March 23, 2008
I had been meaning to re-read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, for what that's worth. (No; I'm not going to read SIASL; it's too long, and I have no attention span, except on special occasions. I have read the "notebooks" contained therein, though.)
Yeah, yeah: RAH does overdo the animal-related similes for human behavior, and his characters aren't complex—generally not "round," in the E.M. Forster sense. But for a preachy writer, he's pretty good. He's one of maybe 2-3 SF writers I've actually read a bit of, and somehow his "pulp-ey" streak feels like a virtue.
I mean, it isn't as if every Jane Austen character was drawn to the nth degree, is it? One has to make choices. Books should be short, for one thing: ideally, one reads the entirety of any given novel within a day. (This is why serious readers and writers tend to subsist on foodstuffs that can be eaten with one hand, such as apples and bagels and whatnot.)
Anyway, yeah: I'd love to see what the "fish spinoff" symbol is for a Heinleiner, or whatever we're going to call it. I've been meaning to put a fish on one side of my bumper, and a Buddha on the other—just to see what the people around me are made of.
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Now I truly know what it means to be a narcissist . . . I could just stare at it for hours:
Thanks, Darrell. I assume you got the face from that lunch with Desert Cat and Daisy Cat last winter?
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I'm not usually into cutesy stuff. But when I get it, I get it bad. Maggie may not be quite as adorable as Mandy—but she's damned close.
Doggie!
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The word nigger has so many different meanings it's difficult to unpack them all. And, to be fair, Old Punk got into some weird areas of fashion—like white kids don't wear baggy clothes to look cool? Tell that to my young white cousins.
For the most part, Old Punk's post leaves me just as cold as the people on my side of the aisle who "don't have any problem with immigrants, as long as they're legal," but never want to hear Spanish spoken in any public place, and are offended by the sight of grubby little taco stands polluting the public streets. If you show them a piñata, they need smelling salts.
That said, there is a use of the word nigger that is meant to describe "a person without class, morals or values." Where do you think the term white trash came from? It comes from the Jim Crow-era South, and it means, "someone with underclass values, but white skin." At least, it was used that way in every early 20th-century novel I ever read that was set south of the Mason-Dixon line. It meant "low-class," but in a way that went far beyond a person's means, and generally accused them of being low-class on the inside.
Now we use the term "trailer trash," so that we can take race out of it, and don't have to use the parallel, unwieldy—and highly offensive—terms niggers and white trash. Because there's no longer any logical association between race and trashiness, since blacks are no longer locked into low-income lives and deprived of upward mobility.
Of course, the new nomenclature isn't necessarily fair to people who live in prefabricated housing, but English is an imperfect language, and most people I know who live in trailer parks have a sense of humor about the negative associations therewith. They tell me it's really a "stationary coach" lifestyle, or explain that they only operate the meth labs on the weekends, so it's okay.
Anyway, I don't think I'm really white—Mayflower ancestry notwithstanding—because (1) I know I have some Creek Indian in me; (2) I suspect I have some Nez Perce as well; (3) some of my family is from the state of Virginia; (4) I have very full lips; and (5) my brother [and one of his sons] has very very dark skin, and fuzzy hair. Because people look at the skin color more closely than they do our features, they never suspect we're even related unless we tell them.
But, whatever. I'm pretty pale, so I identify with the Anglo-Saxon strain; it's the most convenient one to claim, given the way I look. Another friend of mine, who's also an English major white-looking chick, was talking with me about the Stuff White People Like site, and I told her that I know the intent is harmless, just as it was with The History of White People in America.—but to associate anything that's intellectual, or ironic, or upwardly mobile with white skin seems to me to be playing off of old stereotypes and going in the wrong direction. I see that it's probably funny sometimes—and to some people—but I don't like the conflation of "middle-class," or "upper-middle-class," with white. She responded:
I object as well, and perhaps more, to the use of "black" to signify cool, young/hip/urban, anti-corporate bullshit.... Specifically, white kids [students] who call each other (and, on at least one memorable occasion, me!) "my niggah."
Of course, once we acknowledge that any educated black person is equally likely to enjoy Starbucks and Sarah Silverman, and that any black person who lives in La Cañada or Santa Monica or Bel Air is culturally "white," then we're getting somewhere—provided that the term stops being an insult in the black community, and darker-skinned folks start allowing each other to wear cowboy boots and listen to Pink Floyd and do their homework without accusing each other of "acting white." At that point, maybe literary white chicks like my friend the composition teacher and I should be calling each other "mah niggah." Anything that blurs the lines and shows that culture and race are two different things (the first being relevant to who we are, and the second, irrelevant) should be applauded.
