Let's take a break from the Holocaust and neo-Nazis for a bit to discuss some good ol' popular culture. I, like many internet procrastinators, find a set of reliably funny sites to laugh at when I need a break from reading/writing/graaaaaading/etc. Some favorites are Overheard in New York (or Overheard Everywhere, which I'm secretly dying to be featured on due to one of my more fanciful classroom claims), videos of Maru on YouTube, and Cake Wrecks.
Psychedelic, no?
Cake Wrecks is a blog devoted to "when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong."
This has probably happened to many of us, including this winner that my
Mom got one year. Reportedly it was not only fancifully decorated with these "flowers," but it tasted odd enough that my grandfather decided it was really better to push around on his plate than actually eat. Cake Wrecks strives to only mock those cakes made by professionals, never to make fun of our friends' good-natured cakes. Although, occasionally one can end up with a really talented baker friend and get surprised by a cake like this one, from my 29th birthday.
So cute! Thanks, Kelly!
Anyway, Cake Wrecks is also written by a blogger with a great sense of humor and ability to make puns out of just about anything. The site has been successful enough that there are two spin-offbooks for purchase, and author Jen Yates goes on book tours around the United States. It's a phenomenon, is what I'm saying, ok? So why write a blog about it? Clearly I'm not "just" adding this here to praise some funny sites and add cake pictures from my past. (All cake images beyond these first two are copyright Cake Wrecks).
Cake Wrecks primarily functions on two types of humor: terrible cake "artwork" and terrible cake text. The things that professionals put on cakes! There are the infamous "Naked Mohawk-Baby Carrot Jockeys" (which, honestly look like babies riding carrots at least!) to the amazing recently-spotted diploma cupcake-cake (Jen's caption: I call it, "Tar Donkey Butt-Peeing"). The terrible artwork is consistently amusing. While I won't link to them all, there are terrifying bridal shower cakes with babies bursting from wombs, foot fungus cakes, and unintentionally phallic cakes galore.
However, it's the terrible cake text that calls for some analysis. Let's take a look at "The Cake that Started it All:"
While this (and others below) is a horrible/hilarious mistake it also seems to be an example of what we could deem functional illiteracy. Functional illiteracy is often defined as "a person whose reading or writing skills are inadequate to everyday needs." Clearly, this decorator can write. And read. But they lack the ability to contextualize instructions, to think critically about what the words mean in relation to each other.
Literacy rates in America are overall quite high (The CIA, as of 2003, lists Americans as 99% literate). Yet 2003 studies on literacy have more layers than merely overall ability to read and write to complete simple tasks. The most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy was completed in 2003. Their findings cover prose, document, and quantitative literacy. Basically, can one comprehend articles, brochures, etc; can one read things like job applications, maps, or bus schedules; and can one understand how to calculate a tip, balance a checkbook, or do basic everyday calculations. All of these are necessary for basic, everyday life in the 21st century. (Of course, for tips and checkbooks and buses, there's probably an app for that. But we'll touch on that later.)
The 2003 study found no significant change in prose and document literacy between 1992 and 2003. And quantitative literacy actually went up in that time period:
* indicates statistically significant difference
This would look like a good sign, yes? However, the study also found that there were "Fewer adults with Proficient prose and document literacy in 2003 than in 1992." So while we have a good deal of basic literacy in terms of documents and prose, between 1992 and 2003 the overall sophistication of those skills went down. We can assume, from the fact that these cakes are professionally done, that the decorators were able to navigate a basic job application. Yet the ability to proficiently interpret instructions gets lost somewhere along the way. (One might say "maybe they were just high" but I think that distinction goes to the "Happy Falker Satherhood" cake.) Naturally, I'd like to believe that a robust humanities education would help the proficiency of prose literacy. But that's going to have to be another post, because otherwise this blog will only ever get hashtagged #longreads and no one will ever read it. Why does this matter for a blog that discusses power and privilege in popular entertainment? When you look at the demographics of the 2003 study one finds a clear connection back to various identity categories, including race and ethnicity. While the rates for African Americans improved between 1992 and 2003 there was a shocking decline in the literacy rates of Latino/as, "down 18 points in prose and 14 points in document." I can think of a series of potential explanations for this based on dates and cultural trends, including a complex relationship detailed here about NAFTA, outsourcing, and Latino immigrants there's a clear inequality in how literate Whites are vs African Americans and Latinos in the 2003 study (clearly, I'd love to see an updated 2013 study done).
