• Hemant Mehta and Charles Kuffner share the latest news on Texas’s flagrantly unconstitutional 12 Commandments law and the should-be-a-slam-dunk-but-who-knows-anymore lawsuits against it. (Here’s Kuffner’s index of all his posts on this ludicrous law.)
I’ll just take this opportunity to remind us that these efforts to mandate “the Bible” in public schools don’t actually involve the 10 Commandments from the Bible. They list more than 10 commandments. And they’re not from the Bible.
This bill, like any such legislation, “requires a specific version of the Ten Commandments.”
That’s a problem, because there are a lot of different versions of the Ten Commandments, all of which are phrased and enumerated differently. The version of “The Ten Commandments” mandated by Horton’s bill is not taken from any of those. It is, instead, the version concocted in 1950 by the Fraternal Order of Eagles and Cecil B. DeMille.
Yes, really.
This is not “The Ten Commandments” that can be found in any Bible. It’s “The Ten Commandments” that Hollywood used to promote DeMille’s 1956 blockbuster The Ten Commandments.
• Here (via AZspot) is Paris Marx with a fine rant about Ring doorbell cameras:
The camera doorbell is the perfect example of a technology that makes people believe they’re safer when really making them more paranoid and anxious as they see their neighborhood and community with deep and unwarranted suspicion. People become aware of things that had already been happening around their home for ages without them knowing about it and they become like big brother, spying out everything once the camera detects movement. It gets even worse when this paranoia meets social media, whether through snitching apps like Nextdoor or the spread of clips on platforms like Facebook that convince others to fear their surroundings and vastly overestimate the amount of crime happening in their vicinity.
Camera doorbells are social cancer as a technology, breaking down social solidarity and further encouraging people to see strangers with suspicion. They make people a participant in the surveillance state, even aiding the oppressive power of police, while convincing them their home is their sanctuary — where they can hole up and keep ordering products from Amazon, food from DoorDash, and consuming content on Netflix — contributing to the erosion of their own community in the process.
Also, if you’re trying to market a product that’s supposedly going to make people feel safer thanks to video, maybe “The Ring” is the wrong name for that?
• Philip Jenkins argues — convincingly — that folk horror has just as much of an American pedigree as it does a British one. He cites some strong examples here, including Hawthorne and Shirley Jackson, as well as a host of once-popular novels.
If you’ve never read Jackson’s “The Lottery,” or if it’s been a while, take the short amount of time it takes to read it again. Unless you don’t want to be deeply unsettled.
The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”—eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.
Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. …
And here is Jenkins’ follow-up post, arguing that H.P. Lovecraft can (and should) be included in discussion of folk horror.
• Shirley Jackson’s legacy as a powerfully unnerving writer is commemorated with the Shirley Jackson Awards — an honor that one might be nervous about accepting if one has read “The Lottery,” but don’t worry it’s an actual award and not like that.
One winner of that award is Isabel B. Kim who, like many of us, has thought many different and difficult thoughts ever since reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s story/parable “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Many of Kim’s different and difficult thoughts about that took the shape of a story of her own: “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole,” which I’ll also recommend here today for anyone who just finished “The Lottery” and is now thinking, “Yes, please, can I have another thought-provoking and disturbing (in perhaps a good way) literary experience?”
• Speaking of folk horror and such, here’s Steve Wiggins on The Damned, the 2024 horror movie from Icelandic director Thordor Palsson. The story, set in the 19th century, involves a remote arctic fishing station and a monster from Nordic folklore called a draugr. But it also links to current events and very current scandals in that the story also involves the laws of the sea and the dire consequences that arise from refusing the obligation to rescue shipwreck survivors.
(N.B.: The Wikipedia disambiguation page for Damned/The Damned is both long and fascinating.)
• The title of this post comes from Todd Snider’s “Easy Money,” because I’ve still been mourning/celebrating by listening to a lot of Todd Snider. Here’s a terrific live version of this song, introduced by his “Bill Elliott” story:
Segueing from Snider’s song about two-bit con artists into a reminder that December is a fundraising month here on the blog seems kind of awkward, but every such reminder seems awkward. Anyway, here’s the PayPal link, and the Venmo: @George-Clark-61. Thanks.
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