I sort of assume that everybody has seen at least one parody of Hitler in the bunker ranting from The Downfall. If you haven’t seen The Downfall, itself, I recommend it; it is totally engrossing and very creepy. If you haven’t seen a parody, as it is explained on Ranker.com,
usually the video clip starts with someone informing him of something
horrible, Hitler brushes it off as a solvable problem. Full of fear, his
commanders tell him that his solution is not possible. He tells
everyone who isn’t important to leave and then goes on a huge tirade
about something. Of course, this meme has always been in German, so
people replace the subtitles in the original German film to make Hitler
rant about pretty much anything. Examples include everything from Disney
buying Marvel, to random movie reviews, to the lack of new features in a
new tech product.
Now the producers of The Downfall are using copyright protection to have these parodies removed. Too bad.
Last Sunday – OK, last Sunday in the Bay Area – maybe only the south Bay Area – was Native Plant Day. Every year, the Native Plant Society hosts a series of open houses for gardens that are planted with Native Plants. Actually, because there are so many tempting plants that grow here if they only had year around water, usually these gardens have more than Native Plants.
The gardens seem to fall into three categories: true natives only which are very rare, natives with other plants that don't take much water, and, the most common of all, regular gardens or old gardens with some natives added.Either way, I always enjoy going to gardens where people are interested in plants. As an added bonus, these kind of gardens are often owned by plant people who are more than a little crazy anyway.
When I see a front yard like this, with a nice dry creek, I get very inspired to rip out our whole backyard.
And I am probably not the only one. Talking to fellow enthusiasts are what makes garden tours fun. Oh! and looking at nice natives likeIris douglasiana
or these very colorfulmesembryanthemums from South Africa.
I love NPR but I thought it was dying. I mean, I love NPR but I am 70 and I sort of thought kids – you know, people under 40 – were listening to something else. The chart below, thanks to Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress shows that that I was wrong. NPR – National Public Radio – about as low teck as you can get, is doing very well. Why?
A couple of reasons, I think. No ads for starter. Once I got used to listening to radio without ads, it is hard to go back. And longer stories with lots of real analysis. More discussion on what is happening politically and less discussion on the horse race aspects. And little oddball stories. Oh! and nobody is yelling.
From everything that I have read on the life and times around 1600 – which is not very much, excluding the 1632verse – using God’s name in vain was a big deal. I mean, a really big deal. People didn’t do it. When I read that, it seems so strange that I adjust the words to mean that it was probably like saying fuck today.
But, now that I have really thought about it, I am convinced that people didn’t do it. It was taboo.
By the middle of the 19th, century, people did take the Lord’s name in vain, people might say damn you, but sex was taboo. Even indirect words like bastard or son of a bitch were considered heavy duty. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was considered a great book for it’s accurate depiction of Civil War combat and it does not have any sexual swearing in it – I have not read it in more than 50 years so it is possible I might have forgot them, but I don’t think so. I don’t think fuck – or, to push the limit, cunt – is to be found in Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because they were effete – they were anything but – but because those words really were taboo.
Now, we use sex words. Michele and I are watching HBO’s Pacific and they use fuck all the time. But we don’t use disparaging words about race. As close as a white person gets to using the N word is to say the N word. It has become taboo.
The vice-president says This is a big fucking deal! and nobody really notices. Senator George Allen, during his 2006 re-election campaign, calls somebody a Macaca, and he is political history. No reprieve.
Here is a test:
Imagine you have an eleven year old daughter; she comes home from school and says Jane, that fucker, lied about me to the teacher…. Depending on alot of things: you might tell her that If you say that again you will go to your room for a timeout; admonish her saying Nice people don’t talk that way; just laugh, knowing she wouldn’t say that in front of your mother and she was doing it for shock value for you only.
Now imagine she comes home and says Jane, that nigger, lied about me to the teacher… Among other things, you would probably consider pulling her out of school and putting her in a different school. I know I would and – I have to admit – I am sort of shocked about that.
To me, from now, from here, slavery seems so improbable. Not informal, chance slavery like bringing home a captured souvenir from winning a war; but institutionalized slavery. It requires a belief that the slaves aren't really as human as the owners – how does someone do that to a person they are living with every day (and, more than sometimes, having sex with), it requires complex laws to define who are the slaves and who are the owners, it requires an huge infrastructure to keep the slaves from escaping, it must, I think, require a preoccupation that permeates every part of society.
That is why the whole concept of slavery in the south is abhorrent but not really real. And that is why a post, entitled Honoring CHM: One Drop, on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog, is so horrific. With little commentary, it shows a picture of eight people and reprints a letter asking for money to educate them. They are emancipated slaves.- eight individual, traumatized, human beings.
The letter describes each one of the people with passages like this
Wilson Chinn is about 60 years old, he was "raised" by Isaac
Howard of Woodford County, Kentucky. When 21 years old he was taken
down the river and sold to Volsey B. Marmillion, a sugar planter about
45 miles above New Orleans. This man was accustomed to brand his
negroes, and Wilson has on his forehead the letters "V. B. M." Of the
210 slaves on this plantation 105 left at one time and came into the
Union camp. Thirty of them had been branded like cattle with a hot iron,
four of them on the forehead, and the others on the breast or arm.
I really recommend that you follow the link back to the original post. It is hard to read – at least it was for me – but it makes real what we often think of as abstract. Check it out.