George sends along a link to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Male Defeat, from the September issue of I-used-to-remember-to-read-it Bad Subjects:
Buffy's awesome arse-kicking ability sits comfortably with my aggressive feminist tendencies. However, I always liked the playful personality of Spike, the resident evil vampire played by American actor James Marsters. Spike delivers the best lines. Indeed, Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, has distinguished the show through sharp dialogue peppered with self-reflexive wit and intertextual humor. The razor-like insights of Spike's dialogue shape him as a worthy foil and folly to Buffy's physical prowess. As a result, he embodies a contradictory masculinity that embraces a series of complicated issues encircling the current 'crisis in masculinity.' He is a conundrum. Simultaneously empowered and disempowered, Spike is forced to redefine his identity outside traditional masculine power. With Buffy colonizing the space of male legitimacy, Spike is persistently problematized within the Buffy universe.
Problematized?
There's also a review of Bowling for Columbine at the site. Not only is it written at a level suitable for us sub-PhD types,
Throughout the film Moore mentions the history of the NRA and ties it closely with the history of white Americans' fear of African-Americans. He points out that the NRA was "coincidentally" founded in the same year that the KKK was founded. And in following the story of the Columbine shooting early in the film, and the shooting of a six-year-old girl in Flint Michigan toward the end of the film, Moore chronicles the NRA pro-gun rallies that were held in both locations within weeks of the respective shootings. NRA president Charlton Heston presided over those rallies, and at the end of the movie Moore pulls all these threads together in "Roger & Me" style by pursuing a one-on-one interview with Heston.[. . .] My only real critique of this movie is that Moore could have gone a lot further to tie together his points about white Americans' fear of African-Americans with his thesis that Canadians [are] almost the same as us. He neglects to mention that Canada does not have a comparable history of slavery, which could go a long ways toward explaining why white Canadians are so much less afraid of their nonwhite neighbors.
it contains the suggestion, taken from the film itself, that the one thing differentiating the U.S. from other nations with high levels of gun ownership is, um, us.
Wonderful.
Think I'll finish reading the Buffy essay now. . .
Interesting. Of all of the arguments for 'American exceptionalism' I've ever heard of (and it's not by a long shot all of them) none of them have focused on our exceptional history of systemic violence and brutality.
I'm not sure if I buy any of it, or if so, how I feel about it.
Must teach now.
garrity, I figure a reading of U.S. history that places the systemic violence front and center -- rather than ignoring it, or attempting to excuse/contextualize it as necessary or business as usual -- couldn't hurt, might help.
This is probably needlessly Hegellian of me.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think such a reading is capable of being a bad thing. I do fear that it may oversimplify, but I feel totally unqualified to make much comment either way, because a)I do not know very much after about 1789 CE, and b)I don't choose to study anything after 1789 because I think it's very ahrd to read critically with so much current poltiical stuff on the line. (At least, it's not possible for ME to do it. I get too bent out of shape. Then I worry that I must be oversimplifying. Then I don't know what to think anymore, and I creep back to my permodern sources with spinny-symbols where my eyeballs should be.)
garrity, I think it's glasses with spinny-symbols that mean "mad genius" in manga.
There's nothing wrong with a few emotionally potent oversimplifications. That's why we're fighting the evildoers who hate us for our freedoms.
Actually, you might have a point. . .