Marcotte on the Obama school speech

[prog]

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon hits the panic over the Obama-corrupting-the-youth thing square on the head:

We laugh at the wingnuts pulling their kids out of school, and we point out that Obama’s speech is perhaps the most bland, inoffensive, apolitical thing he’s ever written. But that’s exactly what the wingnuts are afraid of. They can just imagine their kids sitting in a classroom, watching this man speak---a Democrat, a liberal, a “socialist” (so they’ve been taught), a black “racist” (so they’ve been taught)---and two things might occur to them. 1) Their classmates do not share their fear and hatred and 2) Obama is saying the same sort of things that anyone would say. In fact, the sheer normalcy of the situation is hard to deny, and kids who are eager to fit in with their peers are extremely unlikely to start insisting that up is down and this normal situation is scary and fucked up. And that might be the first step towards becoming a more open-minded, decent human being. No wonder their parents are scared.

As one who doesn't consider his life as an independently conscious entity to have begun until the day he left home for college, this resonated deeply with me.

Comments

[radtea.livejournal.com]

"Obama is a socialist" is the purist example of The Big Lie we have seen in recent times, even more pure than "Iraq has WMD's".

It should be used as a laboratory for subverting this approach to propaganda. Personally, I'm thinking absurdism might work: "Don't be an idiot: he's a Nigerian, not a socialist! Don't you know anything?"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Similarly, when creationists claim that teaching their children evolution will lead to the disintegration of their entire religious and moral worldview, it sounds ludicrous to scientists, but it's a real threat. The worldview in question is extremely fragile.

That's why, even though hardcore religionists have always had more children than anyone else, they never outbreed everyone else to extinction.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yup. The whole "outbreed" argument never works with me, because I consider myself living proof as to its antithesis. And it's not like I had to fight hard for my own enlightenment, or that anyone else had to come deprogram me; I just had to spend a few months (in fact, my freshman fall semester) outside of the bubble.