Althouse

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• Sunrise.
• The de-normalization of "normal."
• "[Cornel] West said in an interview with The New York Times last week that he did not know why his request to be considered for a tenured post had been rebuffed..."
• "But Biden, so far, has been impregnable. The voice is too bland and devoid of obvious quirks..."
• "I’m nowhere near as crazed as I was. It’s a lot easier now. I feel like I can hear the thoughts in my own head again."
• "I originally saw this story somewhere other than WaPo that had pictures of the pastor, unlike WaPo, which just shows this skinny cross."
• "We are seeing again and again this version of Jim Crow in a suit and tie..."
• After all the enthusiasm for Joe Biden's bringing dogs back to the White House, the dogs are banished to Delaware.
• At the Ice Melt Café...

Sunrise. Posted: 09 Mar 2021 09:01 AM PST   Talk about anything.

The de-normalization of "normal." Posted: 09 Mar 2021 08:32 AM PST I'm reading "Maker of Dove Soap Will Drop the Word 'Normal' From Beauty Products/Unilever.... said a study had found that the word 'normal' makes most people feel excluded" (NYT). The study found that 56 percent of participants thought that the beauty industry could make people feel excluded, and that as many as seven in 10 people agreed that the word "normal" on products and in advertising had negative effects. That figure rose to eight in 10 for people between the ages of 18 and 35....  The changes were long overdue and "completely necessary" after last year's worldwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations, said Ateh Jewel, a beauty journalist and an advisory board member of the British Beauty Council, an organization that represents the British beauty industry. "Saying the word 'normal' has been used to set you apart," Ms. Jewel said. "I am normal. My dark skin is normal. My juicy West African curvy body is normal. Everything about me is normal.... Words are powerful and we're so used to having this unconscious bias.... It just washes over us. We don't even realize what we're saying because we've been spoon-fed racism." In this light, "normal" is not a bad word, to be avoided. It's a concept that demands more attention. If the position in the middle is called "normal," then it makes it sound as though the other positions on the continuum are defective. Even if the other positions are less healthy — such as oily or dry skin compared to "normal" skin — why be unpleasant about it by creating the inference that they are abnormal?  It's pretty normal to have dry skin or oily skin and actually unusual to think you have normal skin! I can remember shopping for some skin product and having the sales person ask me if I had dry or oily skin and when I answered "normal," she rejected the answer. It just didn't compute. Surely, I lean one way or the other. Or maybe I have "combination" skin with a "T-zone."  If I understand Ateh Jewel correctly, she would like to free up the word "normal" so it can be used across a wider array of possibilities. But what word do you use for the middle position?  By the way, in the OED, the 4th meaning for "normal" is "Heterosexual." Examples: 1914 E. M. Forster Maurice (1971) xxii. 106 Against my will I have become normal. I cannot help it. 1972 T. Keneally Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith v. 38 Of course, Jimmie knew, Farrell was not normal and had once begun to caress him. 1990 Lesbian & Gay Pride 11/4 Back west in a long standing 'normal' society like old Blighty, many lesbian or gay teachers go in fear of exposure.

