Public school culture

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Public school culture is an atmosphere fostered in public school,[1] especially in the most liberal of public schools, which is characterized by:

prohibition of classroom prayer sex education, homosexual curriculum and sexual abuse by school personnel has been referred to as a "red-light district" for students [2] a culture of incompetence [3][4] fashion that includes all black clothing (Goth), facial piercings and rings, tattoos, and male earrings depressed demeanors (a so-called "emo" culture amongst some teens) an absence of objective morality; instead, a principal will say someone "made the wrong choice" a sense of hopelessness a lack of critical thinking about liberal indoctrination compulsive profanity general inability to look someone in the eye lewd behavior euphemistically referred to as "PDA" or "Public Display of Affection" [5] racial discrimination resulting from set cliques of racially homogeneous students [6] tolerance of homosexuality due to school-supported and funded groups [7] extreme anxiety feeling that it is funny to be dumb disruptive yelling lack of supervision, class cutting being so accustomed to censorship of ideas that there is genuine surprise when someone actually says something unfamiliar or politically incorrect lack of awareness that prayer is censored in public schools and that teachers' unions are very liberal smoking, alcohol and drug abuse drug testing [8] disrespect for teachers, taking advantage of substitute teachers bullying, hazing, public humiliation gang activity [9], weapon detectors, locker searches lack of proper etiquette and manners glorification of certain groups such as athletic teams and outcast of others bitter hate for rival schools and their students corrupt and abusive teachers and school administrators[10][11][12] censorship of conservative sources of news and information violence and school shootings excessive network abuse complete lack of awareness or involvement by parents rampant cheating by students[13] and teachers[14] cross-dressing - in schools plays, boys wearing girl jeans, powder puff sports, etc. special concessions for certain ethnic groups and religions while Christianity is ignored allowing students to opt-out of saying the Pledge of Allegiance pregnant students being accepted by school officials, and sometimes even pregnancy pacts[15] acceptance and sometimes even encouragement of abortion and birth control a lack of respect for public property and other people's personal property, as seen by vandalism (e.g. defacing and/or inscribing obscenities into desks, lockers, etc.) and high rates of theft disruptive pranks like false fire alarms have caused many schools to implement detection mechanisms such as surveillance cameras and tamper dyes.[16] students impeding traffic by walking on roadways instead of walking on the sidewalk or on the grass going to and from the school bus stop. disrespect for authority figures and high-ranking elected public officials[17] Participation in sports and other activities. Social Development ? Public schools are the government-controlled schools in the United States. In other countries different terms are used to describe the government schools.? Public schools: The new red-light district?, Olivia St. John, World Net Daily, January 09, 2008? POINT: A Call for Action, Rick Norwood, The Mathematical Association of America, Accessed May 4, 2008? John Merrow, Mixed Results for School Reform Efforts in New Orleans. The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS: July 24, 2008? http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0523/p03s01-ussc.html? http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/lifestyle/nearly-all-high-school-cliques-are-racially-divided-study_10025532.html? http://www.gsanetwork.org/? New Jersey School District Random Drug Testing Program Fox News, July 29, 2001? Gangs recruiting at middle schools, Diana Hefley and Kaitlin Manry, Daily Herald, April 27, 2008? "School Says Official Embezzled Millions". Court House News. January 21, 2010.? "National Media Largely Ignore Public-School Sex Scandals" Citizenlink. 01.26.2007.? "Not the Catholic Church? MSM Mum About Huge L.A. School Sex Abuse Scandal". Dave Pierre. NewsBusters. May 19, 2008? http://articles.cnn.com/2002-04-05/us/highschool.cheating_1_plagiarism-cheating-students?_s=PM:fyi? http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992885,00.html? http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/19/eveningnews/main4197525.shtml? http://www.ahs.albany.k12.ny.us/AHS/misc/Hall_Sweeps_October_2008.pdf? http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/emma-sullivans-potty-mouthed-tweet-has-a-lesson-for-all-of-us/2011/11/29/gIQAG6CEAO_story.html

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Rubio: Republicans are 'primarily' to blame for culture of dependency

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Thursday said his party was “primarily” responsible for the culture of dependency on the federal government in the United States.