I'm pretty divorced from the celebrity culture, so I don't know about every case Old Punk mentioned, but I'm completely willing to specify that Jeremiah Wright, O.J. Simpson, and Louis Farrakhan are niggers. So were Jeffrey Dahmer and Joseph Stalin. Kim Jon Il is a nigger. Catherine Shelton appears to be a total nigger. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka are niggers. Mary I of England? She was mondo-niggo.
But my friend and I? Just a couple of overread, middle-aged niggahz.
At this point, linguistically speaking, it's all in the spelling. In 20 years, though, one of my nephews is going to look at this post of mine and go, "Aunt Joy, what the fuck was it with people like you in the double-Os? Why were you on about race like that? Too much time on your hands? Geez."
Which is why instead of a "conversation," I'd like to see us eventually have a "national shut-up" about race. Not because I want us to censor ourselves, but because I hope we run out of things to say.
Just try not to be hating people. Not as individuals, and not as members of any group. Okay?
UPDATE: I'd forgotten about this; it may be the best Glenn Greenwald post of all time. I mean, the best one about him. I don't think it was by him, though of course one never can tell. Sometimes I wonder if the entire blogosphere other than me is simply an elaborate Greenwald prank. I mean, I know I exist, because I annoy my husband. But how about the others? How can I be sure they aren't all just extensions of Gleen(s)?
h/t: Clarice, in this thread at Just One Minute.
UPDATE 2: Ralph Robert Moore:
In addition to the N word, we also have the F word. In case you don't know, the F word is 'fuck'. If we're going to persist in the assignment of letters to disturbing words, then I do have a concern as a practical matter, since we only have 26 letters in the alphabet, and two of them are now taken. That means we only have 24 letters left to act as a code for the words we find objectionable in our modern society. As a service towards reserving the remaining alphabetical letters to the most deserving of bad words, I suggest the following:The A word Asshole
The B word Bastard
The C word Cancer
The D word Dope
The E word Easy
The F word Fuck
The G word Gimp
The H word Hooker
The I word Idiot
The J word Jackass
The K word Kike
The L word Lez
The M word Moron
The N word Nigger
The O word Open sore
The P word Pisser-away-of-opportunities
The Q word Queer
The R word Retard
The S word Shithead
The T word Tits and Ass
The U word Urine-receiving prostrate individual
The V word Vain
The W word Weird
The X word Xenophobe
The Y word Young
The Z word Zoo-hanging-out-in practitioner of bestialitySome of them need work.
I'm open to suggestions.
UPDATE 3: Still more here. I'm searching around, trying desperately to remember/find out which 20th-Century African-American female writer it was who also advocated repeating the word aloud, over and over—to young black kids, especially—simply so it wouldn't carry the same sting. But not by white people, presumably—jeez! It was in an interview I read in the early 1980s, and I cannot find it right now, for love or money or my search-engine Kung Fu.
In case people do not understand, I have no desire to make it respectable for white people to call black people niggers, but I do think it should be okay within the same race (whatever we're defining as "race" in 2008—same-ish, let's say). Black-on-black, white-on-white, Asian-on-Asian. And if a black person called me a nigger, I'm afraid I'd just hear niggah, and be flattered. Context is everything: I'd never say that word to a black person, because . . . why? That just sounds low and stupid.
Of course, if this were a black man calling me nigger in the "woman is the nigger of the world" sense, I'd assume he just wanted me to do the dishes or cook or whatever, and my abilities to do these things are remarkably . . . inconsistent. Fickle, even. The older I get, the more I forget how to do stuff like that. Isn't that weird? It's like I get amnesia, or something. By the time she died, my grandmother had "lost" all of her domestic skills. She couldn't cook. She couldn't clean. She couldn't drive (that one would kill me). But she seemed to have plenty of time for the things she wanted to do.
UPDATE 4: Apparently, whatever we are, Juliette just wants us to get the hell off of her lawn. I sympathize: I wouldn't want me on my lawn either . . .
I wonder if the B-sphere is fated to have the same fights over and over again over race and gender, and gender and race, and people named Glenda, and race car drivers, and Glendale and pace, and grenades and pax and sex and sociability and space and engendering Irish lace.
