ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Do Small Dogs Have So Many Psychological Problems? “No one has looked at how the dramatic differences in size and shape of dogs affect canine psychology – until now.”
SUNSHINE MARY: The baffled spinster.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that articles like hers are a good thing simply because they expose the lie. Feminists have sold young women a bill of goods, that they can live like men, work like men, have sex like men, and then turn back into women when they feel like it. We laugh at a woman like this sometimes and make fun of her and say, “Didn’t she know that she’d end up like this?”
No, she didn’t know that. That’s because when you are 17 years old, you don’t know much, especially in this culture of extended adolescence. And when you have been told from a very young age that, as a girl, it is your destiny to Have It All exactly When You Want It, I’m sure it is very baffling to find yourself in your thirties with no husband and none in sight, with the dawning realization that your job and lonely apartment are not nearly as fulfilling as being a wife and mother would have been.
PETER FROST looks back on his series of posts on the white slave trade.
The existence of this trade is little known even among the well-educated, who typically react with disbelief. Surely those white slaves were fewer in number than the black slaves taken across the Atlantic. And surely all of that happened long before the Atlantic slave trade.
Wrong on both counts. Europe exported about as many slaves to the non-European world as were exported from Africa to the Americas. Eastern Europeans continued to be “harvested” until the mid-1700s and the population of the Caucasus until the mid-1800s. By comparison, the black slave trade was banned within the British Empire in 1807 and throughout the Western Hemisphere by the 1860s. The difference was qualitative and not quantitative. Black slaves were mostly male; white slaves mostly female. . . .
In this five-part series, I was responding to Cameron Russell’s argument that she and other top models are cashing in on a legacy of white privilege. In other words, if Europeans had not become so dominant socially, economically, and geopolitically, her white skin and facial features would today seem much less attractive. Well, that alternate reality did exist. Until five centuries ago, white folks were weaklings on the world scene, with large areas of their continent under the rule of outsiders. And yet, European women were greatly admired in Muslim Spain, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, this being why so many of them were enslaved and exported to those regions … just because of their looks.
DISCOVER: Body Atlas Reveals Where We Feel Happiness and Shame. “Researchers have long known that emotions are connected to a range of physiological changes, from nervous job candidates’ sweaty palms to the racing pulse that results from hearing a strange noise at night. But new research reveals that emotional states are universally associated with certain bodily sensations, regardless of individuals’ culture or language.”
AARON CLAREY: Teachers Love Your Children More Than You Do.
I estimated the amount of time children, from kindergarten to 12th grade, spend with their parents, vs. teachers and daycare providers.
There are some assumptions I made and you can certainly calculate your own figures, but including weekends, friends, commuting, summers, etc. those state paid teachers spend a HUGE amount of time more with your child than you do. AND keep in mind their ENTIRE JOB is to be teaching and engaging them the entire time. Your time also includes feeding them, lecturing them, chores, etc. NOT sitting down and TALKING with them.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Build Size & Strength With Isometric Co-Contractions.
The grievance that divorce laws placed all power in men’s hands in preference to women, “wholly regardless of the happiness of women,” however, is not quite as supportable as the others. As we have seen, early American divorce laws made marital offenses, such as adultery, grounds for divorce whether committed by the husband or by the wife. Women actually had two special grounds for divorce or legal separation both of which, in most states, were denied to men: cruelty and non-support. In the nineteenth century, only husbands were legally obligated to support their spouses; and in most states, at least during the first part of the century, cruelty to wife was grounds for divorce but cruelty to husband was not.
The grievance that child custody laws gave men all the power “wholly regardless of the happiness of women” also is not quite as supportable as the others. . . . American courts had been favoring mothers for custody of children, especially young children, at least since 1813, and probably earlier. . . .
The resolutions quoted above make it clear that first-wave feminism was not entirely, or even primarily, an “equal rights” movement. Although an equal right to vote was part of the platform, the ultimate objective seems to have been to ensure women’s primacy in the law, not mere equality. Hence the resolution quoted above, that the obligation of the law to make women happy was “superior” (not merely equal) to all others. . . . Feminists made no effort to extend the male-only child-support obligation to women. Rather, they were committed to advancing and promoting sex-based stereotypes according to which women’s naturally superior and proper role was that of child-raiser, while men’s only legitimate function was to provide material sustenance for women and children. This kind of supremacism was congruent with the sexist judicial philosophies that had spawned the tender years and maternal preference doctrines, and it helped cement those doctrines more firmly in the law than they already were. . . .