Seen this one around your social media?
While we may want to believe that we're merely judging others based on their ability to follow "proper" (read: white) sentence structure, what we're actually doing is boiling down complex educational inequalities and laughing at those less fortunate or literate than ourselves (as my poet-friend and editor rightly pointed out recently in response to this user card above). This makes these cakes seem more sad than funny, a sign not of inattentive workers, but rather those doing their best to make do with an uneven grasp on the complexities of the written/spoken word.
How does the digital age impact these statistics, then? As mentioned above, there's certainly an app for calculating tips and balancing checkbooks. But those, too, are the realm of anyone privileged to carry a smart phone or tablet. If there is/was an updated version of this study it would most likely raise questions about how online communication impacts the ability to be proficient (can perform complex and challenging literary activities) prose readers. (We're also lacking any question of visual literacy here!) Articles such as this one from the New York Times open a discussion on the debate of failing literacy vs. different type of literacy. This is a topic that I'm looking to explore at SAMLA 2013 here in Atlanta or MLA 2014 in Chicago, although an extended post on the topic will have to wait as this one is already getting pretty longwinded. Suffice it to say, I'm not going to assume our functional literacy abilities are going down the tubes due to the internet. And we'll talk more about it later.
In the meantime, don't worry, there's always cakes like this one that need our laughter:
Aww. It's...cute?
Finally, go now and read the post which this last cake came from. It highlights the best Cake Wrecks has to offer.
What is hate, and how do we combat it? Recently, I attended a symposium organized by Gonzaga University's Institute for Hate Studies and American University's Washington College of Law. The symposium was on "Hate and Political Discourse" and was organized by John Shuford and Robert Tsai in honor of the Journal of Hate Studies 10th Anniversary issue that is forthcoming this October. Additionally, I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
for the first time and want to use this blog to reflect on those
experiences and offer some suggestions for the importance of the
humanities in combating hate.
"Love and Hate" CC image courtesy of Skley on flickr
The
Hate Studies Symposium was a fairly intimate event. The group of
scholars chosen for the event was an interdisciplinary one, although it
was weighted towards work on the law and legal issues related to hate,
including the keynote speaker Professor Mari Matsuda.
The questions we set out to consider were "what do we mean by hate in
political discourse?" the definitional problem or challenge and "where
does hate come from/how is it sustained?" which leads us to ask "what
are the solutions?"
Matsuda's keynote "Is Peacemaking Un-American?
On Violence and Ideology" directly addresses some of the concerns that I
try to evaluate in my book manuscript and my teaching. She argued that
to say "there's no such thing as a false idea" is problematic for a
variety of reasons. The notion that all ideas are equally true, based
on locating them in the realm of opinion is something commonly seen in American culture, including things as forgettable as this commercial for Elmer's Glue:
"But that's just my
depinion" the little girl says, and the assumption is that this is
something cute, it's adorable how she uses that adult phrase to refer to
glue. But this is a larger claim than just a preference for adhesives,
and one that continually causes problems to those who attempt to combat
hate speech. If every opinion is equally true, then no opinions can be
challenged. It follows from that how no opinions can then be changed.
