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• SomeGuy
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• 1983-08-05
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Male
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• Vancouver, BC
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• 2003-08-02
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• Writer; Part-Time Hero
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• James
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• Visiting eight different myO friends in person thus far
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• Winter 2001
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• Neon Genesis Evangelion, .hack//SIGN, Naruto, Bleach, Beck, Peacemaker Kurogane, Ranma 1/2 (the guilty pleasure)
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• Visit the myO friends I've missed thus far; complete a cosplay from 300
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• Writing, Gaming, Kung Fu, Movies, Acting somewhat strange in general
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• Can recognise most quotes from almost any movie/show on first listen; Can recite the entire 12 days of Christmas by memory
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Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Never take anything at face value . . .
I don't really have anything good to say today and I don't wanna go through another "school is hard, I suck at Latin" post, so instead I'm gonna bring up something kinda funny yet unsettling and unbelievable about school textbooks.
Now, I have a professor who also happens to be first nation, post-modern, and slightly anarchistic in his ways. A lot of people hate him for his opinionatedness(?), but I'm not bothered by it a whole lot. Makes for a good way to kick off the morning, I suppose . . . anyway, he hates our book . . . . .
Oxford University Press' text A Brief History Of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and Culture by Pomeroy, Burstein, Donlan, and Roberts is a brutal book! First off, you have 4 people with different agendas, so the book contradicts itself a lot. Second, the book has these really stupid lines of rhetoric that have so much subtext - take for example, a part of the preface where they tell us what the book has gained "from the patient scholarship of a half-century of talented Greek historians" (as opposed to other books that have untalented historians, right?). Then there's this big thing of thank-yous for a number of people to give them credibility . . . it's silly.
The best part of all, though, is that the book really does have a brutally obvious agenda: it wants to make a distinction of good democracies versus evil socialism or whatever. So yeah, the Athens are happy and democratic and green and happy while the Spartans are evil and mean to their children and have strange sexual practices (unlike the rest of the Greeks who did nothing like that, of course). The final paragraph in the Spartan chapter is seriously the best part of it, though. I'll let you see if you can pick out what's wrong first:
"...As late as the twentieth century, critics of Western capitalist society have idealized the Spartans as highly virtuous, patriotic people produced by a stable noncapitalistic society. In recent years, however, those who cherish individual freedom and social mobility have come to see in Sparta a forerunner of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany. Furthermore, the blueprint for twentieth-century Communism had many affinities with the Spartan utopia..."
If you didn't catch it aside from all the flowery language to bash the Spartans, essentially the book says that the Spartans are both Nazis AND Communists. I'll let you think about the rest for that.
Though, "Commie-Nazis" were pretty funny in this one Simpsons episode . . . ah, I tell ya, there's a Simpsons reference in every aspect of life . . . . . but yes, be careful what you read, savvy?
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