CSotD: Happy Holiday, I guess
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At the time of Nelson Mandela's death, it struck me that South Africans see Mandela has having greatly improved their nation for everyone, while Martin Luther King is seen in the US as having helped "his" people, which essentially means he failed.
Just as "Memorial Day" has gone from mourning our war dead to having picnics and "Veterans Day" is a holiday only marked by banks and post offices, MLK Day has very little significance across the main culture and seems only to be kept in spirit within the African-American community.
A greater sign of futility is just what Bennett and Pett point out: We have abandoned that post-WWII period of caring for each other that made the Civil Rights Movement possible.
And, while the destruction of voting rights and our pugnacious foreign policy are direct rebukes to his legacy, the general mean-spirited, selfish, unthinking hostility that defines us today should be some comfort.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the contents of their parents' bank accounts.
Yes, you may rest easy, Martin: We no longer hate Negroes. Today, we hate everybody.
Case in point:
Never mind the idiotic bigotry of Duck Dynasty, though I have some horrified fascination for the legal notion that religious beliefs justify discrimination even when it defies the law.
It's dangerous to assume that people will reject that kind of blind hatred, because sometimes they don't. And, as stated above, the much-praised "Greatest Generation" returned from their war with an appreciation for human rights and the social contract that their children and grandchildren appear to be rejecting.
It's important to recognize that the benefit of Godwin's Law is not that it forbids comparisons to Nazi Germany but that it discourages them when they are frivolous and argumentative. If everyone who disagrees with you is called a Nazi, it undermines the aptness of the parallel when it is valid.
And while it is easy, if dangerous, to laugh off the halfwits who celebrate blatant bigotry, there is real peril when the mainstream lionizes the predators who make themselves acceptable by wearing three-piece suits and speaking in articulate, measured tones.
Whatever the moral of the story, whatever you are supposed to carry away from these glitzy portrayals, the Archie Bunker Effect is in play: "All in the Family" featured 22 minutes of bigoted jokes which were then supposed to be justified by three or four minutes of "Oh, Archie! You're such a fool!"
But if we were supposed to identify with his flibberty-gibbet wife, his earnest, whining daughter or the son-in-law who was every bit as big a buffoon only from the other fringe, there was clearly a large mass of people who repeated Archie's jokes at the water cooler the next day at work.
And laughed.
Proof that I'm right? No, you give me proof that I'm wrong: Show me the lawsuits that attempted to shut down the purveyors of "Archie Bunker For President" bumperstickers.
Archie was hardly slick or well-dressed and coifed, of course.
But the triumph of impact over (alleged) intent is the relevant point here, and people came away from "Wall Street" not praising Charlie Sheen's character for recognizing and rejecting the evil he encountered, but aping Gordon Gekko.
Ditto with the Corleone's, Vito and Michael, and with Tony Soprano.
And Al Capone's baseball-bat scene in "The Untouchables," and Tommy DeVito's "I'm funny like a clown? I'm here to amuse you?" from "Goodfellas."
There are those who still bear the wounds inflicted by the "Wolf of Wall Street" but I'd be astonished if the net impact of the film (which I admittedly have not seen) was a rejection of manipulative greed. Until I see otherwise, I'm going with the dependable durability of the Archie Bunker Effect.
Like a lot of things in life, we laugh because it's funny and we laugh because it's true. Now, some people will say – reformers, they'll say, 'Put that man in jail! What does he think he is doing?' Well, what I hope I'm doing — and here's where your English paper's got a point — is I'm responding to the will of the people. – Al Capone, The Untouchables
Meanwhile, science marches on
The Buckets takes on the science fair. I hated the science fair, man and boy, mostly because it always seemed to be about 20 percent science and 80 percent presentation, giving a huge advantage to the kids with parents light on ethics and skilled in arts and crafts.
Volcanos win ribbons not because they demonstrate anything about tectonics or geothermal energy but because they demonstrate that you can spew colored vinegar for the judges and, if your volcano looks like something from Miniature Village, it means you've learned about the scientific method.
Gotta say, though, my senior year of high school included the Best Science Fair Ever. Rural schools have some recruiting issues, and somehow that year they had brought in a science teacher of stunning incapacity.
I cringe at what we put him through for his single year in the profession, but the astonishing thing was that even the honor students joined in the abuse: At the end of chemistry class one day, our soon-to-be valedictorian asked him why you could see your bones through water, then demonstrated by having him place both thumbs on the edge of the lab table and balancing on them a beaker filled to the brim with water.
Of course, he couldn't see the bones of his thumbs, but, more important, he couldn't see a way to free his hands without spilling the water.* The bell rang, the chemistry students emptied out and he was left standing there until the next class arrived and someone rescued him from his dilemma.
So the weekend before the science fair, I realized I hadn't actually done anything yet, but a friend had come up with an "experiment" in which he photographed a bare lightbulb a few times and then wrote some codswallop comparing the solar system to the structure of the atom. If the orbits of neutrons and planets were theoretically elliptical, the reasoning was absolutely so.
I bought him a six pack of beer and he added my name to the project. We got an A, as I recall.
Today, he is a working scientist, though I hesitate to identify him further for obvious reasons. Another classmate who was permanently kicked out of physics class for his hijinks works with the National Science Foundation, if he hasn't retired since last I heard.
Oh, and the experiment which beat us out and won blue ribbons was a distilling tube and a half dozen beakers of fluid supposedly extracted from crude oil, one of which bore the distinctive pink tint of a commercial product and one of which was neatsfoot oil, which is derived from cattle byproducts.
The "crude oil" was simply the filthy drippings of a recent oil change.
* Bend down, drink a little of the water, then grip the beaker with your teeth and lift it enough to extract your thumbs.
And finally (oh god I hope)
I am so sick of Amazon drone cartoons that I was surprised and delighted at Wiley Miller's take, both at the cartoon and at the fact that a drone cartoon finally made me laugh.
I hope it drives a nail into the coffin of this entire non-event, though I know it won't.
The only thing that will distract from the theme will be when Jeff Bezos next explains how to distill neatsfoot oil from crude to the fawning praise of the hard-hitting investigative journalists at 60 Minutes.
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