Tebowing – In Which Tim Tebow Stops Praying and Figures Out What Else His Knees Might Be Used For

Pop culture being the full-time commitment that it is, I’m almost always at least a few weeks behind the latest “news.”

Which explains why I’m only now getting around to commenting on David Beckham’s Super Bowl Sunday underwear ad.

Now, I didn’t actually watch the Stupor Bowl — and, in fact, take a certain amount of pride in saying I’ve never watched one in my life, which is the kind of winning streak I hope to maintain for another 50 years — but I am capable of putting two and two together.

Or one and one, as the case may be.

Imagining that Tim Tebow watched the game and, unless God happened to call him a safe distance away during the publicity breaks, certainly saw Beckham’s rock-this-body shill for overpriced underwear, I find myself filled with childlike curiosity.

TeBookends!

What happened when Tebow saw Beckham’s ad? And more to the point, didn’t it make him feel even the tiniest urge to get down on both knees? I mean, maybe just for a few, plesmograph-busting seconds?

I know that whenever I see Tim down there, I can’t help but recall Madonna’s famously provocative line, “Every straight guy should have a man’s tongue in his mouth at least once.” Yeah, well, his tongue at the least.

And then when straight guys like Beckham get all soft-porny and strip down to their giblet-cases so they can use their “I’m too sexy for my shortsiness” in order to sell products to other men, well, I start being confused about what gay and straight mean.

Which is a very good thing. Because it points up why the difference between “I wanna be him” and “I wanna do him” is the real thin blue line.

Or, as Woof says when the Army shrink asks him, in the famous draft-board scene from Hair (the 1979 movie version) whether he’s sexually attracted to men:

Woof: You mean if I’m a homosexual or something like that?
Army Psychiatrist: Yeah.
Woof: Well, I wouldn’t kick Mick Jagger out of my bed, but uh, I’m not a homosexual, no.

Which turned out to be a much more profound commentary on sexual orientation than most of the rest of what’s been said since 1979.

Anyway, Tim and Becks would be an awfully cute couple. Sure, there’s a 12-year age difference, but that’s even sexier when you think about it. And if TT really is still a virgin, he could do a lot worse than DB for his first outing. So to speak.

And then, wiser and more well-rounded, they could both get back to their respective wives and … whatevers. (Really, Tim — Playboy models? Katy Perry? All those “rumored to be” girlfriends? You’re “too busy” to date? Are you trying to tell us something?)

Most of all, it might mean less public praying and more private reflection. Just the sort of thing the Madonna Test was invented to accomplish.

Let’s all hit a knee and think about it.

Call a Gay Man “Miss,” Risk Getting Dissed on Facebook

So now let’s talk about Giuseppe Ripa, the Director of Traffic and Transportation for the city of Lecce, the largest city in Italy’s Puglia Region, who has used his Facebook page to criticize the health-care policies of the President of the Region, Nichi Vendola, who happens to be a gay man, addressing him in the process as “Miss Vendola.”

Because that was apparently not evil enough, Ripa went on to “explain” his views in the post below:

Only two kinds of human beings exist in nature: man and woman. Everything else can be scientifically classified as a “mental disorder,” an illness that falls into the category of the health sciences in general and psychiatry in specific. Naturally, no one’s looking to criticize patients with mental disorders. My own religious beliefs have taught me tolerance, for goodness sake. THOSE WHO ARE DIFFERENT HAVE ALL MY RESPECT!! but we can’t pass off abnormality as normality because this is precisely the reason why our society is on the verge of death….

(Stop me if you’ve heard this before. I’m not even going to bother to translate the rest of it.)

OK, so Ripa is a religious bigot. The world is full of them. Italy is especially full of them.

What’s truly appalling is the reaction of Paolo Perrone, the Mayor of Lecce, whose entire response was to post his own message on Facebook “putting distance” between him and Ripa and assuring his “Friends” that he certainly didn’t share the same sentiments.

And that’s the way we deal with homophobes, folks! The minute they start spewing hatred, we post a respectful message on Facebook to let people know we don’t “share their views.” Tiè e stra-tiè!!

Here’s a better idea, Mayor Perrone: You don’t “share” Perrone’s backwards, hateful (not to mention scientifically bankrupt and completely inaccurate) “views”? Good.

Fire his ass. Right now.

Let the Puglia Region and all of Italy know just how much you don’t tolerate homophobia and gay-baiting.

Otherwise, you might as well have saved yourself the 70 seconds it took you to write your useless, lame-ass message.

With “Friends” like you, we don’t need enemies.

__________________________________

P.S. Hey, Beppe Severgnini, are you listening? Anche questo è “razzismo,” ma questo lo sapevi già, vero?

Another Day, Another Holocaust-Denying, Neo-Nazi High School Teacher in Italy

A little over a week ago, I wrote about a thoughtless, irresponsible column by memoirist and Corriere della Sera blogger, Beppe Severgnini, entitled “Italians Are Not Racists.” You can read my post on Severgnini’s #SpectacularFail here.

What was most irritating about Severgnini’s facile dismissal of the proposition that Italian society might have some work to do in the area of racial sensitivity and cultural integration was the specious distinction Severgnini made between individuals who “treat others differently on the basis of race or ethnicity” (he considers such folks “vulgar, stupid, and loutish”—strong words, indeed!) and the presence of any actual racists in Italy (Severgnini apparently believes they’re a myth, like Santa Claus). Of course Severgnini had no choice but to pursue such a rhetorical strategy: If you have real racists, then you have to have real racism. As long as all you have are individual idiots, then (big, exaggerated sigh and rolling of the eyes) what can one do?

