Cambridge Police Provide PSA on Racism: It’s Still Alive

I’m sure you feel the same way: I’m still proudly wearing my “American Racism Is Over because We Elected a President who Is Black” t-shirt, and I’m not ready to take it off just yet, especially during this period of American ecstasy as we win the space race again, albeit retrospectively.

But, thankfully, the Cambridge Police Department has gone out of its way to remind us that we still live in a country that harbors a large amount of institutional racism by arresting Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr on his front porch.

“Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.

Police arrived at Gates' Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had "no idea who he was messing with,'' the report said” (Boston.com).¹

The details are various, still emerging, and (as you’d expect) often contradictory. (Gate’s attorney’s account here, on TheRoot.com.)

Truly, this story foregrounds the tentative position even the most-successful African-American citizens occupies in this country—always one step away from being reduced simply to the color of one’s skin and subject to the prejudices and beliefs that have been attached to that single characteristic.

You may or may not be familiar with Gates beyond his reputation or name, so here is an excerpt from “African American Studies in the 21st Century”:

Within the academy, I believe, we must seek to explore the hyphen in African American, on both sides of the Atlantic, by charting the porous relations between an "American" culture that officially, even today, pretents [sic] that an Anglo-American regional culture is the true, universal culture, and that African-American culture is, at best, a subset to it or a substandard and subservient deviant of it. (We hear the complaints, of course. Allan Bloom, for example, laments that "just at the moment when everyone else has become 'a person,' blacks have become blacks . . ." Unfortunately, "everyone else" can become a person precisely when the category person comes to be defined in contradistinction to black.)

We must chart both the moments of continuity and discontinuity between African cultures and African American cultures. Only a fool would try to deny continuities between the Old World and the New World African cultures. But equally misguided, needless to say, is any attempt to chart those continuities on the basis of a mystified and dubious biological or so-called "racial-science." Above all else, we are a people who were constructed as members of a new Pan-African ethnicity. We cannot -- and should not -- deny historical contingencies of this construction, lay claim to the ideal of "blackness" as an ideology or a quasi-religion, totalized and essentialized into a proto-fascist battering ram supervised by official thought police. (I remember as a student at Cambridge, I was about to have my first supervision with Wole Soyinka, then in exile from Nigeria, on African literature . . . though I was only twenty-two, I was certain I had a deep understanding of African culture. I had read Jahnheinz Jahn's Muntu, you see, and was fired up with the inspirational doxa of "nommo," which was the master concept, the distilled essence, of all African culture. "I hope you know something about Africa," Soyinka told me as I came for my supervision, viewing my Afro balefully. "Absolutely," I said, having just memorized the principles of nommo in preparation for our meeting. "Because the fact is," Soyinka added, "the only reason I accepted you as a student was that at least you didn't talk about that nommo nonsense." "Nommo?" I said. "Never heard of it.")

….

We are scholars. For our field to grow, we need to encourage a true proliferation of ideologies and methodologies, rather than to seek uniformity or conformity. An ideal department of African-American Studies would have several of these approaches represented, rather than merely one officially sanctioned approach to a very complex subject. African-American Studies should be the home of free inquiry into the very complexity of being of African descent in the world, rather than a place where we seek to essentialize our cultural selves into stasis, and drown out critical inquiry.

And while I for one wish that all persons of color would pursue our discipline on one level or another during their undergraduate careers, our subject is open to all -- whether to study or to teach. After all, the fundamental premise of the academy is that all things ultimately are knowable; all are therefore teachable. What would we say to a person who said that we couldn't teach Milton because we are not Anglo-Saxon or male, or heterosexual -- or blind!

UPDATE: Apparently the charges are being dropped, but then the fallout will really begin.

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¹ Incorrect usage of quotation marks to offset this text being embedded into other web pages that obscure the whole block-quote thing.

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Ballad of the Amputee: The Song Remains the Same

You might know this photograph. The object of this photograph is what Mike Simpson calls, “The Lobster Box,” meaning a shoebox that holds two prosthetic arms. The Arm on Top connects to the Terminal Device in Middle; the Cosmetic Hand below can also attach to the Arm on Top; and the Arm at Bottom is fully-assembled, the first prosthetic I had when I was an infant. If you do know this photograph, you probably know it from The Dismodern Bodcast (which is, coincidentally, up and running again after a late-spring hiatus).

The Lobster Box holds my earliest and most recent prosthetic limbs—the Arm on Top dates to sixth grade, approximately 1985, and I think I wore it about four times. I never wanted to use a prosthetic limb, and I felt that they got in the way.

Flash-forward: July 10, 2009, to Hanger Prosthetics and Orthotics, 38th Avenue, Denver, Colorado.

I am sitting in a strip-mall storefront, a prosthetics and orthotics office with an adjoining shop for orthopedic footwear. (It is incidental that the man being fitted for new shoes tells his wife and the fitter that if he has more trouble with “that toe” he will “cut it right off,” although through the power of retrospection, it creates an odd foreshadowing. let’s just say it isn’t incidental, and let’s agree that it is foreshadowing.)

Hanger is a nationwide company that creates many types of prosthetic devices, and it is the company that famously provided the base limb for Aron Ralston’s “bag of tricks.” In the past year, I’ve met Ralston, read his book, wrote about him¹, and in general had him rub off on me a little bit, specifically his stories about paddling and mountain biking. Using a special terminal device designed by TRS, people with upper-extremity amputations can hold onto a kayak paddle, something I now cannot do but sincerely wish I could.

So, at the age of 35, I made this appointment with Barry (not his real name), the prosthetic fitter.

An evaluation for a prosthetic is mind-bending for the person with the amputation. In daily life, people stare at you, and their looking is rude, no matter their intentions, upbringing, etc. In the evaluation room, though, Barry stares, judges, photographs, measures, feels, and determines, all while you sit there fighting your basic human feelings about being measured in such a way. You are objectified, fragmented, atomized—you become estranged from a body you know better than anyone else.

If you know me, you know my left arm (which has a just-below-elbow congenital amputation) also has a hand. Five fingers, a palm. The hand is small, has no bones, and I cannot use it to grip anything. What it does have: Nerves, which I suspect are more highly-concentrated there than almost anywhere else on my body. Although it does not look like a normative hand or have normative functions, it is my hand.

As you can imagine, a prosthetic arm is a value-added product of an industrial process. Meaning, to make the highest return on the sale, the prosthetic manufacturer standardizes many of the parts that go into the artificial limb. According to Barry, amputations that result from medical operations tend toward a uniformity—there are standard shapes and positions on the limb that the surgeon attempts to meet. Thus, while creating the abject, the abject is normed.

However, my left hand (which I called “my little hand” growing up) is not typical of either a medical or congenital amputation, nor is it similar to the bodily differences attributed to phocomelia or thalidomide. Contrary to Tyler Durden’s opinion, I am a unique snowflake.

Within the first five minutes of the evaluation, Barry had taken my left hand into his fingertips and asked, “Have you ever thought of removing this?”

For the third time in my life, I’d been asked that question (or, more accurately, that question had been asked of me). At birth (btw, the physical condition of my left arm was a surprise to everyone at that moment), the doctors advised my mother to have my left hand removed. When she asked why, they could not provide her a practical, medically-sound answer other than convention. She declined, forcefully.