UPDATE 5: Yeah. Group hug time.
UPDATE 6: I'm starting to look at Old Punk with new respect. His latest post on the subject is remarkably sensitive and insightful, and he does, in fact, answer my charges about having brought The Fashions of the Young into this discussion: the fact is, a lot of young black people live life closer to the margins than my young cousins do, and when they act out in certain ways they genuinely can jeopardize their chances of employment in a small town. I hadn't thought of it in those terms, of course, since I've lived in cities most of my life.
And, goddamn; the man can write. As W.H. Auden once pointed out, that makes up for any number of sins. Furthermore, Old Guy can spell, which makes me swoon in and of itself.
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But I couldn't read Acidman. I just couldn't get past the way he wrote about women and black people. I know some people loved him--but I could never hang around long enough to see the sweet side everyone swore existed.
I simply couldn't tolerate . . . well. His use of the n-word.
From what I hear, it was my loss.Let's just keep those things going counter-clockwise—at least, for all future constructions. Fair's fair.
The iron cross, though, I won't give up; it's been used too many other places for too many other things. I won't cede that one to the Fuhrer.
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McCain wins by being acceptable to the independents and white Democrats who will inevitably, over time, crumble off Obama's imperfect reality. He loses if he becomes caught in a partisan base versus base contest with the Democrats. The job for Team McCain is not to tear down Obama, it is to give those who will become increasingly disenchanted from him (Hillary voting blue-collars, Jews, moderates) a reason to see McCain as acceptable. This means McCain should return to his roots and run as the different kind of Republican he truly is. The GOP base will not enjoy this, but they--sorry AM radio crowd--will not control the outcome of this election. Ticket-splitters and swing voters will.
Yeah. That sounds about right.
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And yet spiritual at the same time.
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March 22, 2008
I don't think so, mainly because the parallels don't work. In 1968, you had a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who was chiefly responsible for "escalating" the war in Vietnam. LBJ's vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, had become the Democratic presidential nominee almost by accident. The early anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, had faded after Robert F. Kennedy jumped into the race. Then RFK had been assassinated, leaving the pro-war candidate Humphrey to claim the nomination despite a strong anti-war presence among the delegates.None of those political conditions is duplicated for the Democrats who will gather at Denver this year. Most importantly, there is no military draft, which was the basic factor that made the anti-war movement of the 1960s as strong as it was.
Finally, the protests at Chicago turned violent because of a hard core of SDS/Yippie radicals who actively provoked confrontations with police. Today's protesters don't have the numbers, don't have the leadership, and don't have the discipline necessary to pull off anything remotely like what happened in 1968.
I've seen these latter-day protesters in DC at anti-globalization rallies in 1999-2000 and at anti-war demonstrations held regularly since 2001. The protesters come in two varieties: Over-the-hill hippies out for a little nostalgia, and spineless young punks.
Still, the situation between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp has gotten quite severe. For the record, I don't expect violence, but the rift is going to set the DNC back on its heels for a couple of years, until someone can bring the mainstream folk, the feminists, and the whites into some kind of dialogue with the left wing of the party and much of its African-American component.
Also, see Ross Douthat has a great feature in April's Atlantic about why the film industry has attempted in some ways to go back to the filmmaking style of the 1970s—and why in doing so it is misreading some of the cultural zeitgeist:
The Vietnam War was a cultural phenomenon in part because it couldn’t help being one—there was no way for Americans to keep the war at arm’s length, not with more than 50,000 dead, a million deployed over the course of the war, and every able-bodied teen and twentysomething at risk of conscription. In contrast, the Iraq War, a lower-casualty conflict fought by an all-volunteer military, takes place at a greater distance from the everyday lives of those Americans who don’t have a family member deployed overseas. The objective correlatives needed for a truly pessimistic era simply don’t exist for many Americans today. The last time around, we were participants; this time, we’re voyeurs.This doesn’t mean that the current paranoid, doom-ridden mood in cinema and television was manufactured in Hollywood and foisted on an unwilling public. Up to a point, at least, Hollywood is meeting Americans where they are. Mistrust of government and disquiet about the country’s future have risen to Vietnam-era levels, and reviving ’70s-style paranoia and pessimism is a natural way for the culture industry to connect with a public coping, once again, with a military quagmire, rising oil prices, prophecies of ecological doom, and corruption in high places.