Now comes this piece of news, the details of which continue to emerge, about a thirty-year-veteran history and philosophy teacher in some of Turin’s best high schools who not only teaches Holocaust denial, but has a Facebook profile decorated with images of Hitler and Mussolini and who recently posted a solicitation for volunteers to come over and do some “target practice” with him in order to get rid of the “nigger drug dealers” on his street.

Certainly Severgnini would agree that the teacher, Renato Pallavidini, is vulgar, stupid, and loutish, but Pallavidini himself is almost not the point. The point is that he’s been doing these things for a long, long time. And a lot of people knew about it. Colleagues, parents, and students, in fact, have repeatedly reported him, but no one has thought to fire him.

Renato Pallavidini

In 2007, because of such reports, Pallavidini was investigated and suspended from the Cavour High School for the Humanities—the one Fatto Quotidiano describes as one of Turin’s most prestigious. Regarding that incident, Pallavidini bragged, “In 2007, the Jews tried to get rid of me but they couldn’t do it. When all was said and done, all I got was two weeks of suspension. I appealed my suspension and I won. They had to pay me my back salary and give me back my seniority. I’m proud to be one of the few people, since the death of the Führer, who has managed, at least in his own small way, to defeat the Jews.”

And then Pallavidini turned up immediately at another Turin school, the D’Azeglio High School for the Humanities, apparently with no questions asked.

After his December 2011 rant on Facebook (“Here’s a warning to those stinking Jew bastards who run that faggot-infested shithole called California: If anyone tries taking down this photo [i.e,. of Hitler and Mussolini], my pistol and I are going to pay a visit to the synagogue right next door and terminate a few of the Jew parasites who hang out there. Don’t you think you’d be better off letting sleeping dogs lie?), D’Azeglio placed him on “sick leave” with full pay through the end of March 2012. Currently a “school-wide teachers’ meeting is planned” to “respond” to the situation. In other words, Pallavidini still hasn’t been fired.

In fact, it’s all but certain that nothing would ever have happened to Pallavidini if his Facebook postings hadn’t gone quite so viral. Decades ago the quip was that nothing was real until it appeared on television; today’s corollary is evidently that nothing is real until it appears on Facebook.

In any case, it remains unclear whether Pallavidini will actually lose his job or whether—much more likely—he’ll be allowed to retire with a full pension. After that, he’ll sit at home and nurse his psychiatric problems while we all wait to see whether he turns into the next Anders Behring Breivik or simply spends his time quietly curating his collection of SS memorabilia. (OK, I made that last part up—about the SS memorabilia, not about the pension or Anders Behring Breivik. On the other hand, you can go to weekend markets throughout the north of Italy, especially in the Veneto, and buy all the Mussolini paraphernalia you want—it’s all right there out in front for sale—so it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that Pallavidini might have a bust or two of Il Duce at home.)

But I can’t help but wonder what Severgnini would have to say about Pallavidini, other than calling him a lout. More importantly, I wonder what Severgnini would have to say about the Italian system that kept this man in the classroom, spewing race hatred for years—even allowing him to win an appeal of his suspension for teaching Holocaust denial—all until it became public on Facebook and couldn’t be swept under the rug anymore.

See, because that systemic, institutional refusal to do anything about a Nazi-propagandizing, anti-Semitic, gay-baiting, woman- and immigrant-hating teacher … that isn’t just loutish. That’s downright racist.

………………………………………….

*Details for the report above come from four sources: the Fatto Quotidiano story translated below, as well as two articles in La Stampa and one in La Repubblica:
Numa, Massimo. “Minaccia strage di ebrei; Indagato il prof nazista.” La Stampa, 6 January 2012.
Mariotti, Antonella. “Torino non è razzista, ma lui lasci la cattedra.” La Stampa, 7 January 2012.
Pasqua, Marco. “Torino, prof neo-nazista su Facebook—‘Potrei fare una strage in sinagoga.” 5 January 2012. .
………………………………………….

Turin: Neo-Nazi Teacher Launches Internet Threat to Carry Out Synagogue Massacre
From Fatto Quotidiano, 6 January 2012

A history and philosophy teacher at a Turin high school for the humanities threatens a bloodbath in a place of worship for Turin’s Jews if anyone dares take down the photos of Hitler and Mussolini he’s posted on his Facebook page. Condemnation arrives from all quarters.

As news reports have begun to reflect with increasing frequency, Facebook is no stranger to anti-Semitic threats and insults. But this time the culprit isn’t some Nazi forum, but a teacher of history and philosophy in a Turin high school for the humanities who used Facebook for his diatribes against Jews, gays, women, and the disabled, going so far as to propose a “massacre in a Synagogue.”

On his Facebook profile, the teacher, Renato Pallavidini, uploaded portraits of Hitler and Mussolini and yesterday posted this threat: “Here’s a warning to those stinking Jew bastards who run that faggot-infested shithole called California, If anyone tries taking down this photo [i.e,. of Hitler and Mussolini], my pistol and I are going to pay a visit to the synagogue right next door and terminate a few of the Jew parasites who hang out there. Don’t you think you’d be better off letting sleeping dogs lie?”

As long ago as 2007 (at the time Pallavidini was teaching in one of Turin’s most prestigious schools, the Cavour High School for the Humanities), parents, teachers, and students reported Pallavidini for his denial of the existence of Nazi concentration camps and for his insults to the memory of the Jews. Since then, Pallavidini has never missed a chance to publish his opinions on Facebook, and his hate seems limitless.

Just before Christmas last year, Pallavidini posted a sort of SOS on Facebook in which he said he was looking for someone willing to do some “target shooting” of the “nigger” drug dealers on his street. When the women’s “If Not Now, When?” March was held in Rome last February, his most restrained words for the participants were to call them “frustrated feminists.” And of course there was his suggestion that the disabled deserved to be subjected to the “methods” of the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele. Pallavidini apparently also wrote to the Mayor of Turin, Piero Fassino, saying that he would refuse to pay his property taxes as long as the money went to provide public assistance to “niggers and gypsies.”