Rubio was discussing the Gang of Eight immigration bill on "The Rush Limbaugh Show," when Limbaugh said he didn’t understand the argument that Hispanics were a natural Republican constituency because a poll showed that 70 percent of Hispanics believe “that government is the primary source of prosperity.”

“I'd say that's a growing problem in America in general,” Rubio said. “I think we have a growing problem in this country that too many people have forgotten what the true sense of prosperity is … and let me tell you who I blame for that first and foremost. I blame that primarily, quite frankly, on decisions made by the Republican Party in the past to embrace crony capitalism and corporate welfare as conservatism, when, in fact, that's not what we're about.”

Rubio didn’t identify any specific members of his party, but referenced “multiple candidates” who campaigned as small-government conservatives and later governed as big-government liberals.

That comment seemed at least partially directed at former President George W. Bush.

“I also think that while we've had multiple candidates in the past that have campaigned as limited-government conservatives ... until it's their government program that they're trying to protect, or what have you,” he said. “So I don't think necessarily Republicans have always governed as the limited-government movement and the result is you see this kind of confusion in the American electorate about what the source of prosperity is.”

Rubio said the party needed to do a better job of explaining that “free enterprise is the only way to consistently create the kind of growth and opportunity that America's always been identified with.”

“We are about upward mobility,” he said. “We're about the true free enterprise system. We're not about big companies being able to use the federal government to create rules and regulations that make it harder on their competitors.”

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On International Women’s Day, Five Women In Pop Culture I’m Thankful For

It’s International Women’s Day, an occasion that often focuses on human rights and gender issues around the world. But I wanted to take today to remember that pop culture is a global enterprise, and women are doing amazing work as actors, directors, and writers all over the globe. Hollywood is such an international environment that I think we don’t always acknowledge the debts we owe to countries ranging from New Zealand to Malaysia. So today, here are five women in pop culture who make me thankful for the international community of film and television:

1. Jane Campion: This New Zealand-born writer and director is one of the fiercest champions for women’s stories out there, particularly ones that don’t fit neatly into romantic comedy story arcs or bandage dresses. The Piano, her story about a mute artist who is effectively sold off in marriage and shipped to the New Zealand frontier, is probably Campion’s most important work. But her new mini-series, detective story Top of The Lake, which premieres on the Sundance Channel on March 18, is a fascinating, twisty story, featuring Mad Men‘s Elisabeth Moss as a cop investigating a sex crime in a remote region where a colony of feminists is set to collide with the local culture.

2. Gurinder Chadha: One of the best stories about female athletes in recent years? Check. One of the best Jane Austen modernizations in recent years? Check. With movies like Bend It Like Beckham and Bride & Prejudice, Chadha, born in Nairobi to Sikh parents who were part of the Indian diaspora, and settled in the UK, has painted vivid portraits of immigrants and explored how culture survives outside its point of origin. And she’s done so while being funny, wildly romantic, and narratively rich.

3. Michelle Yeoh: News that we might finally get a sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that focuses on Yeoh’s character Yu Shu Lien is a welcome chance to celebrate this incredible, athletic Malaysian actress yet again. Famous for doing her own stunts, Yeoh also was a bright spot in the Pierce Brosnan years as one of the few characters to actually qualify as a Bond Woman, rather than an arm-candy Bond Girl, and recently turned in a fantastic performance as Aung San Suu Kyi in The Lady. Yeoh’s a constant reminder that women deserve better as characters, and as action stars, not least because she raises the ceiling on what everyone in her genre is capable of.

4. Salma Hayek: Born in Mexico and now a naturalized United States citizen, Hayek isn’t just a versatile actress who can segue easily between comedy and drama, and fim and television. She’s a producer who gave us Ugly Betty, one of very few shows about immigrant families, working-class neighborhoods in New York, and what it takes to actually break into the glamorous jobs in fashion and journalism so much other pop culture took for granted. And when she’s not making great pop culture, Hayek’s an advocate against domestic violence—she’s testified in support of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act—and for immigrants.

5. Emma Thompson: What more needs to be said about the British actress and screenwriter who’s transitioned from romantic comedy heroine (and great Shakespearean actress) to one of the few women who can still act and not be a joke or a sidshow at middle age, who turned in the never-to-be-topped performance as a veiled Hillary Clinton in Primary Colors, who gave us the brilliant adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, who gave Sybill Trelawney dignity in the Harry Potter movies, and who reminds us how much we all love Joni Mitchell?

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Marlo Thomas On Making ‘That Girl’ Feminist TV, PBS’s ‘Makers,’ And Where Pop Culture Goes Next

Last night, PBS aired Makers, a documentary about the history of the feminist movement, exploring everything from the relationship between women’s liberation and the struggles for black and gay civil rights to the rise of the eighties power tie as women entered previously male-dominated professional fields. While some of the subjects may be familiar to those of us who ended up in women’s studies classes at some point, Makers is a reminder of how much feminist history has been forgotten or obscured over the years, starting with the rumors of bra-burning at the Miss America protests. Because part of the goal of Makers was to spark discussions about the state of feminism today, I spoke with one of the subjects whose work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the portrayal and employment of women in popular culture: Marlo Thomas.

As the star of the groundbreaking sitcom That Girl, Thomas fought to preserve the integrity of the show’s portrayal of a single woman’s life—and to hire more female writers. And as the creator of Free To Be You And Me, the book, album, and television special for children that challenged pre-existing notions of gender norms, Thomas fought to give children entertainment that would change the way they saw their possible futures. We spoke during the Television Critics Association press tour in January about the evolution of sitcom roles for women, Brave and princess myths, and the struggles women—and men—face to have it all. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m excited to talk to you in part because my first job as a critic was when I was eight years old for my local paper—I wrote children’s books.

You were a critic at eight years old? How cute!

I was, my author photo has me in little pink glasses and the world’s largest lace collar. I was proof that women, even at eight years old, aren’t paid enough. I was paid in five-dollar gift certificates to the local bookstore. So I was really curious to talk to you because Free To Be You And Me was inspired by the lack of good books for boys and girls alike. What do you think about the rise of young adult fiction? It seems to me that there are many more options for young female readers today. Have we made enough progress if what young girls get offered is Twilight?

Well, you know, far be it for me to tell people what to write. I must say that after we did Free To Be You And Me, and its phenomenal success, and its continued success, I’m surprised that more and more people aren’t writing about that. I saw the movie Brave, which is taken right from Atalanta [a princess story from Free To Be You And Me], which is exciting to me. And I just wish more people would follow, not just follow the path, but find the path to children’s imaginations that is going to open up their horizons and their minds. It just seems that—my husband has two grandchildren, they’re now 16 and 17, the girl is 16—and I’ve noticed with her stuff, it’s all princesses, and the boy’s stuff is all violence. All violent games from the GameBoy on up. And I look at it, and I try very hard to bring other things in, but that’s what all their friends are reading, and watching, and playing. I’m disappointed, I really am. Somebody, some book company has to make it their job, or part of their imprint, part of their conscientiousness to say “Why aren’t we putting out books that do this?” The Free To Be You And Me classic, when it came ou,t there was nothing like it. We’ve already paved the way. Why doesn’t someone pick it up? I can’t do it all.

I think you’re describing two different challenges. It’s hard to ask individuals to take on all the work for anyone else. And you mentioned the persistence of the pricness myth. I felt conflicted about Brave. I like that she’s a different kind of princess, but the victory at the end is that she gets to choose her own husband, who will still be dyanstically important. A princess is still a princess.

Right. But it’s just that she was athletic, and she ran, and she took some action. That’s a big difference from the other princess, from Cinderella. But it’s true. In our princess story, Atlanta at the end decides not to marry, and go off to explore lands. We were feminists writing that. I don’t know that the people from Brave got our whole message, though they took a lot of it…I don’t know, it’s sort of a surrendering to a happy ending, or what you consider to be a happy ending. When I was doing That Girl, they wanted me to have a wedding at the end of the series. And I refused. I refused to have a wedding, to have her get married at the end of the show. And they said “It’ll be great! It’ll get huge ratings.” And I said, “But then I’m copping out to every girl who loved this show…This was the first girl to say “I don’t want to get married, I want to work. I want to have a career. I want to live in my own apartment.” All of those things. And the mail was extraordinary about girls wanting to be just like her, and grandmothers saying “Don’t marry Donald!” They really were very invested in this single girl. The idea of betraying them at the end of the show and getting married just seemed like a true betrayal. I wouldn’t do it. Even that, Clairol was the sponsor, and they wanted a wedding, and ABC wanted a wedding, the producers wanted a wedding. It took a feminist to say “No, no wedding!”

Well what struck me about that story, and the story you told about the executive who looked at you like you were speaking Swahili when you talked about putting a woman at the center of the stage, is that we’re still at a point where there are not a lot of women with the power to say no in television production. We have Shonda Rhimes, who can do whatever she wants—

Tina Fey, Lena Dunham. There a lot of them. When I was producing my show, there wasn’t anyone except Lucille Ball. Now there’s a lot of women doing their own shows…Those are the ones who produce their own shows and they star in them. Roseanne Barr did that. And I don’t know who else. Laura Dern is one of the producers on her show. But certainly not to the extent that men are.

Women are something like 23 percent of television writers. We’ve gotten to a place where people understand that more women watch television than men, and there are more stories about women, but a lot of those stories are still controlled by men. Men run 2 Broke Girls. Men are the majority in the writers’ room on Whitney, which was created by Whitney Cummings. Do you think women have become something it’s possible to profit off with any real attention to telling women’s stories from a woman’s perspective?

Well, I think if a woman creates a show, as you just said, 2 Broke Girls, why did she step back?…You have the power, it’s there for you to take. My show, the first year it was on the air, it was all men producers. And after the first season—I had hired the producers, it was my show—I said, “I have to have a female story editor.” There weren’t a lot of female comedy writers. There were two. Carol Burnett had one and Lucille Ball had one. And there were a couple that were in teams, male-female teams, and we used them. But I said “I need a female story editor to help me, because I’m combatting every week, these guys, about what a girl would do, what a girl would not do.” I was constantly saying “A girl would not say that to her father. A girl would not say that. She’d be more diplomatic about this. She doesn’t want to hurt her father’s feelings if she wins the battle. She’s not going to rub his nose in it. That’s not the way girls compete with their fathers.” It was a constant thing. Or, “I don’t think it’s funny to make fun of how Ruth Buzzi looks. I don’t want a joke about an ugly girl. I don’t want to do that joke.” “Oh no, it’s hilarious.” I said “No, it’s not hiilarious. Girls don’t find that funny.” So I said I have to have a female editor. So we found this woman, and believe me, it wasn’t easy, Ruth Brooks Flippen was her name. And she came in and was the story editor for the rest of the series. But, this woman, who you said created two shows and went off and just produced one. She could have said there’s another woman I really would like to produce this. Or here’s two women I want to put on staff. Because if you don’t have some women on the staff, you aren’t going to get a woman’s consciousness into the story. You’re just not…It’s the right thing to do. It’s a smart thing to do. But you’ve got to take the power when you have it. You have to use the power when you have it. Not that many women have power, but when they do, they really have to share it.

I think that’s one of the things that’s been difficult for women in the industry. Melissa Rosenberg, who’s running Red Widow, made sure her writers’ room was half male and half female, and that there were parents because she doesn’t have children and her main character does. I struggle with asking these writers what their obligations are to hire more women.

Maybe that’s not the right question. I don’t feel an obligation. I think it should be more, do you think a show would be a little better if it had more of a female consciousness on it? Or since your show is about women, wouldn’t it be better to have some more women? That may be a better way into it…It’s really about the responsibility to the show, not to women, but to the story. It’s really about whose story you’re going to tell. If it’s a story of a woman, a girl, a woman, and it’s her point of view, you’re going to have to have quite a few women on the show to do it otherwise. It’s not possible to do it otherwise. You can’t leave it to Judd Apatow to figure out what girls do when they’re broke and trying to make it living in the world. It’s going to be different.

