Terra Incognita

Garrison Keillor is often funny when he makes fun of the close-knit midwest.  His show has great music and the sketches (especially “Guy Noir”) are funny tributes to old-time radio theater.  His fiction can also be good, like in WLA: A Radio Romance.  I also agree with a lot of his politics, which he described in Homegrown Democrat (although I have my problems with it).

Having said all that, I have a significantly lower opinion of the old scout after he wrote his weekly column that appears in the Baltimore Sun (it will run in the Strib on Sunday).  It feels like someone venting long-restrained complaints at an inopportune time.

The whole thing starts going wrong when he criticizes Ralph Waldo Emerson, of all people.

[Emerson] preached here at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit… and [he] tossed off little bon mots that have been leading people astray ever since. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” for example. This tiny gem of self-pity has given license to a million arrogant and unlovable people to imagine that their unpopularity somehow was proof of their greatness.

I’ve never heard of such people, and I hope to never meet them.  I’ve also never heard of such people justifying themselves with that quote.  I also don’t like calling a church an “outfit.”  It makes it sound like it’s part of a mafia conspiracy, which Keillor builds on later in his column.  What he also conveniently forgets is that in the same paragraph that Emerson says that quote, he says an even more famous gem: “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

And all his hoo-ha about listening to the voice within and don’t follow the path, make your own path and leave a trail and so forth, encouraged people who might’ve been excellent janitors to become bold and innovative economists who run a wealthy university into the ditch.

This is something I’d like Keillor to explain a little bit more.  That last bit about economists is a reference to Lawrence Summers taking part of Harvard’s endowment and investing it in the stock market, with the end result being the investment losing $1 billion in value.  And Summers, who is now the director of the National Economic Council, did not become an economist because he read that quote from Emerson.  Chances are he became an economist because that’s what his parents were and he is a nephew of Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson, both of whom have won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

But never mind that.  Summers is also Jewish, which becomes important in Keillor’s column later on.

Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone.

I wonder if I should tell him.  Nah, he’s livid with rage over Unitarians. How could Unitarians provoke such anger?  I don’t know.  Keillor’s been on good terms with them for the longest time.

This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck.

No, Garrison.  What you’re doing is cultural elitism.  It is astounding that someone like Garrison Keillor would take a swipe at Jewish guys like that.  When carolers knock on his door and they sing “White Christmas” does he have the same fits? (‘Cause, you know, it was written by Irving Berlin, a Jew)

Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.

More cultural elitism.  Non-Christians celebrate Christmas too and while earlier in this column it seemed like Keillor was okay with Unitarians celebrating Christmas, but I guess he changed his mind half way through.

He then goes into how Christmas is perfect and it doesn’t need improvements.  Well, Garrison, nobody is saying that these things are “improvements.”  This is just their own contribution to all the wonderful things that Christmas is.  And you’re not a curmudgeon for saying these things.  You’re a mean-spirited old man who deserves to spend at least one more Christmas in Norway with the flu.

He’s also a dupe.

Katherine Kersten wrote about this “controversy” two weeks ago.  When Fox News reported the story, it provided a link to the working paper in question.  And John Stossel and Bill O’Reilly make the same mistakes that she made about it.

The most damning quote from this whole thing is in what future teachers will know about themselves:

Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.

Both Kersten, John Stossel and Bill O’Reilly quote that with no explanation and leave off the rest of the section:

Future teachers will understand that they are privileged & marginalized depending on context

They also leave out the introductory paragraph:

Future teachers will understand themselves as beings who position themselves and are positioned by others in relation to dimensions of differences (racial, social class, gender), and other hierarchies in school and society. That teachers will “become students of history and how it has shaped all of us into the beings that we are and how we wish to reshape ourselves.”

But first a little explanation: “hegemonic masculinity” is a theory in gender studies which says that there is an ideal masculinity and that society compels men to live up to this masculinity. “Heteronormativity” is a concept in queer studies that describes the belief that there are only two sexes and that each sex has natural roles.