Pallavidini has now been condemned from all quarters, but worry about his actions is equally widespread. Emanuele Fiano and Roberto Della Seta, Democratic Party (Partito Democratico-PD) members in the Italian Parliament, along with an MP representing the Northern League (Lega Nord), Davide Cavallotto, have sent urgent inquiries to the Italian Minister of Education and Research, Francesco Profumo. The president of the Union of Italian Jews, Renzo Gattegna, and the president of the Jewish community in Turin, Beppe Segre, meanwhile, have asked that Pallavidini be put on trial.

The education of our children—tomorrow’s citizens—Gattegna and Segre said– is essential to the building of a mindful society. “The fact that a teacher in a well known high school for the humanities in Turn is using Facebook to publish what are clearly Neo-Nazi photographs and to direct unmistakable threats toward Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, and immigrants is cause for significant concern.”

“Our deepest hope,” Gattegna and Segre continued, “is that from this point forward, this individual—in addition to being tried in order to ascertain his guilt without doubt, be dealt with in such a way that he can do no further harm to young people, neither in any Italian school room nor on the internet.”

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Update—6 Jan 12, 3pm: Renato Pallavidini is under police investigation and charged with inciting racial hatred. On his Facebook wall, Pallavidini had posted anti-Semitic comments and threatened a bloodbath in a Turin synagogue as well as encouraged “target shooting” of immigrants. At the same time that an investigation was officially opened in Pallavidini’s case, the general investigation and special branch. (DIGOS) of the Turin police searched his home and confiscated two computers and other digital material. The investigation is being coordinated by prosecutor Sandro Ausiello.

Writer Beppe Severgnini on Italian Racism … #SpectacularFail

In his 27 December 2011 post on Italians, his Corriere della Sera-sponsored blog site, writer Beppe Severgnini responds to a letter from a reader regarding Italian racism.

The post comes in the wake of two recent race-related atrocities in Italy: First, An “immigrant hunt” through the streets of Florence on December 13th in which a right-wing militant shot and killed a number of Senegalese street traders in two of the city’s outdoor markets (see “Racist Attack in Florence Markets“) and, in the same week, the raid and arson of a Rom encampment near Torino by some 500 “enraged citizens” after learning that a 16-year-old girl had told police she was raped by “two gypsies” (she could tell they were gypsies, she informed police, because “they stunk like animals”). Unfortunately, the story was entirely made up: the girl recanted 24 hours later, admitting that she’d invented the rape accusation to keep her ultra-religious family from learning that she’d been sexually active with her boyfriend (see “Vigilante lynch mob of 500 torch gypsy camp with petrol bombs after teen’s fake claim she had been raped“).

Severgnini’s reply to the letter, entitled “Gli italiani non sono razzisti” (Italians are not Racist) makes his position clear.

To which I can only say, “Caro Beppe,” I beg to differ….

___________________________________

Caro Severgnini:

Mi schiero subito: Sono con loro che dicono che questa volta hai sbagliato, che le tue forti capacità di ragionare in un modo pacato e equilibrato questa volta ti hanno abbandonato.

Vorrei offrire prima un paio di osservazioni. Ho vissuto cinque anni in Italia prima di tornare a “casa,” cioè gli stati uniti. Posso dire che, tra tante belle esperienze in Italia, ho anche conosciuto un popolo subito pronto a dichiararsi “non razzista” senza mai considerare seriamente la possibilità, un popolo che aveva sempre fretta a portare la conversazione su qualche altra sponda. Su qualsiasi altra sponda, in realtà, spesso arrampicandosi sugli specchi. Per voi, è un rigetto istintivo e sventato. E questa impulsiva, leggera negazione è uno dei più precisi motivi per credere invece che il razzismo in Italia sia ben radicato.

Seconda osservazione: Cosa significa “gli italiani sono razzisti” o “gli italiani non sono razzisti”? Sono, alla fine, frasi vuote e non degne di un discorso serio. Se vogliamo parlare del razzismo in Italia, dobbiamo veramente dimostrare che ogni singolo italiano è razzista? Che ogni istituzione è razzista? Ogni azione del governo? Ogni trasmissione televisiva e ogni perla che cade dalle labbra di ogni insegnante?

Certo di no. Ma questo è il ragionamento sul quale tutta la conversazione nazionale si basa. È il gioco a somma zero del discorso italiano sul razzismo, e la lettera del buon Franco Pellela insieme alla tua risposta ne sono esempi: O “gli italiani sono razzisti” (tutti, sempre) e per prova abbiamo “Torino e Firenze,” un approccio abborracciato che ci constringe non soltanto ad ignorare le radici e il significato del singolo evento ma a tralasciare gli esempi di buona convivenza e di comportamento civile tra le razze in Italia.

Oppure abbiamo “gli italiani NON sono razzisti” (nessuno, mai), e abbiamo per prova la convinzione (completamente infondata) che episodi come “Torino e Firenze” siano “isolati” e che i razzisti siano pochi e emarginati (altra ipotesi priva di fondamento). In altre parole, abbiamo la smentita ansiosa, automatica, e immotivata.

Ti dico che, per più di 7 anni ho fatto una collezione di “episodi” italiani di razzismo, e non sono né pochi né marginali. Sono frequenti e sono spudorati. Potrei farci un libro (e chissà? Forse lo farò.) Cosa dimostrano? Che tutti gli italiani sono razzisti? No, ma evidenziano la forte corrente razzista in Italia e il fatto che, al livello del discorso nazionale, dell’educazione civica, degli interventi da parte dei vostri politici, del linguaggio di ogni giorno, delle immagini, del modo in cui i media forniscono “disinformazione” al pubblico (l’esagerazione del numero di immigrati in Italia, giusto per dirne una), il razzismo è un filo rosso del carattere italiano. (Non cercherei mai di dire IL filo rosso.)

