Author: Ophelia Benson

I do like to see a good roundhouse attack like this one in The New Republic, on that contemporary American plague, the Sport Utility Vehicle. I only wish there were more of them (and that they did any good). There was an auto industry reporter on Fresh Air a few days ago, and it was a pathetic series of missed opportunities as Terri Gross let the guy rhapsodize about the wonders of the SUV without bothering to point out the obvious drawbacks. For instance he sang a little aria to the joy of being so high up off the road and able to look over the other traffic. Well yes, and SUV drivers are so high up that they are also able to look over pedestrians, look over them so completely that they often don’t see them at all. I wonder how many times I’ve been walking innocently down the sidewalk and been nearly flattened by someone hurtling out of a parking lot in a giant SUV without noticing any pesky pedestrians.

But I hadn’t realized I was being impious in thinking this way. The New Republic article says Washington Post auto industry reporter Warren Brown ‘deliriously proclaimed that the Hummer is what Jesus would drive. Its size and its profligacy are justified, Brown said, because “if you are a missionary like some of my friends,” you could use a Hummer “to bring loads of food and medical supplies” to the poor.’ Of course! That’s what all those people high up over the walkers and talking on their cell phones are doing–shlepping food and meds to the poor! I knew that! ‘In the beginning was the Durango, and the Durango was with God, and…’

This is an interesting and uncomfortable story. The American Association of University Professors is about to publish a study which shows that Affirmative Action policies at US colleges and universities have failed to close the gap between whites on the one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other.

The article will highlight admissions policies that give special consideration to the children of alumni and donors to colleges; prepaid-tuition plans, which benefit only those parents who can afford to save money for college; and the current movement among many public colleges to tighten admissions standards and end remedial programs, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Surely that sentence skates rapidly over the difficult issues inherent in the subject. Surely there are two very separate problems that the article plans to highlight. Special consideration for alumni would indeed seem to give an advantage – an arguably unfair and arbitrary advantage – to people whose parents went to universities in the past, which will naturally be white people. But what of this movement to tighten admissions standards? Is that unfair and arbitrary in the same sense? Is it unfair and arbitrary at all? Is it inherent in the education process? Perhaps the study addresses these issues. Perhaps it is simply impartially listing the causes of the gap. But a newspaper story’s grouping all such factors in one sentence, without reference to the differences among them, could create a false impression.

Oh good, another piece of Imaginative History, or The Case of the Peekaboo Evidence. Not unlike the Clonaid festivities last week, when the ‘Raelians’ announced the birth of the first cloned baby, but when invited to provide DNA evidence to support such a surprising claim, came over all bashful. There is a good deal of sly wit in Natalie Danford’s Salon piece about retired Admiral Gavin Menzies’ claim that the Chinese sailed to America seventy years before Columbus. It was a shrewd move, for example, to rent the lecture hall of the Royal Geographical Society as the place to announce his ‘discovery’. And publicity does do the trick: there has been so much attention that Menzies’ American publishers have advanced the date of publication by five months. Danford talks to three experts in the field who are unimpressed or plain skeptical of Menzies’ claim, and she wonders why a serious publisher like Morrow ‘didn’t question these unorthodox research methods or the veracity of the statements Menzies has built on them’. The executive editor Danford spoke to resorted to speculation on motives rather than answering the question.

Wachtel theorized that skeptics are threatened by Menzies’ attack on the status quo: “People don’t like the basis of their fundamental knowledge to be challenged, and we all know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

Ah. That explains it then. Because people don’t like their knowledge challenged, therefore bizarre claims based on shaky or no evidence are true. Interesting argument.

But of course we like this kind of thing. Think The Education of Little Tree. Think of the ‘Chief Seattle’ speech, that was actually written by a Hollywood hack. Think of Black Athena, and The Goddess, and The Gentle Tasaday. Think of Tacitus’ wildly romanticised version of the Germans, people he’d never laid eyes on and knew nothing about, but used to vent his hatred of ‘decadent’ Rome. No doubt the Chinese arrival in America in 1421 will soon be on the curriculum of many a school.

Is it a possibility that music can impact on culture in such a way so as to affect people’s behaviour? Apparently not, at least not if the music is rap, the behaviour violent, and you agree with Viv Craske, editor of Mixmag and would be sociologist. To suggest such a thing is “racist, out of touch and bigoted”. But Mr Craske is a little confused. On the one hand, he claims that “if gun crime is up 55%, it can’t be down to music in any part” (he didn’t elaborate on whether it might be down to music in some part if gun crime is up say 54%). But, on the other hand, he doesn’t accept that guns are fashion accessories for everyone (so that’s cleared that one up then) “but rather for the kind of person who is brought up in a culture who believes that’s the right thing to do.” Right, Mr Craske, but obviously a culture which cannot have been influenced by music in even the smallest way…

Anyway, in Mr Craske’s view, all this is stuff and nonsense, because if music were powerful enough to contribute to gun violence, then it would be used by governments. And there we all were thinking that governments have been using music for millennia…

Well, those silly Victorians, you know, of course they thought about sex every instant of their lives just as we do, but they wouldn’t admit it, the nasty hypocritical creatures, but we’ll fix them, we’ll just make a lot of movies and tv shows based on 19th century novels and if the sex isn’t there we’ll just damn well insert it! So to speak. There is an excellent article on this subject in the Boston Globe today. In it Abby Wolf reports, among other things, that child sexual abuse was featured in a tv drama based on Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, a feature that is entirely absent from the novel. This is one reason not to see movie or tv ‘adaptations’ of novels and expecially of novels that were written more than about five minutes ago. They just can’t get it right. All those Elizabeth Rs and Shakespeare & Lady Violas and Queen Margots having gleeful free-spirited fearless consequence-free sex on ten minutes’ acquaintance or less (Margot grabs the first man she sees on the street and they copulate against the nearest wall, implausible behavior for a 16th century princess, I would have thought, even a French one). We just can’t believe that they really were more inhibited than we are, and for good reason. We also can’t believe that they just weren’t as interested as we are, because we take it for granted that we’ve got it right and they had it wrong. But as Wolf says, ‘That we see sex wherever we see Victorians may say less about them than it does about us and the way we see things now.’