But the ’70s revival isn’t simply a case of supply responding to demand; it’s also a case of Hollywood giving the audience what Hollywood wants to give it. The ’70s were in many ways dreadful years for America, but they’re remembered much more fondly in the film industry. There’s no surer way to establish your artistic (and political) bona fides than to name-drop a ’70s movie—whether it’s George Clooney bringing up All the President’s Men (1976) while promoting Michael Clayton, or Stephen Gaghan remarking that of course he was “thinking about The Parallax View and also Three Days of the Condor” while making Syriana. The suggestion is always the same—that the age of leisure suits and sideburns was also the high tide of politically engaged filmmaking, before the studios embarked on the relentless pursuit of the blockbuster and the Reagan reaction pushed American culture steadily to the right.
And:
The paranoid style of filmmaking . . . is defined in both its Vietnam- and Iraq-era incarnations by the insistence that villains at home are more dangerous than any enemies abroad. This was a plausible point of view when the enemy abroad was Ho Chi Minh: the Vietnam War didn’t begin with “Charlie” bombing downtown Manhattan, and there was little chance that VC cadres would follow America back home. It’s a tougher sell in the age of Osama bin Laden, and as a result an air of omission, even denial, hangs over this genre’s contemporary incarnations.
Yup. Read the whole thing(s).
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"I am done eating. I'm just not done snacking."
Who knew those were different activities?
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Barack has no clue the extent to which Hill and Bill will go to get the nomination. He's like a little lambie. I would feel sorry for him if I didn't think he was the devil."
Schadenfreude is a dish best served with a dollop of sour cream and a bit of cilantro.
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And, yes: I have at least two more posts pending about Expelled, on (1) why I think one can allow for some role of divine inspiration or guidance in the origins of life (and our particular species)—and still have this speculation be referred to as "science" [quite a touchy subject, but one I intend to tackle] and (2) some of the amazing interviews Stein, Craft, and Ruloff conducted for this movie. And, possibly, (3) the very cool computer graphics that went into the animated-cell sequence, which is in-and-of-itself worth the price of admission.
(Wait. How come my husband can get a meeting with Ben Stein, and Rush Limbaugh can get a meeting with Ben Stein, but I'm stuck interviewing Stein's producers? Oh . . . wait. That's pretty good, actually. Never mind.)
By the way, I just got the script I had Ben Stein's autograph on framed. Stein wasn't surprised when Attila the Hub asked him for an autograph for the wife. He was, however, surprised that it wasn't because of his film or television work, but rather his writing in The American Spectator that led me to request same. The note, on an episode of Freakazoid!* that Stein did voice work for, reads "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" (I kept the entire script together for the framing.)
The downside: I am now "out" to my framing place. I've been working with the same people for ten years, but I might have to switch, now that they've seen something that alludes to TAS . . . In a pinch, of course, I could resort to some reasonable standard of courage. Always a last resort, for me.
* If you're a Freakazoid! fan, consider monitoring Jaime Wienman's site.
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h/t: Memeorandum.
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Anyone have any favorites? Or does anyone have any favorite subjects I've written on? Do you prefer the political tears, or the bits of imaginary dialogue? Am I better when I'm nice, or when I'm a bitch?
Or am I getting too commercial anyway? Perhaps I'm on the verge of selling out.
I certainly hope so.
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Self-defense is a human right. To deny this is madness . . . or English, at the very least.
(Extra credit question: Can anyone spot the error in gun history in Jonathan Rauch's article? Take home assignment: read Rauch's original "Pink Pistols" article.)
Time Magazine's Alex Altman gives us a rather dim and misleading summary of the issues at stake in Heller, but the accompanying photo is enticing.
I'll be in my . . . well, you know.
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What surprises me is that—given (1) the fact that it appears to underscore his own hypocrisy, and (2) the fact that Ferraro is a free agent now, no longer restricted by being linked to Clinton's campaign—Obama chose to bring Ferraro back into this mess. As Ed Morrissey points out at Hot Air, this issue "isn't going away." Why borrow trouble in this way, given everything else that the Obama campaign has on its plate?
It's just odd.
