This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.

One of the myths about disco, one that I think that contributes to a lot of misunderstandings about it, is that it was a brief trend that collapsed as quickly as it rose up in the 70s. In reality, disco was just another step in a long 20th century evolution of dance music, and it ended for the same reason a lot of musical trends do: it morphed into other forms. If anything, disco had a larger impact than most music trends do, as elements of it came out in techno and all other electronic dance music, post-punk, New Wave, and most importantly, hip-hop (which is why we're doing a dual theme for this year's WAM Prom.) But one reason I think there's a sense that disco was its own thing in a way that other trends aren't is that the kind of dancing people think of when they think of disco is this elaborate, ballroom-style dancing that has no relationship to the bouncing and writhing that is most dancing people do in America, whether at a rock show, hip-hop club, or rave. You know what I mean. People think "disco" and they think of John Travolta playing Tony Manero.

Or Travolta's solo style dancing in the same movie:

Nothing against Travolta's unbelievable dancing skills, but this wasn't actually how people (at least prior to this movie) danced to disco, which was, from what I understand, much like they've danced to everything since, which is mostly formless bouncing and writhing. Now, all sorts of music trends have movies that exploited them to make semi-musicals with elaborate dancing, but Saturday Night Fever became synonymous in the public imagination with disco in a way that hasn't happened before or since to a musical form. Why? 

There's a lot of reasons: the dancing is really that good, the music is that much better, a zeitgeists was hit. But I think one reason is that Saturday Night Fever purported to be based on a true story, giving the audience the feeling that they really were taking a peek into the Brooklyn disco scene by watching this fictional film, in much the same way that 8 Mile got a little extra boost because it's so well-known that Eminem did in fact scrape his way up through rap battles like the one portrayed in the movie. But while I think Eminem's life is pretty well-documented, the "true story" of Saturday Night Fever is actually, well, a hoax. 

The whole thing started with a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn in 1976 called "Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a story about the elaborate disco lifestyle of the Italian-American regulars at a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco. The story was a hit; it seems it must have gone into development as a movie in record time. The only problem wiht it is that Cohn made the whole thing up. 

He finally admitted the hoax 20 years later, in 1997.

For an article in the December 8 issue celebrating the 20th anniversary of the movie, Cohn tells of a disco deception born of frustration. The British writer describes how he went to Brooklyn's now legendary 2001 Odyssey searching in vain for a flamboyantly dressed fellow he had spotted in the club's entrance a week earlier. "I didn't learn much...I made a lousy interviewer: I knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn't speak the language.

"So I faked it. I conjured up the story of the figure in the doorway, and named him Vincent...I wrote it all up. And presented it as fact," Cohn confesses. "There was no excuse for it...I knew the rules of magazine reporting, and I knew that I was breaking them. Bluntly put, I cheated."

The culture and specifically the emphasis on dancing skills was a mish-mash of Cohn's own imagination and what he observed in the Northern soul clubs in Great Britain in the 60s. It's one of those stories that has drifted under the waves, because most people don't really think it's that important (though why not in our James Frey-bashing era, I don't know). But while it's far from the most important story of journalistic misinformation, I still think it's not something that should be waved off. After all, Cohn's imaginings supplanted the more reality-based portrayals of disco, most of which I think are far more interesting than the image that Cohn painted. To make it all worse, if people had a better idea of how disco actually was in the 70s, I think it would be easier to see it as part of the larger quilt of American pop music, which is always mutating as different genres swap and steal and morph into something new, yet still familiar. 

In case anyone was unaware, Newt Gingrich is a professional historian.

Well, okay, not really - he's got a PhD and was denied tenure then went around Washington D.C. generally being the sort of haughty dick who misread an article on Cracked.com and is amused by your lack of knowledge concerning what really happened to Amelia Earhart. 

He's also an ideas man, a brilliant ideas man, and is willing to take this country forward into 1915...if only we'll let him. One of his recurring ideas is to seek vengeance on federal judges by abolishing their positions, and from that point sending the clear message that he has no idea how the Constitution works.

The Judicial Reform Act of 1802 abolishe[d] 18 out of 35 federal judges. That doesn’t impeach them, it just says this court no longer exists, we are no longer going to fund it, go home. That was over half of all federal judges at that time.

… take the most bizarre of judges and simply abolish their court. Tell them to go home. Those are the kind of steps. And I think they will lead to a very substantial national debate. There is nobody who has had the temerity now for almost 60 years to stand up and say that this is absurd.

Gingrich defends this idea as "Jeffersonian", because Jefferson was behind the JRA of 1802, and people like the way "Jeffersonian" sounds. It's mellifluent. Also, it abolished 16 positions, not 18, but history's not about accuracy. It's about ideas.

Here's the problem: Gingrich wants to abolish the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The JRA of 1802 abolished judgeships within each circuit, but still kept judges on each circuit. Gingrich's suggestion of abolition isn't just a foolhardy act of political vengeance; it's very likely unconstitutional as threatened.

A basic tenet of due process and equal protection is that all citizens have equal access to whatever form of judicial adjudication the federal government makes available. By abolishing the appellate arm of the Ninth Circuit, roughly 20% of America (the population of the Ninth Circuit states) would have no effective appellate rights in the federal system. Our current system of jurisdiction and venue laws bar the sort of circuit-hopping necessary to afford Ninth Circuit residents appellate rights in other circuits (and the closest states to the Ninth are the not exactly judge-heavy Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming and North and South Dakota). 

Gingrich is a poor student of history, and an even worse student of the Constitution. My suggestion: he should hire some poor ghetto children to do some research for him.

