If A Pirate Wants To Donate $5 Million To Your "Liberal" Arts School, What Should You Do?

"HARRGH!  We're looking for University Relations! HARRGH!"

You might want to wonder if that pirate has a camera hidden in his blunderbuss before you say a word.  Whatever you do, don't chat him up and think maybe once he really gets to know you he'll build a Women's Center instead of a Center for Swashbuckling Studies, because he could be a Republican in disguise.  Those little jokes about peglegs are going to be awfully embarassing once the Disabilities Studies folks see them in the New York Times.

I never thought I would have to give this career advice, but I would feel remiss if I did not do so at this moment in history.  In the wake of conservative activist James O'Keefe's most recent effort to help defeat the thugs Republicans are saving our country from -- women, the poor, and intellectuals -- I just want to know: why did Schiller, the president of fund raising at NPR, not even have an inkling that two unknown "Muslims" who supposedly wanted to make a major gift were not a little shifty?  Had he never listened to his own radio station?  Did he not take in O'Keefe's little scam that brought ACORN to its knees?  Or the little rumble he tried to cause over at Planned Parenthood by impersonating a donor who would give money only on the condition that underage girls and as many black women as possible would be provided with abortions?

Here's the deal, for you other folks who have been living under a rock for the past year.  O'Keefe sets up embarrassing scenarios that feature liberal groups. He then records them secretly to demonstrate what conservative activists "already know" -- that liberals are lying, law-breaking hypocrites.  Of course, the videos and audio recordings often have to be edited to actually produce the "evidence," but no matter. Then mainstream conservative Republicans leap on the bandwagon and demand hearings to express their outrage that a single government dollar goes to these organizations (as opposed to the many federal dollars that go to homophobic religious organizations and schools, for example.)  O'Keefe also has connections to the Leadership Institute, Morton Blackwell's organization that trains conservative youth (who, in turn, developed the affirmative action bake sale strategy recently used at Zenith by other students affiliated with LI.)  O'Keefe was also arrested for trying to bug U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu's telephone.

The latest O'Keefe special involves unveiling NPR as a moral cesspool and a wealthy organization that is fleecing the taxpayer.  It is timed to coincide with the annual pledge drive, as well as the debate in Congress provoked by House Republicans zeroing out what budget remains to support public broadcasting.  O'Keefe hired two people who claimed to be representatives of a Muslim organization.  They arranged to meet with Schiller  in a Georgetown restaurant claiming they are interested in giving $5 million to public radio. "The heavily edited video," according to the AP account in Salon,

shows Schiller and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, meeting at a pricey restaurant in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood with two men claiming to be part of a Muslim organization. The men offer NPR a $5 million donation. NPR said Tuesday it was "repeatedly pressured" to accept a $5 million check, which the organization "repeatedly refused."

"The current Republican Party is not really the Republican Party. It's been hijacked by this group that is ... not just Islamophobic but, really, xenophobic," Schiller said in the video, referring to the tea party movement. "They believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting -- it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people."

Part of what I find puzzling about this is, while it wasn't a smart thing to say, it is at least an arguable point of view with some basis on the truth.  Schiller didn't even say it on air.  Rush Limbaugh says something whacko and false about every ninety seconds right on his own radio show and nobody really seems to give a good G-d damn.  Schiller isn't even a journalist:  he's a fund-raiser.

So what was the big deal?

She Started A Heat Wave By Making Her Seat Wave; Or, Having Fun With American Studies

Given that we are going into our third day of temperatures topping 100 degrees, I can't believe no one has posted this yet.



Since this is an academic blog, and a feminist blog, and since I am locked in my study with a small air conditioner roaring away, here is a brief teaching guide to this segment from There's No Business Like Show Business (1954). An utterly dull period piece about a fictional theater family, this movie is far is better remembered for Ethel Merman's belting version of the title song that valorizes the heartaches and spiritual rewards of "the business." The movie also starred legendary dancers Donald O'Connor, Mitzi Gaynor and Johnnie Ray (that's the group watching from the wings in the crazy pastel "Mexican" outfits) -- a who's who cast in what was even then a dying Hollywood genre, the big budget musical.

This little tidbit of Cold War popular culture, originally penned by Irving Berlin in 1933 for the musical "As Thousands Cheered," is a perfect way to spice up any class on the Cold War, whether you are teaching foreign policy, the crafting of South America and the Caribbean as a source of cheap goods and marketplace for American products, or the post-war sexual home front. I'm going to be using it for my Introduction to American Studies, to teach students how to read the politics of a film which they are just going to think, initially, is weird and racist.

