Why Would You Think We're Laughing AT You?

 Mitch Albom: This honey child is a real boo boo

She wears a tiara. She plays with a pig. She wiggles and shakes her hips and makes "come hither" movements. She pulls the fat from her tummy and squeezes it for the camera. She refers to herself in the third person. She squeals, she brags. And her mother yells, "shake your butt," and passes gas on camera.
She is 6 years old.
Two million people watch her.
She is an American star.
Welcome to the latest lowering of a bar that was already deep in the mud. "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo," which recently debuted on TLC, is one of the most talked about TV phenomenons in a while, and the general disgust over its content makes "Jersey Shore" look like "Masterpiece Theatre."
That's because in "Jersey Shore," the main characters were at least over 18 and presumably responsible for their idiotic behavior.
"Honey Boo Boo" is different. The title refers to the nickname of 6-year-old Alana Thompson, the youngest in a self-proclaimed "redneck" family in tiny McIntyre, Ga. (population 700). Honey Boo Boo is a pageant participant. This explains why her mother buys her two-piece cowgirl outfits, pays for strutting and dance lessons and encourages her child to say things like, "A dollah makes me hollah ... Honey Boo Boo Child!"
Honestly, you watch this, and your mouth can't help but fall open.

All for the pageantry

But nothing should surprise us about a family who watches a pig defecate on the kitchen table and jokes about their mother wanting to eat the pig. How could something like that not be on TV?
Nor is there any point in growing furious over a 6-year-old being exploited this way. It's hardly new. Alana was previously on a popular TLC program called "Toddlers & Tiaras," all about childhood beauty pageants. She wasn't the prettiest. She wasn't the most talented.
She was merely the most outrageous.
And that got her what other pageant families are privately lusting after: exposure.
Her own show.
So now America can watch Honey Boo Boo chase her pig, say, "I rocked my Daisy Duke," and wear so much makeup she looks like a mannequin. They can watch her mother burp on camera or her pregnant teenage sister get an ultrasound.
They can see an interview on CNN in which her mother admits to spending $15,000 so far on pageants, but putting nothing toward higher education. Here is a direct quote:
"We haven't, like, saved, like, you know, any, like, college fund from her, like, winnings or anything like that."
What a shame. Harvard was so close.

Supply and demand

The reason we cannot get upset over this obnoxious but still pitiable child who is encouraged by her mother to drink her Go Go Juice -- a combination of Red Bull, Mountain Dew and Lord knows what else -- is that 1) she is just a child and 2) 2 million of us are watching it.
Two million people find this entertainment. Two million! And forget about the train wreck defense. Sorry. People stare at a train wreck and then move on. They don't set up shop to keep looking every week.
This is entertainment for at least 2 million of us. And as long as it is, TLC will keep pumping it out. There is only one way -- there has only ever been one way -- to keep trash off of television.
Show no interest in it.
But good luck doing that in a country infatuated with outlandishness. We are increasingly becoming a nation that revels in saying, "Oh my god, did you see that?" We don't want to think, we want to be amused. We don't want to try, we want to feel superior. We don't want to correct people, we would rather mock them. We don't do, we watch.
This melting of our humanity is witnessed from every cruel YouTube video to the recent death of Tony Scott, whose suicidal leap was filmed by several people, but no one tried to stop him.
Honey Boo Boo isn't the last word in Lowest Common Denominator, only the latest. And when the world grows bored with her (give it five minutes) she and her family will go the way of Octomom and Kate ("Plus Eight") Gosselin, left gasping for their oxygen, public attention, and finding none.
We'll be too busy gaping at someone else.
For (hilarious) comments and more click here.
Contact Mitch Albom: 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com

Wow! Do Not Piss Off A Snake Shaker!!! (more snakes, more snakes.)

If God

   Was a Rattlesnake,

Would You Pick it Up?

