I’m back home in Massachusetts for the summer , dreaming neon as I wait to get back to the city and my now-comfortable routine… A routine that requires bagel joints to stay open past 5pm or at least exist.

My mum (who bases her votes on the military experience of a given candidate) likes to blare right-winged radio loud enough to remind herself of why she sometimes strays to the left with her votes on issues like civil liberties. This, combined with the the fact that I’m stuck in a fellow suburb that can’t be pronounced correctly on the first try, means that I’m currently hearing the whole “pregnancy pact” story from Gloucester at least twenty minutes every hour.

Didn’t you hear? Diablo Cody personally knocked up over a dozen teenagers.

That’s right. There’s been no end to the banter on talk radio, blogs, and those coffee shops you go up intending to get a quick egg and toast order but slowly walk out of when you realize its clientèle consists entirely of 80+ year-old men. The conclusion is unanimous: the supposed pregnancy pact fulfilled by over a half-dozen teenagers in Gloucester, MA is a result of their enjoying the Cody-penned teen pregnancy comedy, Juno. It’s funny to hear the same folks that praised Jason Reitman’s indie hit for its implicit pro-life message bashing it just as fervently as a brainwasher of innocent children’s minds.

I could give the usual counter-argument to this ridiculous assumption that media affects our children’s actions: parents should be watching these films with their kids or sheltering them, parents are responsible for monitoring their kids’ behaviors, etc. etc…. But really, I don’t see the point in this case because personally I found nothing offensive in the movie in question.

This brings me to real topic of this post, the top five reasons Diablo Cody didn’t get your child pregnant:

1. Juno in no ways “glamorizes pregnancy.” While the protagonist herself is hip beyond imagination (she has a hamburger phone!), it’s clear that she goes through an extremely emotional ordeal in choosing to go through with her pregnancy. There are no glamorous shots of her holding her child, no instances where she seems happy about the fact that she is pregnant itself, and certainly no high-fives from friends who made a pact that they’d get pregnant together so that they could by matching strollers in school colors.
2. Juno doesn’t keep or even interact with her baby. The adult woman with a home and a secure job is shown as the ideal parent in the end.
3. Even adult parenthood isn’t glamorized. The relationship between Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman is torn apart because even with all of their financial resources they weren’t ready to handle raising a child together.
4. The pregnancy in the film is unplanned. Michael Cera wasn’t looking for an heir.
5. As a female, Cody doesn’t have sperm.

I like to ask myself why a particular media outlet has made the content choices it did. For example, sometimes my favorite part of a movie is the previews, because it gives me insight on what the marketers thought was the kind of movie views of the current film would watch. It’s interesting when a horror flick is advertised during Superbad or a political drama during Rush Hour 3.

Sometimes I read the front pages of newspapers with this same thought-process. Why did the editors feel these stories were the most important? They have the power to decide what comes to the forefront of public discussion. (Let’s face it, the average American doesn’t do independent research to see what else is happening.) Today I saw this article on the front page of times and began to wonder how what seemed to be a localized addition the death penalty debate with no tangible national consequences could beat out genocide and civil wars.

The more I read the article, the more I understood. It touched on nuances of an issue that has, for better or for worse, been a major conflict in national and local politics throughout U.S. history. I particularly found this prosecutor’s argument interesting, because it made me pit my feelings about the death penalty (which are already mixed) against my feelings about the justice system:

“Our job is to enforce the law no matter who the victim is or what the victim’s religious beliefs are,” said John A. Connelly, a veteran prosecutor in Waterbury who is not involved in the Cheshire case. “If you started imposing the death penalty based on what the victim’s family felt, it would truly become arbitrary and capricious.” 

This angle on the death penalty may have be stated before, but never this eloquently. As long as we have the death penalty, shouldn’t it be subject to the rules of standard prosecution? After all, there are women who try to drop abuse cases against their boyfriends, but the justice system is usually obligated to prosecute the man anyway so that they can protect other women from being victimized by the suspect. 

It’s a good article. Give it a read.

Growing up in a community dominated by the Italian, French, and Irish, I didn’t know what a protestant was until the age of 15 when it was mentioned in a history class. Moving to New York City showed me that Catholicism was not only just one of many religions, but it was a much-hated religion at that. Despite my religious and social beliefs conflicting with Catholic dogma, I felt a cultural need to defend the Church at every cost — usually citing the fact that it’s not the religion that’s corrupt, it’s the people. However, it gets harder by the day. Catholic animals are now engaging in youth propaganda:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20071003/tod-uk-pope-cat-1a5e080.html

Welcome to Manhattan, a major city in a world that produces Nazis for popes and lets cats wield lofty pens.