culture wars – Edward Trimnell Books

The school where a trip to the principal’s office is a punishment, indeed

I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. Life was not perfect then, to be sure, and the perils for children were many. This was the era in which “stranger danger” really took root. I remember several Halloweens during the 1970s when there were rampant stories of razor blades and drugs being placed in trick-or-treat candy.

These were likely just urban legends, but such was the mood then, among parents: the safe, reliable world of postwar suburban America had been swept away with the 1960s, the decade that destroyed America’s innocence, probably forever.

One question my parents never had to consider, though, was how much exposure I should have to drag queens, and adults twerking in public to express “pride” in their alternative sexualities. Nor was any adult authority figure in my midst nutty enough to encourage me to “question my birth-assigned gender identity”.

Gay celebrations have their place. They did in the 1970s and 1980s, too. Pride parades were already a thing, even in Midwestern cities like Cincinnati, where I grew up. No one was locked in a proverbial closet who didn’t want to be there.

But in that era, most of the adults in charge were actually….adults in charge. They recognized that what is appropriate for adults is not always appropriate (let alone necessary) for children.

Nevertheless, there is a sector of our society that seems determined to immerse children in as much aberrant sexual content as they can. Apparently, this is how the “woke” crowd shows how open-minded they are.

A public school district in Oklahoma has just taken this trend a step further: They’ve named a drag queen and former “Miss Gay Oklahoma” as the principal of an elementary school in the Sooner State.

This same individual (a biological man) was previously arrested for child porn, in a case that was later dismissed. At least we can assume that he doesn’t dislike children.

Needless to say, a backlash has ensued.

This may have been an administrative mistake. That’s what I suspect. Since the dawn of the “if you can’t do, then teach” mindset more than a generation ago, the human capital in our public schools has declined precipitously. Could they miss something like this? Sure they could. Remember whom you’re dealing with here.

I suspect that this particular situation will be worked out. Within days, we’ll learn that this individual has been sacked, and someone of at least slightly less dubious background put in his place.

This will, however, be yet one more chink in what remains of public confidence in our public schools. Yet more ammunition for advocates of homeschooling.

-ET

Much ado about M&Ms

There are a lot of things worth getting upset about and debating. Anthropomorphized spokescandies are not among them, I would submit. But in the midst of the culture wars, we are arguing about talking candy, too.

Some time back, Mars, the owner of the M&M brand, decided that its iconic spokescandies weren’t “inclusive” enough. The folks in the Mars marketing department responded by making the female spokescandies generally less svelte and less feminine.

(This raises questions about what “inclusivity” actually means. What about inclusivity for slender and conventionally attractive women, after all?)

That might have been the end of it. Then Tucker Carlson of Fox News got involved. In a blistering commentary, Carlson denounced the new, frumpier spokescandies:

“M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous, until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them. That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity. They’ve won.”

Would I want to “have a drink” with any talking candy? Hmm…let me get back to you on that. Tucker Carlson has a point, to be sure; but perhaps there are better points to be made out there.

It’s foolish for a candy company to agonize over whether or not an anthropomorphized chocolate candy is “inclusive”. This is the kind of nonsense that only Ivy League MBAs worry about. The rest of just want our M&Ms.

Tucker Carlson, though, overreacted to a situation that could have been dismissed with a “whatever” and an eye-roll. Not that he was going to do that, of course. Tucker Carlson’s business model requires that he constantly present his viewers with fresh sources of outrage.

And then Mars provided the final overreaction. This past week, the company breathlessly announced that the spokescandies would be retired because of all the “controversy”. Henceforth, Maya Rudolph will represent M&Ms in ads and TV commercials.

I did enjoy Maya Rudolph’s performance in The Good Place, so I don’t mind the change. But was there ever really that much controversy, beyond the aforementioned Tucker Carlson commentary? I don’t recall any calls for conservatives to boycott M&Ms, or anything like that.

Even CNN, no fan of conservatives or Tucker Carlson, was skeptical. Perhaps this final overreaction was a Mars publicity stunt, calculated to stir up attention for those little pieces of hard-coated chocolate.

-ET

Participation trophies and organic chemistry

Maitland Jones Jr., an award-winning professor at NYU, was fired after a group of his students signed a petition alleging that his organic chemistry course was “too hard”.

I should begin with the usual disclaimer: I don’t know Maitland Jones, or the students who signed the petition. I never took his organic chemistry course. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely unfamiliar with the broader questions here.

In the academic year of 1987 to 1988, I took three semesters of organic chemistry at the University of Cincinnati. The reader might reasonably ask why I did this to myself.

During the previous summer, I had taken an intensive Biology 101 course, comprised of three parts: botany, zoology, and genetics.

I got A’s in all three sections of Biology 101. Botany and zoology were easy for me because I have always been good at memorizing large amounts of information that has no logical connections. (I’m good at foreign languages, for much the same reason.) I struggled a bit with the genetics portion of Biology 101, which requires more math-like problem-solving skills. But I still managed to pull off an A.

I was 19 years old at the time. With the typical logic of a 19-year-old, I concluded that I should go to medical school. I changed my undergrad major to premed, and began taking the math and science courses that comprised that academic track.

That’s how I crossed paths with organic chemistry. Organic chemistry was nothing like the Biology 101 course I had taken over the summer session. Biology 101 was aimed at more or less the entire student body. (I initially took it to satisfy my general studies science course requirement.) Organic chemistry was aimed at future heart surgeons and chemical engineers. Organic chemistry was the most difficult academic course I have ever taken, or attempted to take.

Organic chemistry is difficult because it requires the ability to memorize lots of information, as well as the ability to apply that information in the solution of complex problems. Organic chemistry is, in short, the ideal weed-out course for future heart surgeons and chemical engineers.

How did I do in organic chemistry? Not very well. I managed two gentlemanly Cs, and I dropped out the third semester.

My dropping out would have been no surprise to my professor. Nor was I alone. Plenty of other students dropped out, too.

Early in the course, I remember the professor saying, “Not everyone is cut out to be a doctor or a chemist. Organic chemistry is a course that lets you know if you’re capable of being a doctor or a chemist.”

That was 1987, long before the participation trophy, and back when a snowflake was nothing but a meteorological phenomenon. My experience with organic chemistry was harrowing, so far as “harrowing” can be used to describe the life of a college student. But in those days, disappointments, setbacks, and the occasional outright failure were considered to be ordinary aspects of the growing up experience. My organic chemistry professor did not care about my feelings or my self-esteem. He only cared if I could master the intricacies of stereochemistry, alkenes, and resonance.

The good news is that I was able to quickly identify a career that I would probably not be good at. Even more importantly, you, the reader, will never look up from an operating table, to see me standing over you with a scalpel.

If we have now reached the point where students can vote their professor out of a job because a course is too hard, then we’ve passed yet another Rubicon of surrender to the cult of feel-good political correctness.

A decade ago, many of us laughed at the concept of the participation trophy. But at the same time, many of us said: “What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that small gestures, small surrenders, have larger downstream consequences. A participation trophy is “no big deal” on an elementary school soccer field. At medical school, participation trophies can endanger lives, by enabling the less competent to attain degrees and certifications which they would never have acquired in saner times.

Are you planning on getting heart surgery down the road? You might want to get it now, before the present generation of premeds and medical students becomes the next generation of doctors.

-ET

Kristen Clarke, Harvard, and “race science”

Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”. At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.

Clarke based her letter on…race science.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.

“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].

“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.

Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.

Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.

Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.

Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)

This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.

This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.

Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.

What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.

We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.

I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.

I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.

Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.

Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.

-ET