If a tree celebrates Presidents Day in the forest, does it make a sound? And at what point do we care?
I guess it depends if the tree's of voting age? It'd seem significant if the tree's potential for civic engagement weren't limited to a small circle of soil. Or if anyone else were around to be inspired to a newfound respect for the office of president by the oak's fervent patriotism.
But let's set trees aside for the moment.
Holidays, like public monuments and the political blogosphere, are stubbornly fixed set-pieces in the ongoing stage production that is our society.
They are prominent, largely unshakeable features of the structure in and through which we go about our lives. Like trees! And like trees, they're only relatively stable because we've stuck them in the ground good and tight, and ignoring them is easier than buying a chainsaw on a college budget.
Unlike trees, however, holidays, statues and buildings named after Ku Klux Klan organizers are man-made. Thus they only really "do things" when we celebrate or regularly attend classes in them.
So what's a holiday do if it just sits on campus and gets ignored? Does Presidents Day do something to us simply by existing -- even though we didn't get a day off to contemplate its significance and nurse our snow-weekend hangovers?
We're conscious of it, so that's something. And a lot of states use it to celebrate just George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's birthdays, so maybe that specificity mixes things up?
Alabama excludes Lincoln and celebrates Washington and Thomas Jefferson's birthdays -- even though the latter isn't until April. Presumably because that other president presided over one of the greatest periods of death and violence in American history?
(At least they're not celebrating Andrew Jackson -- I think the irony alone would be enough to kill me, or at the very least uproot thousands from the land they've lived on for centuries and force them to march thousands of miles so white settlements can expand comfortably.)
So Presidents Day must have some symbolic value in shaping how we see our society. But what about holidays like Labor Day? We get a day off, so it must be significant, but does it play a role in shaping our values or ourselves?
Probably not, because until the age of 16 I'd never considered Labor Day to be about anything beyond pregnant ladies and obscure fashion codes. (I had to check Wikipedia to be sure it's actually about the American labor movement. It is.)
We actively celebrate Veterans Day, but that's a tree we've altered over time. (It used to be Armistice Day -- so a bit more about "peace" than "soldiers.") But what about Columbus Day?
And while we're on the subject of memorialized racism, what about all these Confederate legacies and quiet monuments to racism scattered around our campus? Lingering relics of an ugly past slowing our moral march forward? Useful symbols of injustice to rally around (e.g., the Pit Preacher)? Dead metaphors like Labor Day?
I'm undecided. But if we get a consensus going I'll chip in for a chainsaw.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/hacking-at-some-racist-trees
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Obama makes it to the end zone (Daily Tar Heel Op-ed column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
Making sports analogies is like being political on Facebook. It gets you a lot of attention, and you can be saying intelligent things, but it's nothing some blogger hasn't already beaten to death, and unless you're astoundingly subtle you'll alienate half of your audience right off the bat -- but we keep doing it.
Anyway, we've just gone through two of the bigger significant American events of the year in a week and a half: the Super Bowl and the State of the Union.
One is a pageant of commercial excess, a scripted display of pretense and coercive prowess masking empty pandering and desperate appeals to and for various demographics -- the other one has Peyton Manning.
They really are more alike than different, but the Super Bowl is a lot better at doing what the State of the Union is really meant to do in the first place -- you know, assess the state of our union and whatnot.
The Super Bowl is that time of year where our whole diverse, opinionated society gets together and drinks until it's not awkward (family reunions!). We try not to talk about anything divisive -- but you know some people can't help but chime in (and you can't really blame them, because it's not like Uncle Ben stops being a dick over Thanksgiving, we're just actively trying not to talk about it).
The State of the Union, on the other hand, is when a small segment of our nation gets packed into an auditorium, fidgets in silence for a couple of hours and claps until their hands snap off.
Even with the embarrassingly uncompetitive little league soccer match that somehow passed for a serious athletic event this Sunday, more people watched it than have ever watched anything on a screen at the same time in American history. And the people that didn't watch it all posted statuses to make sure everyone was aware of exactly how little they cared.
In both events there are always going to be farcical attempts and failures to somehow make everyone happy. (See: Bruno Mars and Red Hot Chili Peppers with their guitars unplugged.)
The smallest, subtlest things carry a lot of meaning, and they're easy to miss. Bob Dylan had all of 30 seconds to talk to America during the Super Bowl, but he only needed for four to write off three-fifths of the world's population ("Asia makes our cellphones").
All things considered, however, I thought our union looked pretty great this year. (Except Jerry Seinfeld -- at this point it feels like he's dropped the jokes and we're just watching him age). It definitely wasn't much worse than any other recent year, and maybe even a little better. But that's not to say there's not massive room for improvement.