When I was being fitted for Arm on Top, the prosthetic maker (at Hershey Medical Center) asked the question near me, but directed it mainly to my mother. Other than that question, the prosthetic maker was exceptionally kind an considerate.

Now, an adult, I was being asked this question seriously. Here is a snapshot of my internal responses:

• Anger: I had a hard time believing that a professional prosthetic maker did not have more tact (to ask a question based upon function or design, etc.) or awareness than to ask this.
• Fear: With that question, all the weight of ableist ideology settled on my shoulders—medical discourse wanted me to be a different extraordinary body, and I wondered how many people kind of shrugged when asked that question and later, post-op, wished they had not trusted the experts so fully.
• Sickness: My limb is just material to an industry. I am just matter. (Truthfully, I thought of Yossarian in Catch-22: “Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.” Yossarian realizes his body is just material and materiel for the war effort; what is my body, in this industry, material for?)
• Confusion: I am “healthy.” In our culture, “healthy” people are considered sick or ill if they have apotemnophilia, yet Barry, as a mouthpiece for the prosthetics industry, seems to suggest that the desire to electively amputate is normal or healthy for someone who is already stigmatized.

I had so many acerbic almost-said’s on my lips that I cannot believe I did not utter one of them, but instead said, “Why?”

When he explained the obvious (the sockets of prosthetic arms do not come with room for a hand like mine), I said “in the past, I’ve had prosthetic arms like the one I’m interested in now, and I still have this hand. The socket needs to be bored out with a drill.”

Then Barry told me I should meet with the “specialist” (I thought Barry was a specialist) who comes up from Arizona once a week. So now I’m on the books for an appointment with the same person who helped Ralston design his prostheses, and I am feeling marginally better about things.  Still, after 30 years of strident disability-rights efforts, those trained to work with people with disabilities still use dehumanizing language without a second thought—coincidentally, a student who will be beginning the prosthetics program at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti this fall was shadowing Barry, and I plan to keep in touch with him to see what, if any, training about interacting in mixed contacts the students receive. From my spot in Ann Arbor, maybe I can help out somehow.

Insurance and cost, however, is the subject of another post. And on this process, I’ll keep you posted.

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¹No matter how deranged my senses at a given point, I would never write the headline “Amputee Aron Ralston Lives to the Fullest after Self-Amputation.” It is offensive on several levels—first, it foregrounds his physicality, not his humanity; second, it is conventionally triumphal. The original was “Catching up with Aron Ralston,” which (while sounding like a Depeche Mode greatest hits) suggests that Ralston, the human, is on the move (you can see it in the full URL).  Apparently, sometime recently, the editors have decided to rename the article.  Awful.

P.Y.T., R.I.P. (1958-2009)

Somewhere, a joke is about to be born. This joke will use the deaths of Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, both June 25, 2009, as the set up to deliver a punch line that has something to do with “the reason for millions of boys’ first ejaculations” or “America mourns the loss of two who shepherded so many young men to sexual maturity.” Now that you read it, it seems obvious.

What was, however, less obvious (that is, before yesterday, June 25, 2009) was the outpouring of grief at Jackson’s passing, at the event’s utter domination of the news cycle on multiple channels. Watching the coverage—the sanctimonious news anchors, the grieving fans who gathered outside Jackson’s home (a few) and the UCLA Medical Center (a few thousand)—one could easily forget that the just-deceased “Icon” was every late-night talk show host’s comedic piñata for decades, was a man recently acquitted of child sexual abuse. As America mourned Jackson’s passing, he was again “The King of Pop,” and we let ourselves off the hook for how we treated and thought about him for decades.

Watching Jackson’s body being airlifted from the hospital to the coroner’s office, watching Larry King Live broadcast a photo of Jackson, gurneyed and intubated, being taken from his home to an ambulance (which King called, inexplicably, “good reporting” not “tasteless exploitation”¹), and watching these scenes interrupted by portions of his music videos and concert footage, one wonders why we made such a big deal about Bubbles the Chimp in the first place.

At this point, it is probably important to clarify that this is not an apology for Jackson. This essay is not some recuperative measure meant to erase whatever short comings he had or crimes he might have committed. But: He was acquitted. We can’t forget that, even though with Michael Jackson, America forgets it all the time. Which brings us to the thesis: For all the microscoping, all the fine-tooth-combing we (as a culture) have done to Michael Jackson, have we ever asked the right question: What do our reactions to Michael Jackson say about us?

Although he was acquitted, American culture always considered Jackson guilty, and this discrepancy speaks to more than one man’s alleged nefariousness, but to an unspoken but collective belief that the American criminal justice system does not work. That the system is broken, that a celebrity or an exorbitantly wealthy person can manipulate this system to his or her advantage is a commonplace(Consider Donte Stallworth’s 30-day sentence for killing someone while DUI, and at 7 in the morning! Consider Chris Brown’s confession about beating Rihana, and consider his jail-time-less sentence.) What is surprising is that we can’t seem to talk about it (the flawed system). And in this man’s opinion, we accept it because we want it to be flawed. Why? Because, in America if we work hard and keep our nose to the grindstone, one day we too will be wealthy and powerful and outside the limits of jurisprudence. In short, we publicly ridicule Jackson because we envy him, wish that we could (perhaps even in a small way) be him.

While you or I spend most of our time sublimating or transferring desires—you want to experience the carefree feelings of childhood again, so you belt down some cocktails after dinner and “relax,” or I study intensely so that I know that in any social situation I am likely smarter than everybody present about something (or maybe I sling the drinks and you do the studying, does it really matter?)—Jackson seemed to live beyond the edge of wish-fulfillment. He loved Elvis, so he bought the rights to his catalog. (And married Elvis’s daughter.) He wanted a monkey, like just about everyone I know has wanted at some point, so he bought Bubbles. And when he wanted to feel childlike, he bought Neverland Ranch. On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin suggested these decisions were signs of poor mental health, but (and maybe just for a moment) could they not be signs of excellent mental health, of one man’s ability to identify his desires and, because of wealth and a general disregard for cultural norms, act on them? Is that somehow less healthy than our system of id-repression, sublimation, transference, and so on? I don’t know the answer; I’m honestly asking you to consider this. And is marrying Lisa Marie Presley the example of sublimation that wrecks this whole line of questioning? Maybe. But maybe not.

The fallback position, the Alamo of Jackson Vitriol, though, is his alleged abuse of children. As I watched coverage of his death, CNN again and again showed footage from Martin Bashir’s documentary about Jackson, in which Jackson says he sometimes sleeps beside children who are not his own. He does this, he says, to show those children love. (No matter your opinion of the facts about Jackson, you have to think Bashir is a bit of a prig for his moral grandstanding during this scene.) What is your reaction to this statement? Disgust? Outrage? If so, why? Have you never fallen asleep on a couch beside a niece or nephew? Have you never been sneak-attacked in bed by your child and his or her friends at a sleepover? I think it’s important that we know the answer to these questions, and not for Jackson’s memory. Have you ever felt love and compassion when a non-family member or non-lover physically touched you, and do you think of that touch as an assault now? Honestly, it’s a question, not a coded way of saying we should all feel free to run around touching children. We shouldn’t. But consider this: As an educator, my job sometimes becomes crisis management—a student walks into my office having just lost a parent in an accident, having been dumped by a significant other, by catching a serious illness or whatever. As I look at that student (and these students are college-aged), with tears running down his face or her words going staccato as she chokes while trying to talk and simultaneously manage her grief, I know that as a human I should put a hand on a shoulder, touch an elbow, offer a hug to the boy whose father just passed unexpectedly. But I don’t, because I know that (or at least I assume that I know ) some other time, the same situation has occurred in someone else’s office and he has hugged that student but followed it up with something like, “and I know how you can protect your grade through this difficult time.” And in the great American way, because “one apple spoils the whole bunch,” I sit with an “appropriate distance” as the student basically writhes in the chair, suffering.