Lost in the Land of Faith, Hope and Venom

Douglas Cruickshank

 
  "YOU CAN NEVER EXHAUST THE POWER when the Spirit comes down, not even when you take up a snake, not even when you take up a dozen of them. The more faith you expend, the more power is released. It's an inexhaustible, eternally renewable resource. It's the only power some of these people have."
I never quite understood church religion --- what it can mean to people, what it can do for them --- until I took a long drive through the Mississippi Delta a couple years back. The American South is another country. If you think it isn't you either haven't been there or you haven't been away from there. Like other countries, it is delightful in many ways, dreadful in a few well-publicized other ways, and entirely ordinary in still others. Parts of it are shamefully poor --- poorer than any other place in the United States. It's a congenital indigence, passed down from parents to children, down again. And then again. That kind of destitution and powerlessness gets on you, gets in you, and does what it does to people everywhere --- compels them to scour the landscape for hope. The hopeful thing is that sometimes they find it, though occasionally in the oddest of places, people and beasts.
Driving past endless cotton fields and cypress swamps, I must have passed a single room church every mile or two from Vicksburg to Clarksdale. On a Sunday morning there would be dusty, busted up Impalas, Rivieras, Ford pickups, old Dodge flatbeds and Chevy Blazers parked all which ways in front of the shining white buildings. Maybe even a green and yellow John Deere tractor. And if I slowed down and opened the window as I passed, I'd often hear singing, shouted "Amens," or the sole, rhythmic voice of the preacher exhorting the congregation. "The church is the glue," I later jotted on a café napkin, "that adheres people to one another. It's where transcendence is found, and faith turns to hope --- the kind of hope that gets you through the week when there's little else to keep you going." Not a profound insight, but the bittersweetness of the Delta made it seem so.
In 1992, Dennis Covington, a freelance journalist and professor of creative writing, was covering a trial in the northern Alabama town of Scottsboro for the New York Times. In Scottsboro, a place made notorious by the unjust 1931 rape conviction of the nine "Scottsboro Boys," a man named Glendel Buford Summerford stood accused of attempted murder. Summerford was the pastor of the Church of Jesus with Signs Following. In a drunken rage, he'd tried to kill his wife by forcing her to stick her hand into a cage full of snakes. "...after the diamondback rattlesnakes had bit her and she'd stumbled on the way back to the house and fallen to the ground, he unzipped his fly and pissed on her. That's how bad it had got," Covington writes. Darlene Summerford lived and her former husband is now serving 99 years in the state penitentiary.
That's where Glendel Summerford's story ends and Dennis Covington's begins. As he attended the trial, and afterwards, the writer got to know some of the snake handlers, members of the Church of Jesus with Signs Following, and others who would pick up serpents when "the Spirit moved on them," notably Charles and Aline McGlockin. Covington also got in a lot deeper than he could have anticipated. But he got back out and wrote it all down in a spare, moving book called Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (Penguin, 1996).  It was a finalist for the National Book Award. It should have won.
"The Prosecutor had maintained during the proceedings," he writes, "that the trial was not about snake handling. But in many ways that is all it had been about. Facing fear. Taking risks. Having faith." That's also what Covington's book is about.
The rationale for religious snake handling --- speaking in tongues, handling fire and drinking poison may also occur during a service --- is found in the literal interpretation of a passage from Acts in the Bible's New Testament: "And these signs shall follow them that believe;" the text reads, "In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover!"
After the trial, Covington was invited to a service being given by another congregation of snake handlers on Sand Mountain near a town called Section. His interest, as he tells it, was still largely journalistic. "I was pleased the handlers had felt comfortable enough to include me. It meant the work was going well. The relationship between journalist and subject is often an unspoken conspiracy. The handlers wanted to show me something, and I was ready to be shown....But I had a personal agenda too. I was enjoying the passion and abandon of their worship."
