EVAN: So our good friend Stew mentioned something that I should have when we first did this talk, and it has to do with second-hand smoking.
It’s something I should have mentioned because when I was in middle school a man with a hole in his throat showed up to talk to us; he’d had lung cancer and never smoked a day in his life, just been married to a woman who did often.
GORDON: I’m not going to deny the danger of second hand smoke. However, as the man you mentioned does demonstrate, for that to you happen you have to be exposed to second hand smoke in huge volumes for massive periods of time.
You can’t stand down wind of a smoker one sunny spring day and then BOOM- cancer. Besides, with the vicious regulation we have today, you can go pretty much anywhere and not have to deal with it; smokers can only really smoke in a few places. Continue reading →
GORDON: Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em, folks, this Wednesday Evan and I will be discussing our culture and smoking.
EVAN: This is largely due to us not putting up the poll until days after the last E> was posted, but what are you going to do.
GORDON: I will I take responsibility for this. But back to the topic at hand-
No one here is going to make the argument that smoking is good for you. But speaking as someone who occasionally enjoys a pipe or a cigar and the like, I can’t help but feel there’s a ridiculous amount of discrimination against smokers in our society.
There’s an old supposedly Scottish proverb that goes,
“The only reason some people are alive is because is because it is illegal to kill them.”
This is perhaps truer of no one than former South Carolina Republican Party
executive director Todd Kincannon.
Now you’re probably all saying “Whoa there! Ain’t that more than a little harsh?“
To which I respond: no.
This is a guy so twisted I feel perfectly comfortable with slapping the label “evil” on him and not losing a moment’s peace of mind. Let me break it down for you.
And just to be sure there was no confusion as to his meaning, Kincannon continued on to post this:
Yeah, I’m going to give you all a moment to try to wrap your head around just how vile of a thing that was.
Ready?
Well, we’re moving on anyways.
Now I could spend the entire post breaking down Kincannon’s assumption that some high school kid gunned down by a gung-ho neighborhood watchman was a “thug” or that had he grown up, he inevitably would’ve resorted to “sucking dick” for “drug money,” but there’s oh so much more still to see!
Kincannon’s spent the past few days attacking Iraq war veteran Mike Prysner for his views on recently deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, offering such reasonable and level-headed comments as:
What makes it all worse is that when this guy is confronted over his statements, he resorts to “free speech” arguments to evade any responsibility. He is correct in that he has the freedom to say whatever he so chooses, just as I have the freedom to stick forks in my own eyes or kick a grizzly bear- just because I have the right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. As far as trying to play off his statements.
In one interview, Kincannon out rightly stated that “If you say something that’s borderline offensive or if it is offensive, the people that attack you and say just the awfulest [sic] things about you, they do the very thing that they accuse you of.”
Evan does try to keep the blog relatively profanity-free, but this was really the only gif I could find that quite captured the feeling…
For anyone wondering, that’s the equivalent of punching a guy and calling him a hypocrite when he punches you back. But there’s more to it than just that.
Even if Kincannon truly does believe he’s nothing more than a witty prankster, he does have a following and his statements do get reactions out of people, including such gems as:
So we’ve effectively jumped from “This vet deserves to have died for holding political views I disagree with” to “every soldier who has come back alive is a coward and a disgrace to the fatherland.”
Again, if this is all some elaborate prank being played by Kincannon, we can’t ignore that it’s not being taken to lightly by his followers. I don’t think J.D. Salinger should be blamed because a nutcases took Catcher in the Rye to be code for “Kill John Lennon,” but when most everyone reading your work is coming away with homophobic, racist, sexist, and generally reprehensible messages, it’s time to rethink your medium.
Now there’s no rant I can write which is going to effectively communicate just how psychotic it is that Richmond and Mays received minimum sentencing, so I’m going to forgo any attempt and jump right into a list of crimes receiving harsher penalties.
Sale of Marijuana in Amounts Under 50 Kgs:5 years.