As with both the State of the Union and the Super Bowl, you always feel like there's something missing -- something incredibly pertinent but eerily absent from the conversation, that we'd really prefer to just leave off the table for now. Native American slurs, drone warfare and sex trafficking, perhaps? Oh well.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/obama-makes-it-to-the-end-zone
Anyway, we've just gone through two of the bigger significant American events of the year in a week and a half: the Super Bowl and the State of the Union.
One is a pageant of commercial excess, a scripted display of pretense and coercive prowess masking empty pandering and desperate appeals to and for various demographics -- the other one has Peyton Manning.
They really are more alike than different, but the Super Bowl is a lot better at doing what the State of the Union is really meant to do in the first place -- you know, assess the state of our union and whatnot.
The Super Bowl is that time of year where our whole diverse, opinionated society gets together and drinks until it's not awkward (family reunions!). We try not to talk about anything divisive -- but you know some people can't help but chime in (and you can't really blame them, because it's not like Uncle Ben stops being a dick over Thanksgiving, we're just actively trying not to talk about it).
The State of the Union, on the other hand, is when a small segment of our nation gets packed into an auditorium, fidgets in silence for a couple of hours and claps until their hands snap off.
Even with the embarrassingly uncompetitive little league soccer match that somehow passed for a serious athletic event this Sunday, more people watched it than have ever watched anything on a screen at the same time in American history. And the people that didn't watch it all posted statuses to make sure everyone was aware of exactly how little they cared.
In both events there are always going to be farcical attempts and failures to somehow make everyone happy. (See: Bruno Mars and Red Hot Chili Peppers with their guitars unplugged.)
The smallest, subtlest things carry a lot of meaning, and they're easy to miss. Bob Dylan had all of 30 seconds to talk to America during the Super Bowl, but he only needed for four to write off three-fifths of the world's population ("Asia makes our cellphones").
All things considered, however, I thought our union looked pretty great this year. (Except Jerry Seinfeld -- at this point it feels like he's dropped the jokes and we're just watching him age). It definitely wasn't much worse than any other recent year, and maybe even a little better. But that's not to say there's not massive room for improvement.
As with both the State of the Union and the Super Bowl, you always feel like there's something missing -- something incredibly pertinent but eerily absent from the conversation, that we'd really prefer to just leave off the table for now. Native American slurs, drone warfare and sex trafficking, perhaps? Oh well.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/02/obama-makes-it-to-the-end-zone
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
The real media and the real fake media (Guest post on copyediting blog)
The question of the day used to be, "Who gets to count as a real journalist?" But that doesn't seem to cover it anymore. For some reason, the question just seems irrelevant and nitpicky.
Now there's a better question: "What gets to count as a real news organization?" After all, that's the first thing we see when sharing or finding information online. Any article I'm sharing is attributed first and foremost to a company or website and only secondarily to the individual.
Here are a few online news organizations you may or may not have heard of: Free Wood Post, the Daily Currant, Diversity Chronicle and Hayibo. All of them have had articles go viral at one point or another.
The catch? They're all fake. They call themselves satire, which seems to legitimize what they do, but they are "satire" the same way TMZ or the Drudge Report could be called "news."
So let's amend our question once more: "What gets to count as a real fake news organization?"
Given how easy it is to confuse the real and the fake, we should consider it as a spectrum. At one end is The Onion, the big dog as far as media satire is concerned, and at the other end are the most reputable of the standard news agencies: The New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc.
Then we drift toward the middle, what we might generally refer to as the tabloid zone. The National Enquirer imitates real news organizations just like Diversity Chronicle imitates fake news organizations, but at that point in the spectrum they probably have more in common with each other than with either of our more reliable poles.
Although, of course, there are ambiguous points on each side. The Drudge Report and Hayibo might be closer to the edge, if not out of the tabloid zone entirely. (Hayibo is a South African satire site, now defunct.) But the worst satire is virtually indistinguishable from the worst news.
So what's the problem? In a nutshell: Bad news can spread misinformation and reduce people's trust in the news, and bad satire is even worse.
The Onion is a fairly well-established organization, but their articles still occasionally get taken as real news. (There's even a whole website devoted to documenting this phenomenon.) For the more tabloid-esque satire, however, one gets the feeling that they subsist almost entirely on readers that mistakenly think they're reading actual journalism. And this isn't only because the brands aren't well-known and the disclaimers are tucked away in corners; the content is different too.
