Feb 15, 2007

More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

History Carnival XLVIII is up at Aardvarchaeology! Martin Rundkvist is your host and he's done a fine job of it.

February's OAH Newsletter is online. The bulk of it is the supplement for the 2007 centennial convention in Minneapolis (29 March-1 April), but Lee Formwalt has a revealing interview in it with Larry Friedman. Friedman's mix of radicalism and naivete has long both attracted and irritated me. It is subject to the blinders that honored Michael Bellesiles's early research (and never revoked the prize for his JAH article) and moved conventions in St. Louis and San Francisco, without regard to the enormous financial costs to the OAH.

Daniel M. Ryan,"It Began in the Nineteenth Century," Enter Stage Right, 12 February, reviews Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement. See also: Amy Benfer,"Randy Girls – Adolescent Females Love Ayn Rand – Wonder Why?" In Character, Winter.

Tim Burke,"Obama and Blackness," Easily Distracted, 13 February, takes on the issue; and Nathanael Robinson takes on Stanley Crouch,"What Obama isn't: black like me," NY Daily News, 2 November. Surely, Crouch remembered that the phrase"black like me" was John Howard Griffin's title; and, if so, it can't have the essentialist meaning that Crouch wanted.

Finally, here's a sampling from what is apparently Fox News' answer to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. Canned laughter at racist humor. Thanks to Chris Richardson for the tip.

More Comments:

Manan Ahmed - 2/15/2007

Yeah, that was racist.

Ralph E. Luker - 2/15/2007

I still wonder whether -- if Oprah were white -- there would have been any joke to go for.

Alan Allport - 2/15/2007

Isn't it a rather obvious pastiche of 'O' Magazine? (And yes, its proprietress is of course black; but I think the joke is more about the magazine's anodyne self-congratulatory style, very similar to the bland gush being heaped on Obama, than it is about colour). Of course 'BO' stands for body odor; if his initials were FU, don't you think they would have gone for much the same obvious joke? I think you're reading a wee bit too much into what is quite a gentle (if not terribly witty) bit of satire.

Ralph E. Luker - 2/15/2007

Maybe I'm more sensitive than you are, Alan, but what would make the title of the magazine, _BO Magazine_, amusing? Even the slightest bit amusing, as the canned laughter suggests? Could it be that most Americans know "BO" as "body odor"? I think so and don't have any problem thinking that that association is racist.

Alan Allport - 2/15/2007

That fake news piece isn't especially funny (1), but it doesn't strike me as any more racist than Tim Noah's Obama Messiah Watch over at Slate.

(1) But then I don't find The Daily Show nearly as funny as other people seem to either, so maybe it's me.