“Internalized Opression” is a sociological term that refers to when an oppressed group uses the methods of the oppressor against itself.  It does NOT mean guilt-about-America-being-a-bad-place or whatever Bill O’Reilly or John Stossel think it means.

O’Reilly touts that Stossel has been “looking into” this working paper and “investigating it.”  But based on the interview above, he might as well have done nothing.  He only refers to one professor, Jean Quam, whom the Fox News caption calls her a dean at the University of Minnesota.  More specifically Dr. Quam is the interim dean of the College of Education and Human Development.

Stossel didn’t quote any of the people listed on the working paper, he didn’t mention any of the people involved with the initiative to reform teaching methods.  Although I do like that he ranked the U in the top 10 education schools (US News ranks it 21, which is still good, but there’s nothing wrong with thinking it’s in the top ten).  It sounds like he didn’t ask President Bruinks for a comment or anything.

And it’s always good to take five or ten minutes and read the damn working paper before you say what’s in it.  It is NOT about hating America or believing its a bad place like O’Reilly says it does.  What it calls for is for future teachers to be trained in dealing with other cultures and have skills with dealing with other cultures by the time they begin teaching, because as Stossel points out at the end, most teachers are white while most of their students are not.

I’m not going to touch what Stossel says at the about degree requirements and a “government monopoly.”  It’s just shouting at the rain.

He shows just how much of a bigoted idiot his is every day.  There’s a lot of stuff in this clip, but I’m just going to focus on the stuff he says about India.  I’ve spent some time there and been to the hospital there (for minor stuff).  Glenn hasn’t been to India and, like always, has no idea what the bloody fuck he is talking about.

First, getting the math right:

The average per capital income of an Indian is not $1,016, it is $749.80.  I got that from the Central Statistical Organisation in India converting their estimates from INR to USD (divide by 50).  That’s across all professions.  The average real disposable personal income per capita in the US (according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis) is about $32,000.  Not the $27,000 Glenn claims it is.

More specifically, he talks about doctors in India having an income of $5,760 and in the US it being $150,000.  There aren’t any official studies or statistics, but a specialist in an expensive city like Bangalore would have an income of around $10,000.  A doctor in the US could be paid between 100 and 800 thousand dollars depending on their specialty and how many years they’ve practiced.

Of course, one of the problems with having doctors get such high salaries is that people who want to make money rather than help patients go for those kinds of jobs.

And “Mumbai clinic at Punjab,” Glenn?  Can we make a law that you have to know at least a certain amount of stuff before being put on a TV news network?  Like Mumbai being a city that’s several hundred miles from Punjab (which is a state)

As an aside, one nice thing about the Mayo clinic is that doctors there are paid on a fixed salary, rather than by how many procedures they do, so the incentive to do more (thus driving up costs for the patient) is not there.  By the way, not everybody can just walk into the Mayo clinic and get treatment, by the way.

Also, Glenn, “Gaja Raja medical school” doesn’t exists and you probably know that.  A real medical school like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences is considered one of the best medical schools in the world.

And do you honestly think that flush toilets don’t exist in India?  What rock do you live under?

Well, not me specifically, but he thinks that journalists who don’t follow up his conspiracy theories about the loans Bank of America is paying back (he even admits that he doesn’t know what’s wrong, but he’s convinced something’s wrong with that!) should be put in jail.

I wish MMFA had a more complete clip, because he says something about “you’re job is going…” and then it stops.

I mean even the Wall Street Journal (which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch, and one of the few people still advertising on Beck’s TV show) says paying back the loans are good news.

And what does any of this have to do with your little imaginative crusade for America, and how did journalists become anti-America, Glenn?

Oh, and good luck jailing journalists who don’t cover “the real story-even-though-I-don’t-know-what-it-is-yet.”

Just as its about to be voted down in the New York state senate.  Senator Diane Savino says what all this is really about.  Incidentally, one of the eight Democrats who voted against legalizing same-sex marriage was recently caught on tape assaulting his girlfriend.