Word: schoolyard
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...Ghraib photos were revealed and the U.S. military chose not to fight the Islamic radicals in Fallujah (a retreat compounded by last week's decision not to pursue Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army). Taken together, those events represent a coherent pattern of behavior-that of a schoolyard bully, who tortures the weak and runs away from the strong. This is, sadly, the way Abu Ghraib and Fallujah are perceived by our enemies. I was traveling through the Middle East as some of these events unfolded, and so the embarrassment I felt was direct and intense. The experience has been...
Watching this schoolyard scuffle with a smirk plastered across his goateed face, taking a perpetually unsatisfying drag from his hand-rolled cigarette, is the intellectual film critic. To those removed from the academic world, this person doesn’t exist, but any student at all familiar with the inside of a university film studies department knows his kind very well. Subsisting on a rigid diet of Fassbinder and Brakhage, the only filmic pleasure he knows is found deep within his Criterion collection...
Boys today are force-fed these categorical imperatives of manhood in the schoolyard, the backyard and from the greatest teacher of all: the mass media. Boys playing Halo, a popular game for the X-Box game console, for instance—where the objective is to shoot everything in sight—learn that manhood is about power and domination. Television reinforces the lesson, often advertising a violent brand of masculinity. TV shows celebrate hyper-violent male icons like wrestlers, football players and action-heroes, a.k.a. professional killers. Meanwhile, men who don’t put on what anti-violence...
Suddenly, I was playing field hockey on sprinkler-fed fields tended by legions of gardeners. I went to sleepovers in mansions, and attended sweet-sixteen parties that would have given Caligula a run for his money. Instead of getting chased around the schoolyard by pit bulls, I spent my afternoons at meetings for the various clubs I’d joined, or reading quietly beside one of the stained-glass windows. I graduated in a white gown, holding a basket of red roses...
Knapp spoke of her sister’s hunger as an “agent of denial” for family love she felt was withheld in childhood, while Harold said her multi-ethnic background led to painful schoolyard taunts...