After a 25 year hiatus, I now have a subscription to National Review again. The magazine formed my conservatism back in the 80's and early 90's - I owe the writers a great debt.
While "God Before Midnight" is not a political blog, sometimes political stories can be encouraging and even funny. I found this story to be both: encouraging because this is the kind of nonsense that believers don't have to get tangle up in, and funny because, well, it's fun when other people do. The "you're a racist" trend is hopefully running its course. Articles like this show the desperation of it and how ridiculous it can be. Where racism exists, it needs to be addressed. Trying to find it under every rock, river, and...sea, undermines its seriousness.
This is from the November 11, 2019 issue.
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The latest entry in the ever-lengthening list of Things You Never Knew Were Racist is none other than SpongeBob Squarepants. His animated antics with Patrick Star, Pearl Krabs, Squidward Tentacles, and the other Sponge worthies may seem innocent but in fact, says University of Washington anthropology professor Holly M. Barker, suppress "public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities" by "normalizing the settler colonial takings of Indigenous lands" and "maintaining American military hegemonies in Oceania." How so? The series is set in Bikini Bottom, a seafloor community assumed to be underneath Bikini Atoll, the site of a 1946 U.S. nuclear test for which the indigenous population was permanently removed from the atoll. That action was arrogant, to be sure, but blaming "the cartoon's appropriation of [the islanders'] homelands" for the indigenous population's current troubles is problematic because (a) the show's characters don't live on Bikini Atoll, but miles beneath it, (b) they are a wide variety of diverse colors, so it makes no sense to call them racist, (c) they're sea creatures, and (d) did we mention that it's a cartoon?
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