Heck, Aaron Schwartz, an MIT student and internet activist who downloaded thousands of academic papers from JSTOR, was sentenced to 35 years in prison, in addition to a million dollar fine (Schwartz tragically killed himself in January of this year). Is what Schwatz did seventeen times more heinous than rape and dissemination of child pornography?
I don’t think so either.
And I don’t think people like Patricia Spottedcrow should be given twelve-year sentences for selling a dime bag of weed while someone who commits domestic violence may receive a maximum (in Nevada) penalty of 180 days in jail.
But I’m not hear to rail on our demented and irredeemably corrupt legal system.
I’m hear to talk about our values as a whole.
Back in 2011, during the teacher’s union strikes in Wisconsin, a complaint I heard a lot was “That teacher makes more than I do, has better benefits, and wants more money? That’s just greedy!” or “I saw that teacher driving around in a <insert fancy car here>!”
Now I honestly don’t know where these figures were pulled from; I have yet to see a wealthy teacher, let alone one who drives to and from work in a 1965 Chevy Impala, but that’s not really the point.
I do get being ticked off at people demanding more money when there aren’t enough hours in the day to spend all that they already have. Believe me, that resonates.
But if that’s the case, then where’s all the righteous indignation during the NBA lockout in 2011? No matter which way you slice it, those players were making millions, and pretty much shut down the NBA for half a year because they felt they weren’t making enough.
Now I’m not trying to pass judgment one way or the other, partly because I don’t know enough about the politics of the sport, and partly (mostly) because I think everyone involved makes and obscene amount to begin with.
So do actors, for that matter.
I frankly don’t see why actors should be paid millions to act as teachers in the ghetto while real teachers in the ghetto wouldn’t make that kind of money if they worked until their deaths. The same goes for doctors, civil rights lawyers, independent journalists, and so on. Pay an actor $5,000,000 to pretend to be a teacher, and everyone’s fine with it. Pay a real teacher $50,000 and the world is apparently coming to an end.
A professional footballer makes about $2,000,000 a year. Y’know how much a grocery store clerk makes? $28,000 (if we’re going ridiculously high). And you’d best believe my life is impacted more by any grocery clerk than anyone catching/kicking/hitting a ball for a living.
Now all this is to say we need to step back and take a hard look at our value system. What do we really consider to be a terrible crime? Is selling weed or beating your spouse senseless a more awful crime than rape? Is the work done by actors really so much more valuable than that done by teachers and nonprofit works *cough*? And even get me started on our military budget and the perks we give our politicians.
Again, I’m not here to pass judgment (not until tomorrow, anyways). I’m here to simply present the facts before you. Do you think we’ve got our priorities in order?
EVAN: Alright, people of the internet, it’s time to stop correcting each other’s grammar in YouTube comments sections and start tuning in to the wisdom we’re about to drop out of our mouth-holes/fingertips.
On this installment of E> we will be discussing the ever-popular C2H5OH, more commonly known as alcohol, and how it’s treated in Western culture.
GORDON: Now right here we’re running up against a problem: “Western” culture isn’t exactly united on the subject of drinking. I mean, for the most part we’re fans, but there ARE some pretty distinct differences. For example, a severe alcoholic in Canada or America would in Europe be simply known as an Englishman.
EVAN: You make a very astute point, so I’m going to propose we boil this down to how North America [barring Mexico, sorry (though to be fair they should be used to this by now)] treats alcohol.
GORDON: Poor Mexico.
But let’s get right down to it and try to get a handle on the general stance we have on drinking in the west. We certainly like drinking, but drunkenness is largely viewed as something either juvenile or to be relegated to the weekends. Is that fair?
EVAN: Somewhat debatable.
GORDON: Then let’s debate.
EVAN: I suppose the question you have to ask yourself is who thinks it’s juvenile? I know a fair amount of people who consider it fairly normal to drink until they can’t see on the weekends, as regular and sacred a routine as my going to church on Sundays.
GORDON: I’ll admit freely that this does happen, but I wouldn’t say it’s what the average person does. In fact, the only people who really have the time and/or physical ability to do so are usually young people and students, bringing me back to the original point.
WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH YOUNG PEOPLE IN AMERICA [AND CANADA] AND BOOZE?
