Dancing With the Tea Party

I had to steal this title from a blog I've recently encountered about the Bristol Palin debate that has been going on lately. Bristol Palin, a contestant on Dancing With the Stars, is now a part of the final 3 couples on the show, despite receiving the lowest scores of all the couples for the past few weeks. The scores come from judges who all have professional dance training and background, but the votes come from the adoring public. As the loyal fans of DWTS watched Brandy (of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella) get voted off after getting the best scores consistently for many weeks before that, they started wondering if there was something going on "behind the scenes". In blog posts (link) and news articles (link), people have suggested a glitch in the DWTS voting system, or even an unjust Tea Party takeover. The Tea Party, which I mentioned in my last post, consists of the "new" Republicans, such as Sarah Palin. And it just so happens that her daughter is a competitor on DWTS. Hmm...

I actually don't watch this show, but my mom does, and religiously. I used to watch it with her a little but I got sick of watching the judges judge great dancers harshly and poor ones really leniently. But many of the people blogging about this situation don't watch the show, just like me. It's not about who deserves to win, it's about questioning the ethics of a group of politicians who have possibly been rigging the voting system in order to make a political statement in support of Sarah Palin. The accusation is that Tea Party followers have been entering false email accounts into the voting forms on the DWTS website in order to vote more than once for Bristol. But others say that this is allowed because they don't state any rules limiting how many times you can vote for a contestant. I found the rules and regulations myself on the website and it stated that you may vote through text, email, or phone call only 5 TIMES. While I largely suspect that there was some ballot-stuffing going on, James Poniewozik of Time Magazine makes a good point: "The show is called Dancing With the Stars. Not, say, Dancing With the Dancers." This show is meant to be a popularity contest, not based on solely who is the best and strongest dancer of the group. And doesn't this remind you of our country's political system, in a way?

The results of DWTS will be revealed tonight on the final episode of the season...may the best politician's daughter win.

Quasi-Republicans

   We just learned about the Quasi-War from our intelligent peers this past week. Something that stuck out to me was the fact that back then, Republicans were called Federalists and Democrats were called Republican-Democrats. While the names of the political groups had eveloved since then, they have also evolved recently in the world of politics. There is now a "splinter" group of Republicans called the "Tea Party," which is made up of younger minds and has recently taken over the House. The Republican party had a hard time defining itself, and was considered to be running out of energy in terms of leadership, policies, and popularity. So the Tea Party came out and is trying to become the new "face" of the Republicans.

Pretending

   We briefuly talked about the Stanford Prison Experiment in class the other day. As some of the students had not heard about it, I knew what it was because we learned about it in Theater 3. It came into play when we started discussing the idea of "cognitive dissonance." This is when one believes something so strongly and completely in their mind that it becomes a reality for them. The reason this prison experiment was conducted at Stanford University was so study the psychology of pretending to be in a situation you're not really in. At least, that's how we looked at it in theater class. In the link provided, it seems as though the experiment was really to test the "goodness" of people when they are placed in an "evil" situation. This relates to The Crucible because as the accusations and rumors of witchcraft start flying, we see everyone in the town of Salem become accusatory and vicious. People start lying about the neighbors they have always held a grudge on, and basically condemning them to their deaths. The evil situation that has befallen the people of Salem brings out the demonic side of them. This is ironic because it is the demon that they are so strongly afraid of and avoiding.

Mommy's in High School?

A teacher from Teach For America visited us in class the other day. Teach for America is a program in which qualified adults volunteer as teachers of students in poor communities for 2 years. He talked about the community he teaches in, which is in the United States, contrary to what some of our preconceived notions stated. Curious as to what the school and students are like, we asked him how it is different than here. He would know especially because he graduated from New Trier so he had experienced both worlds in his young life. The most shocking thing he said is that a quarter of the students at his school have a baby. This disturbing, yet accurate fact, shocked all of us in the classroom. Occasionally there is an incident of teenage pregnancy at our school, but it is always regarded as a huge scandal, not a common occurrence. We New Trier students have such a narrow view of the world that we cannot possibly imagine some of the hardships these students face on a daily basis. It instills hope in me that we have programs like Teach for America that recognize these troubled schools and look to fix it, starting with small actions and working to change the system of education nationwide. I hope that we all put ourselves in those unfortunate students' shoes and realize how grateful we should be for this world we live in and do not take it for granted any longer.