So what, then, should we make of the booing of Michelle Obama at a NASCAR event?  We can look at the video.

To recap, in case you aren’t interested in watching the video: a veteran is introduced, along with his family; his accomplishments as a sniper recounted and he gets applauded; then Mrs. Obama and Jill Biden were introduced; then some booing; then everyone announced, “Start your engines.”

The whole stadium, thankfully, wasn’t booing, but there was clearly a significant number of upset fans.  Unfortunately, we quite literally don’t know what they were upset about. Would there have been booing if Mrs. Obama were white?  Or a man?  Or a Republican? Or would any politician shoehorning in on the tribute to a veteran have gotten booed?  We don’t know.

What has been far more interesting is the reaction of pundits and their interpretation of the boos.  The debate has focused on race: did the fans intend a racial insult or no?  There’s no way of asking the fans what they meant by booing, so the only thing pundits can do is project their own meaning onto the event.

Two friends of mine, Robert and Dan, were tweeting about the event.  Twitter is good for many things, but nuanced debate isn’t one of them.  Dan made a couple of tweets that I’d like to address a bit further. First:

@mikeahub @DCbigpappa it’s inappropriate to boo the first lady for any reason. I don’t care if it’s racial or not.

Dan is utterly right that it’s inappropriate, but whether it’s racial is the whole reason things blew up on Twitter and the blogosphere.  First ladies from Lady Bird Johnson to Hillary Clinton have been booed.  It was wrong then and wrong now.  On first amendment grounds, they have the right to speak.  Common courtesy alone should dictate that we listen politely to what they have to say.  Booing is nearly always the wrong reaction; it’s inarticulate mockery, more worthy of barnyard animals than humans.  It was particularly inappropriate on when Mrs. Obama was ceremonially starting a stock car race.

But since Mrs. Obama is the first black first lady, the question of race comes into many things she does.  You may not care if the booing is racial, but many people do.  Bad manners don’t get tons of commentary, but racism does.

Dan also made a second, rather more inflammatory tweet:

@mikeahub @DCbigpappa how do a group of people claim to be patriotic then publicly disrespect the first lady?

The booing fans are unquestionably guilty of bad manners, but a lack of patriotism? That seems overstated and unprovable. Measuring patriotism is tricky, for the most valiant soldier may have achieved his deeds not through love of country but through love of his own glory; we cannot measure patriotism without God’s abacus.

The booing of Michelle Obama has become a Rorschach test.  What we see in it says more about how we view NASCAR fans than it does about what the NASCAR fans actually think.  Going back to the old political hand, it’s pretty clear that booing politicians at sporting events is relatively common.  We can’t know if the fans are racists, but we can know what you think of them.

***

You can follow me on Twitter, which where this blog post got started. I’m usually much less long winded there for some reason.

[RCMP Inspector] Massie said the incident highlights an important message to drivers: “Speed is fairly unforgiving. Whenever you’re involved in a motor vehicle accident where there’s any speed at all, it’s unforgiving … Slow down, be responsible and understand that speed limits are there for a reason.”

Um, that can’t possibly be the lesson of the story. The story involves a bunch of spoiled brats driving “over 200 km/h” on public streets and behaving, generally, like jackasses, and no one got hurt. The reality is that, given the capabilities of modern automobiles (in engine performance, braking performance, and handling), just about anyone can drive well in excess of most speed limits without dying a fiery death, or causing others do so. I think the message this story actually “highlights” is that if you’re going to drive double the posted limit, don’t do it in a large group, don’t be a jackass to other drivers, and drive something less conspicuous than a Mercedes SLS.

Doyle’s thrust is that Martin is a raging sexist whose female characters are imprisoned by male conceptions of the proper role for women while being under the constant threat of gang rape, all for our entertainment; in short, J.R.R. Tolkien with Joe Francis’s aesthetics.  Martin’s fans (male) fans devour the misogyny and mayhem with neither examination nor scruple.

To be sure, the people of Martin’s Westeros do have traditional gender roles for women.  These women are, moreover, the victims of a nearly endless series physical and sexual assaults, which Doyle summarizes at length.  The summaries are – in fairness to Doyle – quite funny in how they undercut Martin’s penchant for melodrama.  For instance, her summary of Lady Catelyn Stark, a very serious and important character in the series, begins:

Meet Catelyn! She’s a dutiful, obedient wife and mother. Also, her husband is the hero. She will, therefore, be a sympathetic figure. Catelyn’s an all-around swell gal, and seems pretty sharp and competent, too, except when she is (a) getting all hysterical and non-functional because [of] HER CHILDREN, (b) stupidly kidnapping members of the royal family on a whim because HER CHILDREN, and (c) being a total bitchface to Ned’s illegitimate son because he is not HER CHILDREN.

Taken out of context like this, one can make a seemingly-persuasive case that Martin has issues with women. But as Alyssa Rosenberg argues at ThinkProgress, this analysis fails because it assumes 1) that Martin’s description of such a society is an implicit endorsement of it, 2) that his readers are incapable of rudimentary moral examination, and 3) that there is no literary value for writing about characters struggling against (or within) their society’s expectations, to say nothing of their own identities.

It fails for another reason as well, one Rosenberg either missed or left out entirely: that any society with strict gender roles for women is fated to have reciprocally restrictive ones for men.  Indeed, armed with a perspective equally myopic to Doyle’s,  male characters fare no better than the women (spoilers ahead):

Meet Ned!  He’s the Nice Guy hero.  He’s chivalric.  He’s noble.  He’s just.  He cares for his family and has a good marriage.  But you know what happens to him when he’s separated from his wife for the first time in sixteen years? He starts acting like a complete numbskull and gets his head chopped off!

Meet Drogo!  He’s a barbarian.  A manly barbarian. A man’s barbarian, if you will.  He lives in a manly culture whose manly pastime is rape, you know, that’s what men do when they’re manly. It never once occurs to him to even consider the morality of his actions until a plucky 13-year-old lady comes along to point out the blatantly obvious in a way even his man-brain can fathom.

Meet Jaime! He’s handsomer than the good guys, which means he’s also evil.

Meet Tyrion! Yeah, he’s lecherous, but we can like him because he’s not sexually threatening to the female characters we like.

Meet Bran! Also likable because a) not sexually threatening and b) got shoved out a window.

Meet Joffrey! He’s such a mean, sadistic, and misogynist little bastard that even Joss Whedon would be embarrassed to use him as a filler episode’s villain of-the-week. If only Danerys were there to show him the wickedness of his ways!

Meet Jon! He’s actually pretty likable, but he’s also obsessed with exceeding his father’s expectations and proving his step mom wrong.  That’s what being a 16-year-old dude is all about.

Meet Robert! He’s good for killing, drinking, and wenching, but not much else (mostly because he doesn’t listen to his wife).

Meet Gregore Clegane, the Brave Companions, and the Iron Men! Gaaaaah, if only Danerys where there to tell them — as only a girl can, because men are incapable of independent moral reasoning — that rape is bad.

George R. R. Martin doesn’t have a low opinion of women; he has one of people in general, though also a deep and incitement sympathy for them.  That may make him a misanthrope, but certainly no sexist.

If someone were to tell me, “A would-be left-wing president of France is going to be framed in for a rape, who would you like to do the framing?” I would immediately say, “Someone connected to a union.”

I don’t like it when bad things happen; I particularly don’t like it when the force of the law comes down on people who haven’t broken the law. But, everything else being equal, if I would be asked as to who should be framed for a crime and who should be caught doing the framing, this might well be what I’d suggest.

Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.

“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.

“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard” by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.” 

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Baker in Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.

Perhaps all presidents try to manage their supporters, but this certainly fits in with the perception that this president can’t handle being criticized. I don’t like West, but he’s no dummy and he seems to have principles, so berating him like that seems quite unlikely to result in anything positive for the president. Moreover, it’s just rude. The president has a lot of authority, of various types, and no one is ever on even ground when engaging the president in public. To see a president use that advantage to berate a private citizen (and a supporter, at that!), knowing that the private citizen will be unable to adequately respond, should (but won’t) revolt those on the Left who claim to constantly be aware of “power dynamics.” It revolts me, though I’m not a Leftist, just an old-fashioned republican.

I’m glad we no longer have a stupid, bumbling president, otherwise this would be proof of his stupidity and of America’s ignorance of the world.

Aren’t you forgetting a thing or 2? You’ve got them chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Walker has got to go” — but what do they know about Scott Walker? That he’s done something the teachers don’t like. So, maybe some day, when you do something they don’t like, some kid might start “Hey hey, ho ho, [TEACHER'S NAME] has got to go.” Today, you’re pleased to teach them “The children, united, will never be divided.” I’m picturing them repurposing that chant back in the classroom.

This confirms my long-standing observation that while you can’t dismiss a political cause because some jerk brings his kid to a rally, you can go a long way toward that when they start coordinating bringing their kids and teach them sloganeering.

Added: On reflection, I was entirely wrong to say parents shouldn’t bring their children.  Bringing a child to a political rally so they can observe and learn about about our civic process is a laudable thing to do. However, the children depicted in this video are actively participating in the rally, indeed chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” in response to an adult’s call (I sure hope our democracy doesn’t look like a bunch of 3rd graders!).

Now Joseph Epstein takes on Professor Bailey in an oblique look at a new scandal involving the man:

Northwestern University, the school at which I taught for 30 years, has been visited by a delicious little scandal. A tenured professor, teaching a heavily attended undergraduate course on human sexuality, decided to bring in a woman, who, with the aid of what was euphemistically called “a sex toy” (uneuphemistically, it appears to have been an electric dildo), attempted to achieve a climax in the presence of the students. The professor alerted his students about this extraordinary show-and-tell session, and made clear that attendance was voluntary. The standard account has it that 120 or so of the 622 students enrolled in the course showed up. Questions about what they had witnessed, the professor punctiliously noted, would not be on the exam.

The professor, J. Michael Bailey, is a man with a reputation for specializing in the outré. (Northwestern ought perhaps to consider itself fortunate that he didn’t teach a course in Aztec history, or he might have offered a demonstration of human sacrifice.) The word got out about the demonstration he had arranged, journalists quickly got on the case, and Northwestern found itself hugely embarrassed, its officials concerned lest parents think it was offering, at roughly $45,000 a year, the educational equivalent of a stag party.

There’s more—much more—in this piece.  Read to the end to get Epstein’s unvarnished view of the state of American Education.

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” Gingrich told the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Sure, Newt. Sometimes things just happen.

Sometimes you look up at a flagpole and see Old Glory waving in a stiff breeze and that female aide in your office smiles, and the next thing you know, you’re getting your patriotism on.

Obviously, his great love of country will force Gingrich to modify aspects of his as-yet-unannounced presidential campaign.

For example, what’s Newt’s new campaign slogan?

“Newt’s a Yankee Doodle Randy!”

And the soundtrack on the campaign video as Newt and his third first lady walk arm in arm around the Washington Monument?

The theme from the Cialis commercials.

And the joke that the late-night TV comics forgot to write?

“Newt? Is that the Constitution in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

During that interview, former House Speaker Gingrich parsed words almost as carefully as former President Bill Clinton.

[snip]

As a conservative and self-described Clinton despiser, I found it extremely difficult to type the following words. But in the interest of fairness, I must type them.

Gingrich has surpassed Clinton.

Not even the hypocrite Clinton would blame patriotism for those priapic urges fulfilled in the Oval Office with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

We agree.

I think in situations like this one, where an ideological enemy has suffered some sort of downfall, consistent and genuine apathy comes across much better than petty antagonism. Human diversity being what it is, there’s a market for most any point of view on television and the radio (my local talk station is the flagship station for Alex Jones). It’s simply not worthwhile to get worked up about the fact that people you disagree with have shows. Conversely, it’s not worth celebrating when those shows collapse for non-ideological reasons.*

*That is, I’d be slightly happy if Olberman quit his show after announcing that he’d realized he’d always been wrong, was now a conservative, and wanted to take time off to reflect on all this. But Olberman quit his show over money, and I do not care about the financial affairs of people I do not care about.