Tag: culture

Where we sat at lunch

What were the cliques at your high school or equivalent (ages 14 to 18)?

Clarification: This isn’t a request for your particular affiliation or lack thereof; there’s loads of quizzes and “memes” where you can relive that for good or for ill. I’m fishing for descriptions of the social groups from your teen years as you observed them, whether from the inside or the outside. It’s a survey of environments: what were the groups you saw? If you weren’t at anything like a school with social groups then, none of this really matters.

I went to an almost entirely white public school in a Southern California beach resort town from 1979 to 1983. Think Fast Times at Ridgemont High. So, mine were, in roughly hierarchical order:

Preppy/”Sosh” (rich pretty kids or those who could pass for rich, anyway): pink and green clothing, lots of chinos and khaki, cashmere sweater knotted around the neck, penny loafers.

Jock/Cheerleader (sports and beauty competition winners in the classic American vein)

Surfer (specific to my locale; not quite the same as jock: they were too obsessive about surfing to participate in much of anything else or deal with the hierarchy at all)

“Band-O”: marching band members as obsessive social phenomenon

Theater club: actors singers dancers and technical theater types and wannabees

Pop Music Lifestyle Subculture: at the time this meant rockabilly revival kids, metalheads, and some of the new wave stuff.

Mods and Punks: this was the early 1980s, so a Mod Ska/The Jam flavored revival was going on, and punk was a seriously transgressive style that set you apart. the two groups were pretty interchangeable because they were scarier than the other pop music identities. The mods were always high on black beauties and the punks burned things and put safety pins in their noses.

Academic/geek/nerd. You know the drill. The straight A’s crowd plus anyone who liked computers or Dungeons & Dragons and science fiction.

Stoner

Total outsider of some kind (doomed).

I’m interested for a few reasons. Subculture identities are multiplying, for one thing, and most of the pop music-related ones that have appeared in the last 20 years became permanent options on a kind of menu. And high school has a huge presence in American life. Some people spend their whole lives rebelling against the slights they got in their teens. Others don’t ever move beyond the subculture they found then. If you know what clique an American middle-class person claimed at age 16, you know a lot about them right away.

What Would Amos Say?

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. […] The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap? — Diedrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

apostle to the dudes

From the Register article I cited yesterday about the “SWAT Team” kids preaching on the beach. Photo credit to Andy Templeton for this excellent piece of photojournalism. The other pics with the article are good also.

The perfectly scrubbed whiteness of these people — even when they’re not white — is alarming. They exist in a perfect bubble of privilege and cultural isolation. Their friends and family are all like them. Their ideal world is a kind of 1903 Tennesse where everyone is inexplicably 2006 “cool”: chastity, whiteness, conservative politics, extreme sports, rock ‘n’ roll music, TV, great new snacks, and women in their place, obediently following behind their husbands even while surfing some massive waves.

The place where dogmatic evangelical religion and cluelessly neotenized teenage privilege meet is the best-gilded turd you’ll ever see. But you’ll smell it, too. Smell is pretty strong around these parts.

ballistic behavior! reverse planning! predator variable! MOTH POPULATION!

I just ordered The Logic Of Failure ( at amazon ) ( at isbn.nu )

I like Amazon’s SIPs, and I particularly like the ones for this book:

Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
storeroom experiment, bad participants, predator variable, reductive hypothesis, reverse planning, elaboration index, ballistic behavior, experiment director, good participants, moth population, problem sector, partial goals, regulator settings, watch factory, temporal configurations, experiment participants, planning game

Academic freedom

Ward Churchill is not a likeable man. He also says unpopular things. And he may well not be a perfectly careful scholar or a star as a teacher. Most of his public persona seems well-tuned for annoying the hell out of almost everyone, and particularly for being a huge headache at the University of Colorado for everyone.

Unfortunately all of this has badly muddled the discussion of his academic trial and dismissal. Because his deliberately provocative political style hit the national media scene, he became an embarrassment to the University. He was then purged and his dismissal recommended by a committee of his peers at the request of the Administration. An unreasonable standard was applied to his scholarship. The microscopic attention and rigid standards used to convict him would in my estimation fire about ten percent of the nation’s tenured faculty, minimum. I say this as someone who grew up the child of a professor at a good university and has heard 30 years of watercooler talk about and by professors.

This was a political lynching. To draw an analogy, they treated him the way a really angry state trooper would treat someone who insulted him after a traffic stop. Let’s find out exactly what we can do to this guy: search the car, run all the computers, write up every possible traffic violation.

A number of academics seem to agree, thank goodness, and have published an ongoing petition. This isn’t some useless petitiononline thing, I think. I hope a lot of academics sign it.

At a minimum the University of Colorado deserves to be publicly shamed and blacklisted for this. At this point I personally consider them to be unaccredited.

FATWA

It is time for people to stop flashing “gang signs” in their photos. This is because:

  1. None of y’all’s gangstas.
  2. It’s really dated, you know. Really, really dated.
  3. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

    Penalty: missile up ass.

Winners.

I’ve never been a sports fan, but I’m a huge fan of the revolution in women’s sports in the U.S. Title IX went in about when I was in junior high school, and the result has been a huge increase in the respect, encouragement, and resources girls get in the athletic world growing up. Not just women’s sports, but women crashing men’s sports.

The effect on our culture is huge.

I have a special place in my heart for women auto racers, because I am a car nut and because it’s a boy’s club where women can excel. What’s required is endurance, precision, and courage.

GO DANICA!
danica

Also, inexpicable picture of Danica having a toy car race apparently supervised by Madeline Albright on FOX News. ?

what

rhinoceros

Behind me two women talk about their “awesome” pastor. In front of me another woman reads with the Life Application Bible and a Josh McDowell apologetics text called “A Ready Defense” stacked next to her. The parking lot is full of ichthyomobiles.

The groupthink is dreary. I feel like the last one in Orange County who’s not an evangelical Protestant Konservative Kristian Klone.