Polished satire from organizations like The Onion tends to have a political slant, but it's obvious, and it approaches issues from a very particular sort of angle that shapes the way it's read. They feature shareable headlines like "Al-Qaeda operative can't believe how expensive Super Bowl tickets are," or "Biden frantically hitting up Cabinet members for piss." Readers might take these as real, but that only leads to confusion, hilarity and embarrassment.
And how does bad satire compare? Free Wood Post goes viral with headlines like "Mitt Romney: I can relate to black people, my ancestors once owned slaves," and Daily Currant gets views with headlines like "Obamacare death panel orders first execution." The contrast should be obvious. The worst of these articles are nothing more than hyperbolic political rants masquerading as journalism -- and as a general rule, they're not even funny.
While satire ideally contributes to public discourse and offers novel perspectives in otherwise stagnant debates, sites like these reflect and perpetuate the political polarization that permeates our media. Uncritical readers who share the expressed partisan views take the satire as fact, while others simply disbelieve.
And if I haven't made it clear so far, this problem isn't adjacent to the modern media landscape and its own quirks and discrepancies, it's fully a part of it. It's an extension of the already polarized political media, and it's only one of a number of ongoing factors that erode media credibility and contribute to the conflicting views of reality entrenched on each side of the political spectrum.
So it's a problem. And it's not quite clear what we can do about it.
http://editdesk.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/the-real-media-and-the-real-fake-media/
Now there's a better question: "What gets to count as a real news organization?" After all, that's the first thing we see when sharing or finding information online. Any article I'm sharing is attributed first and foremost to a company or website and only secondarily to the individual.
Here are a few online news organizations you may or may not have heard of: Free Wood Post, the Daily Currant, Diversity Chronicle and Hayibo. All of them have had articles go viral at one point or another.
The catch? They're all fake. They call themselves satire, which seems to legitimize what they do, but they are "satire" the same way TMZ or the Drudge Report could be called "news."
So let's amend our question once more: "What gets to count as a real fake news organization?"
Given how easy it is to confuse the real and the fake, we should consider it as a spectrum. At one end is The Onion, the big dog as far as media satire is concerned, and at the other end are the most reputable of the standard news agencies: The New York Times, CNN, BBC, etc.
Then we drift toward the middle, what we might generally refer to as the tabloid zone. The National Enquirer imitates real news organizations just like Diversity Chronicle imitates fake news organizations, but at that point in the spectrum they probably have more in common with each other than with either of our more reliable poles.
Although, of course, there are ambiguous points on each side. The Drudge Report and Hayibo might be closer to the edge, if not out of the tabloid zone entirely. (Hayibo is a South African satire site, now defunct.) But the worst satire is virtually indistinguishable from the worst news.
So what's the problem? In a nutshell: Bad news can spread misinformation and reduce people's trust in the news, and bad satire is even worse.
The Onion is a fairly well-established organization, but their articles still occasionally get taken as real news. (There's even a whole website devoted to documenting this phenomenon.) For the more tabloid-esque satire, however, one gets the feeling that they subsist almost entirely on readers that mistakenly think they're reading actual journalism. And this isn't only because the brands aren't well-known and the disclaimers are tucked away in corners; the content is different too.
Polished satire from organizations like The Onion tends to have a political slant, but it's obvious, and it approaches issues from a very particular sort of angle that shapes the way it's read. They feature shareable headlines like "Al-Qaeda operative can't believe how expensive Super Bowl tickets are," or "Biden frantically hitting up Cabinet members for piss." Readers might take these as real, but that only leads to confusion, hilarity and embarrassment.
And how does bad satire compare? Free Wood Post goes viral with headlines like "Mitt Romney: I can relate to black people, my ancestors once owned slaves," and Daily Currant gets views with headlines like "Obamacare death panel orders first execution." The contrast should be obvious. The worst of these articles are nothing more than hyperbolic political rants masquerading as journalism -- and as a general rule, they're not even funny.
While satire ideally contributes to public discourse and offers novel perspectives in otherwise stagnant debates, sites like these reflect and perpetuate the political polarization that permeates our media. Uncritical readers who share the expressed partisan views take the satire as fact, while others simply disbelieve.
And if I haven't made it clear so far, this problem isn't adjacent to the modern media landscape and its own quirks and discrepancies, it's fully a part of it. It's an extension of the already polarized political media, and it's only one of a number of ongoing factors that erode media credibility and contribute to the conflicting views of reality entrenched on each side of the political spectrum.
So it's a problem. And it's not quite clear what we can do about it.
http://editdesk.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/the-real-media-and-the-real-fake-media/
What makes for a good roommate? (Daily Tar Heel special housing issue column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
The short answer: It depends. But otherwise there's a lot of ground to cover.
