Thursday, December 9, 2010

Grape Interview About Mental Health at Oberlin

“Oberlin, to me, is about stress,” a former psychologist of mine from the counseling center once told me. No one has since expressed this basic fact to me as plainly. As Oberlin heads into finals, Oberlin is certainly defined by stress more than anything, yet this stress is only discussed indirectly—most recent conversations I’ve had revolve around grueling workloads, but the insane amount of stress everyone experiences is accepted as a given. Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression are largely normalized as part of the college experience.

In fact, mental health issues on campus have increased and may recently have literally reached crisis levels. According to Harvard clinician Richard Kadison,in his 2004 book College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It, there has been a "mental health crisis" on college campuses since the late ‘80s. "Since 1988, the likelihood of a college student suffering depression has doubled, suicidal ideation has tripled, and sexual assaults have quadrupled," he writes. “It is the elephant in the room that no one it talking about.”

Oberlin, as a small campus, may be particular susceptible to this mental health crisis. Charlie Ross, the director of the Oberlin counseling center, said that last year the center, “saw 640 students, which is about 22 percent (of the student population). Compared to the schools like us, like Mt. Holyoke, Wesleyan, Amherst, it’s a pretty similar number. Nationally, it’s 11 percent”

“We do have an increase in urgency that students express in getting counseling.” Ross said. “We have what’s called a crisis walk-in everyday. And it used to be that we would have one person or maybe nobody waiting for an appointment. But it turned out that two or three years ago we would have six or eight people come to a walk-in. So it drastically in a year it changed from none to maybe two people to maybe six or eight people.”

Fortunately, Active Minds, a nationwide organization that is devoted to changing “the conversation about mental health on college campuses,” has established a chapter at Oberlin that can help provoke discussion of these kind of issues. I interviewed Oberlin Active Minds member Jamie Flynn about Active Minds, stress, and how we talk about mental health on campus.


Can you give a description of Active Minds?

Active Minds at Oberlin is a chapter of a nationwide organization founded by Alison Malmon after her brother committed suicide as a way to promote an open dialogue about mental health issues on college campuses. Her main goal in doing this, and our mission, was to educate the public and advertise mental health resources so that people can get help before they end up in crisis.

As an Oberlin College student organization, we work to remove stigma from the people who live with (mental health issues), and the discussion surrounding mental disorders through education and programming. As a local chapter, we are working with the student voice to promote healthy changes in the dialogue about mental health on Oberlin campus. If you can’t talk about how to be mentally healthy, how will anyone be able to discuss living with mental illness? Also, we're a fun group. Everyone should come check us out.

How would you describe the stress/mental health situation at Oberlin?

"Stress" is a ubiquitous state of mind that peaks during finals. I don't think that I have met a single person at Oberlin during the academic school year that has not experienced an alarming degree of stress at some point or another. That is where the mental health component of Oberlin's resources come in. Since I began as a first-year, organizations like the counseling center and the center for leadership in health promotion have tried to introduce programming to help students reduce their stress like massages and puppy therapy to name two. While definitely an improvement, I feel that these programs have also encouraged students to think of stress-reducing measures as time-consuming and out-of-the-way.

Furthermore, I think that the mentality surrounding stress is something like "if you don't have a lot of it, you're not doing it (Oberlin/school) right." In reality, simple steps like making sure you get enough sleep, eating right, and time management are the best ways to reduce stress and maintain healthy mental states. I do not think people talk about these things for fear of sounding "boring" or "lame." Who wants to sleep at 1 AM when there's a party on campus or a paper due?

What do you think causes stress at Oberlin? Overwork, social issues, other causes?

I think expectations cause stress at Oberlin. Expectations of a movie-typical college lifestyle that Oberlin's campus may not actually support, expectations of academic excellence, expectations of social excellence, etc. all seem to contribute to stress at Oberlin, and they all seem to be built into its very image. I think Oberlin has a body image problem much like a person with an eating disorder. So yes, all of those things mentioned do cause stress, but only as they are interpreted by each individual in accordance with their expectations.

How would you assess the mental health facilities and programs at Oberlin? Maybe include something along the lines of what you were saying on how they need to integrate into the community more.

I think that the mental health facilities available to Oberlin students are adequate, but operating under their potential. Most of the wellness-centered organizations on campus are incommunicado, at least to each other. To try and rectify this, the college has done some re-organization to introduce a dialogue between the counseling center and the physical education staff in Phillips, for example. It's really very exciting because we are working towards a time when a student can receive coordinated and comprehensive relief from multiple sources on campus that already exist.

