On "the Problem that Has No Name"

On "the Problem that Has No Name": When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she was reacting to a widespread feeling of "unhappiness" among women in the 1950s. Coming from a decade in which women were marrying young and having large families, many suburban housewives were feeling isolated and wanted more than just a "nuclear family" or material comfort. This collective yearning for more became known as "the problem that has no name." But Friedan also argued for a masculine mystique. In fact,  it was the men with long hair and sympathies for female reproductive rights who initially co-rode the "second-wave" of feminism in the 1960s. Yet by the 1970s, the masculine mystique had mostly dissipated, as a more radicalized strain of feminist thinking took hold. Led by Gloria Steinem and her Ms. magazine, she published the names of women who had abortions in the United States before Roe v. Wade. Ultimately, it was this radicalization which not only rode the Civil Rights Movement's coattails, but also exposed a fundamental contradiction in feminism, namely that feminists pushed for socioeconomic and political equality (Title IX, ERA, etc.) with men while also seeking special recognition of women's biological functions (birth control, abortion, etc.).

On the "Atlanta Compromise"

On the "Atlanta Compromise": On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington (pictured above) went from being a regional African-American educator to a national black leader, overnight. After delivering the keynote address at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition on that day, he became the de facto speaker for the African-American community in the United States. Northern white elites like Andrew Carnegie (steel magnate) donated money in droves to Washington's Tuskegee Institute while Southern whites such as Porter King (Mayor of Atlanta) praised him for advocating an accommodationist approach to racial segregation. However, not everybody approved of Washington's speech, especially Northern black elites like W. E. B. Du Bois. In effect, Du Bois felt the speech represented a relinquishment of the struggle for racial equality. It had been thirty years since the end of the Civil War and there were a variety of unfulfilled promises (Freedmen's Bureau, "40 acres and a mule", etc.) hanging over black Americans. And if Washington was choosing the "go-along-to-get-along" method of negotiation in his speech, then shrugging off second-class citizenship and attaining civil rights would become an increasingly difficult and lengthy challenge.

On Catholicism and Polish Solidarity

On Catholicism and Polish Solidarity: In October 1984, three members of the Polish secret police bludgeoned Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko to death. It was the half-way point of what seemed like a ten-year strategy by the Catholic Church to put pressure on the Communist regime in Poland. In June 1979, Pope John Paul II visited his homeland for the first time since becoming the Bishop of Rome one year prior. And like Fr. Popiełuszko's funeral, hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens greeted the Pope in the streets. The Communist regime had planned to crush any riots that developed as a result of the Pope's visit, but no such action was necessary. Instead, the Pope's visit helped spark the Solidarity (trade union) movement in the shipyards of Gdańsk. In August 1980, future President of Poland, Lech Wałęsa, organized the first non-communist-party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. At its peak, Solidarity had nearly 10 million members and represented about one-third of the entire Polish workforce. By the late 1980s, after enduring years of martial law and political repression, Solidarity succeeded in negotiating semi-free elections with the Communist regime, which resulted in a partial coalition government.

On Modernism

On Modernism: When Nietzsche wrote "The world is a work of art that gives birth to itself" in the 1880s, he captured modernism's central thrust. Even the above painting (Salvador Dalí's surrealist piece The Persistence of Memory - 1931) defined the modernist ethos of breaking down time and space. In doing so, modernists sought to dissolve rationality itself. The primal superseded the rational, especially since modernists believed it existed before reason along the scale of evolutionary consciousness. Generally speaking, modernism was a distinct period of cultural history grounded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Art, literature, and philosophy all underwent massive shifts in directional thinking. The rigid societal norms of Victorianism provided the reactionary backdrop for many British and American modernists, while Bismarck's Second Reich served a similar purpose for German modernists. As the world's population surpassed one billion around 1850, many people questioned how they would continue to exist. Although advances in agricultural, medical, and transportation technologies (mech. reapers, anesthetics, and trains) helped people survive the nineteenth century, they scared modernists because each innovation effectively reinforced the primacy of time and space.

'90s Industrial Metal at Its Best

'90s Industrial Metal at Its Best: Originating in the late 1980s in Europe and the United States, industrial metal grew from a variety of musical genres, most notably, dance music, noise rock, and heavy metal. Because of this diversity, many industrial metal bands, including Nine Inch Nails (NIN) and Marilyn Manson, have incorporated not only keyboards and synthesizers, but also drum machines and electronic sequencers. Perhaps one of the genre's nearest relatives was '80s synthpop, which included groups like Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, and Gary Numan. These '80s synthpop bands elevated the importance of synthesizers, and as a result, essentially laid the groundwork for industrial metal to solidify as a musical genre in its own right. Yet it was also the genre's dark sounds and anger-inducing lyrics that began to set it apart from other emerging genres like alternative rock in the 1990s. The above video by NIN, which was filmed at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, CA (part of the Manson "family" murders), truly captured the essence of industrial metal's dark and disturbing sounds.