Here is your open thread for January 8, 2020.
The title of this here blog is from a term that Dwight Ozard and I coined to refer to “these children that you spit on / As they try to change their worlds.” That was back in the ’90s when those children were Gen-Xers, but it still applies today to Millennials and whatever it is we’re eventually going to call the following generational cohort when hack-pundits start writing the next round of articles blaming Kids These Days for all that is wrong with the world.
So, OK Boomers, remember when all those pundits were blaming everything on you? That’s what David Bowie (born January 8, 1947) was singing about here:
Today is also the birthday of A.J. Muste (1885), a largely forgotten figure we all would do well to remember, but who maybe especially needs to be remembered or rediscovered by his fellow Dutch Reformed white Christians in and around Grand Rapids.
Going back even further, it’s also the birthday of Alfred Russell Wallace, who is sometimes called the “co-discoverer” of natural selection but might better be thought of as the discoverer of natural selection who could’ve used a better publicist. Wallace looms large in David Quammen’s brilliant, beautifully sad book The Song of the Dodo, which I wholeheartedly recommend, again.
Oh, and it’s also the birthday of Elvis. Aron. Presley. Since angry white America is embracing every other conspiracy theory nowadays as part of an alternative epistemology that denies climate change, opposes vaccination, imagines Satanic baby-killers in pizza-parlor basements, and insists that the FBI helped Hillary lose as a conspiracy against Trump, it’d be fun to revive one more, relatively innocent, conspiracy theory and pretend that Elvis is still alive, walking among us and still shaking his hips at 85 years old.
Talk amongst yourselves.
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