Where the Sun Don’t Shine

 

Tongues are wagging and fingers are busy typing all around the country about the Instagram influencer topic of “perineum sunning”. Or did the topic gain traction on Instagram from a post by a micro-influencer? Or even less popular than that? Wherever she was a week or two ago in the Instagram influencer pecking order, surely by now she is on her way to becoming a mega-influencer, if there is such a ranking.

The perineum is the part of the human body between the genitals and the anus, and according to Metaphysical Meagan, the influencer everyone is now talking and writing about, it feels good and is good for her – and possibly for you, too – to expose that area to direct sunlight for as little as less than a minute each day. Judging from pictures posted online by M. Meagan and others, the preferred method of achieving the proper exposure is lying naked on one’s back and splaying one’s legs in the air. The pictures of people baring their nether parts to the sun are hilarious.

 

"I'm Suntanning in Florida while You're Freezing Your " (11730831393)
A Miami Beach, Florida postcard from February 1967, in the Postcard Collection of the State Library and Archives of Florida.

As stupid trends go, this is relatively harmless, like mood rings or pet rocks. A few people will get rich off it, some others will buy into it and wonder why they did years later, and most will shake their heads and chuckle about it. In any event, the trend will pass soon, knocked off the radar by the next supposed big thing. The adherents of perineum sunning promote it’s dubious health benefits, and it is doubtful their claim will lead to great harm for Instagram devotees who follow prescribed practice and expose their perinea to the sun for less than a minute a day. Why talk or write about it then, and give this silliness more free publicity? Because of what this kind of ultimate silliness says about us and how we arrived at this moment.

First of all, the relatively recent phenomenon of the fascination with a suntanned physique as a sign of health and wealth is an attribute of white people generally, and of some white people with too much time and money on their hands particularly. Until the 1920s, a suntan was the mark of working class people who toiled outdoors all day for little pay, and the upper classes therefore scorned suntans and suntanned people. That flipped in the 1920s and ’30s, in some cases for worthwhile health reasons, such as the recognition that rickets was caused by a lack of vitamin D, a vitamin the skin produces upon exposure to sunlight. Other reasons had to do with displaying one’s wealth and the leisure time to be able to travel to far off, exotic locales and lie around in luxurious idleness soaking up the sun’s rays. Suddenly having a healthy glow from a tan was the in thing among the upper crust, and being pasty white was for the lower orders or the sick.

Now white folks with too much time and too much money are doffing all their clothes, lying back and flinging their legs in the air to get a warm, toasty feeling down where the sun don’t normally shine, and some of them are taking pictures of their frivolity and writing about it and distributing the goings-on to followers who eagerly soak it all in like the rays of the sun, for good or ill. Well, more power to them. It beats working for a living.
— Vita

 

Mind Your Peas

 

The federal government sends out mixed signals about dietary health by promoting the establishment of fast food restaurants in poor city neighborhoods on the one hand, and then on the other hand advocating healthier eating by limiting consumption of fast food. It boosts the use of cheese in fast food items, and then suggests consumers curtail their dairy consumption. It works hand in glove with ranchers in the beef industry by leasing grazing rights to federal lands at minimal cost, and then warns the public off eating too much red meat. That’s a lot of taxpayers’ money wasted on bureaucrats working at cross purposes with each other.

Dane county farmers market
The Dane County Farmers’ Market in September 2007 on the grounds of the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. It is the largest producers-only farmers’ market in the nation. Photo by Kznf.

 

People are so inured to confusing messages about what’s healthy to eat and what isn’t that most of them pay little mind to medical experts and bureaucrats, or rather they take their advice with a grain of salt, and that would be in the form of sea salt or Himalayan salt for foodie elites, and regular old table salt for everybody else. Like everything else in America over the past thirty or forty years, food culture has split into two halves, something akin to the haves and have nots. There are the foodie elites of the professional and upper classes, and then there is everybody else, from the lower middle class which is frantically scrabbling to keep from sliding down into the working class, which is itself struggling to stay one step ahead of poverty.

Americans can make a quick, cheap meal of sorts from a one or two dollar box of macaroni and cheese mix. For some, meals like that are their only option. It’s disgraceful that people of limited means should have to bear the disdain of people with nearly limitless means because their diet is based on calorie value per dollar over nutritional value. The poor and the economically struggling don’t have the luxury of being absolutely sure of their next meal. As to how the well off view their meals, anyone who has ever worked as a table busser or as one of the waitstaff in a high end restaurant can attest to the tremendous amount of food wasted by the patrons, even though they may be spending for one meal what a working class person can expect to earn in a day. The upper classes have that luxury because they have the security of knowing there’s more where that came from.

Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca as The Hickenloopers, Charlie and Doris, visit a health food restaurant in a skit from Your Show of Shows, with appearances by Howard Morris as another customer and Carl Reiner as a waiter.

Unlikely as it seems, the fast food restaurants scorned by foodie elites as obesity enablers for the great unwashed may hold the key to turning things around for people who can’t afford to buy groceries at Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. Taking their cue to keep promotions of healthier options low key so as not to arouse the suspicions of poorer customers whose purchases are based on calorie value per dollar, yet feeling increased pressure from public health groups to offer healthier foods, fast food restaurants increasingly change ingredients and practices in a balancing act to satisfy both constituencies. No one will ever claim that a cheeseburger and fries are healthier than a homemade meal of vegetables from a farmers’ market, but given the realities of human psychology and the country’s current economic conditions, demonizing those who choose to eat the former more often than the latter is ultimately unhelpful in lessening the obesity epidemic, while reinforcing the widening economic inequality that is driving it.
— Izzy

 

Too Hot for School

 

There never was any truth to the notion that schools closed in the summer so that farm children could help out with chores at home, and the real reason had to do with urban schools having low attendance in the summer and teachers and administrators wanting a summer break to escape city heat in the days before air conditioning, as well as using the extended break to pursue avocations or take temporary jobs. Farm children were needed at home in the spring for planting, and then again in the fall for the harvest. While it’s true farm work never slacks off entirely, particularly when animal husbandry is involved, there still were lulls in the summer and in the winter when children could attend school. Through most of the nineteenth century, a short school year was sufficient for farm children who had no ambitions in learning beyond the sixth or eighth grade. Farm children who had greater ambitions resorted to supplementing their learning on their own when they could, much like what we know about how Abraham Lincoln learned to become a lawyer.

 

The modern summer break came about instead from the needs of urban school administrators and the upper and middle economic class students and their families who supported many of the schools. The needs of poor students and their families, as always, hardly entered into the concerns of the rest of society. Before school attendance became compulsory in the late nineteenth century, urban schools were open year round, but often were only half full, and even less than that in the summer. School administrators eventually came around to following the model of colleges by closing for the summer so that students and teachers could pursue other interests outside the baking cities, leaving behind only enough staff to help students who needed to take extra courses of learning during the break. Public health officials added their approval to emptying out the schools in summer because they deemed the hothouse conditions unhealthful in general, and not conducive to learning in particular. By the early twentieth century school administrators had generally adopted the summer break, which started in late May or early June, and ended in late August or early September.

September - back to work - back to school - back to BOOKS LCCN98509757
A 1940 Works Progress Administration (WPA) poster promoting reading and library use upon returning to school in September after the summer break.

The system appeared to work well for most of the twentieth century. Rural schools synchronized their schedules with those of their urban counterparts so as not be left behind as it became increasingly clear a high school diploma was the minimum academic achievement necessary in modern society. The tourism industry could count on a steady source of both customers and labor during the two to three month summer break. The American public school system ranked highly among the school systems of other industrialized nations, even with its extended summer break. Then in the late twentieth century alarm bells started sounding about the supposed failings of that highly successful public school systems, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article, and so in effort to increase academic rigor, or at least appear to do so, school boards have been eroding the summer break, largely on the back end.

Satterfield cartoon - Back to School (1913)
A 1913 “Back to School” cartoon by Bob Satterfield (1875-1958) that captures how most children have always viewed the occasion.

 

In many school districts, fall semester classes now start in the first weeks of August. School may have ended in mid-June, leaving less than two months for the summer break. And yet still academic achievement appears to be falling, at least among the middle and lower economic classes. That also is another article for another day. For today it is sufficient to point out that the public school system does not exist in isolation from the greater society, and lackluster academic achievement by the students cannot be remedied merely by making them sit at their desks for more days every year.

The problem is in quality, not quantity. The society as a whole is fracturing, and the problems with poor learning begin and end in the home. The long summer break enacted by the twentieth century public school system was an excellent compromise that worked well for nearly everyone except families that had both spouses working outside the home. That presents a difficulty today, too, but the answer is not in charging the public schools with child daycare duties and calling that increased academic rigor. It’s not. August is too hot for school, in air conditioned facilities or not. August is for causing students anxiety about the imminence of schools reopening when they start seeing “Back to School” sale advertisements, which now also draw the attention of their teachers, who too often feel pressed to use their own money to buy supplies for their students. July is too early for a return of that unique schooldays anxiety, especially when schools closed only a few weeks before, in June.
— Vita

 

The Nose Knows

 

“A lie keeps growing and growing until it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
― spoken by The Blue Fairy in the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio.

This coming Monday at 5pm, Supreme Leader has promised to announce the winners of the Fake News awards, according to him. Media personalities are lining up for the most prestigious of the Fakies awards, because to be called a liar by the biggest liar of them all is quite an honor. Stephen Colbert of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) talk program The Late Show has taken out an ad in New York City’s Times Square to promote himself and his show for Supreme Leader’s top honors. This is becoming a big deal.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend – that’s the operating principle here. To be called out for Fake News by the biggest liar in the country is not only praise of a kind, but an endorsement. And now Supreme Liar will be bestowing awards of some sort on the highest honorees, though what that might be he has not made clear yet. Suffice to say that any news organization would be satisfied with the honor alone because of the boost to their ratings or readership, never mind the additional prestige. This must have been what Supreme Egotist meant in his recent New York Times interview when he suggested the media needs him around for the re-election campaign in 2020 to boost their income.


Awards and trophies have been a part of western civilization for millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks gave out laurel wreaths and cash gifts to winning Olympic athletes. In the twentieth century, the awards and trophies business really took off since entertainment businesses in particular found out giving them away in publicized ceremonies was a great way to let the tasteless public know what publications, movies, television shows, what have you, had the imprimatur of good taste from supposed authorities within the business, raising more revenue from the public, who now knew how to impress their friends and neighbors when they bought culture.

BBAward
The Big Brother Award from the United Kingdom based organization Privacy International. Near the end of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the representative of state power, O’Brien, says to the protagonist, Winston, “‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.'”

The Fakies, as proposed by Supreme Dotard, promise something a little off kilter from the usual awards bestowing because they will be more in line with the Razzies, an anti-award for bad movie making. But since the Razzies awarders do not take themselves or their task too seriously, there will still be a difference in solemnity between the granting of Razzies and that of Fakies, because the awarder of the latter prizes takes himself all too seriously, as do many of his more die hard supporters. There are the cynical supporters among the upper classes who were only interested in seeing through the enactment of things like the recent tax cut package for themselves and their rich friends, and then there are the true believers among the lower classes who are mainly in it to spite leftists, with their definition of leftist being anyone to the other side of Dwight Eisenhower, who if he were alive today would himself be suspect.

The great Spike Milligan accepted a lifetime achievement award in 1994.

One important point that needs addressing here is that this very website has been first and foremost in denouncing the regime of Der Lügner since it started, and should therefore be in line to receive a Fakie as a promulgator of Fake News by light of how the regime judges these things. If this website receives a Fakie on Monday, rest assured the glow of its bestowal will shower contributors and readers alike with a penumbra of honor from an unimpeachable source – or an impeachable one, as may be the case.
― Vita

 

The Spirit of Giving

 

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
― Luke 2:10-11, from the King James Version of the New Testament.

Just in time for Christmas, the Congress passed its giveaway to the rich known as the Republican tax reform package, and the Thief-in-Chief signed it into the law of the land. Afterward much merriment was enjoyed by them and their kind on the South Lawn of the White House, where boot licking was the order of the day. The corruption and depravity oozing from the swamp of Washington, D.C. is too disheartening to dwell upon at this festive season of the year.


Moving on from the fairy tale that the Republican tax plan does anything at all for anyone but the wealthy, there is the fairy tale that has taken hold in some quarters that the Nativity of Jesus Christ was devoid of political ramifications at the time or in today’s world, and that therefore Christmas should be devoid of politics. A straightforward reading of the Gospels should dispel those ideas. Herod the Great apparently had no illusions about the threat posed by the birth of Jesus to the political future of himself and his progeny. Even taking the Gospels at face value, the Nativity story is loaded with politics.

Alexander Laureus Satuloitu aasi 1820-23
Saddled Donkey, a painting of the Nativity by Finnish artist Aleksander Lauréus (1783-1823). Donkeys were the mount of the lower classes when they could afford them, while the upper classes rode horses. In addition to providing transportation for the Holy Family to Bethlehem and then to a temporary exile in Egypt, a donkey would be the mount of choice for Jesus when he entered Jerusalem to complete His mission.

The dramatic tension of the story derives from the methods that the adult Jesus would teach to change people’s lives, with eventual political change as a by product, as opposed to the immediate political change some of His followers hoped for and most of His opponents feared. And it starts in the Nativity when individuals on both sides refer to Him as a King, though they mean different things by that term. Herod the Great was correct to see the birth of Jesus as a threat to his world, however he may have perceived that threat.

The relation of the Nativity as an innocuous story about a baby and some shepherds is alright for small children who cannot grasp the larger political and humanitarian dimensions of the birth of Jesus, but for adults to ignore the story’s radical aspects and still profess an understanding of it borders on cognitive dissonance. The events set in motion by the birth of Jesus and the principles he taught in His later ministry were a radical departure from the politics of His time. Blessed are the meek? The rich have no chance at salvation until they give away all they have? Those were not standard beliefs then, nor are they now, despite what many people profess.

There is no “War on Christmas”, at least not in the way some conservatives formulate it. That is nonsense made up by people who, if they were confronted by the real Jesus today, rather than their Jesus of fable, would be horrified and demand that He be hauled away to prison. Based on what He is quoted as saying in the Gospels, He certainly would not have been there last week on the South Lawn of the White House ghoulishly celebrating the passage of a tax bill that steals from the poor to give to the rich. He would not have sided with evangelical voters who deem the election of any Republican, no matter how cretinous, better than the election of a Democrat. Who are these people to make war on Christmas by celebrating the birth of a baby who preaches war, hate, and intolerance rather than peace, love, and understanding? That story feeds the needs of empire and is on the side of the Romans. That’s not the true Christmas story, and there’s nothing funny about it.
― Ed.

 

I’m Not a Cook, But I Watch Them on TV

 

At a time when cable television shows are promoting cooking, and cooking in superbly designed and equipped kitchens, like never before, Americans are cooking at home less than ever before. In this sense of cooking, throwing a prepared meal from the supermarket into the microwave, oven, or a frying pan does not qualify. Cooking means readying and blending raw or minimally prepared ingredients in such a way as to constitute a full meal. Cooking in this sense refers to how many households prepared dinner, if not breakfast or lunch, forty or fifty years ago.

For dinner at least, the American home cook of 1960 or 1970 visited the grocery store to pick up ingredients in the produce department, usually the meat section, and perhaps the middle aisles for flour, sugar, spices, and canned goods. The home cook of that time rarely picked up things from the frozen food section, and then only basic ingredients like frozen vegetables instead of any of the frozen meals, of which the selection would have been limited anyway. At that time there were only a few cooking shows on television, and those, such as Julia Child’s show, were buried on public television where relatively few people saw them. Home improvement shows with their enormous kitchen remodels hadn’t even shown up yet, and wouldn’t do so in anything like their current form until the 1990s.


African woman working
African woman frying bean cakes at a roadside. Photo by IKoye.

In the years since the 1960s and 1970s, home cooking has dropped off considerably, and at the same time interest has risen in TV cooking shows and home improvement shows that feature enormous, professionally equipped kitchen remodels. It’s comical to watch on television these upper middle class couples with too much money tour homes that have kitchens large enough for the staff of a small restaurant, and which statistics about current trends and your own instincts as a viewer tell you the couple will never need nor use to its full capability, and to see them ooh and aah over it as if it’s perfect for them. These shows seem to be more about fantasy wish fulfillment than realistic expectations, and the same dynamic appears to operate for the cooking shows which have taken over cable television.

At a time when over one billion of the world’s population goes hungry, Americans are enthralled by television shows which detail how to prepare rich and intricate dishes, often with elements of stressful drama added for no reason other than to intensify viewer engagement in an otherwise prosaic process. This is perverse. Few of the viewers will actually attempt to make the dishes themselves, but that is besides the point. It is like the expensive and needlessly over-equipped kitchens on view on the home improvement programs. It is a sort of pornography. Those in the lower classes might wish they could make those fancy dishes in those elaborate kitchens. Those in the middle classes might ponder that with a home equity loan the kitchen would be possible for them, and then what times they would have in it, cooking and entertaining!

Julia Child, the original television cook, demonstrating on her public television show The French Chef that perfection is not always possible, and that’s alright.

The upper classes, of course, find all of this unnecessary, because they have, as they have always had, people to do all of this for them. As long as they can come down to the kitchen at midnight and find the makings for a sandwich on their own, they should be okay with any kitchen, however elaborate. The real target of these television programs, both the debt-inducing kitchen remodels and the guilt-inducing cooking shows, is the middle class, and especially those already in the upper middle class or aspiring to make it to those heights. What’s the point? Spend money, even money you don’t have, to become part of the People Living the Good Life. Eat well, even if you have to pretend to know how to do that. There’s no need for all these cooking shows. A few would suffice. Instruction in cooking for a good life doesn’t need hours upon hours of elaboration and drama; cooking to impress others with your station in life apparently requires whole cable television channels.
― Izzy

 

When We Were Okay

 

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
― Jesus Christ, quoted in the Gospel of Mark, 8:36, King James Version.

For many Americans in the growing lower class and shrinking middle class, the American Dream of their parents and grandparents no longer means the same things or presents the same possibilities. How can it, when they have been either treading water or slipping beneath the waves for over a generation now? In 1971, the middle class was 61 percent of the population, and the lower class was at 25 percent. In 2015, the middle class had slipped to 50 percent, while the lower class had increased to 29 percent. What group had increased it’s numbers the most at the expense of the middle class? The upper class increased from 14 percent in 1971 to 21 percent in 2015. Those numbers reflect population shifts within income groups; the shifts of actual income have been proportionally even greater.

Cass Elliot sang this version of the old standard “Dream a Little Dream of Me” when she was with The Mamas & The Papas in 1968.

We hear a lot lately about American Exceptionalism, as if it was somehow tied in with the American Dream. But that is an unfortunate misconception. American Exceptionalism, as invoked by modern politicians, isn’t much more than the Manifest Destiny of the nineteenth century or the pushy nation meddling and nation building of the twentieth century. We’ve got a lot of crust, telling everybody else what to do and how to live just because we think we’re special. Of course, all that political proselytizing is merely a cover for corporations to grab resources and exploit cheap labor abroad. They don’t “hate us for our freedoms”, they hate us for our hypocrisy and our meddling.

Back home, where we belong, the American Dream is a noble sentiment when it refers to a better life through hard work, education, and civic virtue. According to the Gospels, those are values Jesus Christ spoke of many times. The American Dream has not historically meant “grab all you can and the Devil take the hindmost”. It is truly amazing how many wealthy Americans profess Christian values, yet in their actions do little or nothing to uphold them.
Claude Vignon and Workshop - Croesus showing Solon his treasures
Croesus Showing Solon His Treasures, a painting from the 1630s by Claude Vignon (1593-1670) and his workshop assistants. Croesus was the famously wealthy King of Lydia in the sixth century, BCE, and Solon was a renowned Athenian lawgiver.
Those wealthy hypocrites, the money-changers, are the ones who need their taxes raised to 1950s levels. They are the ones whose overseas tax shelters and corporate headquarters need to be brought back home, where they belong. They are the ones whose profiteering from the military-industrial complex needs to be severely curtailed by bringing the troops back home and closing down the more than 1,000 military installations overseas. Those troops could be put to work in this country repairing infrastructure, and then given a proper GI Bill for their education. There is a long laundry list of other things that need doing to return this country not to when it was “great”, which bespeaks the hubris of the American Exceptionalism that has caused so much trouble for us and the world, but to when the middle class at least was okay, and with a prospect for the lower class of getting better. To start, stop glorifying the wealthy. They don’t need your help, unless it’s to carry their water.

A scene with Harvey Korman and Mel Brooks from Brooks’s 1981 movie History of the World, Part 1, depicts his vision of France before its revolution in the eighteenth century. Twenty first century America is not there yet, but we’re closing in on it. Warning: foul language.
― Vita
Special note: To learn more about this subject, watch the 2015 documentary Requiem for the American Dream, featuring Noam Chomsky, or read his book by the same name.