Isn’t that the same situation with Jacko and the whole sleeping-beside-children thing? Because some people lie down beside children and then bad touch them, we assume that the first step, the lying down, necessarily results in that second step? And what about Bashir’s vehement denial that he does not lie down beside children? Is he so concerned that he’ll lie down next to a child and accidentally assault him or her? That he, as a presumably decent and law-abiding person, might not be able to resist the temptation to sexually assault a child who he happens to lie next to? And what does it mean that we don’t trust a fellow human to be decent anymore, to actually operate based on love and compassion, but instead assume that if the possibility of acting out some depravity could occur, than it will likely occur? Kind of makes you feel like a jerk for laughing at that inevitable ejaculation joke earlier, huh?

Ten or eleven years ago, a friend of mine had front-row tickets to a concert. Sitting beside him, Courtney Cox. When my friend went to the bathroom, he brought back two beers from the bar, one for him and one for (then) Ms. Cox. As he offered one to her, she recoiled slightly (he told me) as though it could be drugged, so he immediately offered the other. He said that he told her, “There are still good people in this world,” so she took the beer and drank it. When the Rohypnol wore off…(Do you see what I did just there, feeding the part of you that still said, Courtney Cox is an idiot for taking a beer from a stranger!) The point is, nothing was in the drink, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t trying to pick her up at the time, either (she was, quite famously, dating the lead singer of the band). He was being nice, using a beer to say “I enjoy your show, thanks for making it.”

I don’t have a grand conclusion about any of this. I just think it would be worth our while to consider why we feel such impassioned hate or anger toward people, how if we might see in that hatred a seed of envy or desire, we might come closer to knowing ourselves and that such self-knowledge might actually make this world a better place. And, well, if it gets just too scary to consider why we immediately assume that any male who lies down beside someone else’s child will probably put his hands where those hands don’t belong, we can always buy ourselves a monkey.

So long, Michael Jackson—we hardly knew you, but if it’s any consolation, we know even less about ourselves.

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¹Larry King Live had already been scooped, though, as my friend David had posted the same picture to Facebook about an hour earlier.

The Dismodern Bodcast Goes Live

This morning, our new project (The Dismodern Bodcast) has gone live. 

The Dismodern Bodcast examines contemporary issues of the body, including normalcy and difference. The Dismodern Bodcast examines representations of bodily difference in order to understand how dominant culture uses rhetoric about the body for ideological and political purposes. This methodology disrupts what is often static, essentialist thinking about the human body in order to generate new ways of conceptualizing the body that are perhaps more inclusive and democratic.

Podcast the Dismodern Bodcast directly from iTunes or subscribe through an RSS feed.

The statements or opinions expressed in The Dismodern Bodcast should not be taken as a position of or endorsement by The University of Colorado at Boulder or its affiliates.

File Under: Irony (or, likely, racism or sexism)

Today, DNC Platform Committee Person and former Hillraiser Lynn Forester de Rothschild declared that she plans to support Senator John McCain for president in the 2008 general election.

 

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don't like him,” she said of Obama in an interview with CNN’s Joe Johns. “I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

Forester is the CEO of EL Rothschild, a holding company with businesses around the world. She is married to international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. Forester is a member of the DNC’s Democrats Abroad chapter and splits her time living in London and New York.

Who better to have her finger on the pulse of the masses, on Mr. and Ms. American Middle-class Strap-hanger, than a woman who is a CEO of a multinational corporation, who is wife to an entitled international banker from the Rothschild family, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.

Oddly, when one searches Google for the "Rothschild Coat of Arms," an image of the actual coat of arms is displayed.  Somehow in all its plenitude, Google has no listing for an Obama coat of arms.

Truly, if anyone has a right to reject elitism is Lady Forester de Rothschild, related by marriage an international banking dynasty dating back to the 18th century and ennobled by Austrian and British governments.

Not that I condone the use of wikipedia, but the reverent entry on Sir Evelyn de Rothschild should help convince the masses that the Rothschilds feel their pain:

Sir Evelyn Robert Adrian de Rothschild (born August 29, 1931) is a British financier and a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England.

The son of Anthony Gustav de Rothschild (1887-1961) and Yvonne Cahen d'Anvers (1899-1977), he was named after his uncle Evelyn Achille de Rothschild who was killed in action in World War I. Evelyn de Rothschild spent several of his boyhood years in the United States during World War II. He studied economics at Cambridge University but, with no desire to go into the family's banking business, he dropped out before obtaining his degree.

Born into great wealth, Evelyn de Rothschild became one of England's most eligible bachelors, spending his youth travelling, socialising, driving exotic sports cars, enjoying thoroughbred horse racing and playing polo. It was not until age twenty-six that he decided to join N M Rothschild & Sons banking house to be trained in the family's business. In 1961 his father retired as head of the bank and cousin Victor Rothschild took over as Chairman.

Now that's a story that unemployed auto workers can relate to....

La Lucha Continua, Señor Beck

Lately, conservative television commentators have increasingly focused attention on tee-shirts depicting the image of Che Guevara. While T's of El Che were popular throughout the 90's (See: Zach de la Rocha), these T's and their wearers have received venomous attention in the post-9/11 world, a world in which the meme seems to have become the most important materiél in a war against radical Islamic extremism née radical extremism née terror [Maybe it always has been, but now even the U.S. government is acknowledging it. ~ Ed.].

In his commentary, "T-shirt depicts 'brutal and pathetic' legacy,"  enlightened pundit Glenn Beck again takes up the issue, citing the use of a Che-based tee as costume in a Columbian-army hostage rescue operation as proof positive that "When you are wearing a Che T-shirt, you're wearing the same shirt that makes terrorists believe you're just one of the gang." [I have the same luck every time I wear my Hines Ward jersey to Heinz Field. Want to see my Super Bowl ring? ~ Ed.] Now, Mr. Beck's position is untenable in several ways.

First, Mr. Beck assumes that at some point one of the FARC members looked at the t's-shirt, indexed it against known images that signify rebel or nationalist, and decided to accept the false identity of the rescuer based solely upon the tee. I offer this: If the forces of terra' are that trusting and simple minded, why did it take five years to rescue those hostages? Why has W not held a celebratory Roast-Bin-Laden-On-A-Spit-In-The-Rose-Garden media event? Not only is it likely erroneous to suppose that the Che tee tipped the scales for a successful op, but it is also dangerous—if Americans believe the "bad guys" can be duped with a t's-shirt, will those Americans take those rebels seriously?

Second, Mr. Beck only espouses the capitalist, post-industrial, hegemonic narrative of Guevara. As an opponent of colonialism who used violent means in an attempt to liberate countries from settler colons who would not go quietly, peacefully, or at all, Guevara deserves to be seen as a more complex figure. Would it be fair, I might ask Mr. Beck, if we were to simply our description of the current Commander-in-Chief as a war-mongering, fact-fabricating, nation-deceiving, imperialist who engineered the overthrow of a sovereign country in order to revenge his biological father and follow the message of his spiritual father? I submit that it would not [Totally avoids his anti-science, pro-oil positions. ~ Ed.], and I assume Mr. Beck would agree.

However, if Mr. Beck wishes to pigeon-hole Che, I have a few suggestions of other tee shirts featuring colonized people who used violent, unconventional means to secure their own liberty and freedom:

Of course I am being hyperbolic, and I am not seriously equating George Washington with Che Guevara, but I am suggesting that each figure, each person who walks this earth, cannot be reduced to one or two adjectives, no matter how politically expedient it might be. Moreover, by simplifying Che, painting him as a "murderer," glosses over the very real social injustices Che witnessed and was committed to correcting.

But, for most speakers who rage against the Che tee, that is probably the point.

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BTW: Who knew they made patriotic Cosby sweaters?

Messenger, DOA

Does anyone remember the 2000 election, when the voting public acknowledged that then-Governor Bush did not seem like the brightest possible candidate but was likely to surround himself with great people and that those great people were as important as the president himself? [Exhibit A, Exhibit B]

Well, the Bush administration has been a ship afire for years, and few of his staff can be confused with "the boy [who] stood on the burning deck / trying to recite 'the boy stood on / the burning deck.'"¹ (But plenty have been left still stammering.)

However, with the publication of former Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan's book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, those closest to the president have stopped just short of calling McClellan a traitor.

In an e-mail to McClellan, former Senator and presidential hopeful Bob Dole wrote:

There are miserable creatures like you in every administration who don’t have the guts to speak up or quit if there are disagreements with the boss or colleagues.... No, your type soaks up the benefits of power, revels in the limelight for years, then quits, and spurred on by greed, cashes in with a scathing critique. (CNN.com)

While Dole may be right in his assessment of McClellan, his invective speaks to something much more nefarious. Dole suggests (perhaps rightly) that McClellan should have spoken up at the time, that it was McClellan's responsibility to do the right thing. More incredibly, Jack Cafferty, a conservative commentator on CNN, suggested that had McClellan spoken up at the time, he could have "saved a few lives."²

Thus, the right-wing of the conservative party is painting McClellan, not the Commander-in-Chief or the administration that perpetrated the deception that McClellan ostensibly reveals, as a cause of dead soldiers. In this administration where the buck never stops, this is hardly surprising, but it is deplorable and as disrespectful of the soldiers' sacrifices as can be conceived. Moreover, the ones who are ultimately accountable for this war are being let off the hook (not only by these commentators but also by the mainstream media, an industry that seems to have forgotten investigative journalism when it comes to George W. Bush).

While it seems obvious that the administration engaged in some manner of misinformation regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (remember them?  the reasons we went to war in the first place?) and Iraq's role in aiding anti-American terrorists, and while such misinformation is likely impeachable, Senator Robert Wexler's (D-Florida) call for McClellan to testify under oath might just be the move that mobilizes the imperiled Republican party and creates a stiffer fight for the democratic presidential nominee.

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¹"Casabianca," by Elizabeth Bishop

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite `The boy stood on
the burning deck.' Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.

²CNN Tuesday, May 27, 2008.

Sobchak 2008

As the Democratic Party's Rules Committee prepares to convene in order to resolve the situation in Michigan and Florida, the mainstream media is ramping up the spin. Whether the spin favors Obama, Clinton, or ultimately John McCain, what the spin never favors is American democracy.

Every political party in the United States has the sovereignty to set its own rules for its elections and nominations; however, the language used in most mainstream media reports on the DNC's stance on the invalid primaries in Florida and Michigan make those rules and the exercising of that sovereignty appear like whims, not rules for the good of the party and for the fairness of the democratic process.

Very few articles also mention that the Republican National Committee (RNC) also penalized Florida and Michigan for moving their primaries by cutting in half their delegations to their national convention. Republican primaries are "winner take all" contests, unlike Democratic primaries which allot delegates proportionately with the vote; had the Republican race been tighter (i.e. had Huckabee decided to take his bid into June or to the convention), the penalty could have effected McCain's lead. However, after Huckabee withdrew from the race, the RNC's appropriate penalization of Florida and Michigan ceased to be an issue.

Yet the spotlight is solely on the Democratic party, and the language used diminishes the responsibility of the Florida and Michigan legislatures who knew the rules they were breaking as they approved the movement of their respective primaries. 

Consider the following excerpt from a CNN.com article written by Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston:

Clinton has argued the primary results of two of the nation's largest states should count because otherwise millions of voters are being disenfranchised. Obama has said he is willing to work out some compromise.

But he is insistent the primary results are invalid since the two states failed to follow party rules and the rules are the rules.

The DNC has not seated the Florida and Michigan delegates because the two states violated party edicts in holding their primaries early.

The three paragraphs above exemplify all that is wrong with current mainstream media reporting. It seems as though CNN has adopted the "hands-off" rhetorical position of FOXnews: "We report, you decide." In the first two paragraphs above, Griffin and Johnston summarize the positions of senators Clinton and Obama, but they do so without context or commentary, and in fact the article seems to suggest that the opinions of the contestants are somehow more important than the sovereignty of the rules by which they are bound to compete. Most readers do not know the rules of national political parties; most readers do not know precedents when those parties have been forced to uphold their rules through penalization; most readers do not know the authority given to national political parties to conduct their own business.

Moreover, Griffin and Johnston call the DNC's rules "edicts," a word that is used incorrectly due to its denotation and used rhetorically due to its negative connotations. an edict is an order or command made without any legal authority but with the force of law. One follows an edict simply because one feels like it or because one fears an unjust reprisal; moreover, one can ignore an edict without expecting a justified punishment. If national political parties' rules were simply edicts without actual authority, would U.S. courts (in Florida, no less) continue to dismiss lawsuits filed against the DNC, stating that political parties have the constitutional right to determine their own rules for selecting delegates in nominating processes (Tampa Bay Online).¹

Should responsible media outlets abstain from providing for their readers the appropriate tools to interpret the "facts" they typically present out of context? Do we want a media industry that absolves itself of any responsibility to interpret based upon fact? Few would disagree with the news-consumer's right to make up his or her own mind about the facts of a story, but in order for such a decision to be valid, for it to have the weight of rational decision making, it must have access to the pertinent information. It seems that the "no ideology" position openly proclaimed by FOXnews is in fact a more-insidious ideological tactic--by providing decontextualized "facts," the media is able to manufacture consent among its audience that seems even more authentic because we have "made up our own minds."

Although this may be a new type of Godwin, allow the hypothetical use of Robert Mugabe as illustration for a moment. If U.S. news outlets reported that Mugabe claimed the results of an election should stand despite the election itself being moved to an illegal time and despite the fact that his opposition was not even on the ballot in 50% of the area in question, would anyone in America say, "Sure, Robert. Sounds reasonable to me?" No, because as a nation we claim to believe in the sovereignty of rules, in insuring fairness in competition, and such actions as moving an election, as arguing for the legitimacy of a ballot that does not include the competition would be unfair and, more importantly, un-democratic.

