STRING SLINGERS NIX LIMP BIX

The readers of Guitar World magazine have spoken, and they don’t like Limp Bizkit:

Limp Bizkit, which suffered sales of its long-awaited new album, has been named worst band of the year by readers of Guitar World magazine.

Creed, another act that draws sharp reactions, came in at No. 2 even though the Christian combo took the year off. New York rockers the Strokes were No. 3, followed by “all pop-punk bands” at No. 4 and pop-punk band Good Charlotte at No. 5.

It’s hard to argue with this list, except that giving the thumbs-down to all these bands is the equivalent to talking smack against the Alabama Crimson Tide: Everybody knows they’re all having a down year. Limp Bizkit has all but ceded its fans to Eminem, hating Creed has become the new “All your base are belong to us,” and pop-punk is a dead genre now that everybody who ever liked Blink 182 has a driver’s license. As for the Strokes, I’m pretty sure the White Stripes weren’t on their Christmas-card list.

The article goes on to note that Guitar World readers considered the absence of a new Guns ‘N Roses album one of the year’s biggest disappointments. Well, at least somebody thinks so.

UPDATE!

Matthew Yglesias, responding to Joyner, says his real issue in the matter discussed below is “an inappropriate instance of rights-talk.” I respectfully disagree. If you’re going to insist that someone does a complicated job, you’ve got to give them some latitude to do that job in their own fashion. I think that applies here–and it applies in both directions. It’s wrong for the state to tell parents, “If you home-school, you can’t teach your child x.” But, if parents charge the state with educating their children, it’s equally wrong of them to micro-manage classroom content. I realize this is a huge can of worms to open, but I believe that it is appropriate to speak of a “right” to use one’s own judgement and expertise in carrying out a complicated task. Look what happened to the Dallas Cowboys once Jerry Jones decided to let his head coach actually coach the team . . .

THE BAPTIST COOKBOOK THEORY OF PARENTING

James Joyner, riffing on Richard Mouw and Matthew Yglesias, is today pondering the limits of society’s rights with regards to how far parents can go in passing their religious beliefs on to their children:

Surely, parents should be allowed to teach their kids whatever they want, whether motivated by religion or not. And they should have a reasonable expectation that the public schools don’t work against them. Schools shouldn’t, for example, undermine parental teaching that sex should wait until marriage, regardless of how silly most of us think that is in practice.

But, again, where to draw the line? If the parents literally believe that God created the world three thousand years ago out of nothing, that the entire process took six days, and that woman was created from a rib, to what extent should school protect that belief system? Or, if parents want to raise their kids as if it were still the 1600s and make them quit school at the age of 12 so they don’t get overly modernized, should society permit that? How about snake handling? Religions who teach that getting medical care is wrong?

Many parents are solving this problem by putting their children into private schools that reinforce their religious indoctrination. And an increasing number are simply home schooling the kids, sheltering them from the world even more substantially. Both of these trends disturb me on some level. The early evidence, however, seems to indicate that my fears are unwarranted. Home-schooled kids are doing quite well on standardized tests as compared to their public-schooled cohort, for example.

On the main, parents should be trusted to raise their children. Surely, they have a much greater interest in how the kids turn out than does the school board or the state legislature. But what to do with the whackos? And who gets to say who is a whacko?

First of all, without the unfettered right to call anybody a whacko, where would the blogosphere be?

Speaking as one who is a parent and also acts in loco parentis when I teach confirmation classes, I can tell you that the problems James discusses are quite real. I have known home-schooled children who certainly weren’t whackos, and neither were their parents; the parents simply didn’t believe that teaching the three Rs could (or should) be separated from teaching faith and values. (Bear in mind, these were Lutherans, so Catholic and the invariably-Baptist “Christian” schools were dead options.)
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