The McGlockins were at the service, and though no snakes were handled---there'd been a mix-up and the serpents were left behind---Aline was moved by the spirit and passionate abandon ensued. She lifted her voice in an eerie chanting that Covington describes over more than two pages, and quite beautifully. "It was the strangest sound I had ever heard. At first it did not seem human....I could not disentangle myself from the sound of her voice, the same syllables repeated with endless variation. At times, it seemed something barbed was being pulled from her throat; at other times, the sound was a clear stream flowing outward into thin air." Almost unconsciously, Covington began to accompany the woman on tambourine and an intimacy transpired which he found unsettling. "Through the tambourine, I was occurring with her in the Spirit, and it was not of my own will."  So much for journalism as it's usually defined. (Or, to use the wry disclaimer that appears in teeny type halfway down the copyright page, "This is a work of nonfiction, but memory is an imperfect guide.")
Covington digs into his own past --- Appalachian ancestors, middle-class Birmingham upbringing, comparatively tame religious experience --- as he wantonly immerses himself in the deep faith of the snake handlers. A few months after the Sand Mountain service, he stands up at a West Virginia gathering and testifies that the Holy Ghost brought him there and is guiding his journalistic mission. "This thing is real!" he exclaims to one of the parishioners after dancing and singing to a "wacko, amphetamine dirge." Clearly, Salvation on Sand Mountain is subjective, literary journalism if it's journalism at all (I say it's the best kind). But Covington is an earnest fellow --- one can't help wondering what Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe might have done with this material --- a gifted writer, and downright courageous in exposing his self-doubt and spiritual fragility. The book is near perfect as a piece of writing. If it falls down anywhere, it's in Covington's hesitancy to call snake handling what it is: nutty behavior by superstitious hill folk. But then of course there wouldn't be a story. Most of those who practice it seem to be good souls (the McGlockins come off as authentically sweet and true). They're serious about it as an avenue to transcendence. But only a God with a particularly perverse sense of humor, or a deity dreamed up by Mark Twain, would have his charges demonstrate their faith in such suicidal fashion.
Plenty of the faithful get bitten. Most everyone involved has a relative who's died of snakebite. And at least seventy-one people, Covington reports, have been killed over the years during religious services where venomous snakes were handled. Nonetheless, he goes all the way after getting some "solid advice" from Charles McGlockin: "You might be anointed when you take up a serpent," he cautions Covington, "but if there's a witchcraft spirit in the church, it could zap your anointing and you'd be left cold turkey with a serpent in your hand and the spirit of God gone off of you. That's when you'll get bit....Always be careful who you take a rattlesnake from." Right.
Not long after that warning, Covington's moment came. "I'd always been drawn to danger," he explains. "Alcohol. Psychedelics. War....I wouldn't lose my mind. That's what I thought, anyway." During a service he feels himself pulled up to the front where the snakes are. Where the Spirit is moving. A man named Carl offers him a big rattler. "Acrid smelling," the writer remembers it, "carnal, alive. And the look in Carl's eyes seemed to change as he approached. He was embarrassed. The snake was all he had, his eyes seemed to say. But as low as it was, as repulsive, if I took it, I'd be possessing the sacred."
It would be cheating the prospective reader and Covington to further quote the passage because his fine, forceful evocation of those next moments damn near succeeds in making sense of it all.  Snake handling is a peculiar route to spiritual release, but the result --- surrender of will, "the power in the act of disappearing," loss of self, a brief immersion in paradise --- is much the same as that reported by religious practitioners from any number of the world's denominations, sometimes employing equally strange methods.
Covington stayed in the fold awhile longer and then his relationships with the handlers took an unpleasant, if predictable, course, causing him to turn away from them and back to his own life. "I refuse to be a witness to suicide," he says, finally coming to his senses. "I have two daughters to raise and a vocation in the world."
Salvation on Sand Mountain is a short book on a long subject---the nature of God, faith and fear. And the hunger for hope and power among those who have little access to either. It's also a good yarn from a thoughtful man. Go ahead and pick it up.