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March 21, 2008
Actually, I've noticed a similar phenomenon to the one Postrel describes, but on a different level: when I changed health-care plans (rather, when I got health insurance after a year or two off, in the wake of losing my lovely Motion Picture coverage), I noticed that I had a really bad feeling about the level of care based on precisely the visual criteria that Postrel alleges we neglect. Which leads me to believe that aesthetic standards are higher among providers that cater to the entertainment industry than they are for other elite Angelenos.
Which would, of course, be a shocker. But when I made my first visit to my new GP and saw how dirty the carpeting was, and how crowded with posters the examining room, and how cluttered his desk was, and how there was a television on in the waiting room—tuned in to some horrible channel—I had a very bad vibe about it.
Postrel is right: these things matter in a way that many businesspeople—including those in the business of health care—aren't quite ready to admit.
Needless to say, this is yet one argument against a single-payer healthcare system. Unless we want hospitals to look, even more consistently, like post offices.
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Maybe even, "a wild patience."
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Mostly I'm thinking of the Rodney King riots, and The Riots That Didn't Happen—after the O.J. Simpson verdict. Ace ran a clip last night of the Reginald Denny beating, and just seeing it alluded to brought back a lot of memories. (I think the video has since been taken down—but that's okay. Those days—and the television footage thereof—are seared, seared into my memory.)
During disasters‐natural and man-made—I watch a lot of television, which is different from my normal M.O. (Generally it's difficult for me to remember what day of the week it is, and therefore whether there's something on that I like—furthermore, my time management skills don't allow me to go find a television in time to see what I might actually want to look at. Also, I'm not a channel-surfer: I hate seeing little chunks of television- and movie-salad. Plus, the television is on my husband's side of the house. Okay, okay: I just don't have the self-discipline and attention span that television-watching requires. Are you happy?)
I watched TV during the riots in 1992, and after the earthquake in 1993. I did the same thing most of the day on 9/11. It messed with my sense of time. (Attila the Hub informs me that I was the one who coined the term "riot potatoes" to describe our actions—or lack thereof—after the Rodney King verdicts.)
After The Riots That Weren't (post-O.J. verdict), I didn't watch television. But I remembered us being prepared for "civil unrest" beforehand. I know I went to my mother's house and made her accept one of my guns (she subsequently kept it, the dirty little thief).
But what distinguished the Rodney King riots from the O.J. Simpson verdict non-riots was what happened to race consciousness during the King riots: Outside of South Central, Hollywood, Koreatown, and the other affected areas, the races actually drew closer together in some communities. I waited in line for an hour to buy groceries near my boyfriend's apartment in Glendale—we were preparing to hunker down for a kind of seige—and there were certainly black people in line. We all talked about how horrible it was that it was all happening, and how we hoped it would be quiet, finally, that night.
A black friend of mine talked about growing up in Pacoima, in a rough part of town. His neighborhood was so bad that he and his friends once found a dead body in the trash dumpster. "I never rioted," he declared indignantly. That's how most black people felt. Remember?
So on a weird level, despite the burning and looting and horrific loss of life, the King riots didn't make me feel like I was living in a black-and-white world. They seemed, instead, to open farther the chasm between, as Dennis Prager puts his own dividing line for the human race, "the decent and the indecent."
After the O.J. Simpson verdict, though, I remember walking around and looking at all the black people smiling and honking their horns at each other, and thinking that they all appeared delighted about women getting their heads nearly sliced off, as long as those women happened to be white. It took Rush Limbaugh to put it all into perspective, and to tell his white listeners that the celebrations among African-Americans weren't as they appeared to us—rather, people were happy that, for once in a case that carried a certain level of notoriety, a black man benefited from the legal presumption of innocence in this country. That made me feel a lot better.
But I, for the record, don't think we needed a "national conversation on race." What we need is transcendence. What we need is to cultivate our ability to look at people as individuals, rather than as skin on some kind of goddamned global Pantone Matching System.
What we need is the thing Obama suggested early on in his primary campaign he just might be able to bring to the table—the thing that, despite my disagreements with him on economic issues, filled me with an odd sort of excitement: a sense that history might finally become history, after all. That we had a chance of acquiring to do that skill with race in this country that we have with religion, for the most part—a knack for putting it aside in the public sphere. Not denying it; acknowledging it and getting on with life. Looking at the bigger picture.
And that is the one thing Barack Obama cannot do for this country. The more he opens his mouth, the more any a American's essence appears to be summoned up in how easily he or she can get a freakin' suntan.
That isn't my vision for this country. Is it yours?
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