Rear-guard action. The Dairy Council of Wisconsin, Inc., has been moooved to issue a three-page release denying that the Dairy State’s ranking first in obesity nationwide has anything to do with its being the Dairy State.
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We don’t care. We don’t have to care. David Fremon on the demographic changes in Chicago wards: “The newcomers to the [lakefront] 42nd and 43rd wards don’t feel obliged to be regular Democrats. If you can afford to live there, you can afford to be a Republican” (Chicago Reporter, May 1990).
Educating the in-laws. Yvonne Zipter in Outlines (May 1990): “Aside from any personal satisfaction I might take from being a participant observer at my lover’s family gatherings, I think my presence at those functions helps further the movement, albeit in a small way. When invited to these festivities, Kathy has frequently said to me, ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ the implication being that I’m not expected to go, the way, for instance, her cousins’ husbands are. And that, precisely, is why I go: to get them to the point where they do expect me to be there, to the point where they recognize the nature and stubbornness of our relationship, on whatever level they are capable of perceiving it.”
“I don’t think that respecting the dead obliges me to respect their skeletons too,” writes professional curmudgeon James Krohe Jr. in Illinois Times (May 17-23), apropos the debate over the closing of the Dickson Mounds. “Investing the remains of the dead with sacred or magical significance is a practice the West once dismissed as primitive; it is proof of our sentimentalization of Indians and other non-Western people that we now applaud, even envy their primitiveness.” Besides, “if it is sacrilegious for a tourist to gaze upon Indian remains, is it not also sacrilegious for a scientist to gaze upon them?…I am not too concerned if the religious want to perpetuate their own ignorance about their past, but I resent it when they try to perpetuate mine.”