EVAN: I agree. So let’s talk about that. What’s the deal with young people in America [and Canada] and booze? Imagine I said that in a Jerry Seinfeld sort of voice.
GORDON: Well, Canada I can’t speak to as much, but I’d argue that the fact that booze is forbidden until the age of 21 has a lot to do with it. It turns alcohol, and to a similar degree, inebriation, into a taboo pleasure and a sign of rebellion and… well, I don’t want to say “maturity,” but I guess “adulthood” is gonna have to suffice.
EVAN: You’re preaching to the choir. A drinking age of 21 is levels of ridiculous, I mean, the only thing you can’t do at that age is rent a car [that’s at 25]. In Ontario the drinking age is 19, which is more or less what I imagined it would be when I was a kid.
GORDON: I’m guessing drinking doesn’t have quite the same mystique that it does in the US, huh?
EVAN: Well, to paint a picture of underage drinking, I visited Toronto for a summer while I was still living in Thailand. I must’ve been . . . sixteen, I guess. When I hung out with some former schoolmates a lot of what was talked about was fake IDs, and something called “drunk dial,” or something, which was apparently a number you could call where people of age would bring you booze for cash.
GORDON: Booze for cash? As opposed to what? Beads and trinkets? You have forever altered my image of Canadian society.
Youth drinking is such a small/easily dismissed part of drinking, though. What else is there to say?
GORDON: So says the hyped-up Hollywood media. High school is nothing but a drug-frenzied orgy to listen to ’em.
EVAN: Dude, when people become of age a lot of them get smashed, this is a true fact.
GORDON: Hence the need to get rid of the drinking age.
EVAN: Okay, so we do away with the drinking age altogether. Now what?
GORDON: Now drinking isn’t something you get to do, it’s something that has to be earned. 21 isn’t some magical number at which you can do no wrong and drink as much as you’re able. Abuse will still be there, but ideally we’ll see a drop in a lot of the stupid binging for binging’s sake.
EVAN: Wait, so how would we earn the right to drink?
GORDON: Well, naturally there’s not going to be any universal standard. I’m hoping decent parenting and societal pressure will enforce general standards for drinking. An eighteen year old who doesn’t drive recklessly and maintains a general balanced perspective on life shouldn’t be barred from having a glass of wine with dinner, especially when his twenty-four year old brother who still acts like a four year old has no limitations in this regard.
EVAN: I just realized that in many Canadian provinces drinking with parental supervision is permitted. I cannot find anything to the same effect for the US. Wait. Hold the phone.
“…17 states do not ban underage consumption, and the remaining 18 states have family member and/or location exceptions to their underage consumption laws.”
GORDON: I’m pretty sure there’s one state somewhere in the Midwest with an old prohibition-era law stating that a minor can buy alcohol if accompanied by an adult, though only in very select situations; it’s pretty archaic.
Though let’s hash this out a bit- I’m guessing that most families aren’t going to be hosting chugging contests, or having little Timmy do tequila shots off the baby-seat.
EVAN:I don’t think that’s what people are worried about, though. I think the concern is more about fourteen-year-olds heading down to their local liquor store and buying a bottle of something that would kill an elephant.
Not to that extreme, of course, but at my old high school there was at least one kid who turned to drinking as a way to deal with stress.As to how, let it be known that you can buy beer at 7-11s in Thailand.
GORDON: You can buy anything in Thailand.
EVAN: You are not wrong.
GORDON: While I do absolutely agree with you, I think we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “How can we stop kids from drinking” it’s “Why are kids drinking (stuff that would kill an elephant)?”
EVAN:It’s because, as we’ve said, it’s a taboo thing. I think what needs to happen is for us to somehow, in America and Canada, bring alcohol back to the level it currently is in Europe, where you can have wine on a table alongside your water and not have the kids think anything of it.
My question to you is how we change that Western way of viewing hooch.
GORDON: Well, I think the first step is to, like I said, abolish the drinking age.
