Culture and Media Watch: September 2005 Archives

I see an analogy between cross cultural borrowing, and scholarship. If one is writing a paper, one makes an effort to cite the source of an idea, or information. If one quotes, one makes sure to quote exactly. It is not appropriate to distort what another writer has written in order to make polemic. And if the other writer has expressly forbidden the use of his/her words, it is considered unethical to use those words in one's paper.

Most writers agree, and vigerously defend their copywrite.

The Hopi do not want any one using their ceremonies. The Cherokee say you are welcome to use our stuff, but do it with respect. The Reform Jews say learn from us, but do not do our ceremonies our of context. Orthodox and Conservative have other concerns.

At the superbowl last year had what appeared to be native Americans dressed, doing a modern dance, dressed in totally green lycra... that is an example of distortion and misuse of Native cultural ways .

A relatively new Unitarian Universalist reported to her minister the following conversation overheard in her community's coffee shop. It seems that two women were talking, and one woman expressed dissatisfaction with her mainstream church, it was rigid, do nothing, too dogmatic, and so forth. The other woman commiserated and the began talking about other local churches the two of them dismissing each in turn. Finally they got to the Unitarian Universalist Church, what do they believe? one woman asked the other. "Oh," said the other with authority, "they re-cycle."

"They recycle" maybe that would not be the one thing you would say, if asked what religious liberals believe. But perhaps our neighbors know us better than we know ourselves. Most Unitarian Universalists believe they are environmentalists, but perhaps we are the committed to an environmentalism that is inadequate to the crisis facing our planet. Global warming is bringing climate change, and climate change has given us an increase in violent storms, hot seas, and unusual draughts. Tomorrow Hurricane Rita will come assure, hitting the same region where Hurricane Katrina caused so much damage.

Bill McKibben outlines why the old environmentalism has died of its own inadequacies and why we must move on to entirely new orientation if we are to save our planet. Our religious commitment to being in right relation to our planet will require real change change in our economy and way of life.

Shawn Desjarlais tells the story of his efforts with other Native American youth to create an art form that speaks both to his indigenous roots and to his generations sense of self expression. The Native "hip hop" that Shawn and others are working to create is a distinctive beat, and style, and is explicit in its anti racism and struggle for sovereignty.

Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington. She admits that reading her poetry and speaking to such a large audience (35000 people are expected) would have been an opportunity, and that participating in a community of writers is dear to her heart, but that participating in this Festival would be an implicit endorsement of the Bush led war against Iraq.

Olds, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush to read from their works. Three years ago artist Jules Feiffer declined to attend the festival's White House breakfast as a protest against the Iraq War

Saturday is farmer's market day in North Hatley, Quebec. The stalls were erected by an association of local producers who desired to market their wares directly to the public, so twenty stalls form a three sided rectangle market with a common area in between. Every Saturday until October, the sounds of both languages compete, and complement each other as buyers and sellers share their opinions on the merits of the harvest of lettuce and squash, speculate on the arrival of the apples and pumpkins and share news of upcoming community events. Some of the vendors sell produce, some sell freshly baked bread stuffs, one sells her paintings which she has made into greeting cards, and one sells Middle Eastern and Indian curries, chutneys, spreads and pastries.

There is no such thing as a traditional family pattern! How can there be traditional family value?

There are family patterns that have lasted a long time, but the ideal that is put forward Male Dominated, Female as Housekeeper children bearing the father's name, is a concept of the family that is less than four thousand years old and took root only among a minority of the worlds population.

More ancient than Patriarchy, there prevailed a more egalitarian form of family, some in which lineage was traced through the women, but all in which both men and women were equal in law and practice.

In English speaking colonial America, the male owned all property,and marriages were arranged by men, to facilitate property arrangements. That was a "traditional" family, for the male property holding European settlers in North America. The European who settled in North American brought their family pattern with them, but on this continent with lots of land to steal, and so the children were not as dependent on inheritance for land.

