the "Camp Auschwitz" shirt knows more about the Holocaust than half the population.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/survey-finds-shocking-lack-holocaust-knowledge-among-millennials-gen-z-n1240031
As someone who likely lost relatives there, I'm embarrassed at not knowing enough about the exclusively exterminating camps, e. g. Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek that didn't have labour camps associated with them, pure death-factories with almost no survivors at all.
Must be me, but as overly mocking of the good people of the (presumably inbred) holler as this is, it yet wasn't enough.
The McMinn school board has vowed to find an age appropriate book about the Holocaust to replace “Maus,” one without cuss words, naked mice, Nazis, corpses, ovens… They’ll be announcing their choice as soon as Jim Davis writes it.
Working title: "Who Moved My Jews?"
Just FYI: From McMinnville to Dayton, TN (site of the Scopes Trial) is about 60 miles due southeast as the crow flies, or 68 miles by car--you have to go around a mountain.
And across the Tennessee River...
From the McMinn County transcript (https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/1818370/Called_Meeting_Minutes_1-10-22.pdf)
“Not saying that there is not important material, I’ve read it and read through all of it and the parts it talks about the father, the father is the guy that went through the Holocaust, I really enjoyed, I liked it,”
Must be a matter of taste, my grandparents didn't mention enjoying it so much...
Just like "To Serve Man" turns out to be a book of recipes, some people can read Maus as an instruction book.
And you have actually caused me to look up a book on Amazon, which I can get for free because I have Amazon Prime and yes I am a sell out.
Boy, they are not gonna like what's going on in Dino Ranch, I'll tell you that. There may not be any cartoons they can watch.
Let us pause to appreciate the lapidary care with which the author rendered that exotic dialect. That kinda typin' ain't easy.
"just a mess o' deviation" will stay with me.
Roy is the new Mark Twain.
To be fair, it's the consistent Conservative position that ALL real human suffering must be ignored, when it's not being mocked.
>… gaps filled with dried mud and caulk
Fancy!—why should Good Americans™ listen to these rich elitists?
Probly that fancy LATEX caulk!
Sometimes I think you over-do it a bit (almost, but not quite to the point of some sort of reverse... something). Then my best bud from Baltimore says, "nah, that's about right."
Oh, jeez, Roy. First, didn't think I'd ever have any use for these leftover sets and costumes from "Li'l Abner" but I can repurpose the Jubilation T. Cornpone statue for chairman Moogly. Otherwise, I am destroyed by two stage directions and a line. Taking minutes on the back of a coal shovel! BLACKOUT in close proximity to "The Boondocks." The line: Thass thet trans-sexualism ol’ Rod Dreher tol’ us about when he come through heah sellin’ armbands!
Any time you can work "corn crib" into a piece, you've got a winner.