From there I think it’s a matter of getting people to see drinking more realistically. Again- demystify
EVAN: I get what you said about nixing the drinking age, and we both admitted there may be a few issues there. How exactly are supposed to demystify, though? That was my question to begin with.
GORDON: Well, I don’t want to say we institute a campaign trying to portray the downsides of alcohol, but I imagine that’d backfire more than anything else. As surreal as it might sound, I’d say that more open drinking and easier access to drinking would be the answer. You get to see drinking in it’s entirety- the good stuff and the bad- without an agenda being shoved down your throat.
EVAN: My counterpoint to your suggestion that we should let loose on the public drinking is that we work on the institution that has so demonized the bottle.
Southern Baptists have been down on booze for quite the while, in spite of the fact that our Lord and Saviour partook of the fruit of the vine more than a few times in the Good Book.
GORDON: And the Wesleyans share their part in this. Though in regards to that, I’m not exactly sure how to argue with those people- what argument can I make that hasn’t already been made in the past couple hundred years?
EVAN: Yeah, I don’t know.
“You guys, Jesus drank. He drank with friends and enjoyed it, but he never got drunk. It’s cool, you guys.”
Anyway, we should start wrapping up. Do you want to give us a recap of what we’ve discussed?
GORDON: We’ll as great minds think alike, we’ve pretty much bagged on the existence of drinking ages, agreed that drinking among underage kids is a problem resulting from alcohol’s taboo nature, and batted around a few ideas for solving that problem- generally concluding that we need more drinking and exposure to it. That sound about right?
EVAN: I don’t necessarily think more people need to drink to increase awareness that it’s not a bad thing, but that’s more or less correct.
I wish I had a beer right now.
GORDON: Mmm. New Belgium is coming out with a new stout. It looks fantastic.
EVAN: Yeah, I don’t know a lot about beer past the fact that I wouldn’t mind a cold one right now.
GORDON: It would be refreshing. And speaking of which, we need a new topic for next week. I’ll keep with our discussion of vices and offer up the topic of Smoking and Society.
EVAN: That’s a pretty good one. I’ll propose that we discuss . . . dangit . . .
I’d say we should discuss this new season of Community, but that’d require you to watch all of the new season before next Tuesday night.
GORDON: I have way more free time than you think. It shall be done.
Earlier today there was a fight outside my apartment.
I say “fight” in the loosest sense of the word. From what I could gather, a woman had given the wrong address to a pizza delivery man, and the gentleman who the pizza had been accidentally delivered to had been sleeping at the time and was more than a little annoyed at being woken up and compelled to give the delivery man directions to the right place. It essentially boiled down to this man and this lady shouting at each other while the poor delivery guy stood awkwardly in between them with no clue as to how to proceed. Apparently the whole ordeal of having to deal with a mix-up between apartment block 2 and apartment block 20 is on par with genocide. Needless to say, seeing two people break down into three-year olds over something so trivial didn’t exactly reinforce any hope for the future of humanity.
But that sad incident isn’t what I’d like to talk about today- at least, not entirely. What first caught my attention when the whole hissy-fit was going down was the shrill screech of the lady that “‘He’ had better not lay a finger on her or he’d be going to jail”.
Now naturally, I don’t know the whole story, but from where I was standing, the gentleman in question hadn’t given any indication of violence- from all I could see, he was just annoyed at being woken up and having to help this delivery guy find the right apartment. It did grab my attention, though- and that’s what I want to address today.
Violence- we have a long standing love affair with it in this country.
We view it as the be-all-end-all solution to our problems. When all else fails, there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a good, old-fashioned butt-kicking. From the cowboys to the noir detectives to comic book superheroes, violence is the answer. For all our advocacy of non-violence, tolerance, empathy, and understanding, we do get a rush out of seeing “justice” dispensed by means of a vicious haymaker.
Just take a look at this video that’s exploded on the internet over the past 48 hours.
Now chances are, your only complaint after watching that is that the video doesn’t go long enough for you to hear the derisive laughter of all the onlookers as this jerk slinks off with his tail between his legs. Certainly that’ my only issue with it.
Take a look at this video from a few years back.
