"Chanticleer Calls", a sometimes twice-monthly newsletter for discriminating readers, thinkers, feelers, speakers, listeners, and cogitators.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Idiot, Idiot, Who's the Idiot?
What's in an un nombre, Hombre?
Cheerleader Update
More Rules, More Spirit?
Ban 'em, Dano!
    - No Oz in Kansas
    - No "picnic" in New York
    - No potato in Connecticut
    - No t-shirt at Notre Dame
AND FINALLY -
But You Thought

Idiot, Idiot, Who's the Idiot?

What do you make of this Letter to the Editor, printed in the Dallas Morning News (DMN) October 6, 2000?

Prank is idiocy

    On the night of Sept. 27, while driving through a large apartment complex parking lot, I drove past a vehicle which appeared to have a human body stuffed into the trunk, with limbs dangling from the car. Horrified, I called 911 and informed the authorities. The police were dispatched and subsequently informed that a resident of the apartment complex had placed a lifelike human-sized doll in the trunk as a "prank" and that he did this every year.
    I would really like to know what kind of sick individual would find any humor in simulating a grotesque murder. We, as citizens of Dallas, simply should not and cannot tolerate this idiocy.
    This "prank" clearly represents a profound disrespect for human life, not to mention a complete disregard for effective law enforcement. Morons like this prankster waste valuable police time and energy, impairing their ability to fight crime.
    I sincerely hope this prankster is discovered and punished harshly; he or she should reimburse the police force for the time wasted on investigating this case. Better yet, he or she should be compelled to spend time with a support group comprised of victims of violent crime. Perhaps then he or she may realize that an act of violent death is not something we should simulate, much less tolerate.
JEFF TROST, Dallas

From the October 10, 2000 DMN:

LAWRENCE, Kan. - Critics of Wizard of Oz creator L. Frank Baum say a proposed Oz theme park would be inappropriate because the author was a racist who called for the "total annihilation" of native Americans.
    In editorials written in the early 1890s, a decade before the first of his Oz books appeared, Mr. Baum called for the extermination of American Indians.
    "Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth," he wrote in 1891 while publisher of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer in South Dakota. The editorial appeared shortly after the massacre at Wounded Knee.
    Jimmie Oyler, the self-described chief of the United Tribe of Shawnee Indians, says it would be wrong to build the projected 6,000-acre park on land that used to belong to his tribe.
    "If it has anything to do with Baum ... it's never going to be on Shawnee land," Mr. Oyler said.
    Kristin McCallum, a spokeswoman for Oz Entertainment Co., which plans to build the park near Kansas City for an estimated $860 million, called the 110-year-old editorial irrelevant. "I don't see the relation," she said.

An outing is no picnic:
What is spring without new politically correct adventures?

The scheduling of a picnic to honor Baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson led to a furor over alleged racism at the State University of New York-Albany. Some 40 students at the university insisted that the word "picnic" originally referred to the racial lynchings of blacks. They were wrong. Picnic comes from a 17th-century French word for a social gathering in which each person brings a different food. But in reply to the 40 protesters, affirmative action director Zaheer Mustafa put out a memo asking all student leaders to refrain from any use of the word picnic. "Whether the claims are true or not, the point is the word offended," he said. In publicity for the event honoring Robinson, the word picnic was changed to "outing." This offended gay students, so the event formally known as picnic was publicized without a noun describing what was going on. "Every day we come up with a new word we can't use," said exasperated student editor Richard Ryback. - John Leo

From the pages of the South Bend (Indiana) Tribune:    "The Tourist Tater, a 6-foot-high Mr. Potato Head sculpture, is seen Friday outside the Warwick (R.I.) City Hall. The sculpture, painted a dark brown to appear suntanned and wearing an ill-fitting Hawaiian shirt, is to be removed following complaints that it is racist. State officials insist no offense was meant."    Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts weighed in with an opinion piece against the potato, concluding with "You would hope that someday we might reach a point where a white person would instinctively understand beforehand why a tanned tuber might give offense - or a black person might not instinctively take offense. As it is now, you say "potato," and I say regrettable reminder of blackface bigotry."

WARNING: You might find the following photo offensive and appalling. Please do not look below this line unless you accept responsibility for your own blood pressure, breathing and general emotional sensitivities! STOP!

The photo I'm warning you about was banned from a t-shirt printed by the Junior Class (2002) at Saint Mary's College (SMC), just across the road from Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. Here's what some students said in The Observer, the jointly-published student paper of both schools.

• I am appalled by the shirt and work desparately hard to maintain good relations across the street. This represents everyone on this Board and I have gotten numerous phone calls about it.


• This brings us backwards from where we were going.


• When you put the "ND" on the shirt, that was a direct attack.


• I can see how it's 'cute', but one thing can start the whole ball rolling. I do see it snowballing.


• How can we make certain judgments like that about ND women?


• A really good friend of mine goes to Notre Dame and if she wore the shirt and the situation were reversed, I'd be really hurt.


• I think the shirt says that Notre Dame men hold control of women to choose.


• To me that shirt is sexist. We need to confiscate and prevent any distribution of them.


• The t-shirt not only perpetuated of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's women alike, it also trivialized the women who made the choice to come to Saint Mary's. ... The t-shirt portrays the Saint Mary's women not as being chosen for their mind or as a whole person, but rather as a sexual object by the Notre Dame man.


• The shirt displays disrespect for ourselves as women.

NOTE: I have attempted to reproduce the captions as best I can. The actual t-shirt photo appears differently than this.

The background for this dispute, as I learned about it, is that Saint Mary's (SMC) is, and always has been, a women's school. Until a few decades ago, Notre Dame was a men's school. Now it's coed. The recognized stereotype - not necessarily borne out by facts - that has developed is that women go to Notre Dame to get an education, and are not particularly attractive or interested in men. Conversely, the women who attend SMC are generally more attractive and are there to land a Notre Dame man.

This otherwise innocently-appearing photo thus became an object of vociferous, politically-correct scorn by women from both schools. The SMC women object because they believe it plays into their negative stereotype as being serious only about men, not about Mensa. The ND women object because it plays into their negative stereotype as being serious about Mensa, and not about men.

Menwhile ... I mean, "meanwhile" ... the men of Notre Dame seem silent on the issue. On one hand this makes conventional sense, in line with the old wisdom that you don't step into a cat fight unless one of them's yours. On the other hand, it seems to me there's a case to be made that this whole dispute objectifies and denigrates men. I mean, the women of SMC seem to believe that just by purring across the road they can win the affections of the ND men. And the ND women seem to be scratching out some kind of territorial boundary that marks the ND men as 'theirs'.

Meow!

This is what happens when one suffers from hardening of the cat-egories.