What do you think are some possible solutions are to stress/mental health issues on campus?

I think the only real solution is to change peoples' perspectives on things like sleeping and eating. Most (I would venture to say) would put work and other activities before sleep and nutrition when the fact of the matter is that those two mundane activities will make students more attentive in class and efficient in homework performace. However, to begin that revolution the campus needs to be able to openly discuss what it means to be mentally healthy as well as unhealthy. An open and equal conversation about mental health, good and bad, is the only way for Oberlin to encourage students to prepare themselves for a healthy as well as academically and/or fiscally successful life.

Active Minds, as an organization, is trying to promote programming and increase the educational resources on campus having to do with living with mental illness and living a mentally healthy lifestyle. Our resource panel, an event that gathered the many wellness resources on campus into one room to give student a better idea of what is available on campus, was hugely successful and is being sponsored by OBFit this year.

Friday, October 15, 2010

College Made Me Stupider

College made me stupider. Or at least the classes I took at college made me stupider. In the time I took passively absorbing and regurgitating information, I could have doing what I wanted to do. I could have learned through doing things with other people, or studied what I wanted to study. It’s called self-directed or collaborative learning, and it’s about the only way anyone truly learns anything. College workloads discourage self-directed and collaborative learning. Hence, I am now slightly dumber than I would have been had I not gone to school and had spent the tuition money on something else.

I think that, deep down, we all understand this. Think a little bit, and you’ll realize that you learned about the things you’re truly interested in outside of class. Same goes with most of the people you know. The only exceptions are the budding young academics I'm friends with- all three of them. You really only learn how to be an academic here, since all you're doing is academic work. You naturally internalize the lifestyle, the manner of thinking and acting. College is an institution that, like all institutions, is built to sustain itself: it trains people to be academics so they can then go on to train other young people to be academics. No wonder the market is flooded with wretched graduate students who can’t find an academic job.

It’s not as though I learned nothing here- but it would be remarkable if I did anything for four years and learned nothing. The difference is that I paid $2oo,ooo for these particular four years. While I did learn a few scattered things about philosophy (my major), I don’t have any profound or cohesive understanding of the subject. I can barely apply any of the philosophy I learned here to my own understanding of the world, which is the real value of knowledge. After four years at this college, I have a profound understanding only of what’s wrong with it. I wonder if that was worth $200,000.

Of course it wasn’t, which suggests to me that school is about something else- namely, showing to employers that you’re willing to take orders for four more years. And not only that, you’re willing to pay to take orders. It’s funny when you think about it. Usually, if you’re taking orders from someone, they’re at least paying you; here, it’s the opposite. But college is about landing a job. Students understand this.

"The most commonly mentioned reasons to go to college included getting career training, getting a better job, and making more money" the journalist David Kirp writes in his overview of the corporate college, Shakespeare, Einstein, and The Bottom Line. Or, more broadly, as the sociologist Mitchell Stevens wrote in his book Creating a Class, higher education is another step in the factory process of "social reproduction" which "systematically favors the wealthy, well-educated, and well-connected." This is so obvious as to be almost intuitive. Only in self-congratulatory college propaganda is school centrally about learning or “intellectual autonomy” or whatever.

As Hunter Thompson might say, “there’s something seriously bent” about heading off into the middle of Ohio to submerge oneself in a neo-feudal model of subservience to a covenant of learned priests. It’s even odder to want to pay $200,000 for it. But the kind of person who’s able to make it into an elite institution like Oberlin is usually the kind of person who would pay that $200,000, because that kind of person has been taking orders his or her whole life. We did every idiotic thing our public school teachers told us to do and went through the same grueling process of selling ourselves ("the admissions process").

Noam Chomsky describes it as a trial by idiocy: "People are filtered out for obedience. If you can guarantee lots of stupidity in the educational system, you know that the only people who will make it through are people like me who are willing to do it no matter how stupid it is because we want to go to the next step." Oberlin may have crowned itself as an eternally electic, left of center college, but most of its students are bred though stupidity to obey. We would otherwise not have made it this far. It cannot be otherwise.