In many states, statutes enacted during this period not only gave mothers equal rights, but actually gave them superior rights, with respect to the custody of children.
Interesting stuff. Read the rest here.
Earlier: The Maternal Preference in 19th Century American Law.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Speaking Bureaucratically. “One of the aspects of modernity that I have long wanted but found impossible to satirize is the bureaucratic language that seems to come naturally to so many people. The problem with this language is that it is auto-satirizing, as it were. The act of reading or hearing it is almost coterminous with that of deriding it. Indeed, for a short time I used to derive a small income from publishing (in a left-wing journal) the circulars that I received daily from my hospital administration. Very little additional commentary was required. When held up to examination, the absurdity—the nullity—of these circulars spoke for itself.”
Also: “Psychobabble is to self-knowledge as political correctness is to political philosophy.”
Related: “The Worm in the Brain,” the first chapter of Richard Mitchell’s Less Than Words Can Say. “So there you are with your active verbs being gnawed away. Little by little and only occasionally at first, you start saying things like: ‘I am told that . . .’ and ‘This letter is being written because . . .’ This habit has subtle effects. For one thing, since passives always require more words than actives, anything you may happen to write is longer than it would have been before the attack of the worm. You begin to suspect that you have a lot to say after all and that it’s probably rather important. The suspicion is all the stronger because what you write has begun to sound–well, sort of ‘official.’ ‘Hmm,’ you say to yourself, ‘Fate may have cast my lot a bit below my proper station,’ or, more likely, ‘Hmm. My lot may have been cast by Fate a bit below my proper station.'”
UNWELCOME: Gas Drillers Giving Up In New York. “The never-ending fracking moratorium in the state of New York has left gas drillers with no choice but to just give up on the state. Who can blame them?”
MISREPORTING Even Human Interest Stories.
Every single report states that it is a simple tonsillectomy. That is not the whole truth. The media knows this, but fails to report it and continues the charade. The court documents state it was far more involved. This is not a simple tonsils out and ice cream later procedure but a uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (UP3). . . .
A simple question no media member is asking is why a thirteen year old is getting a UP3. A UP3 is a surgery to help people suffering from sleep apnea. They never say she suffered from sleep apnea, because to mention it would distort the narrative. How is a thirteen year old already suffering from sleep apnea? Google Image search results show Jahi McMath as obese. . . . It is a testament to how fantastic our medical technology has become that people would rather go under the knife for things they could correct with weight loss. Surgeons have become a social safety net for poor eating decisions. People do not think twice and just sign the release forms. This is a conversation the media could start using this teenager as an everyday example.
The greater conversation is obesity and the culpability of the obese themselves. There are money quotes from the mother of McMath about her child being perfectly fine before going to that hospital, but no one bothers to mention her daughter being obese and to the point of needing surgery to prevent her from dying in her sleep. Obese is not fine.
TRADEOFFS: Pew: More Paid Parental Leave Linked to Wider Gender [sic] Pay Gap. Equal pay or special accommodations. Pick one.
Earlier: Mark Perry: “To claim that a significant portion of the raw wage gap can only be explained by discrimination is intellectually dishonest and completely unsupported by the empirical evidence.”
WHY CHRISTIANS SHOULD SEEK SPOUSES WHO TAKE APOLOGETICS SERIOUSLY: Can prayer, Bible reading, church-singing and charismatic preaching stop Katy Perry’s apostasy?
The whole point of the list of 10 questions is to detect women who are not going to help me to produce effective, influential Christian children. If I am going to spend north of $100,000 per child + tuition, then I expect to get some sort of return on that investment for God. That money doesn’t earn itself, and it needs to be well-spent serving God.
It’s my wife’s job to help me to do that. My goal in choosing a wife is to find a helper to make the relationship serve God. Otherwise, it’s better for God if I give that money that I worked very hard to earn directly to effective Christian scholars. I don’t have money to burn “playing house” with someone who is guided by her feelings. I can just give the money to Reasonable Faith or Discovery Institute instead. . . .
The list of questions I use when courting helps me to avoid marrying a woman like Katy Perry’s mother. She could not answer any of my questions. None of them. And what’s more, she doesn’t want to answer them. She wants to live her whole life without learning how to answer them. She wants to stick with her Bible, her singing, her feelings, her passionate oratory and her crowds of gullible people. I will not marry a woman like that. It produces disaster and failure. It produces anti-Christian children.
BOOK REVIEW: The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Munk.
Sachs’ technical fixes frequently turned out to be anything but simple. The saga of Dertu’s wells is illustrative. Ahmed Mohamed, the local man in charge of the effort, discovers that he needs to order a crucial part for a generator that powers the wells. The piece takes four months to arrive, and then nobody knows how to install it. Eventually a distant mechanic arrives at great expense. A couple of years later, Munk returns to find Mohamed struggling with the same issues: The wells have broken down again, the parts are lacking, and nobody knows how to fix the problem.
A little more than a year after that, the wells are up and running again, and the Millennium Villages blog celebrates Dertu as having “the most reliable water supply within the region.” Yet by 2011 the wells have run completely dry due to a drought—a not-uncommon occurrence in the arid region.
Such examples multiply in Munk’s book, showing that purely technological answers to poverty fall well short of Sachs’ promises. It turns out that technology does not implement itself; it requires the assistance of real people subject to widely varying incentives and constraints in complex social and political systems.
HOW IS THIS A PUNISHMENT? Woman who faked leukemia gets 5 years in prison. “A woman who conned people into believing she had leukemia, defrauded the state government out of thousands of dollars in medical benefits and falsely claimed that she had been sexually assaulted, took a plea deal last week in Superior Court and was sentenced to five years in prison.”
In an article from last year, she is referred to as “an 18-month resident of the Prescott Women’s Shelter” who “has been there for a longer than normal time while she gets treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.”
Alternative headline: Woman who received government housing and care for two years on false pretenses now guaranteed five years more.
DON BOUDREAUX: Questions for proponents of income “redistribution.”
Suppose that Jones chooses a career as a poet. Jones treasures the time he spends walking in the woods and strolling city streets in leisurely reflection; his reflections lead him to write poetry critical of capitalist materialism. Working as a poet, Jones earns $20,000 annually. Smith chooses a career as an emergency-room physician. She works an average of 60 hours weekly and seldom takes a vacation. Her annual salary is $400,000. . . .
While Dr. Smith earns more money than does poet Jones, poet Jones earns more leisure than does Dr. Smith. Do you believe leisure has value to those who possess it? If so, are you disturbed by the inequality of leisure that separates leisure-rich Jones from leisure-poor Smith? Do you advocate policies to “redistribute” leisure from Jones to Smith — say, by forcing Jones to wash Smith’s dinner dishes or to chauffeur Smith to and from work? If not, why not?
JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: Why All Children Should Learn to Work.
“CATHOLIC IS OUR CORE” PROJECT launched to address concerns about Common Core standards in Catholic schools. “The project includes efforts to educate key stakeholders in Catholic education—Catholic families, pastors, teachers, principals, superintendents and bishops—about concerns with the Common Core. Today the project introduced a comprehensive website at CatholicIsOurCore.org to share a growing number of reports and studies that reveal significant concerns about the CCSS. Beginning on December 30, The Cardinal Newman Society will release a series of papers by experts on the Common Core and its potential impact on Catholic schools.”
2014 IS LOOKING INTERESTING: Chamber of Commerce to Spend $50 Million to Crush Tea Party.
Related: Karl Rove’s Crossroads Reloading Against Tea Party.
EDUCATIONREALIST on “progressive” schooling and poor whites:
Progressive charter schools for liberal whites trying to escape the overly brown and poor population of their local schools are on the rise. These schools aren’t reliant on philanthropists, but well-to-do parents willing to provide seed money to bootstrap the initial efforts. Poor or even middle class whites need not apply: they don’t bring the color the schools will need to prove the “diverse” population. They can apply for the lottery, eventually. . . .
You’ll go a long, long time looking for reformers’ advocacy of any issue that benefits poor whites, or even suburban whites not rich enough to write a check for seed money. In fact, I’d argue that increased choice is one aspect of reform that will hurt poor and middle-class whites, since no one’s interested in starting schools for them. . . .
We’re a long way from a world in which we give all low income kids an equal shot, regardless of race. We’re not even at the point where each demographic has its own group of interested billionaires to fund selective schools for a lucky few.
BUT WAIT. THERE’S MORE: Byron York: Insurance company bailouts ‘absolutely will happen’ under Obamacare.
COLBY: What do you think about these bailouts of insurance companies, as well? Could that happen?
YORK: It absolutely will happen –
COLBY: Will happen?!
