DEVALUING OUR VALUES

Male supremacy in marble

Public museums and memorials serve our nation’s “foundational commitments to white heterosexual male supremacy,” two Texas A&M University professors say in a recent Southern Communications Journal article.

The authors, Tasha N. Dubriwny and Kristan Poirot, both women’s studies teachers, say the museums and memorials “support, not challenge, mainstream democratic values and figures,” reinforcing “key aspects of American mythology, including a national dedication to equality, liberty, work, sacrifice, ingenuity, and heroism.”

Such values, they say, promote “class hierarchies” and the “systemic violence used to secure them” and embody ‘the ‘great man’ perspective that dominated American historiography for too long.”

Instead of removing the museums and memorials, Dubriwny told Campus Reform, we should “remember more inclusively,” especially women who are “not as frequently subjects of public commemoration.” Among those, she says, “women from the 1960s and 1970s are basically nonexistent.”

The problem is that any woman she may name is likely to have the values of equality, liberty, work, sacrifice, ingenuity and heroism. But since those values — in her words — only reinforce American mythology, she may have a hard time finding a subject to commemorate.

Why not ‘We just hate Trump’

The national Democrats’ search for a soul and a slogan continues.

A Vox reporter, Jeff Stein, last week reported the party’s latest incarnation of a slogan is, “A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages.” The slogan, he said, was “the result of months of polling and internal deliberations among the House Democratic caucus.”

No one is saying, but if those months of polling and internal deliberations included lots of boxes of pizza, a certain pizza company may want to raise an eyebrow. The slogan for Papa John’s Pizza, after all, is “Better ingredients. Better Pizza.”

Not surprisingly, Twitter had a collective giggle. Among the responses:

› “That the Dems couldn’t just say ‘Better Jobs, Better Wages’ without leading off with ‘Better Skills’ is incredibly telling.”

› “Democrats will now petition a federal judge to force Papa John’s to change their catch phrase.”

› “Better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John Podesta’s.”

› And “Too late. Pizza’s on the way.”

A touch of mink, er, irony

Animal rights activists recently attacked a fur farm in Minnesota and released 38,000 minks into the wild. The problem is they released 38,000 minks into the wild.

Many of the minks, who had been raised in domestication, began to starve to death from hunger and heat stress. The farm owner, Dan Lang, said he believes about half his stock died. Others were rounded up and hurriedly thrown into pens. However, he said, many of them immediately fought with each other because they were thrown into different groupings than the ones in which they were raised.

“If they actually cared about animals, they wouldn’t release thousands of mink to die out in the heat,” Stearns County Sheriff Don Gudmundson said, according to the Associated Press.

“They are not interested in animal rights, they are interested in chaos,” he said.

The FBI has now joined the case because it said the attack was an act of domestic terrorism.

Lang said the attack has cost him at least $750,000, not including the massive loss of life the animals suffered.

Putting their stamp on the election

Hillary Clinton had the money, the organization, the media, the wealthy and Hollywood on her side in her 2016 presidential race. Now, it turns out, she also had the Post Office.

The United States Office of Special Counsel recently released a report that the United States Postal Service violated federal laws by allowing employees to do union-funded work for the Clinton campaign and other Democrats while on leave from the agency.

The work constituted “systemic violations” of the Hatch Act, a federal law which limits certain political activities of federal employees, the report said. It went on to say the USPS showed a “bias” in favoring the union’s 2016 campaign.

The activities were not done in typical blue, or reliably Democratic states, either, but in the battleground states of Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Despite their best efforts in those states, Clinton won only Nevada. President Donald Trump won the other battleground states, where the postal workers braved snow and rain and heat and gloom of night for the swift completion of additional votes for Clinton, but all for naught.