George Case's Blog, page 13

Quit Yer Ambition

A recent news item, before the death of Queen Elizabeth II, quoted the celebrity royal Meghan Markle’s observation from her podcast, “I don’t remember ever personally feeling the negative connotation behind the word ‘ambitious’ until I started dating my now-husband, and apparently ambition is a terrible, terrible thing, for a woman, that is – according […]

Books of the Damned

Whenever you see a cartoon of a sorcerer or a wizard, what is his main accessory?  A book.  Where do the wicked witches of fairy tales find the recipes for their magic potions?  In books.  How do Harry Potter and his classmates at Hogwarts Academy study spells and incantations?  With books.  What very old medium […]

Eyes Off the Prize

It’s poignant to recall today that, after the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency in 2008, some commentators wrote hopefully of an impending “post-racial” American society, wherein historic divisions between Black and white citizens would at last be surmounted. A less-remembered footnote to the story, however, was the observation of conservative pundit William […]

Evil Woman Don’t You Play Your Games With Me

Ask a typical heavy metal fan who they consider to be their community’s most despised enemy and you may get a variety of responses.  Is it the evangelical Christian denouncing the music as the devil’s work?  The teenybopper boy band polluting the airwaves with their upbeat synthesized love ballads?  The snooty critic dismissing electric guitar […]

Pride and Prejudice

National Lampoon once ran a spoof of the old EC horror comics stories, “Tales From the Tombs,” in which a bigoted gay-basher winds up – via the traditional EC twist ending – in an entirely gay society.  “Everyone in the world is a homo!” the bully realizes in the last panels.  What was a joke […]

The Imp of the Diverse

My opinions as a middle-aged straight white guy, I’m sure, often veer into the curmudgeonly and the petulant.  It’s true that being annoyed by piped-in hip-hop at the mall is not the same as being lynched, and being told you are a racist when you are a good person is not the same as being […]

Guilt Trip

The term “white guilt” has been around for several decades and can be defined in a number of ways. Foremost of these definitions stems from the historical fact that white Europeans enslaved millions of Black Africans and cruelly murdered or displaced millions of Indigenous North and South Americans, along with Aboriginal Australians and other Pacific […]

In and Out of Denial

Part of the political polarization which characterizes our era is the weaponizing of language. Where once we had indifference, now we have hate. Where once we had freedom of conscience, now we have -phobia. In such cases, the open exchange of ideas is reduced to a binary right-wrong, heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, Do-you-still-beat-your-wife paradigm that discredits one […]

Promotional Rescue

The entertainment industry has been around for so long now that nearly everyone understands the mechanics of hype and manipulation which drive the business. Or do we? Particular books, movies, television, or music might be resisted by audiences as “too commercial,” but all of them, no matter how they’re perceived, have been commercially marketed to […]

The Law of Averages

I once heard something to the effect that if aliens wanted to meet with an average, typical representative of the human race, they would be given an audience with a middle-aged Chinese woman – statistically, there are more of them than any other category of person on the planet. Yet such numerical considerations are often […]