YORK: As a matter of fact, it’s written into the law. There’s something called “risk corridors,” which basically ensure that if an insurance company ends up paying a lot more in benefits than it takes in in premiums, then the federal government will bail it out — it will make it good. And it looks like we are entering a situation — certainly in the first month of January — where the insurance companies will be in that situation. And they’re not going to take the losses. It will be the taxpayer who makes up for those losses.
JANET BLOOMFIELD: A Christmas Letter for Fathers Alienated from their Children.
I am the adult survivor of parental alienation following divorce . . .
Christmas was always the worst time of year. My father was rarely a full participant in the celebrations, but he would drop off gifts, or have them mailed to us, and then be on his way. We had no idea at the time that he was in violation of court orders when he showed up, and that my mother would only permit him to stay for a few minutes. He considered himself lucky to have even that.
We hated him for thinking that being a father meant spending some money and then taking off at the earliest opportunity. Whatever presents or gifts he brought, it was never enough. We showed no gratitude. The words “thank you” were never uttered. We glared at him sullenly and perhaps begrudgingly conceded that some presents were “okay”.
We were utterly miserable and angry and ungrateful and terrible to him.
We had no idea that everything my mother had told us was a lie.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: True or False: “Washing Your Fruit and Veggies is Useless – You Can’t Wash Away the Pesticides, Anyway!” Spoiler alert: The answer is “false.” Cooking helps, too.
WALTER BLOCK: Feminists are not libertarians, neither are gays. “Nowadays, the gays do not limit themselves to upholding their (and by extension, everyone else’s) rights. Now, of late, they have been insisting that other people, who do not appreciate their lifestyle, and who wish to have nothing to do with them, be forced, against their will, to engage in commercial activities with them.” It seems odd that such a reminder should be necessary, but too many libertarians have so closely associated sexual license with both libertarianism and homosexual activism that they end up standing idly by while freedom of association, for example, is violated.
Of course, the post has been removed. See the new version here. “Nowadays, many gays do not limit themselves to upholding their (and by extension, everyone else’s) rights. Now, of late, many in the homosexual community have been insisting that other people, who do not appreciate their lifestyle, and who wish to have nothing to do with them, be forced, against their will, to engage in commercial activities with them.” Point taken: not all homosexuals support the persistent violation of freedom in the name of “gay rights.” But there seem to be so few who actively oppose it in any significant way.
Update: The new post has been removed, too. I guess we now know what you can’t criticize at the Circle Bastiat.
ED WHELAN: Judicial Recklessness in Utah.
One point on which all sober legal minds ought to be able to agree, irrespective of their different positions on same-sex “marriage”, is that a single federal district court decision ought not be allowed to override the marriage laws of a state. Yet that is exactly what federal district judge Robert James Shelby is trying to achieve by his astounding refusal to issue a stay pending appeal of his ruling last Friday that Utah’s definition of traditional marriage violates the federal Constitution. . . .
What Judge Shelby (a recent Obama appointee) is plainly trying to do is sow chaos in order to alter the terrain while the appeal of his ruling is pending. That’s a grossly irresponsible course of action, and the Tenth Circuit—or the Supreme Court—should put a quick stop to it.
Follow-up here.
IT TEACHES CLOSE OBSERVATION, TOO: How to keep your kids entertained for hours for just a dollar each.
UNWELCOME: Beretta won’t move to Virginia due to Terry McAuliffe’s gun-control agenda.
“The anti-gun ads that McAuliffe ran in northern Virginia were particularly offensive,” Jeff Reh, general counsel of Beretta USA, told me in an interview. “And the fact that he could gain a voting advantage by doing so caused us additional concern.” . . .
The Virginia site of the possible plant was one of six finalists locations that Beretta executives are now considering, after visiting 80 locations in seven states.
AN INTERVIEW WITH DANA GIOIA on the Christian retreat from American culture:
Although Catholics are now the largest religious denomination in the United States, representing at least a quarter of the U.S. population—they have a huge financial and social position in this country, they have actually almost disappeared in a cultural sense in a positive way. If you go back 60 years ago there was a vibrant, rich, cultural presence in all the arts. In literature, Catholics were everywhere: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Burton, Ernest Hemingway, et cetera. . . .
I think what we’ve seen is this very strange retreat the church has made—both internally less confident about itself, less presence in culture, which represents a complete historical turnaround for the Catholic church which was seen as the natural home for artists; I mean the glory of Catholicism has been its presence in material culture: architecture, paintings, sculpture, literary, music. But it’s become a rather generic and anonymous cultural presence now. . . .