I try, and often fail, to end the week on a positive note. But this week, I can actually do that for you. Online, for obvious reasons, most of the fussing over NY Mag's look at feminist writing was over the piece on internet feminism. But I also want to recommend this piece on the history of Ms. Magazine, which may be a bit stale these days, but really had a lot to offer in the day.

And one thing really jumped out at me and made me glad. I think it can be a little depressing reading some feminist history because you really see how far we haven't come in so many ways. Back in the 60s and 70s, feminists were fighting the same forces that we're fighting on every front from sexual violence to men speaking to you like you're a child just because you have a vagina. In many ways, we've backslid; after all, we're still fighting the fucking abortion wars they really did have a reason to believe they'd won. Still, this article is a reminder that they won many important battles. The most obvious ones are things like giving women (some) access to male-only jobs---we have the legal right to them now, even if we still face discrimination. Gay rights have come a long way. Women are not only able to have their own money and property, but they're basically expected nowadays to pay as much attention to that as men. If you didn't have a credit card in your own name because you're married, people now would assume that you're a part of a religious cult, but that sort of thing was normal then. 

But one thing stood out to me that isn't discussed much but is really obvious reading this: they succeeded in improving the everyday interactions between men and women.  Well, maybe not for everyone, but absolutely they did on the left. This article leaves it very clear that in supposedly liberal, pro-feminist circles back then, men still felt fully empowered to treat women like meat, or openly support this woman over that woman, career-wise, because they thought she was hot. And worse. Like this story of how Warren Beatty treated Gloria Steinem, even though he was a politically liberal guy who supported the ERA and probably considered himself a feminist sympathizer. 

She said she’d had dinner with Beatty in London, and he got down on all fours and looked under the tablecloth to see her legs. She was wearing a high miniskirt, and you know, she had these perfect legs. She said to me, “Okay, look, let’s just see if Warren Beatty will do it first.”

So, that's changed a lot. There's still a lot of sexism in liberal circles, and even just sexualized idiocy like this, but it's much less and much less obnoxious. Jon Stewart isn't going to crawl under a table to leer at some woman's legs that is supposedly a colleague. On the contrary, when wingnut blogger Ann Althouse made a fuss over Jessica Valenti appearing in public with boobs still attached to her body, the male liberals of the blogosphere largely defended Jessica. In the more professional-left world that Steinem was running in, men who leer like this are the exception, and back then they were the rule. Obviously, there's flirting and hooking up, but that's not the issue here---no one is against that! But being treated like meat by the majority of your male allies, to the point where they expect to get away with shit like this? I'm sure it happens, but not that much. Not anything like it used to be. So big win on that front. Now for the world. 

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Clarence Thomas's Senate hearings that led to his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, which the country has been paying dearly for ever since. The whole thing was a disaster, of course, but one extremely important and good thing came out of it all; Anita Hill's brave testimony of enduring some really ugly sexual harassment at Thomas's hands ignited a public conversation about sexual harassment. And while we have a long, long way to go on this issue---most women endure sexual harassment, often on a regular basis still---the idea that sexual harassment is wrong has really taken hold in a way that simply wasn't true in 1991. It's an important first step. 

There was a conference honoring this 20th anniversary that I sadly had to miss, but that can be watched here.  The Nation had an excellent issue dedicated to it, with memories and reflections from a variety of writers, including one from Jessica Valenti on being 12 years old because she believed Anita Hill. 

"I believe Anita Hill": it was a battle cry of sorts then, and to an extent now. It seems like a straightforward statement---between Thomas and Hill, you find her story more believable---but if you really start to scratch at what happened then, it turns out it's quite a bit more complex than that. 

I was 14 when the whole thing happened. I wasn't really politicized yet, so I don't really recall having a strong opinion on it. Not that thinking deeply about the question was really an option; in my community, believing that Hill as both lying and making a mountain out of a molehill was an article of faith. That these two ideas people held simultaneously directly contradicted each other didn't seem to occur to anyone, much less me. Not at the time. She was lying, and anyway, he was just flirting with her and clearly she's an uptight prude with an agenda: faith, not reason supported this conclusion. Being skeptical of it would have received the same hostile treatment that all widespread faith beliefs are protected by. 

I mainly, at that point in time, liked reading books and listening to CDs, and it was the latter that pulled a brick out of my mental wall on this issue. Sonic Youth had a song on their 1992 record Dirty titled "Youth Against Fascism", and it had the lyric "I believe Anita Hill/Judge will rot in hell" on it. It almost feels like an understatement to say that this lyric blew my mind. A man standing up for a woman---a woman he didn't know, especiallly---in a dispute between a man and a woman over sexualized mistreatment? I had never experienced that before, and probably thought of it as simply impossible. Most women treated other women who spoke up about this stuff like pariahs, so the idea of a man calling bullshit, and being so angry about it, was just unbelievable to me. It felt so incredibly subversive. I didn't want to be caught listening to that lyric. It seemed dirty to suggest that there was any alternative to simply enduring sexual harassment in silence. 

Because, like Jessica, being young didn't mean I wasn't already well-versed in the problem of sexual harassment. By my first year of high school, I'd had teenage boys and even men try to get me into their cars with them on isolated roads (thank god my parents warned me about that one), had guys grope me in the hallways, had guys make lewd gestures at me, and generally been sexually abused at the hands of my male peers and occasional, scarier incidents with older men.  Like Jessica, I think I had no idea that this would be a lifelong problem. What I did know was this: It was not a compliment. You often hear, though far less than you used to, this notion that cat-calling was a compliment and only stupid women could therefore object to it. But it was, along with Hill's mendacity, an article of faith in my community that I was ugly and probably a lesbian and no one male could ever actually want to defile themselves by liking me. Thus, it was literally impossible for a lewd gesture to be a compliment. Most of the boys who did this stuff to me would have sooner endured someone putting a cigarette out on their arms than actually have anyone believe for a second they thought that someone like me was anything but scum for spitting on. I had no illusions, none, about what cat calls and groping meant. It was putting you in your place, a casual reminder that you had no value in their eyes and, more importantly, so little value to the community at large that no one would ever come to your defense. And no one ever did.