Mi fa ridere (amaramente) quando la gente cerca di spostare l’accusa di razzismo sulle “problematiche” dell’immigrazione. È il “benaltrismo” dell’italiano (non negherai, spero, almeno questo tratto nazionale) scritto sullo schermo grande. Tanto per cominciare, l’idea di incolpare gli immigrati per i vostri problemi di integrazione (sono così tanti, abbiamo bisogno di tempo per adeguarci, loro non si assimilano, hanno completamente conquistato certe zone) è razzista di per sé.

Ma lasciamo perdere questo per parlare di sistemi più importanti. La  politica del governo italiano per quanto riguarda l’immigrazione è razzista per definizione. Tutte le polemiche sulle moschee, la burquini, gli spacciatori africani, i-rumeni-che-ci-rubano-il-pane-di-bocca, e via dicendo sono, per definizione, razziste. Presumono la superiorità o il predominio di una cultura (quella italiana). Presumono il pericolo, il male, la minaccia sproporzionata da parte di un’altra. Presumono il bisogno di reagire, di salvaguardare i propri valori (la famiglia, la religione, la stessa “cultura”), ecc., perché esse sono “sotto attacco.”

In fine, credo di aver capito, leggendo tra le righe della tua risposta, che ti riferisci agli stati uniti quando dici di non vedere “una sistematicità” del razzismo in Italia. Se è così, ti do ragione—ma solo in parte. Il razzismo in Italia non è come il razzismo negli stati uniti. Non si basa culturalmente sul concetto della superiorità dell’uomo bianco e i suoi presupposti non sono da cercarsi nello storico assoggettamento di un’intera razza per legge, per religione, e per costume.

Ma non per questo dovrete sentirvi né sollevati né esenti. Il razzismo italiano si svolge come il razzismo italiano, non come quello americano. In primis, non vi credete una razza—un’etnia, come dici tu—perciò definire il razzismo come il “ritenere un’etnia inferiore a un’altra” rende il concetto complicato nel contesto della vostra storia e presente. Ma il razzismo italiano si basa comunque sulla superiorità degli italiani (degli europei, dell’occidente). E quando il razzismo si alza la testa in Italia, sempre razzismo è. (Considera che per confermare l’accusa contro “due zingari,” la ragazza di Torino ha pensato bene ad aggiungere “ho riconosciuto quelle bestie da come puzzavano.” Se non c’è il razzismo in Italia, come ha saputo, una di 16 anni, che quel dato avrebbe fatto così tanta presa sui suoi concittadini? Pensa invece alla frase, “Sapevo che erano italiani, quelle bestie, le conoscevo da come puzzavano.” Non sta in piede, vero?)

Nella tua risposta a Pellela, il tuo è un ragionamento prevalentemente semantico: non si tratta di razzismo ma di un “viatico verso il razzismo.” Non si tratta di razzismo ma di atteggiamenti “grossolani, stupidi, beceri.” Cioè, tutti i sintomi, i presupposti, le impronte del razzismo sono presenti, ma state attenti: non è razzismo. Caro Severgnini, credi anche che una donna possa essere “leggermente incinta”?

Più che altro, quello che mi dispiace è che tu abbia perso un’occasione per educare, per parlare di cose serie. Qualche parole di saggezza, di contemplazione su questi due episodi pietosi, vergognosi? No. Solo l’abituale negazione. Quello lì, non è razzismo. Sono beceri, quelli con le torce e i volantini “Ripuliamo la Continassa,” ma non sono razzisti. Non siamo razzisti, noi no.

Io invece vivo di questa verità: Siamo tutti razzisti. Nella mia esperienza, chi dice – chi insiste – di non esserlo è il primo indiziato. Tanto, se gli italiani sono o non sono razzisti, se sono più o meno razzisti di questi o di quelli, non sono le questioni fondamentali. Razzisti o non, c’e’ una cosa ben più grave da valutare: la vostra conclamata allergia all’autocritica.

Wendell Ricketts

Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum – Richard Fortey

I suppose it’s inevitable to compare Dry Storeroom to Douglas Preston’s Dinosaurs in the Attic, though Fortey doesn’t come out ahead in the competition. On the other hand, Fortey’s Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth was such a fine book that Dry Storeroom had every reason to be just as engaging. It isn’t, though, and I’m still not entirely sure why.

Perhaps it is because Fortey focuses almost exclusively on the scientists who work “behind the scenes” in his museum (or who worked there—quite a few of them are dead); and the recounting of old gossip and long-forgotten eccentricities and peccadilloes isn’t nearly as intriguing as Fortey perhaps intended it to be. Throughout, I wanted to hear more about the science itself, about the specimens, about (for crying out loud) trilobites, which are Fortey’s area of specialty. Though he does a decent job of explaining the basics of taxonomy and nomenclature, including a discussion of the conceptual upheaval of the entire endeavor that has been occasioned by our modern capacity to trace species relationships through DNA analysis, all of it feels a tad superficial.

Fortey mentions, for example, the fact that modern science has challenged the very concept of “species,” but doesn’t ever quite arrive at the point. Meanwhile, other than alluding to the classic “lumpers vs. splitters” feud, he doesn’t say much of anything about what this all means for paleontologists, who are forced to erect and defend species on the basis of entirely external characteristics (given that DNA is unavailable). In light of Fortey’s interesting discussion of the complete revolution that took place in the understanding of the taxonomy of just one species of common marine snail, Littorina, following genetic analysis, or the fact that some workers claim that as few as 40% of living species of Conus are valid, one wonders what hope there might be for fossil Conus (to take one example), which is a morass if ever there was one—and that’s just one gastropod in a single, enormous phylum.