Roommates should either be just like you or totally the opposite, as it needs to be clear where they'll fit in your life (also in your nap, shower and angry ranting schedule). If they're you, you'll get along great. You'll pick up each other's mannerisms (like thumb-twiddling or laugh-suffocating), your cycles will sync (you'll need two toilets) and your lives will merge into one undifferentiated mass.
But if you have too much in common it'll be obnoxious, for the obvious reasons, but also because you'll have doubles of every new Killers album (and if you're me, you don't need to be reminded that they're way past their prime).
Also it'll piss you off and ruin your life forever when you find the one thing you differ on so radically (for me it's usually drone warfare, photojournalism or cashews).
You avoid that inevitability if you pick someone entirely different, but this can go wrong, too. It helps to have at least enough in common to fill one good lunch with conversation every couple of months on a random hungover Saturday of your choice.
Without any common ground, your relationship will be stuck at "friends-by-association." (The association here being that you sleep within at most 20 feet of each other and thus are exceedingly vulnerable to sneak attack.)
Not being close is easy because your lives are separate, like aloof and uncommunicative parallel lines. But one of you is going to be hilariously useless if you ever find the other crying on the kitchen floor some afternoon.
You might not think it'll ever happen to you, but you're probably delusional, which, incidentally, is another common type of stress-burnout -- we don't all break down the same way, but boy do we break down. (I'm a reclusive, break-off-from-reality-and-paint-inkblots type, but I think crying would be healthier.)
Anyway, it helps if your roommate knows you well enough to at least know whom to call for you during the periodic meltdowns in the productive but poorly designed nuclear reactors that are your life.
So a balance between the two extremes is probably for the best! Also, trying to decide and preemptively control the place your roommate is going to occupy in your life is futile and misguided, and it's not going to work.
What you need to do is sit down and compare notes. Talk about what you want in the college experience and your roommate relationship, and see if you're compatible -- communicate!
But that's awkward, so never mind. Screw it -- just pick somebody and run with it.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/what-makes-for-a-good-roommate
Roommates should either be just like you or totally the opposite, as it needs to be clear where they'll fit in your life (also in your nap, shower and angry ranting schedule). If they're you, you'll get along great. You'll pick up each other's mannerisms (like thumb-twiddling or laugh-suffocating), your cycles will sync (you'll need two toilets) and your lives will merge into one undifferentiated mass.
But if you have too much in common it'll be obnoxious, for the obvious reasons, but also because you'll have doubles of every new Killers album (and if you're me, you don't need to be reminded that they're way past their prime).
Also it'll piss you off and ruin your life forever when you find the one thing you differ on so radically (for me it's usually drone warfare, photojournalism or cashews).
You avoid that inevitability if you pick someone entirely different, but this can go wrong, too. It helps to have at least enough in common to fill one good lunch with conversation every couple of months on a random hungover Saturday of your choice.
Without any common ground, your relationship will be stuck at "friends-by-association." (The association here being that you sleep within at most 20 feet of each other and thus are exceedingly vulnerable to sneak attack.)
Not being close is easy because your lives are separate, like aloof and uncommunicative parallel lines. But one of you is going to be hilariously useless if you ever find the other crying on the kitchen floor some afternoon.
You might not think it'll ever happen to you, but you're probably delusional, which, incidentally, is another common type of stress-burnout -- we don't all break down the same way, but boy do we break down. (I'm a reclusive, break-off-from-reality-and-paint-inkblots type, but I think crying would be healthier.)
Anyway, it helps if your roommate knows you well enough to at least know whom to call for you during the periodic meltdowns in the productive but poorly designed nuclear reactors that are your life.
So a balance between the two extremes is probably for the best! Also, trying to decide and preemptively control the place your roommate is going to occupy in your life is futile and misguided, and it's not going to work.
What you need to do is sit down and compare notes. Talk about what you want in the college experience and your roommate relationship, and see if you're compatible -- communicate!
But that's awkward, so never mind. Screw it -- just pick somebody and run with it.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/what-makes-for-a-good-roommate
Monday, February 3, 2014
Of gray areas and gazpacho (Daily Tar Heel Opinion Column -- Cries from the Peanut Gallery)
It was pink and smooth, a peaceful sea populated by roaming herds of bell peppers and stale bread. It was also gazpacho, and I was supposed to eat it.
The first bite made me immediately uncomfortable, like a pack of teens stopping in front of me on the beach or a passing acquaintance who insists on forcing small talk. (It's not that I can't make words, but that the nagging voice in the back of my head won't stop shouting "THIS CONVERSATION MEANS NOTHING.")