The cultural situation for Catholics is very similar to all Christian faiths in the United States right now. . . .
The stories, the songs, the images by which we represent reality have an enormous influence on society and on the future. And when some of the largest groups—Catholics, all Christians—no longer have their stories, their songs, their images, their representations of reality available to the general culture, the culture is impoverished.
HOW GOVERNMENT SCHOOLING has become increasingly centralized.
BACKFIRE: Pennsylvania woman tried to frame husband with child porn, police say. “Police investigated and determined the images were put on the computer Aug. 11 but that Woods’ husband left the residence July 23.” Whoops.
AN AIRING OF GRIEVANCES: Dancing Drag Queen Santas Anger Parents at Alabama Christmas Parade.
STEVEN MOSHER: Russia Considers Banning Abortion. “Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning abortion advertising. Some members of the Duma (the Russian state assembly), are talking about going even further and banning the procedure itself. The Russian Orthodox Church, whose numbers are swelling with converts and ‘reverts,’ is weighing in as well. One Orthodox prelate called abortion a ‘mutiny against God.'”
BLACK ATHENA FOR 6TH GRADERS? Chicago public schools won’t share new African studies curriculum. But what little has been released shows signs for concern.
IT WAS NEVER ABOUT INCLUSION: Girl Guides Organization Threatens Expulsion After Chapter Refuses to Omit ‘God’ From Oath. “Glynis Mackie, the leader of the church-based Newcastle troop, known as the 37th Newcastle Guide Unit at Jesmond Parish Church, said she recently received a letter from the national organization threatening her group would be dropped from recognition if she continues to allow ‘God’ to be referenced in the girls’ pledge.”
Earlier: We need to change to be more inclusive. Don’t like it? Then get out. “Although the decision brought in a record 839 complaints, the organisation has refused to back down, saying that mention of God was deterring new members.”
LEFTISTS DON’T CARE about the rights of men accused of rape:
Progressives are having a bona fide conniption over the Reddit Men’s Righters who spammed Occidental College’s anonymous rape reporting system with fake “rape” claims (from what we can tell, they were not really false rape claims, just snarky comments about the injustice of anonymous reporting). The righteous indignation from feminists is deafening. . . .
The progressives dismissed any notion that the on-line system would pose a threat of false rape claims to innocent young men. Theoretically, fine. But we need to look at the track record of the folks giving us such assurances. Do these progressives have a track record of concern for the rights of the wrongly accused? In fact, when it comes to sex claims, the feminist left has an unfortunate history of dismissing the interests of the presumptively innocent in the name of outing and punishing rapists, and of ridiculing anyone who dares to speak for the wrongly accused.
Examples at the link.
CHRISTOPHER WHITE: Complicating Conception: The Desires of Parents and the Rights of Children.
At a recent conference for fertility-industry attorneys, I listened to a prominent children’s psychologist (who favors the practice of third-party reproduction) speak about the potential psychological issues donor-conceived children might face. In a moment of candor, she admitted, “We never thought about the future families. We only set out to fix the infertility.”
And this is precisely the problem with donor conception: the desires of the parents always trump the needs of the children.
White mentions the personal accounts submitted to the site Anonymous Us. Here’s an example, titled “Child of lesbian parents”:
Am I the only one who feels this way? Am I a bad daughter because I wish I had a Dad? Is there anyone else who has 2 Moms or 2 Dads who wonders what it would be like if they were born into a normal family? Is ther anyone else who wants to be able to use the word normal without gettin a lecture on what is normal???
I dont know my real father and never will. Its weird but I miss him. I miss this man I will never know. Is it wrong for me to long for a father like my friends have? She has two brothers I play basketball with all the time. It feels so amazing to be included in their family. When I am there I think this is what its like to be in a family that has a Mom and a Dad. Then I have have to go home to my own world. I just dont fit in it anymore.
ANGELO CODEVILLA: Crony Capitalists Seek Protection.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican leader, confessed to big business bureaucrats that he and other Establishment Republicans want to remain their link to government money and favors. According to a Wall Street Journal story (December 16), he asked them to open their wallets lest his kind be overwhelmed — not by Democrats, but by those smelly little Tea Party conservatives — the real threats to the government spending and regulations by which big business thrives.
