If You Read The Paper | Fri May 7
Words John McManus
Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Cantor says Americans are ‘better than’ everyone else
I write to you from Andalucía, Spain, a socialist country where I’m in residence at an artists’ foundation that offers no internet access. The sensation of not spending six hours a day online is odd, kind of like vanishing twin syndrome must feel. The nearest Wi-Fi is a hike up what in Norfolk would qualify as a mountain. I’d typically free-climb K2 for some Wi-Fi, but right now I’ve got a broken foot, so my report will be brief. That’s secondary to my main point in bringing up my location. Lately I’ve started answering “Virginia” when people in other countries ask where I’m from. The reactions have been surprising. Back when I resided in Texas, saying so brought predictable results: things are big there, etc. Naming Tennessee as home led inevitably to talk of Elvis and Jack Daniel’s. And to hear I lived in New York pleased just about anyone who asked.
It’s disconcerting to learn that Virginia provokes mainly just polite nods. Which is not to say people haven’t heard of it; they’ve just got no singular sense of how to react. But our governor and attorney general have been working on turning this around, and this week House Minority Whip Eric Cantor stepped up to the plate to pronounce, not hyperbolically but literally, that Americans are superior to the citizens of the other 194 countries on Earth. In doing so, Cantor unwittingly highlighted a branding problem at the heart of the Making Virginia Notorious movement. Although news of Cantor and Co. does indeed find its way to other hemispheres, not all who hear it perceive these folks foremost as Virginians. Just as many consumers don’t realize that Chipotle is owned by McDonald’s, Eric Cantor, being a federal rather than state official, is identified primarily as a member of the U.S. House.
I recommend that Cantor and his buddies hire an ad agency to devise a more consistent way of framing their more audacious pronouncements. That way, each new statement can appear to be part of a coherent and established whole. My own idea is that they start singing them all to the tune of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Disclaimer: the scansion of “Americans are the best people on the planet” might be a little off in that case, and Cantor would probably need to change the wording. I’m hardly Madison Avenue material.
17 more charged with marriage fraud
Speaking of ads, I can’t wait for the ones that come out when the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council and the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family and the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Church and the Anglican Church and the Mormon Church all team up to protect marriage by battling the fraud detailed in this article.
Introducing Antanas Mockus
A Colombian Green Party candidate named Antanas Mockus, who’s poised to win his country’s upcoming presidential election, has conducted his campaign almost entirely on Facebook. When he was mayor of Bogotá, Mockus significantly reduced traffic fatalities by replacing many traffic cops with mimes who publicly humiliated drivers who were violating the law. He imposed a voluntary 10-percent tax that a huge number of people paid because they could designate where their money went. He even quelled a mob scene at a university by turning around and mooning the crowd. We’ll never know who might be mayor-elect of Norfolk today if I’d arrived sooner with my advice that Hampton Roads governments and universities take up miming, mooning, and voluntary taxation as solutions to our most vexing problems.
21 years later, Exxon Valdez scars still healing
If this isn’t already household knowledge, it’s only because the Exxon Valdez spill occurred off the coast of a remote Alaskan wilderness. In 2031 you can bet headlines won’t be needed to announce that the Deepwater Horizon scars are still healing. See a Google map of the ever-increasing spill here.
As jESiO reported yesterday, the oil may move up the Atlantic coast to Virginia and beyond. The current clean-up cost estimate, ten billion dollars, will surely keep rising, since the underwater geyser of oil spewing into the Gulf shows no sign of stopping. In related news, light rail was a waste of money.
Teenage insults, scrawled on web, not on walls
When the New York Times starts writing about websites you’ve never heard of, you can be sure you’re getting old. Seems like just yesterday every Times, New Yorker, et al., was breathlessly announcing the existence of sites millions had been using for years. Here the Times reports that Formspring, “the online version of the bathroom wall,” is “still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors.” Since I belong to neither category, I should spend more time online—either that or go all in and claim Formspring is why kids today are worthless lumps and that when I was young we had proper fun by playing Grand Theft Auto.
Virginia has teeth but rarely bites schools suspected of cheating
This story’s graphic shows six students’ assessments in their own handwriting of the following statement from a standardized test: “Um, I was wondering if maybe I could borrow your pen, if you don’t mind. That is, if it isn’t too much trouble.” The answers (identical–proof of cheating) read as follows. The tone in this sentence is very hesitant or nervous. The tone in this sentence is very hesitant or nervous. The tone in this sentence is very hesitant or nervous. The tone in this sentence is very hesitant or nervous. The tone in this sentence is very hesitant or nervous. The tone in this sentence is very hesitant or nervous.
The teacher directing the cheating maybe didn’t notice that the question contains two sentences. Also the answer, by calling the sentence both hesitant and nervous, comes off as hesitant or nervous. I guess being forced to cheat makes you hesitant or nervous. (I’m leaving out very, because the novelist Robertson Davies, when asked for advice for writers, said to go meticulously through one’s manuscripts eliminating all occurrences of the word very.) Which is to say nothing of the quality of the exam question itself.
The tone in the Pilot’s headline for this story is very sensational and disturbing. The tone in the Pilot’s headline is very sensational and disturbing. The tone in the—oh, sorry; I lost myself in a daydream, induced by this headline, of Virginia as some gigantic vampire that rarely bites but does have teeth. Since Bob McDonnell is our head of government, I was giving it his face. Sure, I’d prefer that it have the face of Kellan Lutz, but Tocqueville said we get the government we deserve. New idea for the Making Virginia Notorious campaign: substitute “Virginia Is for Lovers” with “Virginia Has Teeth.” Omit “rarely bites.” Danger sells.
