Hip Me with Your Best Shot
Professor Charles Rice at Notre Dame liked to tell us, "You don't have to wear a pony tail and sandals to be counter-cultural. You just have to be a good Catholic." So I was a little disappointed (not surprised at all) that nothing Catholic made this entertaining "Brief History of The Counter Culture" (PG language).
I would take issue, incidentally, with their decision to start the history with Kerouac and Co. in the 1940s. Two years ago, I received $100 unexpectedly while I was in Detroit. I decided to go to Barnes and Noble and buy a couple of books with no pre-meditation: no list, no idea what I was looking for, no subject matter in mind. I bought two, one of which I would rank in the top ten percent of books I've read: Hip: The History, by John Leland.
Leland cites two sources of hip: (1) Slavery, which makes sense. Who'd have a bigger motivation to be counter-cultural than a group of people oppressed by the culture? After 1865, the blacks continued their counter-cultural ways through music, which then started to spread through technology (records and radio). (2) Literary types who bristled against American ways and preached non-conformity, starting with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.
I've always been fascinated with the counter-cultural, a fascination that started with my arrival in Ann Arbor ("Little New York," people there called it) at age 20, but I've always been conservative, so becoming counter-cultural through Catholicism appealed to me. I've even read some stuff by that leftist counter-cultural Dorothy Day . . . and enjoyed it.
Torn Between Two Lovers . . .
ACADEMICS at Oxford University have banned step-ladders from its world famous Bodleian library ”“ because of health and safety fears.
The ban means students are unable to reach books on the top shelves but dons refuse to bring them lower because it would remove them from their “original historic location”.
No Dancing Queen
Reminds of the joke, "Why don't Baptist couples have relations standing up? They're afraid they might start dancing: "A student at a fundamentalist Baptist school that forbids dancing, rock music, hand-holding and kissing will be suspended if he takes his girlfriend to her public high school prom, his principal said."
Even though I thoroughly disagree with the Baptist position (what's next, a prohibition on students drinking beer?), I respect that it's the school's decision, which is why I object to this story appearing on the Associated Press wire. By publishing such a story, the AP implies this story is a public matter. It isn't a public matter any more than it's a public matter if I spank my son Max for giving me the finger, which he does frequently (but I don't spank him: he thinks it's part of a hand-motion rhyme that includes a character named "Tall Man"). By implying it's a public matter, there's a further implication that perhaps the public should get involved, which, in this legal-socio climate, would mean it's a government matter.
I know: Maybe it qualifies as a simple human interest story. But that's not the way it's written. For starters, if it were meant as light-hearted human interest, it'd have an airy beginning, like ""Dance or pray? That's the question." Instead, it begins with that zero-bounce, zero-levity passage linked above.
Kill Me Kangaroo Down
Wow, this story must have the tree huggers terribly conflicted. Kangaroos or the darter snail? It looks like the kangaroos win . . . in the conservationists' hearts. Maybe it's because kangaroos don't have flatulence . . . or something to that effect. Unfortunately for the hoppers, they don't win in in the sites of the Australian army:
Australia's army has started shooting 6,000 kangaroos to thin their population on an army training ground near the capital, an official said Friday, outraging conservationists who have vowed to protest.
The killings are intended to protect endangered plants and insects that share the grassy habitat with the kangaroos. A much smaller slaughter of 400 kangaroos on another Defense Department site in Canberra last year was disrupted by protesters.
Doesn't Australia have any wealthy rednecks? You'd think they could raffle off licenses to kill 100 kangaroos for a hefty sum, thereby saving their army the expense and making a profit.
I'm curious, incidentally, about how the kangaroo population got so large. I saw Crocodile Dundee, so I know for a fact that Australian rednecks routinely go about killing 'em.
Miscellany
Giving big families everywhere a bad name: A mother of nine who was arrested after authorities found a dead fetus stored in the refrigerator of her filthy home is headed to prison for 10 years on that charge and 12 years on other child endangerment charges.
Calling Al Sharpton and Ralph Nader: The Oprah Winfrey-fueled free chicken give-away that caused pandemonium this week at Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants has been canceled due to what the fast-food chain called an "overwhelming response."
Star Trek and its later incarnations were unabashedly utopian, portraying a racially and ethnically diverse crew in which men, women and even pointy-eared and thick-browed aliens work together in a true meritocracy in which people are rewarded and punished solely according to their ability.
I found it a captivating idea, but I have since realized that it is far harder to judge people's abilities than we normally believe--an important lesson whether or not we live in a utopia. Given the difficulties in seeing beyond results to a person's true ability, how could one build a utopian meritocracy? Maybe Thomas More had the answer. His term utopia is a play on two Greek words. One, eu-topos, means "good place." But the other, ou-topos, means "no place."