This basic fact explains Oberlin. There’s a reason we’re defined by awkwardness: anyone who could deny their own feelings for their whole life is bound to be something of an emotional cripple. If there is such a thing as emotional intelligence, than many Oberlin students (including and especially myself) are emotional idiots as surely as the kids in the stupid class back in our high schools were academic idiots. William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, described this phenomenon as “Ivy retardation”:

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic…. Social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

This intellectual disparity helps explain why the much of the arts here are so careful and academic (and thus completely useless), why the dating scene is pathetic, and why life at Oberlin is often flat and uninteresting. The reason is simple: it's long been understood that obedience to authority is anathema to spontaneity and communal interaction (as well as, it should be mentioned, true learning). But “we came here to study”, right?

Much of college is useless beyond career advancement, but there are exceptions. The sciences are real academic subjects that can be taught successfully in schools; unlike the "social sciences" and the arts, they truly are a specialized form of knowledge that can only be learned in a rigorous setting under established authorities. And, as opposed to most of America, people actually do things at a college. Colleges, because of their pre-capitalist roots, have some kind of autonomy relative to the outside world that does allow for some kind of community. Oberlin’s civil society may be withering and of little consequence, but at least it exists.

But otherwise, while Oberlin may be "a good school", it remains a school. It's problems are mostly inherent. I certainly won't miss it. Or at least I hope I won't. Imagine if the rest of the world is miserable enough that I actually would...

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

We Hate Ourselves More Than We Hate Rove

The strangest thing about this Karl Rove visit is how liberals at Oberlin clearly hated the protestors more than they hated Rove. It shouldn't be a contest: on the one hand, you had a professional (and knowing) slanderer and propagandist for the most reactionary American administration in at least 60 years; on the other, you had people whose worst crime would be to disrupt a mediocre speech by a man's who's mediocre in all respects except in his cruelty and lack of scruples. (He's not a "political genius," guys. The regurgitation of this piece of pure media hype proves that Oberlin has, if nothing else, successfully cultivated the next generation of Time magazine reporters.)

Yet the hate isn't directed at the bad guy; rather, it's directed at the people who want to fight him- even though we all may hate Rove, at least in theory. And any excuse, no matter how presumptuous, is good enough for the hate. The protests won't be effective, Rove won't care, we're just a bunch of whiny college students, we’re spoiled, a protest would be self-congratulatory, etc. All these excuses don't even come close to explaining the sheer amount of abuse the protestors received.

Which convince me that the real reason for the hate-fest can be best explained by an article about liberal hatred toward Michael Moore, written years ago by John Dolan at the brilliant The eXile:

"You hate Moore because he's likely to drag you into a streetfight. That's what happened at the Oscars: Moore took the podium and used it as a weapon. He bludgeoned Bush with that Oscar, right there in front of everyone, until the crowd booed him off. And they didn't boo him because they were "conservatives," either. I'd bet that the loudest booers were classic H-wood liberals. They booed because when Moore started fighting, they felt ashamed, then angry -- because in some vestigial corner of their minds, they knew they should have been standing with him.


"As a lifelong coward, I know the feeling, the shame of watching someone fight your fight for you--and I know that it's not your tormentors you hate most. No, it's your champion, your damned officious champion, whose courage only throws your cowardice into relief, that you hate most--after yourself."

But the excuses were interesting for being revealing. Take the “protests won’t be effective” argument. It was the argument the anti-protestors made the most; it also happened to be exactly false. About the only time colleges make the news at all these days is when there are student protests against prominent figures who are invited to speak at them.

Professor Steve Volk tacitly acknowledged the effectiveness of protest in a letter that encouraged student to observe decorum during the Rove speech. He listed Chris Hedges and Michael Oren as notable examples of people who were famously disrupted during their speeches. Other examples that ring out are the protests against Ehud Olmert at the University of Chicago and even a rather impressive protest against that indefatigable idiot Martin Peretz when he spoke at Harvard. This means Harvard activists upstaged us, and for a significantly less repulsive figure. Can we please stop promoting that obnoxiously self-aggrandizing “oh, we’re just so darn radical at Oberlin” cliché now?

And I’m willing to bet that some of the same people who directed spite at the Rove protestors watched or could watch some of the above examples on Youtube with glee. And we all enjoyed the video of the Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at George Bush or of the student who pied Thomas Friedman. It’s only when such protests effect us that they suddenly become despicable.