So our choice, as the Griffin and Johnston would not have us believe, is between affirming the beliefs we claim to hold dear and placing blame not on the DNC but on the legislators broke the rules and disenfranchised their own voters or accepting as legitimate an un-democratic process in the name of (somehow) fairness.

Oh, and never mind the fact that Senator Clinton, who has found yet another voice in this campaign and become a crusader for voting rights, agreed to these rules and supported the DNC's decision to strip Florida of its full delegation.

But that was when she was winning.

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¹ The person filing the lawsuit, Victor DiMaio, did not even vote in his primary. Of course he still has the right to file the suit, but the circumstances are nothing if not ironic: "Every vote is sacred, but I had other things to do on election day!"

Pistorius Can Run!

After months of setbacks, South-African sprinter Oscar Pistorius has won his appeal before the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland. The Court's decision overturns a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations, allowing Pistorius the opportunity to qualify for the 2008 Oympics in Beijing.

The IAAF had made a series of escalating arguments against Pistorius in order to prove that he should be ineligible, but the CAS decision immediately overturns all of them.  The IAAF first claimed that Pistorius might fall, injuring himself or others, and should be barred from competition for safety. The IAAF made this decision without evidence that demonstrated that Pistorius was any more likely to fall than an athlete without a disability. In short, their first claim was based upon incorrect, biased assumptions about people with disabilities.

Next, the IAAF claimed that Pistorius' running blades did not provide the same wind resistance as a normative shin. In a sport decided by hundredths of a second, this argument seems to have validity; however, the rules governing the sport do not (yet) include a provision for a minimum shin size, so to exclude Pistorius alone for lack of drag would be completely unfair.

Finally, the IAAF has argued that Pistorius receives a mechanical advantage from his running blades. Again, no tests demonstrate this to be true. In fact, tests do demonstrate that he is mechanically disadvantaged when leaving the starting blocks.

Now, the CAS has cleared the way for Pistorius (and other athletes with disabilities) to compete on the world's largest stage for sport.

According to an ESPN.com report:

"The panel was not persuaded that there was sufficient evidence of any metabolic advantage in favor of a double-amputee using the Cheetah Flex-Foot," CAS said. "Furthermore, the CAS panel has considered that the IAAF did not prove that the biomechanical effects of using this particular prosthetic device gives Oscar Pistorius an advantage over other athletes not using the device."

Pistorius' training has been disrupted by the appeals process, and his Paralympic-record 400-meter time is a second off the qualifying pace for the 2008 Olympics, but now he has the summer to focus, compete, and attempt to qualify. Moreover, he can be placed directly on the South African 1600-meter relay squad.

When commenting about the appeal, Pistorius said, "'It is a battle that has been going on for far too long. It's a great day for sport. I think this day is going to go down in history for the equality of disabled people'" (ESPN.com).

CU Catching the Spirit (no, not the good French one from '68)

Yesterday (May 13, 2008), the Wall Street Journal ran an article concerning University of Colorado at Boulder Chancellor "Bud" Peterson's desire to create an endowed chair for a Professor of Conservative Thought and Policy.

Citing a 32-out-of-800 conservative-to-liberal ratio on the CU faculty, Peterson believes this chair will help to balance what is presumably a leftist college experience for the tens of thousands of undergrads longboarding around Boulder.

Peterson's proposal is problematic on several levels. First, it supposes that those who self-identify as liberal (or at least those who do not identify as conservative) cannot separate their politics from their teaching. As intellectuals, professors of conservative, moderate, and liberal politics represent multiple viewpoints and perspectives—that is good, ethical education. Apparently Chancellor Peterson does not believe this is happening with the 768 other faculty members, and apparently he believes that a hard-line conservative is the anti-dote.  Aside from being blatantly anti-intellectual, Peterson's proposal is ludicrous.

One need only consider Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, appointed by President Reagan, to see illustrated perfectly the flaws in Peterson's argument. While Republicans often denounce "activists on the bench" (i.e. any judge appointed by a Democrat), the right seemingly has no problem with Scalia's opinion that Catholic officeholders (Scalia is himself a conservative Catholic) should resign their positions if they are asked to uphold public policies or laws that contradict doctrinal Catholicism. This direct articulation of secular government with non-secular ideology is antithetical to the Constitution of the United States, the document Justice Scalia is charged to defend.

In response to Chancellor Peterson's statement, Republican congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) issued a press release that inadvertently helped the cause of actual intellectuals everywhere. A former member of the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank in Golden, CO; a current member of both the House Foreign Affairs and Natural Resources Committees; and the founder and former chairman of the bipartisan House Immigration Reform Caucus, Tancredo has introduced enlightened ideas (such as running a fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border [Wait, didn't a former Republican president named Ronald Reagan utter the famous phrases "open this [the Brandenburg] gate" and "tear down this wall!"—Ed.¹] into 21st century democracy.

According to the Denver Post,

Republican congressman Tom Tancredo has fired off a wisecracking press release saying he wants to be a professor of conservative politics at the University of Colorado — a school often criticized by conservatives as being too liberal.

The outspoken opponent of illegal immigration is suggesting classes in "English Only 101" and "American Assimilation." He's also proposing a 20-foot-high fence around the border of the university's Boulder campus.

When I teach academic writing, I always tell my students to analyze and interpret each piece of evidence they cite, as evidence rarely argues for itself. In the case of Tancredo's comments, they are the exception to the rule.

Certainly, Tancredo (as a self-defined conservative) not only trivializes Chancellor Peterson's proposition, but also illustrates the danger in hiring someone for his or her ideological position.

Part of the problem comes from the concerted effort on the part of the right to demonize the word "liberal," and part of the problem comes from the elusive definition of what "liberalism" really means in common usage.  For instance, the WSJ tries to use the fact that "the campus hot-dog stand sells tofu wieners" as evidence of liberalism (if we admit this as valid, can we also admit that the $5 dollar price point equally suggests that the hot dog stand is pro-capitalist?). People eat tofu for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with the lever they pull in the voting booth (if, in fact, they choose to vote).

The WSJ allows Peterson to define futher "liberalism" when it reports:

A college that champions diversity, he believes, must think beyond courses in gay literature, Chicano studies and feminist theory. "We should also talk about intellectual diversity," he says.

Wait, what? After reading that, one might feel a bit like a post-dart Frank the Tank:

 

According to Peterson, courses in queer theory, cultural studies, and gender studies do not represent intellectual diversity?  I suppose someone should tell all the pundits covering the Democratic race for the presidential nomination that America's normative position on these issues is one of equality for those minority cultures; wow, I'm relieved to know that voters aren't making voting decision based upon Senator Clinton's gender or Senator Obama's race. And the fact checker at the Washington Post must be asleep at the switch, because the May 13, 2008 article "Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause" is apparently loaded with inaccuracies:

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."

I sure hope a conservative Republican perspective can set those people straight and restore the balance that Chancellor Peterson seems to think exists on the CU-Boulder campus and in this country.

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¹I suppose President George W. Bush has learned a few things about foreign relations, diplomacy, and sovereignty from President Reagan when Reagan asked Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union from 1985-1991, to tear down a wall in another country.