In the decades prior to the American Revolution, a radical change in family relations began to emerge. We see it in the church records of marriage and baptism. In Concord, Massachusetts in decade of the 1760s, more than half of the first born children baptized at the church, were born less than seven months after their parents were married! The diaries also indicate considerable concern, anxiety, "what is going on with the children, they are so defiant." Unlike their parents, they were choosing who they would marry, and defying the arrangements made between patriarchs.

With two generations beginning in New England, the old Patriarchal arranged marriage system collapsed in America, and a family formed on the basis romantic love and self initiated courtship emerged.

In the 1840s we begin to see another big change in the family, men going off to work.....for millennia in Europe and Asia, the patriarchal household had been the center of economic work. Silversmiths for example worked in their shops and their residence was attached. Bankers had offices in their residences, as did lawyers. Pastors lived in pastorates, next to the church. Farmers lived in a farm house on the farm, or walked out to their plot from a nearby village.

In the 1840s that pattern broke down, and males began to spend hours away from the residence, in offices, in shops, in factories and middle class women ecame the de facto head of the household, and child rearing The resident patriarch that had been the basis of the European traditional marriage was no longer resident.

The new division of roles for men and women began to become articulated. women as nurturers, men as bread winners. We do not find those ideas before, most women worked in their husbands trade in the centuries before, men had supervised children.

In the twentieth century a new pattern emerged, becoming significant in the middle decades of that century. We see middle class women going off to work, women pursuing careers children being cared for in the day time by institutions and service providers. Again a new pattern, a new way of being family.

I have not surveyed the change in Native American family patterns, the change in African American family patterns, or the changes in the family patterns of Europeans who became industrial workers. Each of these are significantly different from what was considered to be ideal by the dominant groups in American society both in the past and in the present. I have only surveyed the changes in what was considered "ideal" by the white people of property.

But even with those limitations, I believe we can see from this very brief trot through the family history that family patterns change, family dynamics change. There is no one way of being family in the United States today, no singular way of being family that is embraced by a majority, and none of the many ways of being family we see in the United States have sufficient antiquity to claim to be the traditional American family.

One of the great illusions of religious liberalism is the idea that the political division in the United States continues to be between liberals and conservatives. The problem with this understanding is that the new political right is not conservative by any traditional understanding of that term.

I was taught that conservatives sought to conserve that which is good and that which abides, but the new political right is advancing an agenda that is strikingly at odds with traditional conservative understandings of constitutional liberties, church and state relationships, and foreign policy. In two areas the departure of the political right from conservative values is striking, the right's war against science, and the right's attacks against environmentalists. Check out this commentary by Jim Motavalli on right wing think tanks who are misusing science to blame environmental groups for the Katrina disaster.

We arrived at the Woolworth's
and the picket line was already in motion.
The demonstrators Black, White, young and old,
were singing songs I had never heard before,
shooting slogans about Freedom, 
holding signs accusing the five and dime chain of Jim Crow,
Segregation, Racism,  Bigotry,

It was 1958
and I had come to believe
that Segregation was very, very wrong
so very wrong that I must act.

Richard Hofstader wrote in 1965:

...there is a difference between the paranoid style in politics and the clinical paranoiac: although they both tend to be overheated, over-suspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him: whereas the spokesman for the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life who fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.

In order to enlist people into the religion of violence it is necessary to have an enemy, who is consciously working to destroy ones community.  To create such an enemy we must suspect the motives of the other, fear that enemy because of they  "hate our way of life."

In 1965 Richard Hofstader was examining the paranoid style of U.S. politician as they postured against the Soviet Union and "communism."  In 2005 the religion of violence has constructed a new image of the enemy,  drawing connections between such disparate movements as the Baath Party in Iraq, the corrupt stalinist oligarchy in North Korea, the nascent populist socialist movement led by Hugo Chavez, the Palestinian militants, and the theocracy in Iran.  The "axis of evil" may never hold a consultation, but for the politician who has embraced the paranoid style the proof of their enemy status has been established by their existence.