This book review can also be found here.

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Texas vs. Science & Literature

Texas Producing Ignorant Sumbitches, Think 61 IQ Is About Normal For the State

Tuesday, August 7, 2012 4:58 PM EDT

Steinbeck’s Family: Texas Wrong In Using ‘Of Mice And Men’ To Justify Marvin Wilson’s Execution

By Joseph Orovic

John Steinbeck gave the literary world a lovable simpleton in Lennie Small, the fulcrum of the Nobel Prize winner's classic 1937 novella "Of Mice and Men." Lennie was meant to be an archetype: the lumbering, guileless halfwit whose innocence was matched only by his intense loyalty and unmanageable physical strength.

He is one of Steinbeck's simplest characters, eliciting sympathy as few in the American literary oeuvre ever do. And perhaps it's this empathy that keeps "Of Mice and Men" on the syllabi of so many high school English courses, 75 years after its publication.
Now the character has been brought to the fore again, providing the baseline comparison that sent a mentally retarded convict named Marvin Wilson to his death in Texas Tuesday night. Wilson, 54, was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., 14 minutes after his lethal injection began at the state prison in Huntsville, NBC reported. 
Lennie Small was never meant to set the legal definition of "mental retardation," the late novelist's son, Thomas Steinbeck, argues.
A snafu in a previous Supreme Court ruling allowed Wilson to be sent to his death, as his lawyers' petition for a stay of execution was ignored. And the whole ordeal bizarrely hinges upon what Steinbeck argues is a misguided and inaccurate interpretation of a fictional character.
"Prior to reading about Mr. Wilson's case, I had no idea that the great state of Texas would use a fictional character that my father created to make a point about human loyalty and dedication, i.e., Lennie Small from 'Of Mice and Men,' as a benchmark to identify whether defendants with intellectual disability should live or die," Thomas Steinbeck said in a statement.
Wilson's attorneys asked the high court to put a stay of execution until Texas' controversial means of testing mental disabilities is properly challenged.
Wilson was convicted in 1992 of murdering a police drug informant. During his stint in prison, he was subjected to a battery of tests to determine the borders of his mental limitations, including a 2004 report by Donald Trahan, a neuropsychologist from the Center for Behavioral Studies in Texas.
Wilson's IQ of 61 put him far below normal, with the literacy level of a 7-year-old. He could not dress himself properly, match his socks, climb a ladder or mow a lawn.
"It is evident that the deficiencies in general intelligence and adaptive behavior have been present since early childhood and well before the age of 18," Trahan wrote. "My evaluation of Mr. Marvin Lee Wilson reveals that he does meet the criteria for a diagnosis of mild mental retardation."
The test results came two years after the Supreme Court ruled the execution of mentally retarded convicts was a breach of the Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on excessive punishment in Atkins v. Virginia.
"The mentally retarded should be categorically excluded from execution," the court wrote in its decision, due to "their disabilities in areas of reasoning, judgment and control of their impulses."
The decision did not specify a definition for mental retardation, allowing states to set their own guidelines.
Texas, a state so execution-happy it accounts for one-third of the nation's trips to death row, took a back door to letting the mentally retarded continue to face the death penalty.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals set a threshold that ignores recognized medical testing while daring the Supreme Court to intervene.
It directly rebuked the Atkins decision in a 2004 ruling, decrying the Supreme Court's "categorical rule making such offenders ineligible for the death penalty," going so far as to deny the existence of "a 'mental retardation' bright-line exemption."
Instead, it concocted seven criteria called "Briseno factors," which were based upon the character Lennie Small.
"Most Texas citizens would agree that Steinbeck's Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt from execution," the decision read. "But does a consensus of Texas citizens agree that all persons who might legitimately qualify for assistance under the social services definition of mental retardation be exempt from an otherwise constitutional penalty?"
In short, Texas' criteria allow the mentally retarded to remain on death row if a judge determines the crime was complex enough to require forethought, planning and intricate execution. Wilson met all the criteria. But it's the bit alluding to Lennie Small that upsets the Steinbecks.
"My father was a highly gifted writer who won the Nobel Prize for his ability to create art about the depth of the human experience and condition. His work was certainly not meant to be scientific, and the character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability," Thomas Steinbeck said.
"I find the whole premise to be insulting, outrageous, ridiculous and profoundly tragic. I am certain that if my father, John Steinbeck, were here, he would be deeply angry and ashamed to see his work used in this way."
The same 2004 ruling Texas used against Wilson has been the foundation of at least 10 mental retardation claims being rejected in other death penalty cases. It has been echoed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which claims mental retardation cases are not grounds for staying executions.
Several factors could have changed Wilson's fate. The Supreme Court could have offered a stay of execution, but did not. Texas Gov. Rick Perry also could have intervened, but he vetoed a bill that would have banned the execution of mentally retarded inmates in 2009.
Arguably the strangest part of the ordeal remains Wilson's very real similarities to Lennie Small, particularly in the facts his crime. Like Lennie, Wilson was one half of a duo. It left him susceptible to the direction of his accomplice. The main witness against Wilson was the accomplice's wife, who testified he admitted to the crime.
Steinbeck's own novel eerily describes Wilson's character -- and possibly Texas' obstinacy. A longer bit of dialogue spoken by Crooks, an ancillary character, reads, "He got nothing to tell him what's so an' what ain't so. Maybe if he sees somethin', he don't know whether it's right or not. He can't turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can't tell. He got nothing to measure by."

Talk About Shutting the Barn Door After the Horse Got Out!

I guess teaching contraception just wouldn't make sense to these 'Billies.