Hello, Democracy

The DNC Rules Committee (scheduled to meet on May 31) has an opportunity to preserve democracy and educate voters in Michigan and Florida, as well as pundits, journalists, and talking heads, about the true nature of the illegitimate primaries in Michigan and Florida.

While the DNC (and Howard Dean, specifically, as though the DNC was a one-person show) has been given the blame for the current situation, the real culprits—the legislatures in Michigan and Florida, specifically the individual legislators who voted to move the primary dates—receive next to no attention.

2008 does not mark the first time a political party's national committee has established rules by which legitimate elections and primaries can be conducted, so the very presence of these rules is itself not problematic, nor is the use of sanctions for states who break those rules.

Moreover, 2008 does not mark the first time that Michigan has attempted to move its primary against DNC rules. In 2004, Michigan Democrats attempted to move their primary against standing DNC rules. In 2004, however, Howard Dean was not the DNC chair (Dean was, in fact, running his own campaign, which was unbelievably derailed by poor sound engineering). The chairperson of the DNC in 2004 was Terry McAuliffe. You know him...he is currently serving as Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, and he is among the most outspoken about the DNC's rejection of the illegitimately-moved primaries.

How did McAuliffe deal with Michigan in 2004? One need only to consult McAuliffe's memoir, What a Party! (2007), for his personal account:

"I'm going outside the primary window," [Michigan Sen. Carl Levin] told me definitively.

"If I allow you to do that, the whole system collapses," I said. "We will have chaos. I let you make your case to the DNC, and we voted unanimously and you lost."

He kept insisting that they were going to move up Michigan on their own, even though if they did that, they would lose half their delegates. By that point Carl and I were leaning toward each other over a table in the middle of the room, shouting and dropping the occasional expletive.

"You won't deny us seats at the convention," he said.

"Carl, take it to the bank," I said. "They will not get a credential. The closest they'll get to Boston will be watching it on television. I will not let you break this entire nominating process for one state. The rules are the rules. If you want to call my bluff, Carl, you go ahead and do it."

We glared at each other some more, but there was nothing much left to say. I was holding all the cards and Levin knew it.¹ (325)

In McAuliffe's defense, he did use a co-writer (Steve Kettmann) when completing his memoir, so perhaps he doesn't remember writing (or having) that conversation with Levin. Or, less in his defense, McAuliffe remembers his use of sanctions as a threat, how he seems to take pleasure in that threat, instead of his simple enforcement of the rules.  Either way, McAuliffe is either a hyprocrit or guilty of a Clintonian "mis-speak."

Either way, Clinton & Co.'s continued suggestion that the DNC is responsible for the illegitimacy of the Michigan and Florida primaries is disinformation. Unfortunately, this disinformation hurts her party in more ways than one.

First, by placing blame on the DNC, she paints the entire party as being anti-democratic and their continued observance of the rules as a choice fueled by a fire to disenfranchise two key states (that the DNC has such a desire is ludicrous). Second, she places blame on the Obama campaign, which only further weakens from within the party's likely candidate. Obama's campaign has objected to several proposals, not because they want to suppress Michigan or Florida, but because the proposals have not been fair to both candidates.

Consider Michigan's current "compromise proposal" to send the Michigan delegation to the convention in Denver with a 10-delegate edge for Senator Clinton. Remember, Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan, so the "compromise" is presumptuous at best. However, if the Obama camp rejects this plan, you can guarantee that the Eternal Campaign will label him obstructionist.

Through all of this, though, the real message is lost. Republican-controlled legislatures (with bipartisan support) in both states voted to move the primaries with full knowledge of the potential ramifications from the DNC.

Consider the following from a New York Times article date August 22, 2007, called "Michigan Joins the Race for a 'Me First' Primary":

The matter is likely to boil over this weekend, at least for the Democrats, when the states meet with the rules committee of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. The party wants to rein in the scheduling anarchy and punish those violating party rules that bar all but a handful of states from voting before Feb. 5. Florida is the chief delinquent, and Michigan could be another.²

So, four and half months before the primaries in question, the state DNC's were reminded of the consequences of their actions. They broke the rules anyway.

Voters in Michigan and Florida should not be outraged at the DNC. They should not be outraged at Obama. They should be outraged at their local elected officials who gambled with the legitimacy of their constituents' votes and lost. In fact, those voters should praise Dean, Donna Brazile, and the rest of the DNC Rules Committee if they are seated at the national convention at all.

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¹Transcription prepared by Mark Nikolas at PoliticalBase.com.

²It is interesting to note how Clinton and Edwards are mentioned in the article, but Obama is not.

From the Mind of Mencia: Ah, the Old "I Was Joking" Defense

There is an old Saturday Night Live sketch starring Eddie Murphy that satirizes then-dominant cultural assumptions about black and white race relations. The premise is this: Eddie Murphy goes "undercover," wearing make-up and wardrobe meant to disguise him as Caucasian. In costume, Murphy is given a free newspaper at a newspaper stand and discovers that the MTA bus becomes a swinging club when all the passengers are presumably white. The skit works because it hyperbolizes white privilege and institutional racism, and while the viewers who are white know they are watching a farce, they are likely to reflect on what, if any, differences they are aware of between racially homogeneous and heterogeneous groups.

In the 21st century, American culture is beset with Carlos Mencia, a "comedian" who utilizes racist stereotypes not to debunk them or to make dominant culture reflect, but to placate those who have power. For example, in some of his stand-up routines, he makes fun of white Americans who cannot tell the difference between "a Hindu and a Muslim." In the sketch, available on the Mencia site here, Mencia adopts a presumably mental-disability-based accent in order to denigrate tolerance before announcing that he pities Hindus because they are often mistaken for (implicitly stigmatized) Muslims. Mencia gets away with this because he is "ethnic," and his brand of "in your face" humor is defended by suggesting that you, the viewer, have a problem if you object to the sketch. In short, because he is a "comedian," he is not being racist; he is being funny.¹

When the line is so blurred between racism, sexism, ableism, and any of the negative -isms, those who do the actual blurring encourage the dominant culture not to know the difference.

Consider State Senator Shawn Mitchell (R, and white), who, when addressing the President of the Colorado State Senate, Senator Peter Groff (D, and black), mistakenly called him Senator Gordon (D, and white), who was also at the podium. In response to his mistake, Senator Mitchell said, "Excuse me, Mr. President. You all look alike to me" (DenverPost.com).

Now, there probably isn't a single sentient American alive who does not know that this "punch line" comes from the racist stereotype that black Americans look alike (in fairness, Bill Cosby uses this stereotype in Himself, when he tells his son that he will kill him and "make another one who look[s] just like [him]"). Senator Mitchell contends that he meant to suggest that all Democrats look alike to him because of their liberal politics. Regardless, the claim is still racist. Here's why.

Mitchell is relying on the audience to understand that within his normative gaze, the objects upon which he looks are marginal, trivial, and that he enjoys the dominant, hegemonic position: i.e. Democrats are indistinguishable because one trait overwhelms all others when he, the empowered, gazes upon them. The reason that the audience understands his comment as a put down, even if they've never heard the term "hegemony,"² is because it invokes that same discrediting, stigmatizing, attitude that was so and remains prevalent among many white Americans with (no?) respect to black Americans.

The point is, Mitchell's joke only works if you can reference a bigoted, racist attitude toward black Americans and index it within the context of the partisan Colorado State Senate. Thus, even if you take Mitchell at his word (and as a politician his word is sacrosanct, no?), he needs you to think like a racist in order for the "joke" to come off at all.