That's why "believing" Anita Hill was such a complex and frankly radical thing to do in the early 90s. It wasn't just that you were accepting her version of events. Many of her fiercest critics seemed not to deny that the events she described happened, after all. To believe Anita Hill was also to believe that Thomas was wrong to do the things he did. "Youth Against Fascism" made this clear. Thurston Moore didn't just affirm that he believed that Hill's testimony was factually accurate. He said that treating a woman like that was so wrong that a man who did such things would "burn in hell". He said that it was a man's fault if a man chooses to sexually harass a woman. No one around me was saying those things.

I think the message must have wormed its way into my head, because by the end of high school I was standing up to guys who sexually harassed me. It didn't make anyone defend me, of course. Most people who see a woman speak out against injustice treat her the way they treated Anita Hill---they're furious that she's making a scene, not that he abused her without cause. But standing up for myself made me realize that I didn't need to internalize the shame these assholes were dishing out. I could be proud of myself, even if no one else around me agreed that I deserved that. Hey, Thurston Moore agreed with me, you know, and none of these fools were making Sonic Youth records, so what do they know anyway?

Lots of online discussion about this movie, notably from Melissa Harris-Perry and Nelson George.  I'm with Jill on this; above all other things, the idea of this movie makes my eyes close with boredom. Another story that puts a white person at the center of a story about racial injustice in order to assuage the white guilt of mainstream American audiences?  Oh boy!  After that, I plan to think about how even though I'm too good to do something icky like get an abortion, I'll generously allow that others should have that right, and after being so exquisitely self-sacrificing, I'll reward myself by listening to some country music renamed "bluegrass" to make it more palatable. 

If for no other reason, I'm angry at "The Help" for raising the usage rates of the words "well-meaning" and "problematic" online, causing me to seriously consider logging off the internet until the euphemism rates get back to normal levels.  

Movies like this, no matter how vigorously anti-racist on their surface, exist to give people an excuse to believe racism is something that happened in the past but is no longer a real problem.  At most points in time, this urge is fucked up, but since we're in a current cycle of---to use euphemistic language of my own---strained racial relations, it's especially fucked up.  I suppose I'll be mewled at for drawing this conclusion without seeing the movie, and in my defense, I'm going to say one thing.  Sitting in a crowd of white people clucking their tongues at how bad the South was in the 60s while ignoring shit like this is bad for my mental health.  I have a doctor's note.  So I'm going to take a pass on this one and not even feel remotely bad about it. 

I was reading the latest issue of The Believer---the music issue!---today, and I found this tidbit interesting.  It's from Hua Hsu's examination of the telephone in pop music history, and it made me cackle:

Early newspaper reports of Alexander Graham Bell's new invention, the telephone, exhibited a laughable narrowness of vision.  Short of changing business or politics, the greatest effect, some teased, would be in the arena of courtship.  "A fellow can now court his girl in China as well as in East Boston," an 1870s editorial in the Boston Times forsaw, before warning of "the awful and irresponsible power" such a device would give nagging mothers.

The technology changes, but the complaints remain the same: 1) Someone, somewhere is using this technology to gain pleasures you yourself are not experiencing and that's alarming and 2) Women are frightening creatures whose awe-inspiring powers to destroy are only being restrained by the lack of this new technology in their lives. 

Nona Willis Aronowitz posted a video from MTV News in 1995 about the internet. The broadcasters were not panicked about the internet.  On the contrary, they seemed to think it was a really cool invention that had a lot of potential. But they reported on the fact that a lot of people at the time were panicked by the internet, because, you know, orgasms.

(There's a little bit of Billy Corgan bashing Michael Jackson, too.  Guess who won history?)

People's continual panic over technological innovation---the way we easily convince ourselves that a new medium or device will somehow be the ruin of us all---is one of those topics I find fascinating without ever really resolving it in my mind.  I'm particularly amused at the knee-jerk assumption that older forms are automatically deeper and more interesting.  I was compelled to think about that some today after reading the tedious, joy-killing comments at what I thought was a fun post at XX Factor about MTV's early years and what it meant to people like me. Using a little bit of colorful language, I said that MTV raised me, by which of course I meant that I watched a lot of it growing up and it had a big impact on my way of thinking.  I made a substantive argument that this was a good thing, but of course the puzzling "OMG TV IS THE DEVIL" folks had to show up in comments.

It is sad....really sad. To think that so many young people (and now old people) park their behinds in front of a television and let mindless television programing become the "inspiration" and the open window into a view of the world and of their lives. REALLY.....I mean REALLY AMANDA? You were "raised" by MTV? That in and of itself is truely a sad statement about not just one generation but multi generations. It is sad, at least to me, that an entire generations view of what is important from their youth was coming home and parking in front of a television to watch a show about a bunch of musicians in made up videos about made up things. But that is also true of the generation that came home and parked in front of a television to watch Andy Griffith or Lassie, or Gulliagans Island. Again a generation defined not by the things they did but what they watched....sad but true.

I told him I rejected his "get off my lawn" argument, particularly the notion that I'm a stupid or sad person because I like music videos. But it did make me think: would such a person crap his pants if I wrote about an older medium changing my life for the better? What if I posted this song by the Velvet Underground and said I related to it? I'm guessing I'd be praised, because radio is an older medium and therefore assumed to be wholesome and intelligence-improving. 

In fact, I got something of an answer to my question, as a number of people showed up in comments and shamed anyone who watched MTV for not being more into radio.  Radio's superiority was assumed to be self-evident, even though I brought forth evidence in the post and people backed it up in comments that a lot of what was on MTV was simply not available on the radio in much of the country.  In fact, I would say that's the point of the post.  By simply having more diverse and newer content, MTV was automatically superior, in my opinion.  But this notion that technological evolution is somehow immoral (I got both right wing puritans shaming me for the sexual immorality of watching MTV and liberal puritans shaming me for the supposed corporatist immorality of watching MTV) just is asserted as if it's an immutable truth of humanity and not just some arbitrary bullshit.

I remain puzzled as to why people so easily take it as a given that a communication/media technology's newness makes it more immoral and vapid than older forms, which were also considered immoral and vapid when they came out.  I'm sure it has something to do with fear of mortality.  Any way you slice it , there's an irony there, because I would argue that the knee-jerk rejection of a technology simply because it's new is what is vapid and quite often immoral, particularly when it comes to the people who begrudge young people whose lives are very often saved by fascinating new technologies that show them a world behind the limited ones that are smothering them.  

I'm somewhat reluctant to feed the beast on this. Every story based around "Michele Bachmann doesn't know her history/the meaning of words/how to work door knobs!" is a story where we're not talking about how Michele Bachmann is a fire-breathing Bible thumper who can't wait for her husband to have a handmaid of his own so they can keep having babies.  While I think folks like Matt Taibbi overrate the damage of making fun of Bachmann for being stupid---yes, it makes stupid people like her more, but it does help her lose support amongst those who still have functioning brain cells, which was why Sarah Palin so dramatically damaged John McCain's campaign----mixing some other narratives (Iranian-style theocracy supporter comes to mind) into the mix will help hurt her chances even more.  

Anyway, despite all this, I want to point out that Bachmann is pulling a Palin, i.e. when she got history wrong, her supporters (with her blessing) decided to rewrite history rather than let Dear Leader be wrong.  "We've always been at war with Eurasia" is no longer hyperbole!  Her supporters changed John Wayne's birthplace on Wikipedia in order to bring it in line with her erroneous statements, which I found especially amusing, because I'd bet a large sum of money that whoever did that believes that Obama faked his birth certificate to become President. And now her supporters are claiming that John Quincy Adams was a "Founding Father", even though he was a small child when the Declaration of Independence was signed.  

The reason they're doing this goes back to---as it often does with this crew---this nation's ugly history of racism and their inability to deal with it that stems from their role as people who are continuing it.  Bachmann was trying to find a way to justify her ridiculous claim that the Founding Fathers "fought tirelessly" to end slavery, and what she happened upon was to put all that statement on one guy who wasn't actually a Founding Father, though he was the son of one.  

By this line of argument, I'm going to say that the citizens of West Texas in the 1970s work tirelessly to keep my cats' water bowl full in the summer. Hey, if your parents and all the people around them get to take credit for the work you do, then the possibilities are endless.  As are the Wikipedia rewrites. 

I think at this point it's worth pre-locking certain Wikipedia pages every time a Republican says something blatantly wrong on the topic.  Clearly, shame isn't going to prevent the volunteer propagandists from rewriting history, but access could stop them. 

Also, with regards to the manufactured flap over the word "flake", I will say this: probably in the future it would be wise, when using accurate descriptors for Michele Bachmann, stick to ones that tend to be used mostly or only to describe men.  "Flake" is applied to men and women, which is enough for the wingnuts to round that up to "sexist", since they don't actually give a flying fuck about real sexism.  I recommend "lunkhead" and "asshole" for future use. 

As I expected, I was chastised in comments by a drive-by commenter who claimed paying attention to this birther thing is a waste of time, because important things are going on. It was the "ignore it and it'll go away" argument in another form, and I was happy at least that it seems so far only one person is trying to pull it.  Nonetheless, I think it's important to understand that this is about way more than a bunch of conservatives getting a crackpot idea in their head.  For that reason, I recommend watching Baratunde Thurston's video on what has transpired.

Like I said yesterday, one of the things that has happened is that Obama, by forcing this issue, has stripped the plausible deniability away from birthers that they are "just asking questions".  The fact that they're not satisfied as they claimed they would be demonstrates that this was never about a legitimate concern about his citizenship, but that they were groping around for a way to say that they will never accept black Americans as full Americans.  That Trump immediately switched to questioning Obama's education is telling, and if anything, it's more stark than questioning his birth certificate in demonstrating the racism of this whole fiasco.  This is because when Donald Trump talks, you get a strong feeling he has to pay someone to wipe his ass for him, because he's too stupid to figure it out for himself.  For him---a man stupid enough to claim that the right to privacy has nothing to do with abortion, a man who probably thinks that combover looks good---to suggest that Barack Obama isn't smart is pure, unadulterated racism. Baratunde is right to compare this birther thing to literacy tests and other Jim Crow laws that prevented black people from voting.  (And which Republicans are bringing back in places like Kansas and Florida.)  No matter what the cursory justifications for this are, the underlying reason for these kinds of "tests" on black Americans is to say over and over again that the people issuing the "tests" and demanding the "proof" don't agree that black Americans are American. And, in the case of Arizona with their "papers, please" law, saying that Hispanic Americans aren't American.  Or, as Sarah Palin puts it, Real Americans.

This right wing obsession with trying to kick large segments of our population out of the category Real Americans has immediate effects on the people being discriminated against, and it has effects far beyond that.  I'd argue that this culture war is why our country's screwed in so many ways.  Culture war got Bush into office, where he promptly started two unwinnable wars to bankrupt the country.  Culture war is why our Supreme Court nominations are so contentious, and why the court is now far to the right and cheerfully ripping up the legal rights of anyone who isn't a billionaire or a corporation.  it's why our economy is going down the drain, because large segments of the population are more concerned about making sure people they don't like don't get a piece of the pie that they are willing to stand by while a handful of rich people take it all from all of us.  The line-drawing of who is and isn't a Real American is complicated, but the biggest, most consistent aspect of it has been racism against black Americans.