"[Cornel] West said in an interview with The New York Times last week that he did not know why his request to be considered for a tenured post had been rebuffed..." Posted: 09 Mar 2021 07:32 AM PST "... but that he thought it could have something to do with his age and his support for the Palestinian cause, which he called a 'taboo' issue at Harvard."  From "Cornel West Is Leaving Harvard After Tenure Dispute/The public intellectual and professor of African-American studies will head to Union Theological Seminary in New York" (NYT)(excellent photo of West at the link).  And here's the article from last week: "Cornel West Is in a Fight With Harvard, Again/The popular professor, who left Harvard in 2002 after a dispute with its president, says he may leave again if the university does not grant him tenure."  West rose to prominence with his 1993 best-selling book, "Race Matters," followed by another best seller, "Democracy Matters." He graduated from Harvard in 1973 and was recruited to its faculty in 1994 as part of a "dream team" to help rebuild the foundering African-American studies program. Over the years, he branched out from academia to advise or campaign for presidential hopefuls like Bill Bradley, Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton and most recently Bernie Sanders. He dabbled in hip-hop and played "Councillor West" in two Matrix movies. An album he collaborated on, "Four Questions," is up for a Grammy. Dr. West says the tenure issue arose when he came up for his five-year employment review recently. The faculty committee that oversaw that review recommended that his position of Professor of the Practice be converted to a tenure job, people familiar with the committee's work said. Although he had been offered more money and an endowed chair, the dispute, Dr. West said, is not about money. (Nontenured professors can sometimes make more than tenured ones.) The last time Dr. West clashed with Harvard's administration was in 2001, when Mr. Summers, a former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, took over as the university's president, vowing to imbue the place with creative tension and to curb rampant grade inflation. Mr. Summers suggested that Dr. West was spending too much time on outside activities and not enough time on serious scholarship and teaching in the classroom, according to accounts at the time. An aide to Mr. Summers said at the time that it was all a "terrible misunderstanding." But Dr. West would not be placated and left for Princeton in April 2002. On the way out, he called Mr. Summers a bully and "the Ariel Sharon of American higher education," a characterization criticized as having anti-Semitic overtones. By the time Dr. West returned to Harvard in 2017, Mr. Summers was long gone. Harvard's current president, Mr. Bacow, "actually has some decency," Dr. West allowed. He said he is mystified as to why he would not be given a tenure review, but offered some possibilities: a reluctance to grant a coveted position to someone of advancing age, whose best work might be assumed to be behind him, and concerns that his support for the Palestinian cause might offend the prevailing orthodoxy and donors....

"But Biden, so far, has been impregnable. The voice is too bland and devoid of obvious quirks..." Posted: 09 Mar 2021 08:40 AM PST "... and beyond the occasional 'C'mon, man,' his conversational manner too muted and self-effacing, to give the parodists much to work with. Trump supporters and Fox News pundits would undoubtedly attribute this to the media's liberal bias. And to be sure, Trump was viewed by the (mostly liberal) satirists not just as an irresistible comic target but also as a dire threat to the nation. Biden's pleasantly boring presidency has been a welcome return to normality — but hardly great material for parody." I picked that quote from WaPo's "Comedians are struggling to parody Biden/Let's hope this doesn't last" because the word "impregnable" caught my eye.  I realize it's not meant as a pregnancy metaphor and we're supposed to think more in terms of a fortress. It's not normal to say that sterile women are "impregnable." The original meaning of the word is (from the OED): "Of a fortress or stronghold: That cannot be taken by arms; incapable of being reduced by force; capable of holding out against all attacks." Then there's the figurative meaning: "That cannot be overcome or vanquished; invincible, unconquerable, proof against attack."  So the assertion here is that Biden is so neutral and featureless that an impersonator has nowhere to go. He's like a giant wall with no footholds. What can you do?! He's normal, so pleasantly boring. This is why I don't watch "Saturday Night Live" anymore. They're too lazy! Trump was ridiculously easy. I guess they loved not being challenged. How about observing Biden and finding what is distinct and capable of mockery? I think the problem is really that they don't want to expose his flaws, that they're committed to the idea that he's normal and pleasant. But they ought to see this as a fantastic opportunity. The best presidential impersonation in this history of "SNL" was Dana Carvey's George H.W. Bush, and H.W. had the same problem of superficial ordinariness.

"I’m nowhere near as crazed as I was. It’s a lot easier now. I feel like I can hear the thoughts in my own head again." Posted: 09 Mar 2021 07:16 AM PST Said NYT reporter Maggie Haberman, answering the question how her days have changed now that Trump isn't President anymore.  Quoted in "Maggie Haberman on life after Trump and the one question she regrets not asking" (Forward). The question she regrets not asking isn't really one question but a line of inquiry: One question that I think is sort of an open one is he has said very little about what he expected the federal government to be like when he came in. Remember, you are talking about somebody who was never in government before, and we forget how strange that is — that we had a president who had never won an election before and never served at any level before. His understanding of what government was going to be, I believe, was very different than the way the federal government actually works. She had 4 years. Why did she never get around to it? I have to suspect that she didn't want to get inside his head and see things from his point of view and with empathy. What if his understanding of "what government was going to be" had value? He was coming in from the outside, with all his observations and powers — what could he offer?  Why assume it was all bad and "the way the federal government actually works" right now is the way it should be? Ironically, it's the very definition of conservatism to believe that the working system already in operation is the way it is for good reason and that ideas about transforming it are dangerous.