Of course, the protestors share the blame in all this. Campus activism- real campus activism, the kind that has acted on the remarkable pretense that Oberlin is a community and could thus unite around certain causes- has emerged from hiding a few times since I’ve been a student here. The Coalition was an example; the Karl Rove Is Coming activists are another. And each treated politics as though it were a grim duty, our dubious birthright as privileged Oberlin students. The Coalition argued that we were spoiled and ignorant of racial issues, necessitating immediate reeducation. The Karl Rove is Coming protestors, on the other hand, argued that it was our responsibility to protest Rove so that we could vindicate our reputation as a liberal campus.

On this, the protestors and the anti-protestors were united: it was our duty to the school to either make a ruckus or to sit quietly to show that we were either liberal or tolerant enough to honor the school’s image. It was typical self-deprecating Oberlin politics on a slightly grander scale; eating out of dumpsters and not showering to conserve water expanded into political theatre.

What everyone seemed to miss is that protesting Karl Rove could be fun. Not fun in a cute, Harkness sort of way, but in a righteous and invigorating way. Imagine the spectacle of hundreds of students, unapologetic in their noble hatred for Karl Rove, directing a furious and joyous tide of boos at that repulsive pig- because we could, and because we wanted to. As everyone knew (deep down, at least), that kind of bold display would become Oberlin legend and would have an effect both in and outside of the campus- which is the real reason that people hated the protestors.

We’re too spoiled and lucky to be able to go to such a venerable institution to allow ourselves any joy or collective gratification. The reputation of the school was paramount, however false that reputation actually is. And the same crippling deference that defines this wretched campus scored another victory. On that note, I should add that I didn’t go to the speech/ protest. Maybe it was because I was too busy, or because I never got around to buying a ticket- or maybe because, “in some vestigial corner” of my mind, I was afraid.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Boo The Pig

Hate him. Hate him. Hate him.

Karl Rove is coming to Oberlin, and I’m already hearing calls to be tolerant toward him. Oberlin students are embarrassed by a "self-image" that's at least four years out of date: We're a bunch of spoiled upper- middle-class radicals who are tolerant of all beliefs, except those that are conservative. Meanwhile, there were a handful of people in the Oberlin Socialists last year; as far as I know, the thing doesn't even exist this year.

I don't see this tolerant image we're supposed to have or why we as individuals would be obliged to defend it in the first place. (What's with this obsession about defending "the Oberlin image" anyway?) The average Oberlin student is about as angry and intolerant as any other overworked, stressed out person. Let's direct that anger against a deserving target, for once. The right thinks we're a bunch of radicals and perverts anyway; why not indulge them?

We should treat Rove like scum not because of his beliefs (which are indeed awful), but because of his behavior. He's a terrible person not on an ideological level, but simply as a human being. This goes beyond made-up "left vs. right" dichotomies; treating him like swine should be a matter of course, not an overt political act.

Matt Taibbi, back during the Valerie Plame affair, wrote the best description of the totality of Rove:

The result of all this was to obscure the basic fact about Rove, which is that he's not a genius at all. He is a pig, and the only thing that distinguishes him is the degree of his brazenness and cruelty. It doesn't take a genius to send out fliers calling your opponent the "fag candidate." It doesn't take a genius to insinuate that your opponent's wife is a drug addict. There's nothing cunning or clever about saying your opponent came home from a war too fucked in the head to govern (particularly when your own candidate was too much of a coward to fight in the same war), or about whispering that that same candidate may have an illegitimate black child. And there's nothing clever about calling the followers of the opposition party traitorous and un-American, and claiming that they all want to coddle and appease the murderers of our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters.

This is all Rove is; this is how he’s “earned” his power and prestige and is thus the only reason he’s being invited to speak. I don't know why anyone would be "interested in what he has to say," and anyway, booing wouldn't prevent him from speaking. Boo, heckle, harass him; I’m afraid to do all that by myself, but if enough people do so, I’ll join in (assuming I go). And please: Don’t dress up as a superhero or dance in protest or some other self-marginalizing Kalan shit. Hate him because you’re a regular person and he’s someone regular people should hate.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

We're All Fictional People


Martin Peretz married into money and bought a magazine; he now thinks he is better than this man.

I'm bringing this up due to a recent piece by Martin Peretz in TNR in which he calls the Palestinians a "fictional people," about which I have nothing pertinent to say except that Peretz can have his married-his-way-into-wealth-and-status ass savaged by a pack of starving dogs. I doubt this is going to matter to anyone who takes the "Palestinians are a fiction" argument seriously, but there's a deep irony to the argument that seems nonetheless worth pointing out.

