Jeffrey Breinholt reflects on a “Deconstructing Islamaphobia” conference at Berkeley, presumably aimed at deconstructing the myths of Islamophobia and wonders if they will actually deconstruct Islamaphobia and thus prove it does not exist.
Along the way, he provides this amusing example of textual deconstruction:
Remember the Brady Bunch? What did we know about them? It was a story about a man named Brady, who was busy with three boys of his own. They were four men, living altogether, yet they were all alone.
Let’s look at the text. How can one be living with three other people, yet be all alone? That makes the Brady Bunch theme song internally inconsistent. There are two possibilities: either the Brady Bunch does not exist, since its theme song yields a philiosophical inconsistency, or, in the Brady men’s narrative, they would never to considered whole unless there were females (woMen) in the house to clean up after them. If the latter, than the Brady Bunch creators believed that men must be entitled to enslave females (woMen). Thank Heavenly Mother we have moved well beyond the paternalistic, sexist construct in postmodern America.
Either possibility renders the Brady Bunch worthless as an art form. In fact, it might as well not exist as a phenomenon. Those reruns you still see? The television screen might as well be a test pattern.
This, incidentally, is not the view of the Department of Justice.