Now this one isn’t quite so clear cut. Yes, the smaller kid is clearly harassing the chubbier one- even getting violent, but nevertheless the beat-down that ensues is so visceral that I defy you not to feel a little twinge of guilt with your (probable) satisfaction in seeing the bullied kid defend himself.
There are, of course, more clear-cut fights. The video below offers a prime example.
For anyone who might be unclear- the guy with the tray is simply standing there, minding his own business when the other guy walks past and for no apparent reason simply decides to flip the first guy’s tray. No (knowable) provocation, no reason- just sheer, unadulterated spite.I don’t know about you, but I thought the guy falling flat was (1) hilarious and (2) a pretty strong argument for the existence of karma.
When is it ok to hit someone?
“When it’s in self-defense!”, I can hear most of you shouting, and do you know what? They’re right. All but the most hardcore pacifist would probably assert that when someone’s shoving you around, there’s really nothing you can be expected to do other than swing back. Of course, it’s never that’ clear cut.
Did the man in the first video deserve to be hit? He wasn’t presenting a clear and present threat to anyone around, unless you count wet willies as a instrument of destruction. That being understood, did you cry out in indignation when the street performer knocked him down?
Again, probably not.
The street performer was very clearly being harassed by a guy who wrongly thought the street performer would just sit there and take it. But what if it wasn’t the street performer who had punched the guy? In the video, you can pretty clearly hear other people shouting “Leave him alone!”- what if one of them laid some smackdown? Would we be ok with that?Probably.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’d all still applaud this guy getting punched, though the fact that justice is dispensed by some outsider rather than by the victim may potentially diminish the poeticism of it.
So what do we have so far?
Violence is acceptable in self-defense, acceptable (in some degree) when being harassed, acceptable when someone else is being harassed- where does it end?
I don’t say that in a disparaging tone- I am simply curious as to where that line of logic takes us. Is it ok for the average man to walk around and step in to defend people from being bullied? Do we accept full-on vigilantism?
It’s not as far-fetched an idea as it might sound. If it’s alright (if not straight-up admirable) to go around attempting to defend others, how do we address the laws that (supposedly) govern our society?
Again, we do have an absolute love of violence in this country, but for all our depictions of this:
And this:
Or this:
And even this:
We rarely ever show the dark side with something like this:
The reason we can all get together and applaud the punching of the guy harassing the street performer is because it appeals to our (almost) universal sense of what is and isn’t acceptable in society, and what is and isn’t a measured response. The moment you drift away from clear cut right and wrong, the waters get very murky very quickly.
And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.
Yeah, the idea of every man, woman, and child declaring “I am the law!” is more than a little unsettling…
…but is it really any worse than what we have now? America and her allies (including Canada, which has only just recently withdrawn from Afghanistan) are engaged in the longest war in recent history with- despite repeated reassurances from the president- no clear end in sight. Do I agree with these wars? Absolutely not. I think the bad guys who actually should be deposed (and we’re talking about everyone from the Burmese junta to the executive boards of BP and Coca-Cola) are getting off clean. You could argue that the role of ensuring justice and security belong exclusively to the police, but what has their track record been?
All that’s to simply point out that you can argue that such an anarchic system means little or no accountability, but how exactly does that differ from what we have now?
I know it sounds surreal, but if right and wrong as so arbitrarily dispensed from on high, is it really that psychotic to suggest that the front line for security and human decency is in fact you?
It’s just a thought- I’m hoping we can actually start of something of a debate in the comment section (something I’d like to see brought up is a discussion of whether or not our society might benefit from the distinct possibility of getting stomped for being a jerk- anyone and everyone who’s ever waited tables knows what I’m talking about).
Now seeing as how this post pretty much escalated to a declaration of “blood in the streets!”, here’s a picture of a baby hippo.
Be sure to check in tomorrow for Evan’s Shame-Day (yes, we’re switching up the order again- just roll with it), and understand that not leaving a comment will be taken as silent agreement on your part of everything I’ve written!
EVAN: So our good friend Stew mentioned something that I should have when we first did this talk, and it has to do with second-hand smoking.
Culture War Reporters 