November 2009 Archives

Sometimes when someone writes a critique of Mormonism, someone will come along and accuse the writer of bigotry against Mormons. To prove the point, they'll replace the word "Mormon" with the word "Jew" or "Jewish," suggesting that finding Mormonism silly is as bad as anti-Semitism. It happened on my blog, somewhere.... I can't find it now, and don't really care, but my response was to say that by virtue of having grown up Mormon and served a mission for the church, I'd earned the write to say things about it others find offensive, so tough shit.

But I finally found a document where *I* want to substitute the word "Mormon" for the word "Jew," to show why I'm glad to be a post-Mormon instead of a regular old devout Mormon.

Somehow I missed the fact that the Strokes' first album, Is This It (is this WHAT?), had two different covers, one for the open-minded people across the ocean, and one for the prudes on the west side of the Atlantic.... You know, Americans, who are either Christians or feminists. The former object to anything that might arouse someone, and the latter object to the objectification of women and their bodies.

I found an image of the British cover because the Guardian has named the album the fourth best album of the current decade. I personally found the album boring and forgettable when I encountered it with the prudish American cover, but I will certainly remember it from now on. And I won't be listening to the Strokes ever again.

After reading that article, I clicked on a link to a story about Adam Lambert and what was or wasn't wrong with his kissing a guy during his performance at the American Music Awards. (Side note: I didn't think there was anything wrong with the kiss, and I agree with this assessment about the offensive nature of some of the reporting on it.) To summarize: nothing wrong with men kissing men; why isn't anyone questioning larger issues in the performance, including the fact that

This blog entry is intended to convince you to read this essay in the Times, about female soldiers and veterans with PTSD. But it has a very long intro before I segue to that topic, so I'm including the link upfront.

An essay I wrote is running today in the print version of the NY Times (at least, it's supposed to--I confess I haven't yet ventured out of the house to buy it) but the online version appeared Friday. I'm not going to link to it here, because my blog is semi-anonymous, meaning I keep my last name out of it, though I know most of the people who read it know who I am, or can figure it out pretty damn easily.