In his own defense, Mitchell explains:

"My attempted joke was that a tall black man and a short white man look alike to me because of their liberal politics," Mitchell said to a reporter later in explaining his remark. "If someone tries to turn that into a racial issue, they're just playing cheap campaign games."

One might counter, by denying any racial element to the statement, Mitchell is playing a cheap campaign game. In fact, by suggesting that criticism of his remark would amount to politics, he is suggesting that common decency is a political issue. If that is the case, we are headed for an even "greater depression" than most of us thought.³

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¹ This defense worked well for Don Imus.
² This is the Colorado State Senate. Anything is possible.
³ As a rider or earmark, if you will, to this story, consider this description of local Denver television coverage of Senator Groff's rise to the Senate Presidency: "Earlier this year, a Denver television station ran a news story about Groff's historic ascension to the Senate presidency. However, the station inadvertently ran a picture of Rep. Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, another black lawmaker, during the story." Awesome.

Showstopper at the Democratic Debate in Austin? Disability.

Regardless of whether or not you have a license to participate in political "silly season," Senator Clinton's concluding remarks have been universally lauded as her most memorable, her most genuine of the debate.¹ The crowd--and the CNN pundits--gushed over Senator Clinton's self-effacement when compared to wounded U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq.

Both senators were asked to describe a moment when they were tested and overcame adversity. Obama framed his response in the narrative of his life--born to a teenage mother, abandoned by his father when Obama was two years old, poor choices as a teen. Senator Clinton reflected on the personal trials she has undergone that were public domain because her husband was in the White House when they occurred. However, she minimized her own personal problems by contrasting her situation with soldiers who had undergone amputations as a result of injuries sustained during combat. Senator Obama nodded in agreement as Senator Clinton painted the injuries to these men and women as far worse than her own trials.

However...

By using disability in this rhetorical way, Senator Clinton claims (and Senator Obama does with his agreement) that physical injury, specifically amputation, deserves the greatest respect and, implicit in her remarks, pity. Such a representation undermines PWD's work towards social equality and further ghetto-izes those soldiers (and others with these particular impairments). No doubt, a soldier without a disability faces many obstacles when he or she becomes a person with an impairment, but the benefit of Senator Clinton's commentary is questionable. In fact, representations such as these are regressive, reminiscent of how telethons frame disability and use emotional appeals to touch a presumably normative audience.

As a person with a congenital amputation, I know what I would choose if offered the option of (somehow) having my impairment eliminated or having my spouse commit adultery (let alone having that betrayal made international news). Here's to hoping my box of unused, left-hand gloves continues to accumulate new members.

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¹As she built up to the final, presumptively-controversial lines, the Vegas oddsmakers must have been going wild trying to settle a line on the likelihood that she would cry. No one watching had any doubt, yet Senator Clinton did disappoint.

Senator Clinton Vows to Make Your Head Explode With Cognitive Dissonance

First, I'm a supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign and a delegate to my county convention on his behalf. Having said that, though, I feel like my take on the democratic nominees' TV ads over the past three days is not biased, but objective. As objective as a sentient being can be, I suppose.¹

Consider the following from CNN.com:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign unveiled an ad Wednesday that took aim at Barack Obama for turning down an offer to debate her in Wisconsin before the state’s February 19 primary, tying the decision to his stands on other issues.

Obama’s campaign struck back the next day with a spot that responded to Clinton’s, calling the original ad an instance of "the same old politics of phony charges and false attacks."

Today, Clinton’s campaign debuted ‘Deserves,’ a response to what it called “false attacks” in the Obama spot.

"Barack Obama still won't agree to debate in Wisconsin,” says the announcer in the 30-second ad, which will also air in Wisconsin. “And now he's hiding behind false attack ads.”

I quote an old Letterman schtick: "My head feel like it wanna bus' open!" Even in hide-n-seek, which is predicated on people hiding while one non-hiding person seeks, the term "hider" and the act of "hiding" are spoken as insults. I imagine in national politics, the rules remain largely unchanged.

Wednesday: Clinton Ad

Thursday: Obama Response Ad

Now, I may have missed the day in high-school civics when Mrs. Martha Smith taught us that a political ad which claims your opponent is ducking a debate with you is not an attack, especially when that same opponent is renowned as a modern-day political Orpheus who packs arenas with rock-band sized crowds, but the first ad seems particularly "negative." Consider: Obama and Clinton have already participated in 18 debates, and they have agreed to two additional debates. Thus, it seems more than a bit disingenuous to suggest he's hiding from her.

Of course, both of their motives for the not-to-be Wisconsin debate are political. Her campaign is not raising money like Obama's (it seems that Obama has the star power that the Clinton's typically enjoy), so another debate gives her another one-and-a-half hours of free airtime. Obama is leading Clinton in the Wisconsin polls, has debated or will debate her 20 times, so he, I imagine, is less-likely to do anything that might diminish his lead. No one can blame either of them (except it's curious that Clinton would use her resources to go negative, as she presumably wants to debate "policy" if such a debate would take place).

As for countering Obama's ad with a charge of "false attack ads," Clinton's campaign seems equal parts absurd and desperate. Clinton was the first to go negative as they campaigned in South Carolina, and now that she has authorized this ad, Obama played immediately into her hands: Instead of headlines that account for Obama's juggernaut since Super Tuesday, we are reading the name Clinton.

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¹This photo, however, is not unbiased.

Here Comes the Terror!

From the AP:

WASHINGTON — President Bush said today that “our country is in more danger of an attack” because of Congress’ failure to extend a law granting the government authority to spy on foreign phone calls and e-mails that pass through the United States.

For one, I would like to applaud the President for admitting that the law is an act of terrorism against the Constitution and....Wait, what? Oooooh.

After listening to President Bush on BBC Worldnews, I understand how upset he must be if he is willing to postpone a five-nation tour of Africa in order to lobby for the bill's extension. Luckily, the President does not plan to boycott the Beijing Olympics, because (as he said) the Olympics are only a "sporting event." President Bush claimed that he understood how the "Dalai Lama crowd"¹ would protest, and that protest is their right.

When asked for comment, Jesse Owens said....

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¹Presumably, President Bush means "Tibetan Buddhists," who in some circles are referred to as "victims of genocide." The knowledge.

Gauntlet, Thrown

On the eve of the Potomac Primaries, Senator John McCain used his victory speech as an opportunity to mark the territory for his supposed campaign against now-frontrunning Senator Barack Obama. Characterizing Senator Obama as ego-driven and messianic, claiming that:

The American people don't send us to Washington to serve our self-interest, but to serve theirs. They don't send us to fight each other for our own political ambitions; but to fight together our real enemies.

Moreover, Senator McCain attempted to co-opt Senator Obama's message of hope, reflecting that:

Hope, my friends, is a powerful thing. I can attest to that better than many, for I have seen men's hopes tested in hard and cruel ways that few will ever experience.

Senator Obama is not averse to challenging Senator McCain in his stump speeches--we've all heard the wheels falling off the Straight-Talk Express countless times--but McCain's attacks on Senator Obama are not based upon fact, but upon misrepresentation. For example, McCain intentionally portrays Obama as a self-serving, ego-maniacal politician when he claims that,

When I was a young man, I thought glory was the highest ambition, and that all glory was self-glory. My parents tried to teach me otherwise, as did the Naval Academy. But I didn't understand the lesson until later in life....