You said it was difficult to find your story editor. Were you able to find more women to write for the show as time went by?

We did. We found more writers. But they were few, and they were mostly teams. There was Treva Silverman, who still is a wonderful writer, and we used her. There were so women, but there weren’t a lot of comedy writers in the sixties and seventies.

The women you found, where did you find them?

Well, you looked for them. You called agents and said “What comedy writers do you have that are women? We’re looking for women to write for That Girl.” We’d go to the writers’ agents. Someone would see a name on somebody else’s show and say this stuff’s really good. But when you put out a call like that to agents, agents can’t wait to get jobs for their writers. You say “Send us samples of your women writers.” And most of them were teams with guys.

That still seems to be the case today. I think half the women who sold shows for the new pilot season sold them as part of teams with men.

I don’t know why that is. You’d have to ask them. You’d have to interview every one of them. It would be really interesting to find out why. Is it because of child caring? Needing time?

It certainly seems like childcare and the hours are big issues for women. If your’e going to run a writers’ room, as people do, where you break story for twenty hours in a row, people have to go home from that because the nanny has to go home. It’s not a regularized profession.

I don’t know that I ever worked with a writing team that were two women. I’ve never worked with them, and I’ve worked with millions of teams, and I’ve never worked with a team that was two women. I mean, I don’t think Norman Lear had a lot of women on his staff, and he had Maude, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. It would be interesting to know how many female writers Maude had.

It seems to me in certain ways like television has become more conservative for women. Any time someone gets pregnant, they either have the baby and it’s the best decision in the world, or they have a miscarriage. I think we’ve had two abortions on television in five years.

But you’ve got a lot of women as cops, a lot of women who are not domesticated. That, I think, is the big step. When I started with That Girl, women were in the house. There weren’t any Mary Tyler Moores or Murphy Browns. That’s what they were: they were somebody’s secretary, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife. So, and as you look at it through the years, I look at situation comedy as a graph, from That Girl, to Kate and Ally, which was huge, to have two single women raising children, and then Roseanne, a mother who kind of hated her children and screamed at them, a female Jackie Gleeson, and then Murphy Brown, unwed, a drunk, screams at her staff. I mean, huge! When you think from That Girl to that…Every person That Girl met or Mary Richards met loved her. The mailman loved her. All the way to Roseanne and then to Murphy, that’s a huge graph.

It certainly seems like we’ve won the right not to be likable on television.

Right. Lena Dunham, she, I read an interview of hers saying “Why do women have to be likeable?” I thought, good for her! You have to defend your character, but you don’t have to make her likable. And if that’s what you want your show to be about, at least you can do that now. You couldn’t do that before. So that’s a huge step. So I htink maybe in situation comedy women are doing better. I mean, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler. I mean, they’re great. And they’re producing their own shows, both of them, and writing them. I know more about situation comedy than I do about the graph of the drama, except I know there are a lot of policewomen, and women with authority, and judges, a lawyer and a judge on Law and Order, there’s more of that.

One thing I thought was interesting that you mentioned in the panel today was the myth of what feminism was about. One thing women my age have struggled with is there are so many options, so what do you choose? And can you choose wrong? I thought that was one of the interesting things that came up at the end of the documentary.

I think it’s rather luxurious to say, “I just have so many choices, I don’t know what to choose.” I’d like to whack you around the room for that. I mean, my goodness. I don’t mean you. I mean any woman who feels “Oh, dear, I have too many options.” It’s like saying “I can buy any dress I want, I just can’t decide which dress I want to buy.” If you have that many choices, a bountiful, bountiful table, then look at it, and what suits you? What do you want? And go after what you want. I think that’s a problem with a lot of people in any age group. If you don’t know what you want, any road will take you there. You’re obviously a young woman who, since you were eight years old, was critiquing things, and I just adore that in your, that at eight years old with your little pink glasses, you were deciding what’s a good children’s book, and today, you’re critiquing with an intelligence that has evolved from having the experience of doing it. I think, wow, what a choice you made? I’m sure along the way, something else interested you.