There's more than that. There's the extreme totalitarian mindset underlying the argument: because Palestinian people- human beings, remember, not just "Palestinians"- didn't exist in a modern nation state at the time of their ethnic cleansing, they are not entitled to make any claims to human rights and dignity. Thus, people only have value as human beings insofar as they exist in a state. Mussolini would love that one; TNR, ostensibly, is not supposed to.

And the argument could be used, without any changes at all, to justify colonial slaughter in Africa or North America: because the natives did not constitute a nation, you can drive them from their lands, kill them, etc. It's sort of a white man's burden argument by way of modern state realism: the savages haven't reached a high enough stage of societal development- the nation state in this case- therefore they must be swept away by the winds of progress. Same with MLK's black nationalism: African-Americans never existed as a nation, so they have no right to control their own communities. None of this makes even superficial sense; the fact that it has such monstrous precedent makes it all the worse, and I'm not sure why people make it in public, where other people can read it.

The irony part is this: the organizing of a disparate people into a nation-state to ensure the protection of their human rights was the principle motivation of Zionism. Norman Finkelstein has done sterling work on this in some of his earliest scholarship: basically, he argues, Zionism was a kind of romantic nationalism whose proponents argued that as long as Jews existed as minorities in other states, the states would never belong to them, and they would be accordingly persecuted. This Holocaust gave quite some weight to this argument, and immigration en masse to Israel began, and resulted in its founding in 1948.

Now, when the Palestinians wish to do the exact same thing that the Zionists did- set up a state to protect themselves from the abuses of a state that will never belong to them ("the state of the Jewish people," remember)- they are- what? Fantasists? Cynical political opportunists? Agents of the Jordanians and "the warrior Arab states," in Peretz's words?" One could argue that the Jews are a fictional people for not having a state prior to Israel; let's see Peretz and anyone else in mainstream journalism make that argument and watch what happens. (The closest anyone in the mainstream came to making a claim like this may have been Helen Thomas, as Think Progress points out; look what happened to her.) And, of course, we were all "fictional people" at one time, Americans included.

Anyway, you can drop this on a pro-Israel apologist if he makes the argument, especially since you're likely to see it being raised more and more as that particular camp runs out of arguments. Anyone still left in the hardcore of that camp, though, is likely to be without shame and/ or completely full of shit like Peretz, so I'm not sure you're gonna get anywhere.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Summer Reading


"Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all."

"God's M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can't perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will never know the dreadful war we've gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen."

"'What is it?' one staff member said.
Donna said, 'A person.'
'Substance D?'
She nodded.
'It ate his head. Another loser.'
She said to the two of them, 'It's easy to win. Anybody can win.'"

Thursday, September 2, 2010

You've Never Heard Of Alex Carey


"'Americans are the most propagandized people of any nation.'"

"The subject embraces a 75-year-long multi-billion dollar project in social engineering on a national scale."

"'The manufacture of consent... was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy' Walter Lippman wrote. 'But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique... Under the impact of propaganda, it is not longer possible... to believe in the original dogma of democracy.'"

And other fun facts you would learn if you lived in a democracy. It's worth pondering on why any half-way decent course on Russian or Chinese history in America thoroughly discusses their social engineering projects- the Five Year Plan, the Cultural Revolution, etc.- as a given, while our own social engineering projects- corporate propaganda, the National Highway Act- are never even mentioned in spite of being significantly larger in scale. We don't even know that there were social engineering projects in this country. Imagine being a Russian student and never learning about the Five Year Plan or a Chinese student never learning about The Great Leap Forward (and the parallels of the US to these massive state-controlled behemoths are frequent and often unflattering), and you're beginning to get a sense at how fucking stupid American education is. And to rub it in, you get smug libertarians like John Stossel (who is, ironically, a pure and perfect product of our education system) snarking on how American kids are ignorant because teachers get paid as if they somewhat resembled human beings. If you don't know the kind of things Carey talks about, you're ignorant about 20th century American history- just like I was before I read the book, and probably still am. It would be remarkable if it were otherwise.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Precious Is Class Warfare




So I saw Precious, again, last night with a group of friends. We all just laughed at it. A friend and I spent the two hours reenacting the "Precious! Precious!" scene from Silence of the Lambs. The exception was one girl who watched the movie cuddled up to her boyfriend in terror, inexpressibly disgusted at the torrent of despair porn the film inflicted on her. It wasn't the reaction you'd expect from a film that, to take a random critical blurb, is "full of life and love, well-meaning and, judging by the reaction in the US, a genuine and important phenomenon that says act- don't dwell- on your dreams."