But my disgust with the gazpacho had nothing to do with the unexpectedly salty flavor, the garlicky lumps of protein or the creamy-but-grainy texture of old yogurt -- my problem was that it was cold. I was a caveman again, sticking random twigs and berries in my mouth, and I knew instinctively that this particular bit of organic material was not food.
It was like a senile aunt or that possessed lady from Ghostbusters was forcing me to eat her leftover chowder straight out of the fridge -- and I couldn't say no because that'd be rude.
It was a simple enough problem, and there seemed to be a simple enough solution. "Hey, you know what?" I said to myself, "This soup wouldn't be all that bad if I just stuck it in the microwave." I grunted in agreement.
My dialogue completed, I translated for my host -- but there I came upon the crux of the issue. As my coarse but caring Spanish host mother so emphatically explained, "Gazpacho is cold." To deviate from that principle would be to alter the reality of the gazpacho itself! Hot gazpacho is soup, and soup is not gazpacho -- so sit down and eat, Michael.
I begrudgingly complied, but I couldn't help but think: Why the dogmatic distinction? Gazpacho and soup -- can't it be both?
Society likes to give us choices and pretend there're only two options, that it's always black and white (It makes me gag to use "society" as the subject of a sentence -- sorry). But as a general rule for life, it's better to embrace the gray. Because you never want to just nail yourself down to one color and one color only, you know?
Ambiguity rules! In that it's always there if you look for it. And I'm not going for "best of both worlds" with this whole "hot gazpacho" thing -- because the gray third option is never a straightforward mix of the standard two. Plus, you'll probably never stop getting crap from both soup people and gazpacho people, and golly do people get crazy about their liquid comestibles.
But if you're comfortable with never really being certain about anything, it can be a lot of fun! And you're probably closer to the truth than anyone else in terms of the fundamental nature of soup and such.
As with all boundaries and binaries, the most fun is in the middle. As with soup (or soup-like entities), so with life.
...Hm. Following an expedition to Wikipedia, it seems that what I ate was not gazpacho but a local variant called salmorejo. Gazpacho is more reddish without eggs. Forget I said anything.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/of-gray-areas-and-gazpacho
The first bite made me immediately uncomfortable, like a pack of teens stopping in front of me on the beach or a passing acquaintance who insists on forcing small talk. (It's not that I can't make words, but that the nagging voice in the back of my head won't stop shouting "THIS CONVERSATION MEANS NOTHING.")
But my disgust with the gazpacho had nothing to do with the unexpectedly salty flavor, the garlicky lumps of protein or the creamy-but-grainy texture of old yogurt -- my problem was that it was cold. I was a caveman again, sticking random twigs and berries in my mouth, and I knew instinctively that this particular bit of organic material was not food.
It was like a senile aunt or that possessed lady from Ghostbusters was forcing me to eat her leftover chowder straight out of the fridge -- and I couldn't say no because that'd be rude.
It was a simple enough problem, and there seemed to be a simple enough solution. "Hey, you know what?" I said to myself, "This soup wouldn't be all that bad if I just stuck it in the microwave." I grunted in agreement.
My dialogue completed, I translated for my host -- but there I came upon the crux of the issue. As my coarse but caring Spanish host mother so emphatically explained, "Gazpacho is cold." To deviate from that principle would be to alter the reality of the gazpacho itself! Hot gazpacho is soup, and soup is not gazpacho -- so sit down and eat, Michael.
I begrudgingly complied, but I couldn't help but think: Why the dogmatic distinction? Gazpacho and soup -- can't it be both?
Society likes to give us choices and pretend there're only two options, that it's always black and white (It makes me gag to use "society" as the subject of a sentence -- sorry). But as a general rule for life, it's better to embrace the gray. Because you never want to just nail yourself down to one color and one color only, you know?
Ambiguity rules! In that it's always there if you look for it. And I'm not going for "best of both worlds" with this whole "hot gazpacho" thing -- because the gray third option is never a straightforward mix of the standard two. Plus, you'll probably never stop getting crap from both soup people and gazpacho people, and golly do people get crazy about their liquid comestibles.
But if you're comfortable with never really being certain about anything, it can be a lot of fun! And you're probably closer to the truth than anyone else in terms of the fundamental nature of soup and such.
As with all boundaries and binaries, the most fun is in the middle. As with soup (or soup-like entities), so with life.
...Hm. Following an expedition to Wikipedia, it seems that what I ate was not gazpacho but a local variant called salmorejo. Gazpacho is more reddish without eggs. Forget I said anything.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2014/01/of-gray-areas-and-gazpacho
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