I assume that Fortey and his publisher made their editorial decisions deliberately to avoid overwhelming the scientifically handicapped, but I couldn’t help but feel that the dumbing-down sometimes went too far. Fortey takes several occasions to comment on the virtual extinction of the grand scientific enterprises that gave birth to our understanding of the systematics of living things, but he’s more wistful than angry about the way changing funding priorities and budget-slashing at universities and museums have made a victim of science. Anger would have been more than justified. Overall, Dry Storeroom is too long on anecdote and too short on analysis of the hard issues, and “popular” begins to edge over into the territory of the run-of-the-mill. It’s a privilege to read Fortey; I very much suspect, however, that he has more compelling things to say.

Sex, Drugs, and Sea Slime: The Oceans’ Oddest Creatures and Why They Matter – Ellen J. Prager

In a world in which what most people know about science could be fitted comfortably into a toothpaste cap, Prager joins the ranks of such “popularizers” and “divulgators” of the arcane and mysterious “ologies” as E.O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, and even, in his way, Farley Mowatt. In other words, with writers like these for colleagues, popular-science writers face a bar that is set fairly high. Prager, however, doesn’t even bother to stretch.

As her title suggests, and as she explains in her introductory chapters, slime turns out to serve a myriad of important functions in marine life: as a defense mechanism, as an aid to reproduction, as an impromptu sleep sack for fish on the open reef. Ocean life, Prager says, is enveloped in slime. Unfortunately, her book is enveloped in it, too, only the slime in Prager’s insufferable writing style takes the form of bogs of imbecilic puns; ropes of anemic, anthropomorphizing similes (which she appears to believe are necessary because you’d be too stupid to understand what she was talking about otherwise); and a steady ooze of peepee/caca humor that Prager deploys with Tourette’s-like doggedness and which reaches its apex every time she gets to talk about sex (and she talks about sex a lot). If she has to describe the mating habits of the sea urchin, well, she can at least find some way to make the whole thing seem scatological, smutty, and slightly icky. Just as though you were in junior high and she were the kid in the lunch room who could take even the most innocent-sounding word and somehow relate it to sex. As you’re reading, you can literally hear Beavis and Butt-Head sniggering in the background: “Heh. Heh-heh. She said ‘sperm cloud.’ Heh-heh-heh.”

If this is what it takes to popularize science these days and teach “average” Americans something about the natural world in which we live, I say the Chinese more than deserve to win every single educational contest they challenge us to. (Personal to University of Chicago Press: Ed Ricketts’ Between Pacific Tides hasn’t been updated and re-issued since 1992; make Ellen Prager return her advance and give us back the “Doc.”)

The Italian Brain Drain – from Internazionale

From the indispensable Italian magazine, Internazionale (I wish we had its like in English): “Cervelli in Fuga” [http://www.internazionale.it/superblog/regole/2011/10/14/cervelli-in-fuga/] or, “The Italian Brain Drain” (Issue #919, 14 October 2011):
1 Before you make your escape, be sure you have a brain to drain. 2 Enjoy earning your big salary in dollars, but never quit complaining about how much you miss Italy. 3 Referring to yourself, stop using the term “young people,” especially if you’re 40 years old. 4 Did you leave the country so you wouldn’t starve to death? If so, then what you’re actually a part of is the stomach drain. 5 OK, so they gave you a teaching position at Cambridge. That doesn’t change the fact that the pasta in the cafeteria is always overcooked. 6 Once you’re gone, you’ll realize what a magnificent place Italy really is. For a vacation.

[English translation by ProvenWrite Italian to English Translations]

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1 Prima di fuggire, assicurati di avere un cervello. 2 Goditi il tuo stipendio in dollari, ma non smettere mai di lamentarti che ti manca l’Italia. 3 Non dire “noi giovani”, soprattutto se hai quarant’anni. 4 Sei partito per non fare la fame? Allora sei uno stomaco in fuga. 5 Ok, hai una cattedra a Cambridge. Resta il fatto che la pasta della mensa è sempre scotta. 6 Una volta partito, scoprirai che l’Italia è un posto magnifico. Per andare in vacanza.

Randall Kennedy’s Nigger … In Which We Wish We Could Read the Book He Didn’t Write

If the question is scholarship and clarity, no fault can be found with Randall Kennedy’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. And if that is so, what makes Kennedy’s book so ultimately unsatisfying? Perhaps it is the sense that Kennedy, who is eternally fair-minded (at times, perhaps, even to a fault), never quite seems to get his arms entirely around his topic. Indeed, if Kennedy is always rational in pronouncing his phlegmatic judgments on various famous and infamous uses of the “troublesome” word, the fact is that his reasons for considering one episode defensible and identifying another as certifiably hateful and racist are not entirely coherent. To say it another way, if the reader were to ask Kennedy to define when, by whom, and under what circumstances “nigger” can be deployed legitimately, it is doubtful that he could express a practical philosophy, even in the broadest of terms. Or to put the matter in still other words, Kennedy is just like many of the rest of us: appalled by the use of the word in contexts in which it is clearly intended to injure, more than occasionally troubled by its prevalence in everyday discourse, ambivalent about its modern-day dispersal as a (quite literal) shibboleth, and intellectually muddled over how to confront the word in its undeniable position as both linguistic fingerprint and American literary instrument. But if that is the case, what purpose does Kennedy’s book actually serve? Those who have spent any time at all thinking about the word and its uses (and, by extension, about American-style racism) won’t find, in Nigger, much they didn’t already know; those who haven’t considered the topic are unlikely to read such a book; and those looking for legitimation and permission (it is, after all, a black man saying that even white people sometimes have the right to say “nigger”) will go away with their oversimplifications intact. In fairness to Kennedy and his obvious gravitas, perhaps we are meant to content ourselves with just what his subtitle—The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—suggests: a linguistic-historical review. The major disappointment of Nigger, however, is that, having spent 200 pages laying the perfect groundwork from which to launch a potentially enlightening discussion, Kennedy closes the book. One suspects that a writer and thinker with Kennedy’s clear admiration for scholarly exactitude might have provided both significant insight and indispensable reflection on the matter (imagine the same topic in the hands of a Toni Morrison, for example), but he rarely goes beneath the surface. We cannot know whether Kennedy’s courage failed him or whether he simply lost interest in the subject, but Nigger is one of those cases in which the reader has every right to regret the book that wasn’t written.