The culture wars really got started with the battle over civil rights.  That's how domestic terrorism was born.  That's how Bible-thumping as a cover for reactionary politics was developed.  That's how Jerry Falwell got his start, as a segregationist.  That's how the modern Republican party formed, in response to federal laws banning discrimination and harassing voters at the polls.  There's a tendency in our country to pretend we've put all that behind us, but as the birther movement shows, that isn't so.  I'm not saying that progress hasn't been made, of course, but these culture wars over identity still shape our politics in disgusting ways.  The people who voted for Richard Nixon are still around, and they vote in larger numbers than the rest of the population, and so they and their Real American obsessions have an outsized influence on  this country. 

That's why I don't think the proper response to birtherism is to look away or minimize what's going on, because it makes everyone deeply uncomfortable. Culture warriors and racists benefit if everyone politely pretends they're not as vile as they are, and Trump is just the latest example of this.  Confrontation is how you fight this kind of bigoted bullshit. People who promote it are the lowest of the low, and people who coddle it should not get away with it.

There were some concerns expressed in the comment thread of this morning’s Friday Genius Ten that I was just kidding, pulling some kind of April Fool’s joke on y’all.  But I assure you that my love for the Dave Matthews Band runs deep.  It’s not even rational anymore—-all the music on that list, with the exception of James Blake, pulls powerfully on my fond memories as a young woman coming of age in the era of “alternative radio”.  Dave Matthews especially invokes in my mind scenes of my youth, idyllic memories of my dudebro friends pulling up at my place in a Jeep with their Greek letters stuck to the back window, and I’d toss an 18-pack of Bud Light in the cooler and we’d be off from Austin to the only place to really party, South Padre Island.  And all the while, bands like Dave Matthews and the Stone Temple Pilots pumping us up for the beer bongs and wet T-shirt contests we soon would be enjoying.  You always had that one guy in the group who wore hemp clothes and sandals that brought the good weed, and he’s insist on playing Phish.  At first it was annoying, but eventually I came around to liking it, as you can tell from my nostalgic music collection. 

But that’s never the guy you’d hook up with, of course.  Tool fans: now those guys were real men.  One of the things I miss the most now that I’m an all-the-way grown-up is making love on a mattress on the floor with the black light making the Jimi Hendrix posters gleam and Tool on the stereo.  Nowadays, everyone washes their sheets, and something is really missing from the experience.  Men nowadays, except maybe a handful of youth ministers in the Midwest, have no idea how sharp a goatee can really look.

Not that I spent my entire wayward youth with only guys!  Far from it.  The 90s were full to the brim of opportunities to hang out with the girls and have some fun. My gals and I had a standing Thursday night date to watch “Friends”, and let me tell you, to this day I think there’s no better model for what love should look like than Ross and Rachel.  “Friends” is why I moved to New York, y’all, and it has not disappointed! After the episode, we’d mix some fuzzy navels, put on some tunes, and hash out what had just happened on the show.  The late 90s was an epic time for women in music.  The big thing was ladies being all empowerful and angry and screw off, boys!  So we’d listen to Paula Cole and be all scandalized that she didn’t shave, which made us feel very rebellious indeed.  Meredith Brooks made us realize we could totally be virgins AND whores—-that’s power!  Alanis Morissette, I mean, how can you put into words the perfection that was her feminist rage that some guy she used to date is totally dating someone else now?  Girls these days have it so easy, with all their time to be worried about petty shit like reproductive rights and equal pay and stopping rape.  I won’t say if there was ever a night when a little too much peach schnapps was guzzled and the Spice Girls came on.  Some things are better left at the party.

And of course, there was Sarah McLachlan, the greatest of the great.  Seriously, my girl friends and I adored her.  You better believe we were the first in line to buy tickets to the Lilith Fair!  I still remember what I wore: my peasant skirt, a cheap midriff-baring tank top, sandals, feather earrings, and a leather necklace with a peace sign in it.  I’m so glad all these fashions are coming back in to style.  Shapeless is sexy!  I wonder why everyone forgot that.  The word “billow” is synonymous with “romantic”, is it not? At least overpriced coffee drinks never went out of style.

Sure, I make it sound like the 90s, especially the late 90s, were the greatest, most perfect time in history. And it was!  But there were naysayers.  I had one friend who fashioned herself all arty, and she’d complain to me all the time about the death of college radio.  Even though they had college radio on at night on 91.7 all through the late 90s, she kept bellyaching about the end of K-NACK, which was supposed to be this great indie/punk station, and it was shut down in the mid-90s.  Like I said to her at the time, there wasn’t any more need for college radio anymore.  After all, K-NACK ended because they got bought out by the alternative rock station, 101X.  Alternative rock meant you didn’t need some stupid college radio stations to have anything on the air besides insipid pop music.  Alternative music was mainstream, baby!  After all, weren’t even the frat daddies and the party girls listening to alternative rock?  Alt rock had won, and there wasn’t a need for any kind of underground or indie music any more.  Everyone’s got an ankle tattoo and a hemp bracelet, but no, she just kept on whining like her grandma died or something.  So yeah, I never got that aspect of the 90s.  But I’ll bet she looks back now and thinks that she was just silly for caring that much about something that no one else saw but her.