Um, that’s all for now, if you don’t mind. Have a good weekend if it’s not too much trouble—oh, and the governor’s been in the area, so if he sinks his fangs into you, don’t say you weren’t warned.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
John McManus is the author of the novel Bitter Milk and the short story collections Born on a Train and Stop Breakin Down. His fiction has appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Harvard Review, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Columbia, Grist, and American Short Fiction. He lives in Norfolk and teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Old Dominion University. Links to his publications can be found at his website, http://johnmcmanus.net/ .
Other posts by John McManus.
Other posts by John McManus.
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From Wikipedia
“In the past, McDonald’s Corporation owned a majority interest in Chipotle. McDonald’s has since sold their entire stake in Chipotle; full divestment was completed in October 2006.”
Most people don’t know Chipotle is owned by McDonald’s because Chipotle isn’t owned by McDonald’s anymore. Fact-checking!
Yes, I think we should definitely zero in on that one aspect of this column. It is surely the most important. Good for you.
Language gets folks in trouble all the time…loving someone, some thing, or some place brings out the hyperbole in nearly everyone…for instance anyone who reads these takes, knows that New Yorkers are heads and shoulders above us yokels…though, I doubt had Cantor said, Virginians are ‘some’ of the best people on the planet, that your cosmopolitan disdain for any thing south of DC would have allowed you to notice…I did not miss your point, and I realize that you need fodder, but does it so often have to be at the expense of Virginians who are some of the best folks on the planet…
Lynne, except for about eight months in 2007, I’ve lived below the Mason-Dixon Line my whole life. I pick on Virginia officials here because this is a blog about Hampton Roads. If I were writing for some NYC counterpart of AltDaily, I’m sure I would devote weekly space to attacking Hiram Monserrate and other bigots of the Empire State. Because I live in Virginia, I mostly leave it to New Yorkers to attack their own bigots. My comment about reactions abroad to my having named New York as home is simply an honest account of what I perceived at the time. New York City is widely admired around the world. I’m not sure how any of this constitutes “cosmopolitan disdain for anything south of DC.” When I’ve compared, say, the walkability of downtown Manhattan to the unwalkability of Norfolk, I’ve made it clear I’m not doing so disdainfully but rather to advocate for the betterment of the quality of life in Hampton Roads. That’s what I thought was at stake here.
Your suggestion that I might have reacted differently had Eric Cantor called Virginians and not Americans the best people in the world makes me suspect you didn’t click the link before replying. Here’s Cantor’s full quote: “What the president said in that speech [in Cairo] was that he hoped to return to the days when we had a partnership with the Muslim world. That America 20, 30 years ago enjoyed some type of good relationship that now has gone awry. I don’t see it that way. I don’t see that somehow we need apologize for anything America has done. Are we a perfect nation? By no means. Are we better than any[one] else because of the exceptional nature of who we are? Yes.”
You say “loving someone, some thing, or some place brings out the hyperbole in nearly everyone.” Cantor’s statement clearly isn’t meant to be hyperbolic. He frames it logically, asks two rhetorical questions, and finally answers them both to arrive at the idea that Americans are “better … because of the exceptional nature of who we are.” Leaving aside how tautological that is, do you honestly think Cantor’s claim is the same as saying “Virginians are ‘some’ of the best people on the planet?” You ask would I react differently to such a quote—well, of course I would, because it would express a fundamentally different sentiment. For your hypothetical quote to be even remotely parallel to Cantor’s real words, Virginia would have had to overtly or covertly overthrow the elected governments of a few dozen other U.S. states in the last century, just for starters.
It doesn’t require one’s living above or below the Mason-Dixon line to see the perniciousness of American exceptionalism. For one of the highest-ranking elected officials in the U.S. to announce “My home state is the greatest place on earth” might seem innocuous even to Chileans, East Timorese, Dominicans, or citizens of other countries where we’ve installed or supported brutal, fascistic governments. But “I don’t see that somehow we need apologize for anything America has done” is a far cry from “There’s no place like home.”
Regarding the ownership of Chipotle, I stand corrected. Turns out Kellan Lutz isn’t a real vampire, either.
First, I’m more than certain that generally, most folks really do not know where Virginia is, as in my travels in Central America and in Europe, and in my correspondence on the Internet folks nearly always ask me where Virginia is. Perhaps, though we do not travel in the same circles.
Admittedly, my concern was for what still seems to me one more intolerant view of Virginians as a whole who “just don’t get it”…but I have to tell you after close reading, especially the end of Cantor’s speech, which seems you completely disregarded, as you pulled the quotations you used out of context, that my views have not changed; and I have always found it so very puzzling when one white person calls another white person bigoted…this seems most often to happen when name callers “know” what another person intends rather than what that person has actually said…I think…
as for apologizing…I can at least understand why Cantor feels the way he does, even if I don’t agree with him. But I don’t think that becasue I disagree with him makes him a “bigot”…(here I choose to believe that you actaully mean “evil white man”)…I don’t think that understanding, persuasion, or mind changing, happens this way…now, to whom should we apologize first?…
P.S. I hope that you are convalescing quickly. I know I would hate to be away from home with a broken foot;I would be homesick…Peace…
Lynne, My use of the word “bigot” here speaks to more than just race relations. Homophobia is bigotry, too. When I speak of Cuccinelli’s bigotry, I’m almost always speaking about his irrational and ad hominem hatred of gay people. I’ll have more to say on this in today’s IYHRTP. I plan to comment on our discussion here in that forum because I think this conversation speaks to a larger point I want to make, but I hope you won’t think I’m attacking you in doing so. I feel strongly about my views but am not trying to invalidate yours; I’m simply trying to persuade you of my point.
John
p.s. having trouble logging in–sorry for the anonymous comment above but it was me (john).