Things I Say

[Garrett Gilchrist]

A Kanye West Presidency would mean Kim Kardashian as first lady. I hope Al Gore isn't still mad about her breaking the Internet he made.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

The year is 2019. Kanye West is running for President. He is making another long, heartfelt speech when suddenly Taylor Swift storms the stage. “Kanye,” she says, “I respect what you’re doing here and Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé would be the best President of all time! Of all time!”

[Garrett Gilchrist]

The year is 2019. Kanye West is running for President. Mike Myers is filming a benefit piece for the people of New Orleans. Former President George W. Bush takes Myers aside and says “Hey Mike, I’m gonna adlib a little.” Sweat drips from Myers’ brow.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Take me down to the paradox city, where the grass is and isn’t green and the girls are and aren’t pretty.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

The Beatles classic “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” was originally written for Ringo Starr. As Paul McCartney explained, “Ringo, bless his heart, didn’t understand that when you go out in public, you have to wear pants. We explained to him that there are parts of the body that are private and special, and intended for the act of love, and when you’re in public you’ve got to hide that away. We wrote this song for him, and I think it helped him understand. That Ringo is a lot smarter than you’d think.”

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Ringu (The Ring, 1998) is one of several recent Japanese horror films that had to be hastily rewritten when Ringo Starr cancelled a proposed acting tour of Japan. The 2002 American version starred Naomi Watts. This wasn’t the first time Naomi Watts played a character once intended for Ringo Starr on film, as she also played drummer Richard Starkey in A Hard Day’s Night.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Caitlyn Jenner is new to this and has very little experience within the LGBT community. But it's okay, Princess Celestia is sending her to My Little Ponyville to learn about friendship.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

This was my response to an Atlantic article about "Trigger Warnings." Read this first.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=332&start=160#p7703


Trigger warnings, part two:

Ah, the constant drumbeat of youth-shaming. With all due respect, go fuck yourself, Mr. President.

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9326965/ob ... orrectness

We should be concerned that one of the most powerful men in the world is using his vast platform to depict twentysomething adults as infants whose concerns are trivial. To silence those who already lack a voice in the mass media. Think about the power differential here and what he's using it for.

"Listen to the kids."

There is a concerted effort by the media to treat anyone below forty but especially college students as "coddled children," more robot than human, lacking true life experience, and not deserving of the same rights as human beings.

Today's young people have been handed a terrible burden economically and all effort is being made to blame and shame "millennials" for everything they do. They didn't make this mess.

As for trigger warnings, literary works of the past - even the recent past - are full of bigoted nonsense that we need to at least acknowledge rather than absorb uncritically.

I graduated college 10 years ago, but I try to read something of what young people are saying, in particular feminist and LGBT blogs. It changes your perspective on young people from being just a stereotype to individual people who are often sensitive and hoping to build a kinder world.

For a few months a few years ago I lived with an [abusive] family member, and she watched a lot of daytime TV so there was this constant drumbeat of TV aimed at moms which was making fun of the young, demonizing and blaming them. It was so ridiculous. This is abuse - it removes all guilt from seeing the poverty young people are living in today.

It's us vs. them, and young people are always the "them." TIME Magazine showing a baby in a college sweatshirt as their depiction of a modern college student is propaganda, encouraging older readers to not listen to what twentyish people have to say today. It's a stereotype which silences the young.

This media isn't aimed at twentysomethings - It's aimed at older audiences to make them see twentysomethings as something other than human, and ignore their opinions and anything they're struggling with. And very clearly it's worked. Young people are being ignored - and are also our best hope for inserting a progressive voice into our discourse.

People who watch that media are affected by it. People who read these articles are affected by them. And they now treat young people as a threat, and as someone to blame, when this economy has victimized us all in a way which especially makes things hopeless for the young.

For as much as I like Bernie Sanders, he is 74 years old and doesn't know a thing about what, say, a 15-year-old black kid in St. Louis Missouri is going through. He's had to be pushed in that direction. We need to amplify young voices.

Being 34, I see my own generation being treated as infants - anyone under the age of forty! It's ridiculous, and certainly college-age people [twentyish] don't stand a chance of being heard by the media. I've tried to be open to voices that aren't the mass media, reading and listening, and it takes effort to do that.

And much of that effort is overcoming stereotypes about college students being "coddled" infants with no serious life experiences of their own. That stereotype does harm, and keeps us listening to people who are sharing their life experiences via social media as never before. [Including LGBT and minority voices who lack representation in the media to begin with.] As for trigger warnings and so on, an actual examination of times when there has been an outcry from students too often shows that there was a need for that outcry, and that it was reported on in a way which made it seem more trivial than it was.

And if we're talking any literary classic taught in schools, it's important to see these works not as bland history, because both writers wrote about controversial subjects in their own time. It's important to not take the past for granted but rather see what it still has to say in 2015. If these are true classics they can handle the scrutiny. They contain the problematic attitudes of their time, as today's works contain the problematic attitudes of our time. And these attitudes should be questioned and not just absorbed uncritically. We are human beings, not dumb sponges.

I don't doubt at all that things have changed a lot recently. By design, since 2000, the American educational system has failed our students. Now we're expected to blame them for that, and feel that they've failed us. It's a complex issue, but I give my support where it's actually needed -- the powerless (individual students) as opposed to the powerful (media, politicians).

At no point are the offended students interviewed in any of these articles, to explain what they intended by their objections. It's a game of telephone, where the teachers who may or may not have acted inappropriately get all the say, if the articles even bother to interview them. Usually it's just rumor piled on rumor. Every generation of young people has been demonized by the media, as in this 1968 example:

http://outdatedbydesign.blogspot.com/20 ... ganda.html

Look at the comments on this very typical article and realize that it has worked exactly as intended -- on you and on too many Americans.

http://columbiaspectator.com/opinion/20 ... classrooms

College-aged students have virtually no say in the mass media whatsoever. These articles are hearsay, far removed from hearing from the actual students involved, or often even the teachers. There's a lot of "if they said this" or "if this was actually true" ... it's vague rumor, repeated in so many other articles, and concrete enough to inspire hundreds or thousands of comments damning an ENTIRE GENERATION as infants -- exactly what these articles intend.

Direct quote from the article below:
“Grow up, open up, care less about your identity and more about your passions,” wrote one of hundreds of commenters. “Such an insufferable breed of self-centered Care Bears.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... r-warning/

Actually hearing from students would result in a very different response -- which is why no one bothers.

"This entire generation are coddled idiot babies with no respect for the past!"

Have you met the past? Good lord, we have too much respect for the past. We live in a constant rerun. Until that ends we've got no chance of a better future.

At 34 it would be VERY easy for me to fall into ageism against young and old alike and just brush them off. I've caught myself doing it too often. I'm becoming sensitive to it, because it's ridiculous. An entire generation! Who have, like so many generations in the past, already tuned out anyone older because they're not being fucking listened to. Give me names, direct quotes, and facts. Give me the actual point of view of these students, which is always mysteriously missing.

You are buying propaganda intended to demonize an entire generation, its women especially. "People are too sensitive now!" One student objecting to a gleeful discussion of rape is framed as the end of the world, like one student objecting would tear down the instructor, the higher-ups and the entire billion-dollar university. When has that ever happened? When would that ever happen?

Think about the power differential here, for just a second. Think about how these traditions and power structures resist any criticism. That's the point - to demonize those who would offer any criticism and dismiss their concerns as trivial. Rape, racism and problematic attitudes are epidemic in America and our universities are no exception. But instead these articles tell you that if you criticize anything, you're what's wrong with America. If you're young and a woman especially.

"They sued the university over nothing," it's said, without proof. This is never stated from the student's point of view. The students are unnamed, even the professors. It's always a story of someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone. Show me the student's own account, at length, of what happened. You never see that, you just see, I heard from a guy who heard from a guy who heard from this professor that this one chick just went crazy for no reason, objecting to a discussion of rape. You're not supposed to ever know what she was really objecting to. Instead you hear what the professor being objected to said, very probably to protect his own hide. And you're supposed to conclude that an ENTIRE GENERATION of adults are really spoiled babies who deserve no empathy or rights as human beings, and who will destroy this entire culture by objecting to it in any way.

The racism, sexism and bigotry of American culture is not going anywhere, don't worry about that. Because young people who object to it have zero power, and any power they exercise is demonized in the media. Because young people do have power - power in numbers - and the media is terrified of that. It ignores their protests and trivializes complaints about bigotry, sexism and rape culture being reinforced in our universities. We only hear their complaints once they've been scrubbed clean of any meaning and power, and carefully selected or rewritten to make the young look like fools.

We're supposed to be scared of any objection a college student might have to our shitty culture. Watch out! They might object to you next! And then where would you be? Dead! In hell! Because these individual college students are just that scary and powerful.

To repeat: You are buying propaganda intended to demonize an entire generation, its women especially.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

He is a 38-year-old white male from rural Alabama. His parents chose to name him after Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate General and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

He has a serious intellectual disability, to where he is not supposed to attend public school, due to his IQ of 75. People call him stupid, something he rarely acknowledges.

The premise is that he represents every American. Through his eyes we experience four decades of American history. He is football player, soldier and CEO. He is a poor millionaire, a conservative Reaganite hippie. He is very nearly a blank slate.

A decision was made here, that this character could accurately represent America as it was in 1994. A cognitively impaired white male from Alabama, named for the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, something stated outright with the lead actor putting on full KKK robes and riding on horseback with his co-conspirators.

America did not reject this portrayal. The film was massively popular and won Best Picture. Forrest Gump is a good film, a classic even, and I might even call its metaphor accurate, not in spite of the subtext but because of it.

So what does that say about us as a nation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raVFzZZLp3A

P.S. As a white man experiencing forty years of history he suffers from "Marty McFly inventing rock & roll syndrome," where he's doing things that in real life were accomplished by minorities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzws1c0bFtI

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Bad candidates as Beatles songs:

Donald Trump - Get Back
Ron/Rand Paul - I Me Mine
Mike Huckabee - Run For Your Life
Scott Walker - Nowhere Man
Ted Cruz - Happiness Is a Warm Gun
Ben Carson - Revolution #9
Jeb Bush - Piggies
Carly Fiorina - Baby You're a Rich Man (Too)
The Koch Bros - Sexy Sadie