I did a lot of political work.

So you could be doing that right now. You could be soembody’s campaign manager, you could be on somebody’s staff, you could be running yourself, you could be on City Council. You looked at the world and you said this is the thing I want to do, and your’e doing that. I have to say, look at yourself and take a grip. How many women in the world, how many women in Mali, how many women in Afghanistan have choices? They can’t even go to school. I don’t have patience with anyone who has so many choices they don’t know what to choose.

It’s what we refer to as a First World Problem.

That’s exactly right. God, I wish that were true for every young boy and girl.

Do you think women get trapped by the perceived obligation to have it all?

Women can’t have it all any more than men can have it all….If having it all means, and it seems to mean that you’re married, and you have children, and you have work you love, that can only be done if both people have it all. If you don’t change the domestic arrangement, nothing’s going to happen. Nothing can happen for men, women, or children if we don’t change the domestic arrangement…I had a mother at home and a father who traveled all the time. I could have been better served by a father who was home more often and a mother and father who shared things more equally. My mother was the complete enforcer and my father was the nice man who came home and gave us presents. It was a complete fantasy of what parenting was about.

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The Obscuring of Black Culture, Or Why I Hate The Fake ‘Harlem Shake’ Meme

The pretender in action

I was confused, and somewhat excited, earlier this week when I first saw a link to a video that purported that the Norwegian Army was captured on video doing the Harlem Shake. Memories flooded back to my time in high school in Flint, MI, and watching my classmates pull off the moves associated with the dance in the darkness of the gym. I clicked, curious to see how a dance associated with Harlem had made its way to Norway after all these years.

That hint of excitement soon gave way to disappointment. Expecting the smooth choreography that I had known, what I was greeted with was a mass of flailing to an electonica song I’d never heard before. The song wasn’t the issue, called “Harlem Shake” and released by Harry Rodrigues, also known as the producer Baauer, last year. No, my problem was with the dancing itself. No unity, no precision, no sense that anything was going on other than pure chaos hiding under the label of a dance that’s existed for years.

That disappointment in turn gave way to dismay when I realized that the Norwegian video was by no means a fluke, but instead just one entry in what has become a meme of global proportions. That meme reached what I can only hope is its breaking point as the anti-debt group “The Can Kicks Back” posted their own version of the video, showing former Former Comptroller General David Walker and former Office of Management and Budget Director Alice Rivlin taking part:

If that truly is the death knell of this meme, I certainly will not miss it once it’s gone.

At first, I was willing to keep my complaints to myself, thinking I was being a buzzkill to the people in the videos who are clearly having a good time filming them for whatever audience they hope to achieve. It soon became clear to me that I wasn’t alone in my annoyance. The Root took a look at the history of the original Harlem Shake in a piece documenting the rise of the meme to the detriment of the classic dance:

Al B, a man who used to dance during breaks at the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic at Rucker Park in Harlem beginning in 1981, has gotten much of the Internet credit for inventing the original Harlem Shake, a dance characterized by wild jerking of the arms and upper body. At one point, it was referred to as the “Albee.”

In a barely comprehensible 2003 interview with basketball website InsideHoops.com, Al B says the dance originated with mummies in Egypt, who shook because they didn’t have freedom to use their limbs. “It was a drunken dance, you know, from the mummies, in the tombs,” he asserted. “That’s what the mummies used to do. They was all wrapped up and taped up. So they couldn’t really move, all they could do was shake.”

VICE also published a piece yesterday by Drew Millard taking the Internet to task for spreading the new meme without recognizing the original Harlem Shake’s cultural significance:

Whenever I look at an Internet full of (mostly) white people doing a bastardized version of a dance that has the same name as another dance (and lest we forget, is named after fucking Harlem), and they’re doing that dance to Trap, a style of EDM that took the name (and some sonic signifiers) of an already-existent style of hip-hop that had a very specific set of sociopolitical implications, and people aren’t finding it at least a little problematic, it makes me feels like I’m taking crazy pills.

