I’ve often referred to the Dauo Report to check out well-written blogs on the left and the right. It’s truly a good site for getting a glimpse of what people are thinking. Here’s a snapshot of what blogs on the right are thinking these days: How will the GOP remove…
You can feel the tide turning. New Republican scandals and indictments are revealed every week. This week, of course, we learned yet another lesson about the Republican version of morality--the kind of morality where horny political leaders relentlessly hit on young boys, a love so stunning that the conservative church…
This is a companion piece to “The Magazines of Wal-Mart.” In that post (and now in this post) I put on my amateur anthropologist hat and explored the range of reading materials made available to consumers by America’s largest retailer.
I traveled to a Wal-Mart superstore yesteday to check out the types of books for sale. Why? Because Wal-Mart serves as a culture filter to the many people who don’t take the extra effort to shop for books at bona fide book stores. For those people who select their books from the limited offerings of Wal-Mart, here is the full range of written materials with which they are fertilizing their minds. Here is how they prepare their minds to deal with important things such as parenthood, justice, the practices of other cultures, the meaning of life and how to vote.
The book section of the St. Louis area Wal-Mart I visited consists of five large sections of shelves. The three inside sections consist entirely of fiction; most of those titles are romance novels. Here are some of the fiction titles you can buy at Wal-Mart:
Such fiction works constitute 60% of the titles made available by Wal-Mart.
If you are one of those people who wants to buy a “Best Seller,” you would need to check out the first section of book shelves (the left-most). But don’t expect to see any of the following books, each of which is currently ranked within the top 15 books on the …
The Walt Disney Studios, and its divisions and subsidiaries, have always upheld a very loose relationship between well-established historical fact, and their productions. One case in point would be The Prince of Egypt, a delightful tale of Moses growing up. It clearly shows Moses playing around the slaves building the…
Here's the definition of "reaction formation" from Wikipedia: In Freud's psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions are replaced by their direct opposites. This mechanism is often characteristic of obsessional neuroses. Here's the example given on Wikipedia: A man who is overly aroused by…