(P.S. As if to underscore some of the points Kennedy makes, Amazon.com refused to post my review with the actual title word in it—that word is on Amazon’s “bad word” list and triggers an automatic rejection of the review. That is, quite frankly, exactly the kind of knee-jerk, no-thought-involved stupidity that Kennedy is aiming at.)

Around Three O’Clock – A Translation of One of the First Nine-Eleven Novels Ever Written

In keeping with the 10-year observance of the 9/11/2001 attacks, and for this week only, download Wendell Ricketts’ unpublished translation of this novel in .pdf format. [Offline: Please contact me if you are interested in reading the manuscript.]

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This short novel is dedicated to all those who, at around three o’clock on that September 11th, were not there. (Meridiano Zero)

At around nine o’clock in the morning in New York City on September 11, 2001, the time in Naples, Italy was just before three in the afternoon. The death and terror that came in the wake of  kamikaze attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington—symbols of American political, economic, and military power—overwhelmed the world with a sense of impending danger. In the hours that followed, the means of international communication spoke of nothing else, and no one could be certain what the attacks meant or whether more were on their way.

Italians, of course, learned of the attacks on America just as many Americans did—from obsessive, incredulous television coverage, in frantic phone calls from friends and loved ones, and “What happened in America” became a mysterious signal, a watershed moment between “life before” and “life after.”

Andrej Longo’s Più o meno alle tre (Meridiano Zero, 2002) was the first Italian novel to take the 9/11 attacks as the subject matter for literature, and it remains one of the few works of fiction in any language to explore the immediate impact of September 11th on average people—on working-class men and women caught, as they attended to personal dramas and everyday routines, by an event whose nearly ungraspable magnitude reproportions their experiences. In that sense, Più o meno alle tre is an illustration of Auden’s famous observation about human suffering: “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

The cities of Naples, Italy and New York, New York, lie along virtually the same line of latitude—but, in Longo’s view, their similarities are far more than geographic. In a July 18, 2002 interview in Il Mattino di Napoli [Naples Morning News], for example, Longo noted:

I was trying to imagine what 9-11 represented in the … lives of ordinary people, like [the ones] I saw every day at the Mergellina subway station [in Naples]. And somehow, almost as if by a kind of magic, those people began to speak to me, to tell me their stories. [The moment of the attacks], for the characters in the novel, represents a kind of “lost virginity,” a point of no return. It’s a decisive moment that falls into the normal course of their lives, something that causes them to change, something that shows them that life is more complicated than it once seemed. And even though all the characters are Neapolitan, the simple, working-class people of that city, I see them as representative of the entire West.

The nineteen chapters in Around Three O’Clock / Più o meno alle tre (two, excluded from the Meridiano Zero edition, are translated and inserted here for the first time as Longo intended them) are interwoven, connected often by simple coincidences of place and time, and at the same moment are deeply rooted in the musicality, color, chaos, and desperate vitality of contemporary Naples.

Longo juxtaposes the nearly incomprehensible international scale of the events of September 11th against the “small tragedies” of everyday life. His characters include a man whose wife chooses September 11th, the date of their fifth anniversary, to announce that she is leaving him; another who learns, that same day, that he has lung cancer; an unrepentant womanizer who bets on a casual pickup and loses his life in the process; a cult-soap-opera actress who loses touch with the difference between her real life and her life on screen; an immigrant prostitute confined by an anti-personnel mine to a wheelchair; a young girl who gives birth to her daughter, Hope, in a broken-down automobile on the side of the autostrada.

For each of these characters, regardless of their unique reactions to the attacks, there comes a moment to reflect—with humor, with irony, with rage, with indifference, with violence—on their fate as individuals and as a collectivity, a society, a race.

There’s no mistaking the theatrical—or, perhaps more specifically, cinematographic—element in Around Three O’Clock / Più o meno alle tre. Longo’s design for the novel is a mosaic, a series of “short cuts”—interconnected and parallel stories that comment on one another, juxtaposing reaction to the dramatic events in America with a naked, ironic examination of a Neapolitan demos in which familiar landmarks and values are in constant danger of slipping out of sight.

A 30-Day News Embargo for Mental Health: No News Is Good News

Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, his exceptional play from 1978, abounds in memorable lines. After I saw the Broadway production at the New Apollo Theater during a trip to New York in 1981 (the unforgettable version with Richard Thomas, Jeff Daniels, and Swoosie Kurtz), I invented a tradition to make sure I remembered at least some of them: I’ve re-read the play on every July 5th since then. This year, only a few months after Wilson’s death in March, my reading brought a special kind of nostalgia.

