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Friday, April 15, 2016

Judge Landis and Jackie Robinson

My latest post, dealing with Ken Burns's new documentary, appears here.

2 comments:

Energyflow said...

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.de/2016/04/american-narratives-rescue-game.html

It is rare that both of my favorite blogs cover the same territory, in this case racism, in the same week. The rescue game is a scripted role game in interpersonal psychology whereby one group persecutes, the other suffers and a third moderates. Your comment about Jackie Robinson's attitude of judging each man individually is really the only possibility of breaking through such stereotyping of classes. Sadly America and the world are going in the opposite direction. People think of others purely superficially, race, class, regionalism, educationl, sexual or religious roles. This is perhaps due to media dumbing down. I read an article recently which said half americans never read a book and school graduates read at 8th grade level. It was full of horrifying statistics.One could argue that audiovisual media is also an art at which Americans excel, hollywood, etc. Films from Xers are comic book reproductions, literally, as Xers don't read classics. The media plays to the lowest common denominator in intelligence. No child left behind holds everyone at the level of the dumbest child instead of encouraging excellence as my teachers did, lucky me.

It is really not that difficult for example to read difficult texts. I started reading some epic poetry like paradise lost, divine comedy, Iliad, and Aurobindo's Savitri and once one gets used to it, its content and rhythym, it is easy. My recently deceased father could hardly concentrate onTV and film his whole adult life. I presume TV arrived to him when he was pushing 40. A people can be successfully reprogrammed to different, more complicated media and narratives with effort. Unfortunately twitter and sound bite emotionalism, not fact based research dominate.

Assurance-First-Assurance said...

Excellent thoughts, Professor. I did not know this and am glad you published it.