(Apologies for the incomplete Petfinder Post. We didn't have a real power outage during the night. We did have a storm that was close enough to the house that I disconnected the computers and slept late.)
Fashion Disasters
Madonna Ceccone, a leader of the long-gone fad for "the lingerie look," apparently accepted a dare bet from a younger singer and appeared on stage in a girdle almost but not quite matching one of Sabrina Carpenter's, who is probably too young to be Madonna's daughter. Sabrina may have been born blonde, though her hair looks lightened. Madonna, at 67, never was credible as a blonde and now looks proud of her black roots. Apart from that both look toned and tanned enough to wear the lingerie look in public and look...I don't know. Drunk and disorderly rather than like professional hookers? Tasteless rather than disfigured? Stupid rather than fat? Not the way I want a niece and myself to look, but not bad?
Attention baby-boomers! Yes, some of us 55-to-80-year-olds do look better in bikinis than some 19-year-olds we've seen. But we're old enough to know about mosquitoes and melanoma, and cover up when we come out of the water, anyway.
Click here to see video clips of the two lovely idiots. (You always wondered what Fenimore Cooper's phrase would look like in the real world, didn't you? Here it is.)
Someone else posted on X about hating Ilhan Omar's headscarves, because she wears them so well and might make adopting sharia-compliant clothing a fad into which American women might be led as a step in the direction of becoming a Muslim country. I think the only way to stop the US becoming a Muslim country is for more of us to be overtly Christian--in ways that acknowledge the humanity of, even express loyalty to, all of the allegedly natural descendants of Abraham through Hagar, Sarah, and Keturah, and their right to separate themselves from us to practice their different beliefs if they so choose.
I think, whatever Minnesotans may decide about Omar's right to stay in Congress or in Minnesota, we can all recognize her scarves as a celebration of her Somali heritage, in the way we recognize saris, when we see them on US streets, as a celebration of people's Indian heritage. Thumbs up on Ilhan Omar's enjoying the (mixed) blessings of being young and cute and Somali. None of my own nieces has any business appropriating her exotic culture but I hope we can all agree that Omar's baby face does a lot for a headscarf.
Music
"Monday."
George Harrison.
Cream.
The Byrds.
I think the band call themselves Hava Nagila.
Riffing on the classic tune:
LOL! Imagine a grown man telling someone else to cook breakfast when he's already out of bed!
The Grateful Dead.
New York City
Wailing on the yuppermost tiers of yuppie affluence! Mamdani carries out his mandate from his electorate by at least trying to move a shelter for homeless men into a posh neighborhood! He said he'd do this, and other things the yuppies won't like. If they seriously don't want these things done, bleep did they vote for Mamdani?
Sensitivity
No links here because the people involved don't deserve them. I'm seeing more overt race hate, and more sex-based hate of various kinds, on the Internet these days. It doesn't read as if people's real thoughts and feelings are finally coming out into the light, either. It reads as if people who've tried to believe that God hath made of one blood all nations of men are feeling hurt and scared, retreating back to old dead expressions of bigotry.
This web site's page view count dropped, maybe because it was a weekend, maybe because people didn't like something I'd said about Black students saying vile things about all White people even including their own mothers.
I am not complaining about the usual, understandable things even White students are likely to say the first time they read certain unavoidable historical facts...not even so much about slavery, which was global. (Slave traders probably sold more European slaves in the Arab and African countries, over time, than African slaves in North America, simply because the market existed longer.) Reading about how our European ancestors (in the collective sense, thank goodness, not mine personally) "conquered" North America by cheating and lying and bringing in diseases, and calling it bringing in the Christian religion, was what made my brother and his biracial school friends form their Hate Your White Self Club. I don't think it's altogether unreasonable to say: "I hate what my ancestors did. I wish I weren't descended from people like that." (Or: "I'm glad my ancestors came later and weren't part of that." Or: "If my ancestors had to be either slaves or slavemasters, I'm glad they were slaves.")
I am not saying that Black students are not entitled to call out the disgusting historical racism they do not personally remember, when they learn about it. Nor that they're not entitled to call out the acts of ignorance that have hurt them. There was a little triracial girl who, if she'd been expected to live longer, might have become my legal stepdaughter; one of my husband's students, born with major disabilities that included inability to speak. Her real name was of Cherokee origin. She had a permanent tan and big hair. The first year or two I knew her, she knew me, and waved and smiled when she saw me. Then came the summer a White nurse tried to "process" her hair, rather than simply conditioning and combing it as anyone with any sense could have done. She spent a lot of time at Johns Hopkins being treated for chemical burns. She stopped smiling at me. She had learned to hate the sight of anyone who was not positively Black. I never blamed her, at all. If she'd lived to grow up I would have hoped to see her work through the memories of this childhood trauma and overcome the prejudice she'd formed.
I'm talking about the videos that are being posted where Black Americans are snarling, "Kill all the White people." So far I've not seen videos where White Americans are ranting about killing all the Black people, which is a point in White Americans' favor. I am seeing a resurgence of bigoted remarks on X and in forums. If called out the authors of these remarks will say "Oh I don't mean all Black people, I mean big-mouth jackasses like that braying fool over there." But things like comments about convicted murderers who "all seem to look alike," because so many murders have been committed by Black Americans recently--never mind the wide range of actual skin colors, hairstyles, body shapes and so on. I don't see much resemblance between the lunatic who killed Iryna Zarutska and the moron who most recently tried to kill Donald Trump, and don't believe most White people do, either.
I don't think anything should be censored from adults. Calls for violence should be published and taken seriously by law enforcement. Those "Kill all the White people" scenes should be followed by video coverage of how the fool was cuffed'n'stuffed and thrown into jail during an intensive investigation of all his social contacts to determine whether he was part of a violent gang, or was just being drunk and disorderly. Those security video clips of how Iryna Zarutska was murdered for no reason by an oversize paranoid-schizophrenic case ought to have been followed up, by now, with video of how the #MadMan was literally thrown into solitary confinement and told, "If you're a good boy you might get to come out and watch television with the other monkeys in here...some day, after the doctor takes off those naughty paws."
I do think that students ought to be learning about the values of politeness and reasoned discourse, not given platforms for spewing hate, even when they read about things that naturally do cause all the White students to "show blood in the face." I think they ought to read Thomas Sowell's historical study of relations between majority and minority groups of humans, worldwide, for perspective. I think they ought to read Sowell's early essays, too, and know: he was not a sycophant trying to relieve his patrons' White guilt; he was a conscious, outspoken, but sane, Black man who found a lot of real racism to call out, and did call it out. In a nonviolent, ethical, humane way.
I don't think it would hurt anything for all of us, of whatever race, sex, or religion, to apologize on behalf of the selfish aggressive dominance-seeking part of us that could become a slavemaster, to the weak unthinking part of us that could become a slave. For, like Jung's hypothetical masculine and feminine souls, those capabilities are built into all of us humans.
I think Black students should be encouraged to focus on finding ethical solutions to society's problems--and, after reasonable preparation and demonstration of competence, on leading society to solve them.
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