August 01, 2007
and on the 8th day, the buddha awoke
8/1/07
If you're fresh out of people to hate, how about hating on someone who is recently dead: may I present Norma Frickin' Gabler.
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This unassuming housewife, who looks exactly like one of Gary Larson's old ladies from "The Far Side" cartoons, fought for "accuracy" in school textbooks, and indeed, made a cottage industry out of finding errors in our nation's schoolrooms. She was also a right-wing, Jesus-obsessed, racist homophobe who fought tirelessly to dumb-down every book you ever studied. Among her victories was to ensure that marriage was defined as a lifelong bond between a man and a woman - and she had the entire publishing industry by the nutsack.
Let me explain. Texas OWNS the schoolbook industry. Every textbook writer in the country wants to land the coveted Texas account, because if one school in Texas holds 'em, they all have to. My family knows this from personal experience, writing music books for Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Silver Burdett - if you didn't land Texas, you might as well de-grease the mats at Denny's.
That's why all of you were forced to learn "Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Deep in the Heart of Texas" when you were kids, even if you grew up in Minnesota; the concessions made to please the Texans gave them enormous sway on textbook content. My mom even had to do half her recordings down there in a shitty studio, mostly just so she could say she did it.
Enter Norma Gabler in 1961. After being offended by one of her son's schoolbooks in a backwater town near Dallas, she and her husband went on a 40-year crusade to "clean up" all texts via the Texas legislature. They objected to stories by Edgar Allan Poe because they were too gruesome, pushed for perceived weaknesses with evolution, forced "Under God" to be inserted wherever possible, tried to shove morality lessons down the gullets of unsuspecting 4th graders, and they were such freakazoid free-market buttwenches that they actually argued Robin Hood was not a hero, but a dangerous advocate of income redistribution.
Of course, their evangelist freakshow was given gravitas by their ability to ferret out typos and historical inaccuracies, something they did with equal fervor. But if you've ever wondered why your school textbooks from the '70s through the '90s were so terrible, Norma Gabler's your huckleberry. And since she had such sway over the Texas legislature, it meant she had sway over every school textbook published in the United States, which meant she had sway over you.
Progressives just don't get how much energy is needed to counteract these people, and those that bother always manage to get "kookified" by the right. You're trying to get Nebraska to let a 10th-grade sociology textbook leave the door open for gay marriage? You're a goddamn kook, and you probably like little boys, too.
Conservatives from the Reagan era onwards were brilliant: first, they vilified the word "liberal," then they resurrected the term "Political Correctness," then they trumped up a devastating backlash to political correctness itself. The next time anyone says you're being "too PC" or preface a comment with "I'm sorry it's not politically correct...", please, please tell them to go fuck themselves.
Until homosexuals are granted the same coupling rights as the rest of us, until women are paid the same, until someone gives a shit about the minority underclass, and until this country HAS ANY REMOTE HOPE AT EQUALITY, political correctness, in all its messy and imprecise glory, should not only be tolerated, but exalted.
You got a joke about Mexicans? You know the one about the black guy's last meal in prison? How about one about the slut where you get to say the "c-word"? I have a better idea: why I don't I just slam your nuts in a car door? Your Hispanic nanny, the guy on death row in Mississippi and that flight attendant you harassed will think that's SO MUCH FUNNIER!
Tessa and I are as white as can be, two heterosexuals in love, with an awesome daughter. Most of Bush's devastating financial policies actually benefit us. This is why it is morally incumbent on us to say something about how WRONG everything is going. We have no dog in the fight, no special interest, no personal crusade other than to see some of our best friends become less marginalized, and to give Lucy a fair shot at growing up in a country that doesn't make us all wince in abject embarrassment and clockwork horror.
If we're not moving to France, or Iceland, or Canada, then we have to stay here and be unrelentingly annoying. The backlash backlash has begun, thank god. Norma Gabler is dead.
It's Dolores Jane Umbridge!
Dude don't move to any of those countries--you can end up doing this:
Here we go . . . it's been a while since Ian foamed at the mouth. He and Tessa must be working very hard and buring a lot of midnight oil on their projects for Ian to have fallen off such a deep end.
