It seems like the last week or so of news occurred specifically to tempt me to break my promise not to engage in unnecessary Internet use during the honeymoon.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Debacle: This is precisely the kind of nonsense one jokes about occurring as a result of hyper-sensitive race theory. Racism is real, and it is a horrible thing...but people who create an entire interpretive apparatus out of race are doomed to generate racism even where it doesn't necessarily exist. That's simply the nature of what Stanley Fish dubbed interpretive communities. Once a person is trained to read through a certain lens, his or her mind will be able to perform impressive feats of mental gymnastics to make it work. To prove the point to my students, I have what I call the "Token Character" lesson plan. We take a film with a conspicuous lack of minorities in it, and then try to recast some of the parts with an African American actor. At least one of the students in the class is always able to determine how we will end up re-creating a racist stereotype no matter what character is cast as black. There's no way to win. This isn't simply a matter of race--it's the nature of interpretation. Indeed, St. Augustine exploited this interpretive skill with his "rule of Charity"--the argument that the Bible should always be read in such a way that most advances love (even to the point of reading passages allegorically if a literal reading would seem to work against Christian love). Thus, people trained in race theory immediately looked at the Gates case as a race issue...when it might just as easily have been a class issue where a police officer was reacting to a snobby professor disrespecting what he saw as a racist Repressive State Apparatus. Had Gates employed the rule of charity rather than the rule of race, had he thanked the officer politely and simply handed over his driver's license instead of his easily-faked University ID, things might have ended very differently.
The Obama Joker Poster: I'm a bit ambivalent about this one. I wasn't thrilled when Bush was depicted as the Joker, so I can understand the laments against it. On the other hand, I like how this has become an underground, counter-cultural backlash. Perhaps my favorite thing about the whole phenomena was seeing comments on other sites that resonated with my reading of the Dark Knight (that Batman was George Bush). If anything, Obama is more like the Harvey Dent figure in the movie than the Joker--a well-intended reformer who is transformed into a villain after becoming a victim of the very corruption he was trying to reform (and how prescient is it that Harvey became Two-Face while in a hospital...as if the script writers foresaw Obama's moral demise in the health care arena).
The White House Thought Police: The White House's request asking citizens to report "disinformation" about the Health Care plan is simply staggering. Talk about a PR blunder. At first, I was pretty confident that the video request must have been produced by The Onion. Conservatives are already panicked enough that Obama is trying to bring in Big Brother-style socialism (it's only a matter of time before kids start reporting their parents to the White House in retaliation for time-outs).
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