Some one should start a campaign to get their “State Dance” changed to the Batusi.
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Henry Ford was a dick.
Adolf Hitler awards Henry Ford (centre) the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on July 30th, 1938. The date coincided with Henry Ford’s 75th birthday.
Square dancing was introduced to keep his arm from rising above his head.
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In Texas, we had to do square dancing in elementary school music class… no big surprise there. But in P.E. the teacher had us line dancing to Steely Dan and Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You.”
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I was in grade school around that time, and I’m pretty sure I remember doing the Macarena in gym class. I know we did the electric slide, and other line dancing moves… that sort of thing is actually not a bad way to develop physical coordination and spatial awareness in children. It’s silly for older kids and teens (I don’t remember it being in the curriculum beyond 6th grade or so), but for young children still figuring out where all their limbs are in space and how to make them work the way they want? Dance isn’t any different from, say, martial arts.
Also good preparation for a lifetime of wedding receptions.
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My reaction every time I predict to myself that a brand new piece of language just got minted on a very popular blog’s comments threads, and I will certainly see it again, despite it being a crime against the universe. Today’s was punishment being “metered out” as opposed to “meted out”. The power of the internet played out in two trivial acts.
“Henry Ford invented square dancing as a way of carefully metering out punishment to US schoolkids, one hour at a time, in later decades”
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Sure there is. Readability and content control are two reasons. One tweet is also easier to take out of context. And, personally, linking to a website is easier. I realize there are A LOT of twitter users, but many more who are not.
This may make me old and cantankerous, but still a valid point.
Who wants to hear my views on the new mumble rap with all the rapid fire cymbal tisses?
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as my old buddy Wild Bill used to claim
“the name says it all - squares - - dancing”
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I absolutely hated this shit when they made us do it in gym class. Was a parochial school in the 80’s. If only I had known to complain about it’s racist bullshit beginning.
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A competitive square dancing aunt and uncle turned me on to bluegrass and I will always be thankful for that.
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I agree totally!
I see now that my sarcastic remark can be misunderstood. My sarcasm was not directed at the idea of including dance in P.E., but at the idea of teaching the Macarena back then: that was a time when the Macarena had thoroughly invaded America, and everyone seemingly knew it instinctively.
As best as I can remember, I just woke up one day and suddenly knew how to dance the Macarena, no explanation. If, after that miraculous epiphany, someone had then tried to teach me the Macarena, I would have been offended! And I’m pretty sure that when they did try to teach it to me in P.E., I spitefully clowned around.
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Boy oh boy, great 13! What a scam that was!
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Square dancing can’t be racist. My (otherwise lily-white, with the occasional Jewish student) large suburban high school, where we square-danced in gym, had two black students while I was there.
I distinctly remember the argument being made that it was okay to have the two black students because one of them was the son of a local TV newscaster, and therefore a celebrity. So I guess the high school and its dancing were only sort of not racist.
(And yes, this memory appalls me. I am not that freakin’ old, so this wasn’t all that long ago.)
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I just read “The Flivver King” by Upton Sinclair, a pretty interesting fact-based novel on Henry Ford. Sinclair does go into this story about square dancing and suggests it was one of Ford’s many efforts to change American culture back to some other time. And Ford imported the Protocols and owned and published an antisemitic rag, The Dearborn Independent, for years.
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'Grats to the ones in a hurry to prove somebody on the internet wrong, but the reality is had Henry Ford not done this we would only know about this from history books, and it would be a mostly irrelevant footnote instead of being state sanctioned “culture”.
So while no, square dancing wasn’t created by Henry Ford, the fact it still exists is solidly because of racism. Bad title, accurate sentiment.
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Meanwhile the quadrille is alive and well in the West Indies.
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He could have picked Morris dancing.
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Ok, minor rant; this is the kind of history effort that bothers me, someone picks up an odd historical factoid and turns it into twitter bait and with luck, a pundit like Cory picks it up. New people get to enjoy it, but that story has already been told. Otoh, doing primary research in archives and musty libraries or newspaper vaults is thrilling - when you find things that have gone unreported or put a new spin on old truths, and can publish, it is great time.
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Dude cut back on the weed when browsing.
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