But it's not surprising that bougie middle-class critics liked it. Precious is class warfare, naked and in-your-face class warfare, albeit of the patronizing liberal variety. To put it as simply as possible: everyone in the movie who's working class (save for Precious) is an awful person, while everyone who's a middle class professional is an absolute saint.

The film doesn't exactly give the poor characters devil horns and draw halos around the wealthier ones, but it comes as close as possible to doing so with one of the crudest devices available to film: it makes the poor people physically ugly (and very black), and it casts pretty and light skinned actresses as the middle class professionals (Mariah Carey is one of them). And boy, does the movie rub that difference in your face. You're treated to extended sequences of Precious' obese mom eating a greasy piece of chicken or dancing in skin tight clothing before going out to a club. The intended reaction of such lingering and voyeuristic shots is nothing but sheer disgust. There's an Oberlin student out there somewhere with 1000 words on how this is "the exploitation and objectification of black bodies"; suffice it to say that this isn't observant sociology but zoology.

Above are the good guys in the movie. The first, Mariah Carey, is Precious' social worker: patient, helpful, and smiley, not the harried and overworked bureaucratic functionary that real poor people are accustomed to working with. She directs her to light-skinned woman number two, Precious' teacher, who's a lesbian- I think we're actually meant to rejoice at how progressive that is- that lives with her partner in a tastefully adorned house with plenty of books and, I think, a piano.

And for the working class people? There's Precious' stepfather, who is only shown raping and impregnating her in flashbacks; the previously mentioned obese mother who hates and abuses Precious for being raped by her husband; obnoxious classmates in her old school who tease her for being fat and won't let her "learn" (her white teacher, on the other hand, is portrayed as another well-meaning savior, although he's helpless against the tide of cruelty directed at him by the poor kids); and street kids who harass and hurt her on the street for being overweight. Her neighbors in her apartment are invisible, non-existent; they don't even call the cops when Precious' mom beats her or pop their heads out of their apartments even to investigate.

There are her fellow classmates who are all girls and thus are all naturally bitchy, catty, and superficial. They're all initially hostile to Precious but are magically civilized by the light-skinned teacher (as is the typical power fantasy in these movies), and they even accompany Precious to the hospital where she gives birth to her baby- although they spend most of the time there hitting on a light skinned doctor. There's literally not a single poor character in the movie who is kind, or intelligent, or at all mutifaceted. At best the poor characters are just window dressing, at worst they're repulsive caricatures. And all of them are there in their resplendent ugliness simply so the film can brag that it's "keeping it real." The film's "gritty realism," however, is deployed in only one direction on the socio-economic ladder.

Precious herself is neither good or bad; she purely neutral, having less agency and independence than any other film protagonist I've seen for some time. Most of the film she spends crying and moaning about how she "can't do it," which sets her up to be immediately reassured by her betters. She's merely the territory, the beautiful soul, fought over by the working class beasts and the middle class beauties. The film is tireless in patronizing her, but the two ladies pictured above do all the thinking and acting for her- which is the real reason the establishment critics like the movie. (Spoiler alert: the light skinned middle class people win her from the poor people in the end.) The name of the film even implies as much: she's "Precious," like a gem, a pretty object owned by somebody to be doted upon.

Anyway, if I was a poor, working class person, particularly a poor black person, I think I would be absolutely furious at this movie. The system that represses them is beautiful and heroic for trying to save the poor from their own awfulness; the problem with poverty is poor people themselves. Now one can see why Precious received the critical acclaim that it did (it got a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes) in spite of its absolute lack of good qualities: it tells middle class critics that working class problems are all theirs to solve, that their failure in solving them isn't their fault, and that their ideology of patronizing liberalism is the savior of America's wretched. Like much propaganda, Precious is the voyeuristic exploitation of caricatured human ugliness for narrow political purposes.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

The Southern and White Ethnic Strategies Live


"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger'."

- Republican Strategist Lee Atwater, 1981

"In the end, the Nixon adminstration recognized and legitimated the category of white ethnic but in rhetoric rather than policy. Instead, his policies and rhetoric directed ethnicity down the narrow channel of the politics of resentment. Rather than bringing ethnics into the civil rights coalition by including them in affirmative action programs, Nixon officials capitalized on white ethnics' animosity over the 'special treatment' of blacks."