The confession was almost that forthright: “said one person at the McConnell fundraiser, held at a Capitol Hill townhouse. ‘The main message he was pushing was: Get involved, mainly to teach those who are primarying incumbents that it is not helpful to run against incumbents who are champions for the industry.’”
ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ: It’s time to admit it, my gay brothers: Our culture is sick.
It is literally plagued with disease — not only HIV (which is rising again), but also syphilis (which has made a comeback). And Michelangelo Signorile, the dowager prince of gay news at the Huffington Post, admitted at long last what gay watchdog groups had been denying for decades upon decades: the chronic, timeless state of the homosexual man is to chase after pubescent boys. . . .
I used to avoid assessing the motives of others at all costs. But I can’t help supposing that the myth of people being born gay served a very useful purpose of justifying “intergenerational” sex as some sort of “teachable moment” rather than what it is: selfish, sleazy, old gay men sodomizing boys.
Do I speak as an outsider? Am I a homophobe? Nope — sorry, GLAAD. I know what the heck I’m talking about, and I suspect you know I know. I was first sodomized at the age of thirteen, and between the ages of thirteen and my twentieth birthday, I would estimate that I was used by at least thirty older men, ranging in age from sixteen to sixty-five. . . .
It would take me another eight years until finally, loosened up with wine, I made love to a female and realized that I’d been wrong and confused about myself, because my mind had been messed up by older men molesting and abusing me.
I say this not to brag or ask for pity, but merely to explain that Signorile’s model of “nurturing” intergenerational sex is destructive and sick.
NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT: Apple approves homosexual meetup app for users as young as 12. “The app was intended to facilitate dating for people who are already out and about, but one commenter on a gay website warned that those who fail to disable the default tracking settings will constantly broadcast their location to other users even when they are at home. That may concern parents of children who download the app, as predators could use the information to find vulnerable targets.”
DOG BITES MAN: Illinois Suffering the Consequences of Awful Government.
“WORST EVER” HOME SCHOOL BILL withdrawn in Ohio. “The language in the bill would have required all parents who home-school to undergo a social services investigation, including interviews and background checks, to determine if home schooling would be permitted. If parents didn’t pass the investigation, an ‘intervention’ would be recommended before further consideration of their request to home-school.”
But that’s not the end of it: “We have collectively decided the best course of action is for me to withdraw SB 248, and instead pursue a more comprehensive approach to address the current challenges in the state’s social service and criminal justice system.”
RELIGION OF PIECES: 12 killed in attacks against church in southern Syria. “The shells landed at the old Church in Daraa while the Church volunteers were distributing charity aid to locals, the report said.”
DANIEL J. FLYNN: Before GQ’s Writer Got Duck Dynasty’s Phil, He Got Me.
Magary’s Deadspin piece on my Values Voter Summit speech begins, “The first thing I saw was the abortion truck.” “Let’s start with the crossbow, because the crossbow is huge,” reads the opening line of his GQ article on Phil Robertson. It’s not just the strange stylistic similarities–the informally abrupt announcements, “The first thing” and “Let’s start with”–that jump out. The substance of both opening lines amounts to the same cautionary note to the urban, metrosexual readership: the subject of this article is not like you. So, rather than understand or debate him, let’s point and laugh. Magary highlights a cultural lightning rod–abortion in one instance, weapons in the other–to proclaim his subject’s status as “the other.”
Drew Magary’s identikit articles, imposing the same template upon very different subjects, reflect a joyless, assembly-line writing that shapes subjects into precast molds instead of understanding them as unwieldy individuals prone to sending long-form journalism into unanticipated and interesting directions. Ideology has that cookie-cutter effect on writing.
PAT ARCHBOLD: Duck Dynasty: The Show That Got Away.
The whole idea of the show was to parade these nouveau riche Christian hillbillies around so that we could laugh at them. “Look at them,” we were supposed to say. “Look how backward they are! Look what they believe! Can you believe they really live this way and believe this stuff? See how they don’t fit in? HAHAHA”
When the producers saw the way the show was shaping up, different than they envisioned it, they tried to change course. They tried to get the Robertson’s to tone down their Christianity, but to their eternal credit they refused. They tried to add fake cussin’ to the show by inserting bleeps where no cussword was uttered. At best, they wanted to make the Robertsons look like crass buffoons. At worst they wanted them to look like hypocrites.
They desperately wanted us to laugh at the Robertsons. Instead, we loved them.
IN THE MARKET FOR SOME DUCK CALLS? Get ’em here.