Here, Monroe stalks the line between what remained of the Motion Picture Production Code after Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952), and the openly dirty. She whips her skirt back and forth across her crotch, dips her breasts back and forth and wiggles her fanny, all the while teasing a manic group of "Latino" dancers who sing, dance, and carry around various indeterminate boxes and burdens (one of which, you will note, is an old phonograph.) They pull close to the thing they cannot have, only to be shoved rudely away -- and be beckoned once more. What we will learn, of course, is that they are laboring purely on behalf of us, and that their only function is to excite Monroe enough that she will offer herself to: You.

And You. And Maybe -- You.

This heat wave, we learn from lyrics added to the original Berlin song, was caused by Monroe herself. "She started a heat wave/By making her seat wave," the dancers sing in North American accents, as she is brought in on the shoulders of another group of male dancers stripped to the waist. "Gee, gee/Her anatomy/Makes the mercury/Jump!" they shout enthusiastically, as she alights and picks up the song:

"To ninety-three," the whiter-than-white Monroe sings richly, looking deep into our eyes, and ignoring the leers of these generic men from somewhere south of Texas, who have carried her in only to lose her to "America."

Why 93? I dunno -- because 69 is too cool for a heat wave and 96 doesn't rhyme? Monroe raises the temperature by teasing her "boys" -- who suddenly acquire "foreign" accents when speaking to her -- and pushing them away, because (of course!) they are only surrogates for us. They don't get to have this white woman, only help us possess her. Monroe makes it clear with skilled glances and winks, as the dancers flop to their bellies and knees around her, that it is only we -- each and every one of us -- whose temperature matters, as she struts back and forth across the stage gesturing to breasts and crotch. "What's your name, Honey" she inquires sweetly of the kneeling dancer leaning toward her, as her out-of-control behind starts to sway to the beat and her hands involuntarily pull her skirt apart in front.

"Pablo!" he whines in a hopeful voice. She whips the skirt closed abruptly, and turns away to another, and then another, calling for their names too.

"Pablo! Chico! Miguelito!" she repeats with rapid-fire ecstasy ("so many men! so little time," she is clearly thinking). Her eyes squeeze shut as she contemplates the sheer weight of their (our) lust.*

Perhaps the ultimate Monroe moment is when she snatches a newspaper from one of the dancers, and spreads it out on the ground to read the "weather report" as the ever-hopeful "boys" (who seem happy to share her) cluster around eagerly.

"Pabloooo," she croons, as he draws in; "It say....It say here under" -- and then she sniffs loudly as if they are all so obviously "in heat" you can just smell it through the camera -- "Weather report...."

That loud nasal inhalation --surely Monroe's own genius -- is. So. Deliciously. Vulgar: ditto the subsequent moment when she slams the skirt shut over her crotch at the exact moment that she informs us that "high pressure" will move in over "the Deep South."

Ohhhhhhhhhh.

OK. Reading list? I think this clip like could be best taught as part of a discussion about gender, sexuality and/or hemispheric politics in the 1950s. Depending on your course, and where you want to go with this, I would use it to lift out arguments from Elaine May's Homeward Bound: American Families In The Cold War Era (1990); Alicia Camacho's Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US-Mexico Borderlands (particularly chapter 3, which contains an excellent reading of the left-wing labor movie Salt of the Earth also produced in 1954; or, if you want to make connections to the pre-war period, you might want to try Anne Rubinstein's Bad Language, Naked Ladies and Other Threats To The Nation: A Political History Of Comic Books In Mexico.

And if you want a really good book to read on the beach while we wait out the heat wave? Try Joyce Carol Oates' fictionalized biography of Monroe, Blonde: A Novel.

...............................................

*I am reminded of Norman Mailer who, like many odiously sexist men, was capable of startling moments of insight about American sexual culture. He described Monroe at such moments as "fucky" (a word the New York Times did not allow Pauline Kael to print in her review of this 1973 book, but which appears on nearly every page of Mailer's text.) As a feminist, I both deplore this, and also think that there is something profound to attend to here about how fuckability is produced over and through women's bodies in mass culture. And by the way? I dare you to use the word "fucky" in class. Double-dog dare you.