The Root article went on to point out that “though the co-opting happened quite by accident, the damage may already be irreversible, as it has been all but stripped of its cultural context and meaning.” Both Millar and The Root are right to be looking at this trend through the lens of race. The Harlem Shake is just the latest data point when it comes to the appropriation of black culture — especially music — and the white-washing that takes place once its conquered.

In the 1950s, rock and roll songs like “Tutti Fruitti” were made acceptable to the mainstream through artists like Pat Boone, depriving their originators of both credit and compensation. While the Harlem Shake entering the consciousness of the mainstream doesn’t have that same stigma of deliberate obscuring of black performers, it definitely helps bury the memory of just where the name came from and what it means to a certain segment of population.

Case in point: when searching on Google for “Harlem Shake” today, only one link is to a page not talking solely about the meme, a Vulture collection of music videos from the early to mid-2000s featuring the dance, hoping to preserve its memory. At a time in the world when the primary way of learning about new information comes via a quick Google, this is paramount to a destruction of history.

There are certainly times when the leaking of black culture into the mainstream produces a synergy that in some ways exceeds the previous product. The introduction of jazz, rock and roll, and rap into the mainstream by white artists eventually helped promote black artists and propel them into the public consciousness in a way that may not have been possible otherwise, resulting in a better product that was able to reach more people.

That clearly is not what’s happening here, though. Jadakiss and Eve weren’t exactly flying below the public’s radar in 2001 when they helped popularize the dance. Instead, the dilution promoted by this meme does nothing to advance the music, the dance, or the culture of the original. I’m highly doubtful that there’s anyone out there who would be willing to look me in the eye and tell me that this is a better piece of performance than this.

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Stop Complaining About “The Masses,” and “Middle American” Tastes In Pop Culture

Over at NPR, Linda Holmes has a lovely post about the fallacies of pretending that “the masses” or “Middle America” are some sort of homogenous block of cultural consumers, or that “the lowest common denominator” is something we should have contempt for, rather than embrace:

I’ve always found the lowest common denominator kind of a cozy concept, particularly because you kind of do it by feel — it’s a translator that lets you take two things that seem to be vibrating on different frequencies and unlock them so they can fit together instead of bumping into each other.

But somehow in culture, “lowest common denominator” has become a way to describe not what’s unifying but what’s worst, as if we all come together where we are awful and stupid. In fact, when we do all come together in large numbers, it’s usually not where we are awful and stupid, particularly not because we are awful and stupid. We come together where there’s enough commonality to let people talk to each other about the same thing. How did that become a slam, unless we assume that the purpose of culture, and of our own tastes, is to efficiently separate those who favor wheat from those who are more into chaff?

The lowest common denominator on a huge scale, in fact, is probably something like The Avengers or the Oscars or the Super Bowl, none of which is embraced for its scandalous or scatological qualities, but all of which are popular simply because lots of people think it’s fun to watch them. And as silly as those things are, their commonality is actually their most redeeming quality — that it’s the lowest common denominator across surprisingly diverse populations is the best thing about the Super Bowl, not the worst. It’s certainly the best thing about the Oscars.

To paraphrase some of the rest of the piece, we watch Community in red states and worship at the altar of Mark Harmon in NCIS in blue states.

I have to say, I wonder if some of this divide comes from shifts in business models that have divided both television and movies into things with massive audiences and tiny audiences, without much space in between. In movies, we’ve increasingly got tentpoles, many of which are genre movies—which face an inherent critical bias and are siloed into “low” culture no matter how self-serious they get—and smaller independent or foreign films, with smart, adult, not very expensive movies vanishing from the scene. 2012 felt like a rare movie-going year in part because there were a number of mass hits, like Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Django Unchained that have both done good or pretty good box office and have received good reviews and been the subject of spirited intellectual debates. The things among our common denominators weren’t inherently the lowest. But I do understand how, if you’re a devotee of those $30 million movies that are vanishing, or if it’s becoming harder for you to find independent and foreign films in theaters and they’re slow to make it to video on demand or to streaming, you might feel a certain amount of resentment. It’s not just that other people want and support other things—it’s that it feels harder to get what you want.

