I obviously wouldn’t remember by now if the Wonder Woman and C-3PO costumes I had were the Ben Cooper ones shown there, but they were probably my all-time favorites–in all their sweaty plasticky glory 😅
I wish I could find one thing I read a while back, with someone talking about the actual history around the Civil War in the North Georgia mountains compared to the number of assholes currently flying the stars and bars under the carefully pushed impression that it really is their “heritage”.
Depressingly similar pattern in my part of Virginia, yeah. The bit that only didn’t get split off to make WV because it already had enough rail infrastructure that Virginia wanted to hold onto.
@illuminatiswag – Yeah, I’m in the UK now, and I thought I was going to have a stroke the first time I saw something like this:
Outside the soccer stadium, European extremist political groups have been known to fly the Confederate flag, too. European skinheads and neo-Nazis have sometimes adopted the Confederate flag, especially in Germany, where the swastika and other symbols of Nazi Germany are officially banned by law. Many Europeans see the flag as a de facto sign of far-right political leanings: A Confederate flag that was spotted in a photograph of a French police station last year caused a minor scandal.
Bizarrely, American Civil War reenactions have become popular in Germany, with significant numbers of Germans preferring to fight on the Confederate side. “I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority,” Wolfgang Hochbruck, a professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg, once told American journalist Tony Horwitz. “They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate their own vanquished racists.”
It’s disconcerting enough elsewhere in the US. Where it’s a lot harder to claim ignorance of some of these connotations, even with some of the rest of the weird resurgence that apparently started in the ‘40s. It’s a mess.
Brazil was a safe haven for confederates after the war.
I wonder what all those “heritage not hate” people are going to say to these people are replacing the swastika with a confederate flag. Kinda turns that myth upside down huh.
Reminded again by this post, as an adult I am impressed in some different ways by the fact that when I had some horrific GI symptoms as a kid? The go-to explanation was always “stress from school”.
(It really was a pretty stressful experience, what with the bullying and all. The main thing causing those problems was unrecognized celiac, however.)
I mean, doctors were taking it as a given that the educational system is regularly stressful enough for kids that they will develop things like frequent otherwise unexplained vomiting and explosive cases of the runs in response. (Plus migraines, and you name it.) Whether it’s “just” from the direct physical effects of stress, or some weird psychosomatic ploy to try to avoid a stressful environment, and/or best attributed to mental health problems brought on/aggravated by school stress.
This evidently seemed totally reasonable, to the point of being the default assumption whenever they encountered a school-aged kid dealing with health problems which they couldn’t immediately figure out. (Then no further investigation required…)
This seems disturbing enough, on its own.
What really gets me, though, as an adult? The answer to this was never once “Gee, if this stressful environment is making children sick, maybe we should figure out how to change the situation to be less stressful!” Or even trying to make some changes to take pressure off the individual kid who is barfing in their office here and now. No, they apparently need to just get over it, if they are not actively milking it to avoid going to school like they should be doing.
Of course, I understand a lot more about institutions now. It’s still seriously messed up, how accepted and enabled some of the harm coming out of bad ones can be.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.