A blog by Dan Brooks
Human beings are caught in a constant struggle between being true to themselves and being true to others. That’s why giving up is so popular. Why devote your life to the real and the good, sacrificing your own interests for compassion and/or enduring the slander of strangers to live with integrity, when there are so many streaming video services out there? Today is Friday, and nothing feels better than rolling over and letting go. Won’t you forget how it felt to care with me?
The Randolph County, NC Board of Education meets in front of some Successories posters.
In response to a parent’s complaint, the Board of Education for Randolph County, North Carolina has voted to remove copies of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man from school libraries. The complaining parent is one Kimiyutta Parson, mother of an 11th grader at Randleman High, which is presumably named after Kevin Randleman. Committees at Randleman and at the school district level recommended that Invisible Man be kept on the curriculum, but members of the BOE—who were given copies of the book to read last month—disagreed. Board Chair Tommy McDonald called it “a hard read.” “I didn’t find any literary value,” said member Gary Mason. Excerpt from Parson’s complaint after the jump.
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who helped the government read your email and then betrayed us all by telling you about it
Here’s a fun quote from former UN ambassador John Bolton about why Edward Snowden is a traitor:
[Snowden] thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us…that he can see clearer than the other 299,999,999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.
Guided by individual conscience? Singing the song of yourself? That’s not what America is about. America is about playing on the team. You’ll have plenty of time to worry about whether you participated in an immoral conspiracy in the moments before death. On an unrelated note, 64% of Americans under age 45 regard Snowden as a whistleblower, compared to only 50% aged 45 to 64 and 40% of those aged 65+. Totalizing theories after the jump.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNCiktGvKVI
Meghan McCain has overcome setbacks in her life—her father not being President, her increasing resemblance to the animatronic mask Arnold Schwarzenegger wears in Total Recall—but those setbacks have only made her stronger. Now, her political acumen and magnetic personality nepotism has earned her a talk/reality show on Pivot, the network for millennials. Somehow, she has named it Raising McCain, a title that encourages even viewers her own age to think of her as someone’s kid. But maybe that’s the point. Besides setting up Paul Begala, Me-Mac has contributed exactly zero ideas to American discourse. From a certain uncharitable perspective, she embodies the confidence of a generation. As Daniel D’Addario complains in Salon, her insistence that she is a pundit “is the hauteur that only a millennial could possibly possess.”
White people
Smick sent me a link to this long essay ostensibly by a teacher at a predominantly black high school, supposed to have first appeared in the Rants & Raves section of Mobile, Alabama Craigslist. It appears all over the internet with that attribution, although the original has yet to be found. It reached Smick via a chain email, and he sent it to me with the possibly facetious question, “Is this racist?” Spoiler alert: yes, the essay is extremely racist. Besides repeatedly using the phrase “the blacks,” it also contains this paragraph:
One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.
Bob Parks described it as “the kind of truth that is often taken back out of PC fear.” He would have sourced it better, but his nephew was visiting him at his cabin.