Fifth of July takes place at the Talley family farm in Lebanon, Missouri, on Independence Day, 1977, and on the day after. The family has gathered for a ceremony, ostensibly because dotty, elderly-savant Aunt Sally has decided—after carrying the ashes of her late husband, Matt, around in a cigar box for years—that she is finally ready to spread them at the lake-edge of the family compound.

At one point in Act I, as Aunt Sally is reminiscing about Matt, she says,

They all hated him…. They said he didn’t love this country because he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. I think they were right. I don’t think he loved this country a bit. He loved the countryside….

I think that just about sums up where I am these days. I do love the countryside. I don’t much love my country. I haven’t for quite some time—but as far as I’m concerned it’s my country that done me wrong.

And that is, at least in part, why I’m taking this occasion to announce a month-long News Fast and Information Detoxification Program, a sort of a colon-cleansing, psyllium-husk treatment for the soul.

I’m not sure I could point to a precise trigger for this decision. I’ve been thinking about it for months. But when we came home late on a Sunday night a few weeks ago—following a relaxing weekend getaway during which our most pressing concerns had involved snorkeling and alligator-viewing—the news that Michelle Bachman had won the Ames, Iowa, Republican straw poll spread a dark, oily slick along the shores of whatever tiny island of tranquility we’d managed to inhabit while we were away.

Long before we went, though—and, in fact, one of the reasons why we needed to get away in the first place—were weeks and months of news in which I seemed unable to avoid a single conclusion, as I looked at what was happening around the world: Evil is winning.

There was the triumph of the Tea Party’s falsehoods and malevolence in the debt-ceiling negotiations. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision, in back-to-back cases, to order the deportation of the non-US-citizen partner in two long-term same-sex couples and (I knew I shouldn’t have read them) the hateful, depraved, vicious comments of my “fellow” citizens on news articles about the decisions (“fucking faggots haven’t done enough to ruin the country—now they want their foreign “lovers” to get citizenship? I say hell no!”).

There’s the continued refusal of any political party to address the war on the poor and the disenfranchised around the world, or to take even the smallest steps to reduce the speed by which the rich and powerful are tightening their stranglehold on the rest of us.

The early-August uprisings in England were no more than a case in point: Every single mainstream news outlet insisted on labeling them “riots” (because, while rebellions and “people-power movements” can take place in Egypt and Syria, they cannot occur in the West) and further insisted on maintaining a focus on the “thugs” and “looters” to the resolute exclusion of any analysis of the racism, systematic impoverishment, and lack of education that are the lot of the working-class in London’s modern-day slums. Suggest that those factors played at least (can we say that? “at least”?) as large a part in the “riots” as did some looter’s desire to score a free flat-screen TV and you’re a coddler, you’re politically correct, you’re a pinko dinosaur.

Or, to say it with John Steinbeck, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

And the media increasingly appear to see themselves as the defenders of the millionaires, of the embarrassed millionaires, of the millionaires who refuse to be embarrassed, and of the millionaires manqué.

Of course, none of this is new. I lived through Anita Bryant and a string of demoralizing defeats of fledgling gay-rights protections between 1977 and 1978: my coming-out present from the United States. St. Paul, Minnesota; Eugene, Oregon; and Wichita, Kansas all fell, and it was hard not to see them as dominoes. That was especially true when we got to California’s Proposition 6 in 1978—only three years after the state had “decriminalized” homosexuality—John Briggs’ attempt to outlaw gay teachers and anyone who “advocated” homosexuality in the public schools.

The election of Harvey Milk in November 1977 and the defeat of Proposition 6 a year later (one of the only times in my life that I’ve voted for someone or something that went the way I wanted), were dazzling points of light in a gloom that threatened to obscure the horizon.

And I lived through the Reagan Years, though most of my male friends didn’t. Up until now, I would have called those my darkest days in America—as I watched friend after friend waste away and die because money for research, for most of Reagan’s eight years, wasn’t forthcoming and, when it finally was, new drugs couldn’t be developed fast enough for them. In the meantime, the heinous William F. Buckley talked of forcibly tattooing HIV-positive individuals and still other politicians proposed mandatory concentration camps—the first and last time the AmeriKKKan right ever thought Fidel Castro had a good idea.

I lived through the first Gulf War and the threat (which thankfully never materialized) that biological and chemical bombs were about to rain down on Israel. I lived through the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and, like all of us, am still living with the legacy of the methodical dismantling of American civil liberties in the name of increased security. Republicans convinced Americans of a pack of lies, Democrats did precious little to stop them, and voices of protest were marginalized and pathologized.

(The other day, I watched Dolce Metà pass through the TSA checkpoints at the airport on his way to catch a flight overseas. Because I wasn’t going with him, I had the opportunity for the first time to stand apart and observe the process. Though the whole thing only took a few minutes, I had to consciously push down a knot of panic in my gut. There he was naked (literally, for a moment), his belongings handed over to someone who could paw through them or even confiscate them; there he was at the mercy of those machines, of those people with guns, of “experts” who could demand an explanation for anything—a bottle of aspirin, a book, the files on his laptop; of “officials” with the power to decide he could be frisked or stripped or held in a confinement cell for hours or days—and I couldn’t do anything about it. If you want to know what terrorism is, Donald Rumsfeld, it’s that.)

So the way I see things these days is this: Evil is on a winning streak and it has been for a while. Sometimes it looks like Ronald Reagan, sometimes it looks like Dick Cheney, and sometimes it looks like Michelle Bachmann. And all of them quote scripture for their purpose.

The Father, the Son, and the Unholy Spirit

I see Evil almost daily among my students—they are not Evil, let me hurry to make clear, but their minds are hopelessly colonized. The more I get to know them, the more I am convinced that greater access to information has not only not made us smarter and better informed, it has had the opposite effect. Nowadays, in fact, the media (which includes the internet and its billion monkeys typing on a billion typewriters) are capable of recontextualizing any issue as a “controversy” rather than making clear that it is instead a dispute between people who are right and people who are, quite simply, wrong.

