In the News: Children Voting

Craig's presentation today looks at the mock elections held in middle and elementary schools. The author seems to think it is significant that children have been consistently correct in choosing the winning candidate "(except for two elections, one of which was the JFK/Nixon election in which students voted before the televised debate; it's likely that the student vote did represent the views before this debate). My question is: why would anyone think that these votes wouldn't be accurate? Children are likely voting for who their parents will vote for, so getting children's votes is basically the same as getting their parents' votes. Granted, there will be some families where the vote is split, but these seem significant statistically.

In the News: Religious Art in Public Spaces

Stacy's presentation today addresses the recurrent issue of the relationship betwen church and state. In this case, the question is whether the government should allow or fund religious-themed art in public spaces. In this case, an Oklahoma city wants to place a statue of Jesus downtown during Christmas and have taxpayers pay for the statue. The only real defense that the proponents of the statue seem to have is to claim that the statue isn't necessarily Jesus.

This raises an interesting question. Art is often ambiguous in its meaning, and its methods of representation are not always to replicate images exactly. What is considered religious art? Would Thomas Kinkade's work be considered relgious art, since the artist claims it is inspired by Jesus, even if it doesn't depict any specific religious iconography? Could a Kinkade painting be bought by a government and displayed in a public space? What if a piece of religious-themed art was created that was intentionally ambiguous in its form? A rainbow , for instance, is part of the biblical narrative about the great flodo and God's promise to Noah to never flood the world again. So, could a rainbow be displayed in public?

Perhaps what is really most offensive about religious art is it's kitchiness. Perhaps it's just too realistic or straightforward or representational. If religious artists could express their religious views throughthe iconogrpahy of the doughnut, or inflatable rabbits, maybe they could get the public to support their work.

In the News - Trooper Accident

Angela's ITN presentation today looked at a trial of a trooper accused of intentionally hitting a suspect with his patrol car. The troper is white and the suspect is black, so there's the possibility of a racial element to this act. One interesting thing here is that the video from the patrol car records the trooper saying "Yeah, I hit him. I was trying to hit him." This would seem to be an open-and-shut case. If someone admits to doing something on video, how could they possibly not be convicted. In trials we have the right not to incriminate ourselves, but video can do it for us without our consent.

Perhaps it goes down to what we think about speech, and what Freud called periphrasis (sp?). When we say things, are we revealing truths about our intentions and beliefs, or are we voicing a socially acceptable belief that we may not really hold? Is the trooper bragging about hitting the man expressing some deep truth about his racist psyche? Or is he showing some bravado in fornt of what he believes are racists (other troopers) in order to conceal his horror at what he's done. Perhaps the most depressing thing is that someone might voice a racist belief because they believe it is more acceptable than the alternative.

I've always felt that racism is one of those things you can't simply attribute to racist people. It's a myth to think that some people are racists and others are not. Rather, we live in a racist culture that circulates myths about race to the detriment of certain races. Our language, our representations, our social structures, they all support racism in some ways. So, instead of looking at whether someone said something racist, it's more important to look at where that racism came from.