Louisiana School Forces Students to Take Pregnancy Tests, Kicks Out Girls Who Refuse Or Test Positive

By Tara Culp- Ressler

One Louisiana school is dealing with the state’s high rates of teen pregnancy by taking an “out of sight, out of mind” approach. No pregnant students are welcome at Delhi Charter School in Delhi, Louisiana — a policy that the institution enforces by requiring students who are “suspected” of being pregnant to submit to a mandatory pregnancy test.

If students test positive for pregnancy, they are no longer allowed to attend classes on the school’s campus and will be forced to either switch to another school or begin a home school program. If a student refuses to take the test, she is “treated as a pregnant student” and also kicked out of Delhi Charter School, according to the student handbook:

If an administrator or teacher suspects a student is pregnant, a parent conference will be held. The school reserves the right to require any female student to take a pregnancy test to confirm whether or not the suspected student is in fact pregnant. The school further reserves the right to refer the suspected student to a physician of its choice. If the test indicates that the student is pregnant, the student will not be permitted to attend classes on the campus of Delhi Charter School.

If a student is determined to be pregnant and wishes to continue to attend Delhi Charter School, the student will be required to pursue a course of home study that will be provided by the school…Any student who is suspected of being pregnant and who refuses to submit to a pregnancy test shall be treated as a pregnant student and will be offered home study opportunities. If home study opportunities are not acceptable, the student will be counseled to seek other educational opportunities.

The American Civil Liberties Union points out that Dehli Charter School’s discriminatory policy for pregnant students is “in blatant violation of federal law and the U.S. Constitution.” On Monday, the ACLU of Louisiana and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project sent a letter to the school asking it to suspend its policy, on the grounds that New Delhi Charter School’s unfair treatment of its pregnant students violates the following laws:

• Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, for excluding students from educational programs based on sex.
• The Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, for treating female students differently than their male peers, as well as stereotyping “suspected” pregnant studies on the basis of their gender.
• The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that recognizes the right to procreate as well as the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy, for targeting students in a way that appears to stigmatize pregnancy.

Aside from its unconstitutional premise, the charter school’s policy toward pregnant students is also furthering a serious education gap between teen mothers and the young women who do not have unplanned pregnancies. Thirty percent of all teen girls who drop out of high school cite pregnancy as the main reason. And a full 70 percent of teenage girls who give birth end up leaving school — although if New Delhi Charter School had its way, that statistic might be closer to 100 percent.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/louisiana-school-forces-students-take-pregnancy-tests-kicks-out-girls-who-refuse-or-test-positive-13. All rights are reserved.

For the full story plus comments click here.

God Damn, Why the Hell Would You Go To That Church?

And I sure hope you never dropped even one penny in their collection plate!

Black couple says racism forced church wedding relocation

Written by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thursday, 02 August 2012

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi couple says the church where they planned to get married turned them away because they are black. Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson say they had set the date and mailed invitations, but the day before their wedding they say they got bad news from the pastor of predominantly white First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs: Some members of the church complained about the black couple having a wedding there. The Wilsons, who live in nearby Jackson, said they attend the church regularly although they are not members. A FEW CRITICS Pastor Stan Weatherford told WLBT TV he was surprised when a small number of church members opposed holding the wedding at the church. “This had never been done before here, so it was setting a new precedent, and there are those who reacted to that because of that,” said Weatherford. Weatherford performed the July 21 ceremony at another church. “I didn't want to have a controversy within the church, and I didn’t want a controversy to affect the wedding of Charles and Te’Andrea. I wanted to make sure their wedding day was a special day,” said Weatherford. WLBT reported that church officials now say they welcome any race. They plan to hold internal meetings on how to move forward. Church member Casey Kitchens said she and other members of the congregation are outraged by the church’s refusal to marry a black couple, a decision she says most of the congregation knew nothing about. ‘BLAME’ “This is a small, small group of people who made a terrible decision,” Kitchens told The Clarion-Ledger. “I'm just ashamed right now that my church would do that. I can't fathom why. How unfair. How unjust. It's just wrong.” “I blame the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, I blame those members who knew and call themselves Christians and didn't stand up,” said Charles Wilson. Wilson told the newspaper that he understands Weatherford was caught in a difficult position and he still likes the pastor, but he also thinks the pastor should have stood up to the members who didn't want the couple to marry in the church. Photo: Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson