What's with the friggin pith helmet? Going on a safari to the White Highlands of Kenya?
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/06/ok-birther-melania-trump-flops-with-tweet-celebrating-juneteenth/
= new reply since forum marked as read
America's Next Top Model Face.
Only Tyra totally called her out for being fake and then she was eliminated that week.
Her "pith-wearing" was heavily criticized on a 2018 visit to Africa as a symbol of racism and colonialism. Not without cause, though they're worn for practical reasons by millions around the planet, including U.S. postal workers. I very quickly found a 2015 article asking if pith helmets were racist and also this from the Washington Post:
The idea that white people from Europe needed special protection from the sun was based on racist pseudoscience, George Orwell wrote in a 1944 essay. “ ‘Natives’, their skulls being thicker, had no need of these helmets, but for a European even a double felt hat was not a reliable protection,” he recalled being told.
Emphasizing the difference between the natives and their colonizers was “one of the necessary props of imperialism,” Orwell added. “You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps toward this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different.”
Orwell noted with satisfaction that the pith helmet’s popularity had seemingly waned by the end of World War II, adding, “The thin skull was the mark of racial superiority, and the pith topi was a sort of emblem of imperialism.” ...
She’s not the only first lady to wear one. In 1994, The Washington Post’s Phil McCombs reported that then-first lady Hillary Clinton “appeared in a pith helmet, looking vaguely like a North Vietnamese Army officer” on a visit to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. (Good luck trying to find a picture, though.) ...
Okay... We know Hillary only gives half a hoot about clothes at her best. Who was the bright bulb who suggested a NVA-type pith helmet was just "the" accessory for a trip to the San Diego zoo? And actually got one?
Frankly, I hope it worked. The morality rates for both natives and invaders were horrible. There are a number of geographic-related reasons why today's African nations don't not lead the world, but killer living conditions are way high among them.
We live in GA and FL these days, and these unstable days often remind me that without HVAC and modern medicine we'd have to flee, if some disease didn't carry us off first. Of course, SoCal, where we came from, has its little issues also.
old GA families who have big trees over their old houses and refuse air conditioning. When we looked for a winter place in FL, I wanted shade and windows open amap. Happily, the half under the big live oak includes both covered porches, one on the east, other on the west to move with or hide from the early and late sun, and the breeze is funneled across the end of one. Sitting out was lovely this afternoon while and after it rained.
That said, I can't take sustained heat. It'd kill me, no exaggeration, and I would have been one of those who did not survive to suck it up. And now with global warming, ...