This is what Kwame Anthony Appiah refers to when he criticizes relativism in his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. The notion of relativism deployed by "that's just my opinion" shuts
down discourse, limits interaction, and sustains false ideas. Matsuda
also reminded participants of one of the fundamental arguments behind
my research and my spring "Cosmopolitan Imagination" course: literature
can humanize the "over there." I look forward to exploring this for a
second time with texts like In the Time of the Butterflies, Persepolis, and Interpreter of Maladies.
Other presenters from Faculty Workshop I asked us to considerWilla Michner's "The Psychology of Group Hate"--how groups are associated with the negative that any group
member has done, such as responses to American Japanese post-Pearl
Harbor and perceived Muslims post-9/11. This creates what Michner
refers to as "algorithms of fear" on a psychological level. Examples of
this type of group hate were covered in Marla Stone's talk on Italian
Fascism and propaganda, how propaganda was used in pre-WWII Italy to
associate all Soviets with a clearly racially defined "other" that
functioned as a threat to the Italian state. Finally there was Damon
Berry's discussion of abjection and blood libel- a compelling paper for
my theory-loving heart. Berry argued that abjection is one important
way to understand the pervasive history of the concept of blood
libel--the dislike of the crossing of boundaries and the narrative of
contamination that is prevalent in blood libel stories from
ancient Rome, medieval Poland, and contemporary Palestine and England. In
Faculty Workshop II there were presentations on
constitutional histories of lynching from Daniel Kato, legal definitions
of hate crimes from Jennifer Scheweppe, and my talk on neo-Nazis in
young adult (YA) literature. While these three topics might seem quite
disparate, Dr. Robert Tsai (conference
organizer) pointed out how the common thread was in considering
competence and hate crimes. What does this competence require on behalf
of citizens? Who is competent to challenge hate crimes? I would argue
that this question of competence could go by another name:
empowerment. How can we empower individuals to make good
decisions when encountering hate? What sort of empowerment might it
take to encourage the idea that we can be wrong, and that's okay?
My argument is that literature is one place where we can do this.
Humanizing the "over there" is one possible avenue for the humanities
and combating hate. Literature can, however, also point us to ways to
discuss what Appiah calls "values not worth living by."
Books from my talk on neo-Nazis and YA Lit: If I Should Die Before I Wake, The Spider's Web, and The Invisible.
My
argument is that young adult literature that features neo-Nazi
characters can help readers look at how some ideas are false, some
values not worth living by, in how they ask readers to consider the
misery and violence that the neo-Nazis inflict on themselves and their
communities. However, in these books its essential that responses come
from two places: individual realization on the part of characters and
community responses when faced with hate speech. One of the challenges
that I see for humanities work on hate studies is in how we can ask
readers to critically evaluate that "over there" through literature and
come away with an empowerment to discuss, to engage, and to promote
change. This constantly butts up against the desire of people to
respond to the "over there" by embracing their own privilege, rather
than interrogating their position within power structures that ask us to
accept "well that's just my opinion" as acceptable public discourse.
Exterior view of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Image courtesy of USHMM.
This
question of privilege is one that the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum skirts, but does not directly address, yet I don't actually know
if this particular Museum should be dedicated to interrogating
privilege. (Hello, Museum of Slavery, where are you?) This is a
conversation that I'm still considering, so please leave comments!
Certainly, it asks us to think through why ideas can be false, why
values can be wrong, and the extreme example of what happens when false
ideas become institutionalized facts about a minority group. Then it
asks us to transform that knowledge into testimony, to become witnesses
when we were once spectators. I've spent, at this point, years of my
life studying the Holocaust and its representations. With all of that
knowledge I was surprised at how much the Museum affected me. I don't
know what I expected from the experience, and I'm still having a hard
time articulating how my expectations and the reality aligned. I was
overwhelmed and drained, there's not doubt about that. I've
considered the performative aspects of the Museum before and so was
aware of some of the logic behind the space and exhibit planning. In
Vivian Pataka's book on theater and the Holocaust she has a excellent
chapter ("Spectacular Suffering") covering the USHMM, which I recommend
for anyone doing critical work on the Holocaust and memory. As a small
sample:
The use of artifacts and dense documentation
to produce knowledge and historical presence, and to shape memory, also
convey the incommeasurability of the loss by making this density
manageable for the viewer. What is critical about the D.C. museum,
then, is in its use of small bits of everything--shoes, documents,
photographs, artifacts--is the sheer, unbearable magnitude of detail
(127).