I actually googled Norma Gabler and she is a bit off the beaten path, shall we say. But, Ian is not being 100% fair either. Yes, her 1st effort involved inserting the words "under God" into a textbook -- for an assignment where her son was instructed to memorize the Gettysburg address but Lincoln's words "under God" had been specifically deleted from the current textbook. Ian describes this effort as Norma "having been offended by one of her son's textbooks", but I do not know if this description is entirely accurate.
Another famous effort was in 1973 when a history textbook literally devoted more space to Marilyn Monroe than to George Washington.
"Ferrett out factual errors" -- In 2001, Time magazine reported that Norma's scroll of shame (list of factual errors) was 54 feet long. The State of Texas find textbook publishers $1,000,000 for failing to remove hundreds of factual errors in 11 history books.
She also dared to ask that the theory of evolution be presented as a . . . THEORY. Shocking.
Now, having sung some of her praises, was she also a bit kooky? Damn straight. Just goes to show there is sweet and sour in everyone, from the wacky right and the loony left.
She also dared to insist that marriage be defined as a man and a woman. I personally don't give a rat's butt about this issue and prefer to let my affection for the 10th Amendment carry the day: let each state decide their own definition of marriage. (Wait, a lot of states did that in 2004 and the results were not so hot for folks looking to expand the definition.)
"Bush's devastating financial policies", Ian? Federal tax revenues are WAY UP after the Bush Tax cuts, federal spending is WAY WAY WAY UP (much to my chagrin) and ALL ecomomic indicators point to a robust ecomony. Ian, please give me a link to an analysis of the "devastating financial policies."
To give Ian credit, he is largely accurate regarding the power of Texas in the textbook industry.Wage gap is an urban legend, but who wants to be confused with facts? The "76 cents for every dollar" statistic is misleading because it creates the illusion that women are making 76 percent of men for the same number of hours worked. Women earn 76 percent of what men earn but for working roughly 84 percent (not 100 percent) of the hours that men work.
If we use wages based on an equal number of hours worked (rather than gross income) over half of the gender difference between men and women disappears.
So, going by wages for equal hours worked women are up to earning roughly 90 percent (76 percent divided by 84 percent) of what men earn. What else are we leaving out?
Plenty. Men earn more money than women because:
1) Men do the dangerous jobs. Every year between 6,000 and 10,000 people are killed in work related accidents in the United States - roughly 95 percent of them male (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).
In their book "Women's Figures" (1999), economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba meticulously compared data on the earnings of childless men and women aged 27 to 33. They found that the wage gap shrank to 98 cents.
In 2003, the U.S. General Accounting Office observed, "Of the many factors that account for differences in earnings between men and women, our model indicated that work patterns are key.
"Specifically, women have fewer years of work experience, work fewer hours per year, are less likely to work a full-time schedule, and leave the labor force for longer periods of time than men."
DFB&T - On the wage equity issue, you need to read the piece in Sunday's NYT (magazine I think) on the new wave of discrimination suits from mothers. Your point about childless men and women almost achieving parity seems to condone a practice of paying mothers less. I think your argument is that mothers work less and therefore should be paid less, but how much of that gap is self-selected and how much is imposed? I'm a bit sensitive to this as a working mom and a manager who has seen women "mommy tracked."
Otherwise, great rant Ian. I always enjoy the political jousting here.
Norma weren't so prissy that night we spent in back of my rig parked outside a diner in Lubbock.
I would never condone people getting paid less for the same work. However, a lot of the urban legend of women getting 77/100 is based on incomplete statistics. I know there are examples of 77/100 and I know Wal-Mart recently got hammered in 1 lawsuit, for example. I do not have an answer to the problem, but I am merely trying to point out that the 77/100 issue is undermined by a lot of recent feminist research.
The Far Side was the stones.
How is it that you can ask all your readers to be tolerant of things, while blatantly showing your own intolerance to anyone who believes in God? Specifically evangelical Christians? That's pretty hypocritical, no? Aren't you evangelizing your views here like they do elsewhere? It seems like everyone is entitled to their viewpoint unless your a Christian, then you need to STFU. I know it's you blog/sandbox and you can do what you want, but just saying...
All I know is that you need to add Australia to the list of places to which you'll move. That place rocks!
beware of doug
hey bill, not to speak for ian here, but i think he's intolerant of people who try to force their views of god on others, as so many evangelicals do. if norma had stayed home and just minded her church sundays, she would not have drawn the wrath of ian.
ian is expressing his views on his own blog. you can read it or close it. norma was exporting her views into text books which impact the growing population of america. as if we don't have enough of a challenge teaching math and literacy...
rock on, ian!
I'm not a big fan of the savage, half-informed rant but...
Kaz makes the crucial distinction. And honestly, if Ian really didn't love stirring up a tiny shitstorm every time he uncorked a rant, he would have probably quit by now. You people just encourage him.
50% of all marriages end in divorce. marriage is not correctly defined in our textbooks!
Divorce has its own chapter now. I think God probably loves at least most divorcees, even if they are (as Richie Cunningham liked to generalize) 'hot to trot'.
I, for one, have been extremely well-informed (and not just from the left) by this entry. I am an educator and knew nada enough about wielder of influence Mrs. Gabler. I'm sure there's an anagram code in her name or something that puts her on the main track to J.C.himself, a kooky-level evangelical's 'Just Cause' for any and all everything. Anyway, thanks for somethin'.
DFB's & T's, You just proved Ian's point by saying that he's "gone off the deep end" by ranting about a number of social injustices. Why can't conservative people argue without calling the other side crazy?
Unfortunately, the 10th Amendment doesn't apply to marriage - from almost the beginning of the union, we've had Federal marriage laws, because the Federal government recognized the need for marriage laws (and related property rights, etc.) to be uniform from one state to another so that people married in one state would be recognized as married in another, and didn't have to get remarried when they moved, etc.
Of course, recently that's been shot to hell with the rest of the states not recognizing Massachusetts marriage laws. The repercussions of that are coming to fruition now, with heterosexuals realizing that if marriages aren't treated the same from one state to another, they can do all sorts of things legal things to their own marriages, like refuse to pay spousal support if they were married in a different state that where they currently live, or not bothering to get a divorce before remarrying, both of which have come up in the courts recently.
This is why the government ought to get out of the issue of marriage entirely. It's none of the government's business who I marry, or for that matter how many I marry.
Ian,
You have a posse.
Paul
well you know what's interesting is that throughout time in the big BIG picture, the world isn't regressive, it's progressive. skirt lengths may come down during a big victorian uber right wing christian freak out backlash, but eventually they get right back to shrinking and eventually women get to wear pants.
so on some level you have to love the way the self appointed conservative morality police try to keep a lid on this boiling pot. the harder they push it down the more pressure builds up for a great big explosion it will be when it finally comes undone.
just let them keep on stickin that "under god" shit in there and all the rest of that crap, because eventually their backasswards bullshit will be trampled by progress and evolution.
time marches on, as does the pride parade.
@xuxE >>well you know what's interesting is that throughout time in the big BIG picture, the world isn't regressive, it's progressive.
Riiight. Except when it isn't progressive. There was a time before the Victorian era. Moreover, the socioeconomic penalties for being an unwed mother in Victorian Britain or America were pretty stiff, so maybe there were some practical considerations behind all that stuffed shirt morality.
In any case, thinking the world is being on an inexorable march toward something better strikes me as pretty neo-conservative and, frankly, just about the opposite of what Ian is saying here.
I'd have to agree with CFYMBFP (and Ian) that there isn't smooth progression of, well, progress throughout history.
There have been numerous periods where progress and enlightenment have been followed by/killed off by a dark age of regression:
Rome, followed by the sack of; the excess of the Regency period of England, followed by the Victorian age; swinging 20's Berlin followed by the Nazis - just to name a few examples, and there are more in the middle ages and in eastern history as well.
It certainly makes me worry, given the state of our educational system and the strange, rampant increase in belief in imaginary, magic bearded white men living in the sky.
"just let them keep on stickin that "under god" shit in there and all the rest of that crap"
"It certainly makes me worry, given the state of our educational system and the strange, rampant increase in belief in imaginary, magic bearded white men living in the sky"
you both must have gotten the shit kicked out of you in sunday school. would have been fun to watch.