And that’s not the result of any effort on their part to be “objective” (because media objectivity, my friends, went extinct a long, long time ago). It’s a concerted attempt to usher in an era of total nihilism. My students, in fact, are perfect nihilists, though they probably don’t even know the term, because this is exactly what they believe: That nothing is ultimately right or true or moral. That everything is an opinion. That lies and falsehoods are simply “alternative viewpoints.” The famous Voltairian (or perhaps only Voltaire-inspired) proposition, “I will defend to the death your right to say it,” has been corrupted to mean “I have the inalienable right to make shit up.”

Think about what happened to Shirley Herrod. Think about the so-called global warming “controversy.” Think about the “theory” of evolution. Think about the “debate” in the “culture wars” regarding basic civil rights for people who are queer.

Think about how, every time we discuss welfare (cue the Cadillac-driving “welfare queens”), we can count on someone frothing at the mouth about “welfare cheats” or about all the money welfare recipients “take” from hard-working taxpayers (most welfare recipients work and, thus, also pay taxes, by the way). Or about how, whenever we have a conversation about immigration, we must contend with the “alternative viewpoint” that immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans. We’d sooner give up believing in Santa Claus, apparently, than let go of that much-beloved myth.

Or think about recent surveys in which 18% of Americans say they believe Barack Obama is a Muslim. Yes, still. Three years after his election. It’s a discouraging figure. First of all, because he’s not and, second of all because, even if he were, it turns out that it’s actually okay to be a Muslim.

I’ve never been more discouraged.

Freedom of Speech - even for the Barking Mad. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Meanwhile, we’re on the eve of the tenth … “anniversary” seems such an ill-considered word … let’s say “observation” of the September 11th attacks in 2001. The patriotic hysteria began weeks ago and is reaching a crescendo, and I simply can’t bear it.

Hence the decision: There’s never been a better time to go on a News Fast.

Starting Friday, September 9 and lasting through October 9, here’s what it means: No more reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, or any other newspaper online. (I’ve never read the local Tea Party propaganda sheet fishwrap anyway, even though they keep attempting to foist it on me for free at the entrance to the grocery store.)

No more listening to NPR in the car. (Full disclosure: I’ve been considering going off NPR for a while, even before I started formulating the idea of a News Fast. You might say, in fact, that the idea for a News Fast started with NPR, because I long ago realized I’d reached the point where, if I heard another low-brow, soft-ball interview by Terry Gross or another smarmy, lame-brained commentary by Tavis Smiley, I was going to end it all and drive directly into a drainage ditch. No, I didn’t care who I took with me.

Then there was the fact that the local voice of NPR in South Florida is WLRN announcer Bonnie Berman. IMHO, Bonnie Berman should be kidnapped, at gunpoint if necessary, and sent to a speech therapy deprogramming center where they will (we hope) cure both her Peewee Herman-esque nasality and teach her to stop elongating her consonants (yes, consonants) at the ends of syllables. Really. She also holds her vowels, if that’s the issue. Apparently, she thinks she’s performing recitative. Every single freaking time she opens her mouth. “Toodeiiiiii on NPRrrrrrhh, we’ll heerrrr from a man who rescuuuuues alligaterrrrsss rayzeddd illeeeegallyyyy in the staaa-aate of Florrridaaaaahh.” Bonnie, nails on a chalkboard is Handel in comparison.)

It means no more newsgroups or email lists, which means per forza della cose no more messages in my in-box with subject lines like “Where The Presidential Candidates Stand On LGBT Issues” or “Rick Santorum: Marriage Equality is Equal to Slavery” or “Economic Illiterates Step Up the Attack on Social Security and Medicare.”

And it also means—this one is scary—no Facebook for a month. And that’s because, after some three years on the site (hating Mark Zuckerberg for almost the entire time—as Zadie Smith recently put it in the New York Review of Books, we’re “500 million sentient people entrapped in the careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore”), I’ve honed my friends list into what amounts to a kind of progressive/liberal/Commie clipping service.

The result is that my truly wonderful politically active and committed friends are constantly posting things I want to read (“Why Won’t Supposedly Progressive Trader Joe’s Sign an Agreement Not to Sell Slave Labor Tomatoes?” or “GOP Hopeful Exposes Republican Anti-Jobs, Anti-Middle Class Agenda,” or “Protest Police Terror in London” or “Corporations Deny Free Speech,” or “Dan Choi Blasts Obama, Prepares for Trial”).

But the fact is, Facebook has got to go, too, at least for the next month. I am going to miss it, as I will miss all my other “sources,” but here is a truth I’ve come to realize: All this information is making me sad. In fact, I increasingly see the “news” as an assault, and I need a break.

Of course this is only temporary. It’s a 30-day fast to clear my head and regroup, to lighten my heart, not a sustained hermitage. I can’t imagine living in permanent ignorance regarding what’s happening in the world. Knowing, in fact, may be the last defense that’s left to us. We might be going down, but at least I won’t go down saying I never knew what hit us.

I’ll be blogging occasionally during my “30-Day News Embargo for Mental Health,” assuming there’s something worth saying. I realize, of course, that there’s no way to seal oneself hermetically away from the world, and one thing that will be interesting is what manages to cross my “threshold” anyway. Das Information kennt verschiedenen Wegen.

By the way, I don’t expect my friends to modify their behavior in the least. You don’t have to treat me like a San Francisco vegan at a Texas barbecue. The only difference is, between September 9th and October 9th, you’ll have to email me directly if you want to reach me — Facebook messages won’t come through.

As for me, I’m fastening my seat belt. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.