There will be many articles and blog posts remembering the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that happened 100 years ago tomorrow.  I highly recommend reading Nancy Goldstein’s piece at the Prospect, where she brings the issues raised by the fire to modern times, and to the most recent example of such a tragedy, the West Virginia coal mine collapse that killed 29 workers.  This is a realy critical issue, because in all the sea of people remembering this tragedy and using it as an opportunity to once again call for strong unions, we can’t forget that the conservative reaction is predictable and could be effective if not properly countered. 

Prediction: conservatives will roll their eyes and point out that this horrible tragedy happened 100 years ago, and everything has changed.  This is a fairly common conservative gambit.  It’s used against civil rights legislation—-which conservatives argue can be rolled back because people are supposedly not racist anymore.  Indeed, it’s being used on unions.  Rarely will you hear a conservative straight up say that workers shouldn’t be permitted to have time off, benefits, or basic workplace safety.  What they will say is that unions once did good, but now are useless.  This distinction allows them to both believe that the outrage 100 years ago was justified, but that the outrage at current union-busting is just fine. 

Which is why it’s important to point out modern examples, as Nancy has done.  The notion that owners nowadays aren’t the Gilded Age assholes who don’t care if their workers live or die as long as they’re replaceable is simply a lie.  And I think the Wisconsin protests are beginning to focus attention on this.  The dripping contempt that Scott Walker has for the teachers and other public sector workers in his state couldn’t be more obvious.  The slobbering eagerness to bash them he exhibited during the sting phone call with a fake David Koch was particularly damaging.  In the face of this, and in the face of the utter indifference to the deaths he caused exhibited by the mine owner in West Virginia should settle the matter.  If the upper class could take away your weekends, your health care, your right to go home at a certain hour, your right to fair compensation, your assurance that you won’t die at work to save them a couple of bucks, your right to save for retirement?  They’d do it in a heartbeat.  Now, as then, most of the people who pull the strings see working Americans as chattel and nothing more.  And the mere existence of unions is our best defense against this mentality.

If you doubt that, look at how hard they are working to destroy unions.  You don’t do that unless you do see them as a check on your power.

I think what’s most fascinating to me about how one of Glenn Beck’s major strategies is rewriting history is that Beck’s audience is most retirement age, and so we’re talking people that have actual memories of the history he lies his fool head off about. Just goes to show the mighty power of cognitive dissonance that people can listen to him say things they must know on some level are straight up lies, but they need to believe them so badly they just suck up all the lies. 

It’s particularly interesting that he does this with regards to the legacy of MLK, since so many of his viewers were old enough to remember objecting to King’s work in his day.  And, of course, the writers that Beck admires and promotes clearly saw King as a communist subversive.  Beck spends a lot of time taking a crap all over King’s contemporaries who were doing the same work for the same reasons, but were not gunned down by assassins and made into martyrs. But for some reason, Beck and his audience have this game of Let’s Pretend—-that they would have supported King, that they did support King, that King would have been on their side against the unions, the poor, and racial equality.  Which includes straight up denying that King was killed while working with union organizers. 

BECK: Wait, wait, hold it, just a second. Dr. King lost his life for collective bargaining for the public unions, really? Did you know that? ‘Cause—that—we have to update our history books, because I didn’t know that. Did you know that?

PAT GRAY: I personally didn’t. (Laughs)

BECK: Thank you for that.

GRAY: I didn’t know that. I - I was - I’m a little confused, I guess, ‘cause, yeah, I thought it had something to do with civil rights, but it was a union deal?

BECK: It was a union deal. Yeah.

STU BURGUIERE: Well, there was the content of the character and the collectiveness of the bargaining was the—

GRAY: Ahh, that’s right. How did I miss that?

BECK: Well, to make the point - here’s the deal—April 4th is the 43rd anniversary of the day Martin Luther King was assassinated after speaking on behalf of the striking black garbage collectors in Memphis, Tennessee. So, I’m sure that the fact that they were black and in Memphis had nothing to do with his mention—with his, uh, message. It was all about unions and collective bargaining. I’m sure that’s what it was.

We’re all aware of this right wing “arguing” technique from forums and on Twitter—-if you don’t have an argument, you restate the fact-based liberal point with sarcasm to show how done you are with it, and hope that suffices for a point.  So, when a liberal notes that the U.S. spends a shit ton of money bombing countries that just so happen to have oil and isn’t that interesting, you say, “OOOOOOIIIIIIILLLLL”, to indicate that you’re bored and hope that this makes them shut up because they’re right and you know it.  Same with whining about the “race card”—-hey, if accusations of racism are boring for racists, imagine how tedious it is for those calling it out.  Believe me, they would far rather be playing pinochle than dealing with the same old racist shit.  And of course, Beck’s just running the same rhetorical ploy on the radio, figuring badly played sarcasm suffices for an argument.*

As Media Matters notes, King was in fact organizing for Memphis sanitation workers when struck down by an assassin’s bullet.  And Beck characterizing King as sort of mindlessly supporting black people in every endeavor betrays the racism behind Beck trying to wear King’s mantle.  It’s simply not true that King was somehow generally anti-union except when unions were predominantly black.  Media Matters quotes a speech King gave the day before his assassination that makes this clear:

The issues is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we’ve got to keep attention on that. That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that.

Now we’re going to march again, and we’ve got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be. And force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That’s the issue. And we’ve got to say to the nation: we know it’s coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.

I’m going to take the time to note the nothing-new-under-the-sun aspect of this, which is that from this speech you can clearly tell that anti-union people were running the same con against Memphis sanitation workers that they’re not running against Wisconsin school teachers, using lurid and often false claims that the unions are violent in order to distract from the real discussion about whether or not we should pay workers fairly.  Of course, the actual deathly violence was the other way around, as demonstrated by King’s assassination. 