- Thomas J. Sugrue, John D. Skrentny, "The White Ethnic Strategy." Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s

"The overwhelming majority of (tea party) supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites (my italics) — compared with 11 percent of the general public ."

- "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated" The New York Times, April 14, 2010

Monday, April 12, 2010

American Political Discourse... And Juno Too!

Carey

like she picked a premise designed to piss people off and then made the protagonist such an edgy little dickens that everyone sort of went "oh that Juno. Oh that Diablo"

8:34pm

Fred

something like that

8:34pm

Carey

aye agreed

8:34pm

Fred

except the premise

8:34pm

Fred

that creepy crypto christian right thing about keeping the baby

so people would like her

fake populist movie critics would like how understanding she was

8:34pm

Carey

i mean diablo is aiming at a liberal audience that will associate with hipsters though

thats whats so frustrating about the movie

its a conservative, unthinking message dressed up like a radical grrl!

and littered with empty deadpan and mugging instead of acting

8:36pm

Fred

yeah exactly

the whole fake conservative and liberal mixing thing

you know how the press keeps trying to find post-ideological narratives?

8:36pm

Carey

yeah no shit

well obama did run on that

8:36pm

Fred

and jump on obama's dick because he's "post ideological"

8:36pm

Carey

right

8:36pm

Fred

its like that

the movie's post ideological!

we can see past our differences!

no we can't

8:37pm

Carey

i mean so did clinton and blair though,werent they called 'third way' candidates at the time

well we can if we only care about identity politics

it sems like the post-political thing is wiffle bat the left is using these last couple of decades

sorry i was talking about two different things there

8:39pm

Fred

nah its part of the same hateful phenomenon

you know what i really love about all this?

8:39pm

Carey

what?

8:40pm

Fred

that fascism has been historically the most successful and prevalent "third way" movement

but who give a fuck about nazis right?

go clinton-consensus!

fukuyama was right!

so diablo cody is a nazi

8:41pm

Carey

hehe what was his deal again? was he the new economy guy?

8:41pm

Fred

may she be hung at nuremberg

he was the end of history guy

im sorry i must be in a bad mood or something

8:42pm

Carey

no its ok

yeah just refreshed on wiki

we are spitting venom because china will bury us because good old folks in virginia cant get over a century old ass beating

which i think is essentially the problem

8:45pm

Carey

the south is deliberately destroying us and they have been ever since we made the mistake of missing the opportunity to tell them not to let the door hit their asses on the way out

8:46pm

Fred

yeah and diablo cody wants to placate them

surrender

that's why i hate her!

i figured it out

she's a traitor

8:47pm

Carey

i dont think we can have a loyal minority from a political party that is so rooted in the tradition of jerking off a bunch of whiny losers

to the left?

8:47pm

Fred

to a society that isn't run by troglodytes

8:47pm

Carey

so to the left

American Political Discourse

9:37pm

Carey

my favorite thing is trying to swing every conversation around to a rant on some awful fox news personality i only know about because im a masochist


9:38pm

Fred

i have something like that, but worse

ive been talking about the christian right to a disturbing degree

people are starting to wonder

9:38pm

Carey

well huckabee has his own show now

9:39pm

Fred

even i cant do that

9:39pm

Carey

its healthy to hate them

watch it, you mean?

9:39pm

Fred

yeah

im more of a john hagee man myself

huckabee's too good at the diplomacy part

hagee's a nazi with his cock flapping in the air

i admire his candor

huckabee manages to be somehow totally crazy and boring at the same time

its a rare quality but it doesnt demand my attention for some reason

maybe when he's caught with a dick up his ass by some undercover cop like the rest of them ill start following his shit

9:42pm

Carey

yeah hagee is slimier and more obviously a crook

oh id tag huckabee as a pedophile

i would put money on that

it will come out

9:43pm

Fred

thats more of a catholic thing

protestant nutbags have a tendencies towards prostitutes or fuckbuddies there own age

9:43pm

Carey

i mean its institutionalized there, sure, but you get yerred state congressmen after their pages

9:43pm

Fred

some happen to be the same sex is the thing

yeah i forgot about foley, true true

9:44pm

Carey

i dont know man

its those hands. and huckabee's whole sitting by the fireplace comfort he exudes. you know he uses that to fuck children

look at him

look at his hands