Tempus Fugit

The Blog from the Core is six months old today. :)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/26/02 10:16:32 PM
Categorized as Other.

Politically Correct Stress Disorder

James Taranto isn't the only one with ingenious readers.

So there.

Re: Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder, a reader writes:

I myself suffer from PCSD (Politically Correct Stress Disorder), everyday is a constant worry.

The following is an examination of conscience for those struck with PSCD:

• Was the chicken I ate a free range chicken or was it one raised in captivity?
• Was the coffee I drank non fair-trade coffee?
• Did I adequately reflect that I was living in a nation stolen from the Indians and built on the backs of slaves today?
• How large did the ozone hole get when I cranked up my air-conditioning?
• How many nonrenewable resources have I recently gone through?
• Have I committed a mortal sin by driving a car with an internal combustion engine?
• Did I think that Western Civilization was actually a good thing?
• Did I condemn or think that same sex marriages were not beneficial?
• Did I not repeat the mantra of choice, choice, choice over and over again.
• Did I have the audacity to use a Styrofoam cup?
• Did I place babies in the womb above whales and dolphins?
• Did I not trust in Government to solve all of my problems?
• Was I uncharitable by not not wishing that the rich were taxed more?
• Did I not curse vouchers for sucking the lifes-breath out of our awesome public schools system?
• Did I think that males and females are fundamentally different and not interchangeable?
• Did I not say amen after a Hollywood celebrity pontificated?
• Did I think that George W. Bush was actually legally elected President?
• Have I not felt guilty for what a distant relative might have done today?
• Do I miss the fair and balanced reporting of Bryant Gumbel?
• Did I not think that Rush Limbaugh and talk radio is the scourge of humanity?
• Did I rely on reason and not emotion to come to an opinion?

The writer did not say to identify himself — but I think the members of St. Blog's, and regular visitors to the parish, ought to be able to discern the inimitable author's name. :)

P.S. I see that Dylan has proposed his own entry for inclusion among the latest psychiatric disorders at Tenebrae:

.... In October 1995, I was suffering from a particularly severe case of RAD-MAD (Reacting Against a Double-Murderer's Acquittal Disorder). I kept hearing these voices ... and they were all saying, "Absolutely 100% not guilty! Absolutely 100% not guilty!" ....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/26/02 09:18:19 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"These Victims Are People, Too"

By Rod Dreher at NRO today.

Like, Jews and Nazis didn't get along, don'tcha know.

As Mark Shea indicates, one can hardly add anything to this article:

.... I believe many, and probably most, journalists share the unspoken assumption that Christians bring such trouble on themselves. Paul Marshall, who tracks religious persecution for Freedom House, told me recently that the Western media routinely omit anti-Christian motivation in acts of sectarian violence overseas.

In just the past week, you could observe this dynamic at work in reporting on two widely reported stories. In Nigeria, Muslims angry over a line in a newspaper article destroyed churches, beat and maimed Christians, and even murdered some of them. Yet in many of the press accounts, there was no mention of who started the violence (Muslims), and who the victims were (Christians). Typical of the nonjudgmental approach was a report I heard Monday from CNN correspondent Nancy Curnow, who mentioned "religious violence between Muslims and Christians."

Similarly, consider the headline on a report from Monday's New York Times reflecting on the murder in Lebanon of a Christian medical missionary, an Evangelical Protestant who was murdered last week in her clinic by an unidentified assassin. The Times headline read: "Killing Underscores Enmity of Evangelists and Muslims." But the enmity unmistakably goes only one way. The dead Bonnie Witherall's husband and colleagues proclaimed their love for the people of southern Lebanon, even after the murder. "Whoever did this crime, I forgive them," Garry Witherall said at her memorial service. "It's not easy. It took everything I have, but I can forgive these people because God has forgiven me."

The missionaries, on the other hand, had been denounced by local Islamic leaders, in part because, as one Muslim magazine quoted by the Times put it, "They destroy the fighting spirit of the children, especially of the Palestinian youth, by teaching them not to fight the Jews, for the Palestinians to forgive the Jews and leave them Jerusalem."

Obviously, this story is so tangled that the only thing for a self-respecting journalist to do is declare moral equivalence, and be done with it. What rot....

Read the whole thing, okay?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/26/02 09:06:22 PM
Categorized as Media.

Thanks to Susanna Cornett

At cut on the bias.

For the notice yesterday and for her kind words.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/26/02 08:34:50 AM
Categorized as Other.

Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder

We can laugh — but for how long?

A while back, Best of the Web Today drew attention to the following Boston Globe article:

Sekou Mims's son was 16 when he experienced a sudden psychotic breakdown. Over three months, the black teenager had a series of delusions - that white police were following him, that white strangers on a train were staring at him menacingly. He'd hyperventilate walking down the street. All his delusions revolved around racism....

Omar G. Reid is a psychologist who was training at Boston Medical Center at the time of Mims's son's illness. While he wasn't involved in his son's treatment, Reid told Mims that black and Latino males were showing up ''in droves'' with similar symptoms. Today, Reid conducts support groups for troubled black men, many of whom say they can't understand why they feel so much general anger and nervousness when ''my life hasn't been too bad.'' ....

My own theory is that if folks like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, Cynthia McKinney, and Louis Farrakhan were all suddenly and permanently stricken dumb — eliminating their anti-white propaganda, whether subtle or blatant — this would all clear up in a while.

Taranto invited readers of Best of the Web Today to invent discover their own new psychological disorders. Some of them were published yesterday; here are some of my favorites:

Roger Butters: Pre-post-traumatic reparations disorder. The present fear of being held responsible in the future for actions that aren't in your past....

Bill Odom: I suffer from pretraumatic middle-aged white-male disorder. As I grow older I become increasingly traumatized by the mantle of responsibility that I will acquire. It will soon be my fault that African-Americans were forced into slavery. It will be my fault that Native Americans were stripped of their heritage and lands. It will be my fault that women were second-class citizens and don't earn as much as I do. It will be my fault that Muslims around the world must face Zionist aggression (and I'm a Methodist!). It will be my fault the homeless have no home, the pro-choice have limited choice, and the poor have fewer tax breaks. And I'm supposed to laugh all of that off on the way to the bank?...

Rob Lyman: Post-traumatic Santa Anna disorder. The Mexican branch of my family (mother's side) still has horrifying pseudomemories of this war, and wants reparations from the U.S. That means me, of course. And we'd like to be retroactively declared illegal aliens because they're so much cooler than boring old legal immigrants....

Gale Nichols: As a Jew, I, too, can claim to experience PTSD--post-traumatic slavery disorder. In my case, though, it is related to the oppression of my ancestors as slaves in Pharaoh's Egypt. With the recounting of the tale of our forebears' experience as slaves and their liberation from slavery each year at Passover for the thousands of years since then, the sense of trauma and stress has had a considerable opportunity to develop and build....

David Schlosser: I have post-traumatic Depression disorder. I believe that my ongoing and occasionally successful efforts to get a good education, dedicate myself to an occupation, earn a good salary, acquire a home and the material comforts to furnish it, and keep as much of my income as possible, can be directly linked to the trauma of my grandparents' and great-grandparents' financial struggles in the Depression....

Sure, we can laugh. Now. But let's face it: the possibility that "professional" and "scientific" decisions concerning these things will actually be made for political purposes is not negligible. And once the deed is done, it would be very difficult to go back.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 11/26/02 08:21:22 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.