Oh sure, New York Times Week in Review used up a lot of space with the current administration's attempts to undo the New Deal.
Whatever.
More column inches, however, were spent dealing with sex and sexuality. In total, five articles covered the antics of Harvard President Lawrence Summers and SpongeBob Squarepants. No they weren't seen frolicking together. Although Summers could probably use a friend like SpongeBob right now.
Apparently Summers misspoke or spoke in what he thought was a private club room.
He suggested at an economics conference that the low representation of women scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes.
Charles Murray says that Summers' critics will have a chilling effect on scientific inquiry. To prepare for this, maybe we should have hired Jimmy the Greek to run an Ivy League School?
Olivia Judson's essay is a little more rounded and thoughtful.
More importantly we need to find out why SpongeBob, as the Council on Family's James Dobson says, is a threat to our children. John Leland has a short backgrounder on cartoon bad behavior, and Maureen Dowd tags our President with the name SpongeBush Square Pants (Dick Cheney is Mr. Krabs). I like Dowd's stuff, but I must say I'm glad I never met her in the schoolyard.
I've already written some about cartoons reflecting our psyches, and our internal struggles, but I think someone should parlay our need for a cartoon synthesis into a best-selling book. Dave Hickey's essay "Pontormo's Rainbow" in Air Guitar would be a good example of such an analysis.
Forty years ago crusaders set out to tame the world of animation. In this case, the puritans saw that the problem was not sex but violence in animated cartoons, and attempted to survey its effects. Hickey was one of the surveyed and describes his interlocutor from the point of view of a twelve-year-old:
. . . Did I like Donald Duck? Yes, I liked Donald Duck, I told her, although I withheld my opinion that the Duck was the only Disney character who had any soul, any edge, that he was sort of the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters. This was not the sort of insight one shared with June Cleaver.'Twas ever thus. Big Brother has always watched us watching cartoons. Cartoons are subversive. They reveal a world of possibility. The great thing about cartoons is that if people start a witch hunt against them, the witch hunters will just be made to look silly. And by the way, it's witch hunter season.Well then, she said, what did I think about Donald's relationship with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Did this frighten me? Did it, perhaps, remind me of . . . my mom or dad!? She looked at me solemnly, expectantly. I wanted to tell her that, first, Donald Duck was a cartoon. Second, he was an animal, a duck, and, finally, he was only about this tall. But I could tell from the penetration of her gaze that she wasn't really interested in ducks, and I felt my face getting hot. My inquisitor smiled faintly, triumphantly, taking this blush as a tell-tale sign of guilt, which it wasn't. I felt like a downed American pilot in the clutches of the Gestapo, determined to protect the secrets of his freedom.
For further reading, here are some links from BoingBoing: