Every week, our toddler’s energy and volume levels tend to build slowly, ominously, and eventually exceed my own comfort levels for the proper public behavior. And every time, I end up hauling him out of the chapel, whispering sharply in his ear, and holding him still in the foyer.
And almost every week, I end up next to this painting, admiring one tiny detail in this depiction of the Sermon on the Mount.
This little girl, like my three kids, is nearly oblivious to the sermon. The beauty of the gospel, untold blessings, inheriting the earth, all of it seems to mean nothing to her. Instead she’s enraptured, not by the Savior or his teachings, but by a tiny, orange butterfly. A fluttering distraction. A flitting piece of living beauty. A pretty little bug.
And every week, as I am distracted by this child’s distraction, holding my own squirming ball of distraction, I remind myself being distracted is okay. These kids are being normal; distraction and energetic outbursts are normal; my kids are normal.
The marketing for beach-related vacation destinations often capitalizes on the association of foreign beaches with (partly) naked bathing beauties. This intersection of race, gender, and sexuality that positions the “ethnic” woman as particularly sexually accessible have deep roots in our colonial past in which foreign lands “open” to conquest by the Western world were conflated with foreign women “open” to conquest by Western men.
The “Hula Girl” is a case in point.
Hawaii was colonized by the U.S. and, when the islands became a tourism destination, Polynesian women were transformed into Hawaiian babes ready and waiting to please tourists from the mainland.
One transformation was the hula. Widely understood to be an “authentic” Polynesian tradition, the hula was actually originally mostly a man’s dance. It was religious. It involved chanting and no music. There were no hip movements, just gestures. Basically, it was story-telling.
Today, the men take a back seat to women, who are scantily clad in grass skirts (not authentic, by the way), and perform exaggerated hip movements to music. So the hula is an invention, designed by colonizers and capitalists, to highlight the appeal of “foreign” women.
Despite the constructed nature of the hula girl, she’s been used to market Hawaii for over 100 years. The image above is of hula girls sent back to the mainland way back in 1890.
This picture was snapped by my friend Jason at a Trader Vic’s restaurant in 2008:
A Google Image search for “Hawaii postcard” in 2013 reveals that about half include the figure of a woman:
The phenomenon is a common one: women are treated as objects of beauty and aesthetic pleasure — exotified, in the case of “foreign” or darker-skinned women — and used to embellish a place or experience. While lots of things have changed for women since the beginning of this particular example in the late 1800s, their role as decoration resists retirement.
Do departments of transportation (like UDOT) publish geocoded construction schedules that navigation apps/services (like Waze or Garmin) can use to estimate traffic and map routes?
“For Google, devices are dumb glass and the intelligence is in the cloud.
But for Apple the cloud is just dumb storage and the device is the place for intelligence.”
Something about this job, about this work that I do, to turn people’s lives for the better, is exhausting. It’s a constant uphill battle. Sometimes people think they know what they want — that twinkie in front of the tv, that nap instead of a run, that choice to wing it instead of planning something out well. And with our current culture of “to each his own” and “who am I to condemn another’s preferences”, being prescriptive is hostile.
Last night, as I quoted a character on tv’s misuse of the word “literally”, I cringed. Somehow, even breaking the rules of grammar have taken on a moral sheen for me. As if using a word incorrectly were the same as saying something untrue, the same as lying. Because if I know what the word means and then purposefully use it in a way that disagrees with that, then I’m in the wrong. I’m not only polluting the language,1 but also, I’m being false to those around me and perpetuating that word’s abuse.
Because language is valuable. Language holds power. And it’s misuse, its pollution, its dilution devalues it to everyone. Ask George Orwell. It makes communication harder, makes understanding others more tedious and difficult, makes getting along more of a chore.
To put it more simply, understanding others is a morally right action, one we should all strive for in every action. Thus, anything that stands in the way of understanding others is, in some way, morally wrong.
In my mind, at least.
Yes, I know that a phrase like “polluting the language” sounds both vague and haughty. It probably casts my voice as nasal and points my chin in the air. The language of morals does that sometimes. ↩︎
The idea of having to diagram a sentence still gives us nightmares, but Pop Chart Lab has diagrammed opening lines of famous novels, including those as simple as Slaughterhouse-Five and as complex as Don Quixote.