Yet even knowing that, stepping into the
elevator holding my ID card (I was a Polish Catholic resistor who
survived--several elements that echo my family history accurately) and
emerging into the scenes of the liberation of the camps immediately
struck me as much more emotionally impacting than I had anticipated.
The Museum is dim, laid out to promote reflection, and an example of how
architecture can really enhance the experience of the content. It is
both a Memorial and a Museum, and not just because it contains the
eternal flame and hall of witness. The way the designers used light and
space, in addition to content and artwork, was a reminder of how
important architecture is. The use of light in the rooms full of
pictures from Eisiskes, the path that encourages you to walk through one
of the train cars, and the smell of the room of shoes are all the
non-verbal performative elements that make it an often-times
overwhelming experience.
The room of shoes, the interior of a deportation train, the images of Eisiskes. All images courtesy of the USHMM.
I
recoiled at the smell of those shoes. I didn't want to walk through
that train car. I cried (a LOT) when looking at the living faces of the
residents of Eisiskes.
As I wound my way through the exhibits a
few things struck me that seem worth noting. First, it is detailed and
accurate and tries its best to remind visitors of the role America
played in the Holocaust--and not always as saviors. While that's the
first image you get upon exiting the elevator on the third floor, there
are comments throughout on the way antisemitism functioned in America
and how that limited immigration and ultimately left European Jews to
their fate. I've heard complaints, which seem fair, about the small
amount of emphasis placed on disabled, homosexual, and Roma-Sinti
populations that were also targeted for elimination by the Nazis. There
were information on these groups, which was important, but it
definitely is a side-note to the main focus. In particular I wish the
Museum would have reminded viewers how the overall population of
Roma-Sinti in Europe was decimated to an even greater extent
(percentage-wise) than the Jewish population. Or how the disabled were
the test subjects for what would eventually become the gas chamber-based
Final Solution.
Anne Frank, who would have been 83 this year. Image courtesy of USHMM.
I
was also surprised at how continually I was reminded of the fiction
that I've been writing about. The descriptions of the ghettos were
overlaid with my experiences from The Cage, Milkweed, If I Should Die Before I Wake, and others. You can't walk through the train car without recalling Night.
Looking at Anne Frank's face as she smiles at us from pre-invasion
Amsterdam is another moment of heartbreaking happiness that we are
forced to counter with our historical knowledge. Even the einsatzgruppen are featured in young adult literature, making an appearance in A Family Secret.
At every turn I was confronted with memories, fictional memories of the
events displayed throughout the Museum. This is why young adult
Holocaust fiction is such an important thing to consider: it is where
our memories of the Holocaust are built, particularly as the years pass
and direct connections such as survivors pass away. I found myself
repeatedly wanting to grab the people next to me and offer extra
information, "No! You don't understand how awful it was! That man in
the film footage of the ghetto without shoes? He most likely sold them
for food. Eventually he will sell all of his warm things in an attempt
to stave off starvation. Then he will freeze to death, having given
away everything in a bid to survive just one more day." (You see this
in Milkweed as the young protagonist begins to realize what the
lumps covered with newspaper in the street actually are: bodies.
Children's bodies take only one sheet to cover.) Naturally, I did NOT
grab random strangers and press unwanted information on them. But it
seems like necessary information as well. While the Holocaust Museum
gives us the facts, it doesn't give us the experience of those "over
there." For that we need fiction, we need the presence of our
imaginations to inhabit experiences other than our own.
See my Slideshare lecture from the Hate Studies Symposium HERE.