I shouldn’t even bother with Beck’s accusation that King wasn’t there because he had an intellectual and moral investment in ending poverty, but because he was just demonstrating some vaguely defined racial solidarity.  But, I just want to quote from King’s book to show that Beck really is the ugliest kind of liar:

In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

He then moves on to propose a guaranteed income as the solution, and in case you’re wondering (I know you’re not), he believed this should be for all people.  Not that King was denying that direct racism was a problem in the slightest, but he could walk and chew gum at the same time. 

*As a sarcastic person, I have to object to wingnuts abusing the form.  Using sarcasm in service of lies is rarely, if ever, amusing.  It just makes you sound like a dick.  Sarcasm deployed correctly is a thing of beauty, however.

I’ve been angry for days about what we won’t hear from the President tonight. Together, Talib Kweli and Thom Yorke say everything he won’t:

You can download the mashup by popping the little down arrow at Soundcloud.

G.D. takes a look at the argument that the “free market” would have neatly solved the problem of segregation if those impatient civil rights people had just waited it out.  G.D. tackles a writer at Human Events for this, but this argument is sadly more mainstream than that.  It was Rand Paul’s argument for why he wouldn’t have supported the Civil Rights Act, for instance. Most Republicans wouldn’t go on the record saying this, but this argument is made so often in conservative circles that I actually think it’s a matter of faith at this point.  Jay Nordlinger, as I noted yesterday, suggested that Martin Luther King would have regretted badmouthing the radical right that pushed Barry Goldwater to win the 1964 Republican nomination, and the reason in Nordlinger’s mind is that Goldwater’s rejection of federal laws against segregation were “classic liberalism”.  This comment makes no sense on its face, but it does make a little bit more sense if you understand that “the free market would have forced desegregation eventually!” is the rationale at work here. 

G.D.‘s reply to this nonsense is well worth reading in its entirety, so click the link.  A sample:

It actually is a pretty abstract proposition, since this is never the way American life, and the crushing racism of the Jim Crow South in particular, actually worked. Flynn’s example assumes a past in which Negroes had economic leverage with whites and their institutions, that some white business owner would have graciously accepted black patronage because, well, money is money. But even the most mundane transactions between blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South were proscribed by custom and law, and backed up by the prospect of bloodshed. So who was going to complain that the white renter was gauging him, or that the white foreman cheated him out of a day’s work? And to whom would that person appeal? Which white business owners were willing to risk the loss of their white clientele (or a melee) for suggesting that they dine or watch movies next to Negroes? In this world, the competitive advantage actually lay with the people who never paid their sharecroppers a cent for their labor, who didn’t sully their store’s reputations by selling to niggers.

It is this last point that I want to talk about more, because the people who are making this “free market solutions” argument are ignoring, I think in most cases deliberately, that the “classic liberals” (which is a euphemism for “reactionaries that dress their assholery up in fancy pants language”) of their time were supported by the Tea Partiers of their time, and the latter were under no illusions about why they preferred “free market” solutions.  And that reason is they wanted to keep black people out of their stores, neighborhoods, etc.  And their rationale for this was…..economic.  They believed and argued strongly that black customers are bad for business.  They did not believe black money spends as good as white money. 

A couple of years ago, historian Rick Perlstein put up a post at Our Future where he talked about the letters that poured in from white Chicagoans to Senator Paul Douglas when Martin Luther King came to town to help organize for open housing laws that would make it illegal for a someone selling a house to reject a customer based on race.  If the free marketers are right, then this shouldn’t have been a problem in the first place, since surely a person selling a house would sell it to anyone buying, right? 

Wrong. On the contrary, white people in Chicago saw it as a matter of their own economic interest to keep black people from buying houses. 

Rick has a lot of letters he collected, one of which likens MLK to Hitler, but one theme strongly emerges, which is that the white letter writers saw open housing as an assault on their economic interests.  A sample:

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Scalia has conclusively demonstrated that “originalism” just means “projecting my desires onto the original writers of the Constitution, so I can blame them instead of myself for my bigotry”.  Here’s the quote in question, where he dismissed the idea that the 14th amendment prevents gender discrimination:

The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.

I like his sarcasm there, which really adds to the sense that Scalia’s implying that this women’s equality thing is just a fad that will pass soon enough.  At the link above, and at this one, Scott Lemieux conclusively demonstrates that Scalia’s ability to read the minds of the Constitution authors only comes into play when what he’s channeling from them is what he already believes.  “Originalism” is functionally a religion, where the Constitution is a holy document and the interpretation is done by priest-judges who get to make shit up as they go along, instead of thoughtful jurisprudence. 

Instead of reading the Constitution out loud in the House, the Republicans should do it in Scalia’s office, because he seems to have no idea what the actual text of the 14th amendment is.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Emphasis mine.  Instead of trying to rule by holding seances to ascertain what the folks who wrote this meant by it, Scalia should be reading the text and asking some straightforward questions, especilly about who he considers a “person”.  Are women considered “persons” nowadays under the law?  I’d say yes, even though there’s constant assault on female personhood by the anti-choice movement, and the justice system fails to provide equal protection all the time by not enforcing laws against rape and domestic violence as much as they should.  Matt Yglesias has more on this.

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One of the most fascinating phenomenon aspects of collective psychology to me is collective willful ignorance.  I wrote about this some in terms of Wikileaks and how it disturbs collective unknowing, and I think Ricky Gervais touched on it when talking about atheism as a matter of letting yourself know what you already know. I get why people don’t want to know certain things they do know, and why they suppress that knowledge, but that we can do it—-and that we can it collectively—-is truly fascinating.  And that people who speak the truth everyone is ignoring can disturb the ecosystem of collective denial is also fascinating to me, probably in no small part because the vast majority of hostility I’ve experienced from others has directly stemmed from their being upset with me for saying out loud what we’re supposed to collectively ignore.

One of the most routine kinds of collective denial is historical denial.  It’s the result of cognitive dissonance caused when your belief that your people are generally good people is disturbed by historical evidence that your people in the past did great evils.  The urge is to minimize the evil.  The most extreme of this is denialism, which crops up when people not only wish to minimize the great evil, but also generally agree with the principles that caused it and want to make the historical facts that disturb their sense that they’re right about what usually amounts to bigotry.  So they deny the Holocaust because they don’t want to confront what their own anti-Semiticism led to in the past.  Or, in the case of the trolls on #mooreandme, they deny that rape is a real problem and always has been, because they don’t want to confront their own resentments of women’s right to control their own bodies, or really struggle with the fact that most of their people (in this case, men) have, throughout most of history, treated women like they were subhuman.  And then you have neo-Confederates, who are basically like Holocaust denialists, but for slavery. 

Denialists often can’t completely deny a historical reality, so they just go to great lengths to minimize it.  Holocaust denialists rarely say there was no Holocaust, at least if they’re speaking to a Western audience.  They just claim that the numbers of people killed were negligible, and then go on to argue, either directly or through implication, that the Jews made it all up so that they could have cover to do [fill in one of the millenia-old anti-Semitic theories about a Jewish conspiracy to run the world]. Neo-Confederate arguments are basically identical.  The argument is that the South seceded for reasons other than slavery, and while they admitted that slavery was legal (since that’s basically undeniable), they minimize how many people owned slaves, how much of the Southern economy was based on slavery, and how miserable slavery was.  They argue that the South seceded because of taxes (ignoring that the tax arguments were about slavery), or that it was to prove a point about federalism (ignoring the fact that the South’s biggest beef with the Union was that the federal government wasn’t using its power enough, to return escaped slaves to the masters).  The conclusion reached by denialists is that blacks and liberals exaggerate slavery in order to steal money from white people and give it to black people.  If you ever hear someone screeching about “reparations”, for instance, they are 99.9% likely to be a slavery denialist. The “Never Forget” movement grew in the wake of WWII in response to this common problem of human nature, and it was effective.  Holocaust denialism has been marginalized.  Sadly, slavery denialism is mainstream in the United States, precisely because the winners of the Civil War were more interested in making nice than holding people who committed treason in defense of slavery accountable. This week, there were actual celebrations of the anniversary of secession, and the only reason that happens is that slavery denialism has given them cover to fantasize openly about being able to own slaves. Slavery denialism is so mainstream that its myths have been absorbed by people that reject its conclusions. Even on this blog, I’ve seen well-meaning people who’ve absorbed slavery denialism myths suggest that the reasons for secession were more complex than they were, for instance.

Which is why I was thrilled to see that the South Carolina newspaper The State published an article denouncing slavery denialism, and arguing that, contrary to widespread myth, the South seceded for one reason: slavery.  Their proof of this is from original documents from the era, namely the secession declaration from South Carolina, the first state to commit treason. (Via.)

What we found most striking in rereading the Declaration was the complete absence of any other causes. After laying out the argument that the states retained a right to secede if the Union did not fulfill its constitutional and contractual obligations, the document cited the one failing of the United States: its refusal to enforce the constitutional provision requiring states to return escaped slaves to their owners. “This stipulation was so material to the compact,” the document declares, “that without it that compact would not have been made.”

Emphasis mine, because I know this myth that the South had reasons other than slavery is so widespread pushback in comments is inevitable (and distressing, since it serves racist ends).  One of the common distraction arguments is to say the South seceded over the right to secede, which is like divorcing someone to prove that it’s legal.  It’s not entirely untrue to say that by the time of secession, most Southerners had decided they felt very strongly about “states rights”, but the only reason they developed this belief was it rationalized slavery.  By the same measure, the only reason “states rights” is an issue now is it rationalizes racist, sexist, and homophobic laws.  Then, as now, “states rights” believers support broad federal powers when those powers serve their ends, such as support for Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 then, and support now for federal laws restricting gay rights or women’s rights.  Indeed, the idea that secession was obviously a right wasn’t a given in the South until it was convenient to say so, and even then, the Confederacy didn’t allow secession itself. All claims that the South seceded for reasons other than slavery fall apart even under cursory examination.

So that’s straight up denialism.  But I’m also interested in the other end of the willful ignorance spectrum, which is a squishier liberal “they weren’t that bad, were they?” kind of thinking.  This applies only rarely to trying to minimize the ugliness of slavery and secession, because that’s so far in the past that I think it’s easier for people to think that we’ve left it behind us.  And believing we’ve left it behind us is the main desire that drives this softer kind of denial, instead of the strong denialism, which is driven by wishing to justify affection for the old, bigoted ways.  It’s when it comes to more recent history that you see more liberal-minded people give into the desire to minimize.

I jokingly call it the “all segregationists evaporated in 1964” belief.  For at least my entire lifetime, it’s been basically considered improper and impolite to suggest that anyone living today was a segregation supporter, even though that’s physically impossible. (When I was born, the Civil Rights Act was only 13 years old, to put this into perspective.) They didn’t all die when segregation was banned.  They kept on—-many of them, like Jerry Falwell, fighting for it until the bitter end.  But saying out loud that Falwell was a segregationist became impolite, even though it was true, and when he died only a couple of people in lefty magazines were courageous enough to note that Falwell built his career opposing civil rights, and only switched to anti-feminism when racism stopped being the source of the biggest checks.  Conservatives love to take advantage of this collective willful ignorance, because it gives some of their more odious figures free license to say straight up racist things without paying any real penalty for it.  On the contrary.  They can expect people to leap up to minimize what they said.

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