The same is true in television, where there remain some massive hits like Dancing With The Stars, NCIS or The Big Bang Theory, but where the ratings for new comedies in particular have quickly shrunk to the point of invisibility. Watching the struggle of something like Community to stay alive, I don’t blame people for being frustrated that more people aren’t tuning in. But the truth is that something like Community, or Happy Endings, or even 30 Rock, all the self-aware, self-referential, pop-culture examining comedies out there—they have an inherent audience ceiling. And that’s totally okay! One of the blessings of a diversified media environment is that networks will create and keep running weird shows with wacky premises and strange-but-endearing characters long after they would have been nuked in a previous era of television. What fans of those shows want is less for everyone to suddenly ditch Leroy Jethro Gibbs and discover the joys of Dean Pelton, and more for NBC to find a way to make money on its wonderful little curiosities, whether it’s an adjustment to the Nielsen ratings that gets advertisers excited about more delayed watching, or richer syndication deals with Hulu and Netflix.

In other words, if folks are still turning up their noses at what “Middle America” watches when Dan Harmon gets his eleventy-billion new shows on the air in coming seasons, the heck with ‘em. But if folks are upset about what’s getting mass audiences because they’re afraid it threatens what they like, I have more sympathy for people’s desire to get their hands on and provide support to content than they love.

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Five Pop Culture New Year’s Resolutions For 2013

It’s a new year, and that means a whole lot of new popular culture, whether it’s a crop of television shows centered on female characters, like FX’s The Americans or Showtime’s Masters and Johnson, the continuation of promising franchises like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness, or even just news on who will be directing the new Star Wars movies and potentially starring as Carol Danvers in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But every year, I like to take some time out to explore things that are missing pieces in my own spotty pop-culture education, that give context to the larger trends that are emerging in film and television, or that I simply didn’t get a chance to catch in the previous year. These are my 2013 pop culture New Year’s resolutions. I’d love to hear yours in comments:

1. Finish Homicide: Life On The Street and Twin Peaks: I got through a chunk of Homicide in 2011, and the first season of Twin Peaks last year. And I can’t stop thinking about either one of them. I’m looking forward to finishing both for the simple pleasure of watching them, and for all the things I know that watching them will let me see in the rest of pop culture.

2. Read all of the competitors in the 2013 Tournament of Books: Judging the 2012 Tournament of Books, a competition that puts all kinds of novels, written in all kinds of styles, up against each other, was one of the most fun things I did last year. This year, I’ll just be an observer as a group of talented critics tries to sort between everything from the pulp of Gone Girl to the interrogations of Bring Up The Bodies. But I’m excited to catch up with the books I haven’t read, including HHhH, The Round House, The Fault In Our Stars, Arcadia, May We Be Forgiven, Ivyland, Dear Life, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Beautiful Ruins, and perhaps most of all, Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

3. Seven Samurai. Yojimbo. Ran. Throne of Blood. I don’t know enough about Asian cinema, or about Westerns, either. So it’s time to get my Akira Kurosawa on. I’m going to start with these four movies. And I’d love your recommendations for where to go once I’m done with those.

4. Watch Hatufim: Whether you think Homeland jumped the shark this season or gained adrenaline as it ramped up to the major terrorist attack that ended this season, the show is guaranteed to remain a key part of the prestige television landscape—and shows based on Israeli programs look to become an even more important part of the network television mix. I want to go back and see where Homeland came from and watch Hatufim, the Israeli show it’s loosely based on, especially as Gideon Raff starts work on American television shows in conjunction with Homeland‘s creators.

5. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl: One of the most common complaints about Hollywood today is that it’s hamstrung by commercial concerns, chasing movies that will make hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than ones that will recoup modest gains but make more important points. But I’m curious about what kinds of movies couldn’t get made when there was a genuine blacklist. So I’m going to spend some time this year with the movies Louise Brooks made in Europe when it was difficult for her to work in the United States.

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