"I originally saw this story somewhere other than WaPo that had pictures of the pastor, unlike WaPo, which just shows this skinny cross." Posted: 09 Mar 2021 03:55 AM PST "The pastor is himself quite chubby. I guess WaPo chose to focus us on the serious sexism rather than the comedy."   I wrote, over at Facebook, where my son John posted the WaPo article "Pastor says women may not be 'epic trophy wife' but should be thin for their husbands. He's now on leave."  WaPo illustrates its piece with a stock photo of a steepletop cross.  The article I'd seen was in The Daily Mail: "Missouri pastor goes on leave after sexist sermon in which he told women to 'lose weight' and look less 'butch' as he hailed Melania Trump as 'the epic trophy wife.'" You can listen to 22 minutes of the sermon here.  The top-rated comments at The Daily Mail are about the pastor's own weight problem, so I can see why WaPo chose to exclude this part of the story. It's the Era of That's Not Funny. Don't be laughing.  And by the way, the pastor was straining to be funny. Example: "Praise God for makeup," he said. "It's like Bondo for dented vehicles. And it's like crack filler for your drywall." Imagine going all the way to church and sitting there listening to that. I'd be thinking, man, I could watch any random stand-up special on Netflix.  WaPo quotes an American studies professor, Kari J. Winter: "Women are pressured from the time we're born to believe that if we support patriarchal power, we're going to be rewarded... The really toxic dynamic is it's not so much which model of womanhood but that men in power have the right to define what a woman should look like and reduce her to her appearance.... Melania models that."

"We are seeing again and again this version of Jim Crow in a suit and tie..." Posted: 09 Mar 2021 03:21 AM PST "... because it is designed explicitly for the same reason as Jim Crow did, to block communities of color from active participation in choosing the leadership that will guide their democracy... In the last two election cycles, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of voters of color who voted by mail, the number of young people who used early voting, the number of African Americans who voted on Saturday and Sunday.... We saw unprecedented levels of turnout across the board. And so every single metric of voter access that has been a good in Georgia is now under attack.... This is entirely driven by the existential crisis of a Republican Party that has decided that rather than adapt to the changing needs of the populace, it is easier to stop the people from participating." Said Stacey Abrams, quoted in "Georgia Republicans Pass the Most Restrictive Voting Laws Since Jim Crow" (Mother Jones).

After all the enthusiasm for Joe Biden's bringing dogs back to the White House, the dogs are banished to Delaware. Posted: 09 Mar 2021 03:03 AM PST Major, the newer of the 2 German Shepherds, had a "biting incident" at the White House, and that's the end of the lovely little story about how bad Donald Trump had no dogs, no warmth, no love, but then Joe Biden bounded in, restoring the love and life that we'd known when Barack Obama and his faithful pal Bo stood guard over the nation. Yes, Joe got off to a bad start, what with his strange game of pulling his dog's tail, which left him with a broken foot, but it was puffed in the press as part of the sheer exuberance of Joe Biden and his "little pup." View this post on Instagram A post shared by Major & Champ Biden (@firstfamilydogs) Who knows all the troubles poor little Major had in the White House leading up to this last offense, a full-on bite? It must be hard to give up your dog in front of the public, to whom he's been photo-op'd so obediently by the press, but perhaps the press can forefront the greater inhumanity of Donald Trump, the man who could not even associate himself with a dog in the first place. ADDED: I'm sure no one will say such awful things as: Biden purports to be capable of leading the world, but he cannot even govern his own dog. Nor will anyone think to google questions like "When Is It Time to Put Down a Dog Who is Aggressive to People?" The dog will have disappeared into the oblivion that is Delaware before any churl thinks to venture such a remark.

At the Ice Melt Café... Posted: 08 Mar 2021 05:44 PM PST   ... it looks cold, but it's warm!

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