While McCain calls Obama's promises mere "platitudes," we are supposed to forget that Republicans for years have campaigned under the platitudes of God, Country, and Apple Pie, often avoiding the plight of working men and women by recharacterizing their struggles as struggles inherent to democracy. In fact, such politicking, as Senator McCain inaugurated last night during this campaign, is simply disinformation designed to promote the dominant ideology that keeps the disenfranchised and powerless in place and allows the hegemons to fill their coffers. And our nation's coffins.

Hopefully, Senator Obama and his hopemongering will continue to take the high road, countering Senator McCain's empty rhetoric with a discussion of policy, a discussion which can only reveal how bankrupt McCain's beliefs truly are.

McCain, John. "John McCain's Feb. 12th Speech." New York Times. 13 Feb 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/us/politics/12text-mccain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

An Open Letter to Mr. Daniel Henninger

The following is a letter I submitted in response to Daniel Henninger's editorial column "After Imus," part of his "Wonder Land" series, published by the Wall Street Journal on May 3, 2007. Read Mr. Henninger's opinion here.

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While Mr. Henninger might have made a legitimate argument about censorship, he chooses to embrace one of the most untenable (and often criticized) counter-arguments, which may be paraphrased as, "Well, black people use these words, too"; "Disparaging remarks about women at the supposed greatest intellectual institution are okay"; and "An entertainer's profession is equal to the head of an administration, political party, company, or university" (please consult Jon Stewart vs. Tucker Carlson).

What is lost in Mr. Henninger's opinion are the very real effects of this language use—no matter who is doing the speaking. The case of the former Harvard president, Larry Summers, suggests a gender bias at the highest level in the administration—what female faculty member would not have reason to think that her career was likely to be or had already been impeded by such bigotry? Such comments cannot be unmade, and Harvard has every right to improve the culture and morale at that place of business by correcting the problem. Moreover, it has a responsibility to do so. ¹

While many cogent arguments might be made that affirm the firing of Imus as an overreaction (which I contend it was, as well), I wonder why an implied conservative (I've not read Mr. Henninger before, so he may well be a self-defined conservative) laments the market correcting itself: to suggest that CBS and MSNBC fired Imus for ideological reasons (their own or those promoted by Rev. Sharpton et. al) is absolutely ludicrous, but sponsors' abandonment of Imus's programs is a much more likely cause.²

Ultimately, Mr. Henninger chooses to write on behalf organizations and people long associated with white privilege, and he seems incredulous that one's words might bespeak one's beliefs and that those beliefs matter when put into practice.

Then again, Mr. Henniger is a journalist himself, now isn't he?

Perhaps this is why Mr. Henninger feels secure in his ability to trivialize hip-hop in his article by hyperbolically stating the number of WSJ readers who do not listen to hip-hop:

For the eight or nine Journal readers who don't listen to the rhymes of hip-hop, "b" rhymes with witch, and "n" rhymes with bigger.

Only the obdurate or the willfully ignorant would ignore the racial implications in such a claim, as well. Yet if someone were to hold Mr. Henniger accountable for those implicit ideas, he would likely consider himself a victim, largely ignoring the demographic impugned by his remarks for the ostensibly-different demographic that is the WSJ's readership.

Mr. Henninger, a number of my closest friends are partners at Wall Street houses, and I have enjoyed many an occasion with them when we have listened to hip-hop music without smug irony (and to respond to your inevitable thought right now, we are, in fact, Caucasian).

Enjoy these days, Mr. Henniger; your era is passing.

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¹Mr. Summers has also made several comments about Cornell West which were quite suspect. In response to Mr. Henniger's claims that Mr. Summers' "entire career as president of Harvard was immolated," it is important to note that Mr. Summers has been invited back to Harvard after the 2006-2007 school year. Flame on, fiery phoenix, indeed.

²Read this article about it at the Washington Post.

Imus in the Mourning

Shock-jock Don Imus has broadcast below radar through much of the Aughts, with no major controversies to push him into the national limelight. However, Imus and crew's remarks concerning the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team in early April 2007 have once again brought the country's eye (and ear) to Imus in the Morning, the long-lived deejay's flagship broadcast.

After the Tennessee-Rutgers Women's NCAA Basketball Championship game, Imus in the Morning featured a section of commentary on the game that dealt less with the athletic achievements in the contest than the normative beauty of the contestants.¹

IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and...

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there.

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE IN BACKGROUND: Oh, oh, oh, man.

IMUS: I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some...whoo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like, kinda like, I don’t know.²

McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.

IMUS: Yeah.

McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes, that movie that he had.

IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough...

McCORD: Do The Right Thing.³

McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

IMUS: I don't know if I'd have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?

ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.

IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.

RUFFINO: Only tougher.

(April 4th edition of MSNBC's Imus in the Morning)

Those who object to Imus & Company's language point to the phrases "hard-core hos," "nappy-headed hos," "the Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes," and (most-inexplicably) "they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors." Each phrase is alleged to be racially-based, and Imus & company's usage is alleged to reflect racial bias. For these usages, critics from Reverend Jesse Jackson to Reverend Al Sharpton to ESPN.com-columnist Jemele Hill have called for Imus' termination.

This is not the first time that Imus has been at the center of such a controversy. In the past, Imus has referred to sports columnist Bill Rhoden as a "New York Times quota hire" and PBS anchor Gwen Ifill as a "cleaning lady."⁴ In a more high-profile instance, according to Media Matters in America, "in June 2001 [Rosenberg made racial comments] about Venus and Serena Williams, two African-American female professional tennis players. According to a November 20, 2001, Newsday article, Rosenberg said on the air: 'One time, a friend, he says to me, 'Listen, one of these days you're gonna see Venus and Serena Williams in Playboy.' I said, 'You've got a better shot at National Geographic.'' Rosenberg also referred to Venus Williams as an 'animal.'" ⁵ These comments are far more egregious than the exchange concerning Rutgers.

Many critics gloss the fact that "ho" is now widely used in American vernacular, a result of its rampant usage in a former object of these same critics' ire, hip-hop music and culture. Whatever the cause, many men and women from disparate racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds now refer to women of all virtues and professions as "hos." While the mainstream usage in hip-hop may have, at the beginning of the word's dissemination, indicated African-American women, current usage no longer restricts the meaning in this way. For good or ill, "ho" is an epithet applied equally across racial and ethnic lines. Thus, Rosenberg's use of "ho" is perhaps a dig at the women's moral virtue, a presumption based upon Imus's reference to their tattoos, once a sign of the presumed "hardness" of the bearer.

When Imus refines Rosenberg's comment, calling the team "nappy-headed hos," he provides his critics with clear evidence of racist thinking. Nappy, as an adjective, means "kinky," and dominant American culture has long considered this "kinky-ness," attributed specifically to the qualities of many African Americans' hair, to be an aberration of normative (i.e. European in origin) beauty. However, Imus claims that the Lady Volunteers "all look cute." While Imus's critics have pointed to the percentage of African-American players on Rutgers as an indication of his racist intent, these critics do not mention that Imus considers attractive a team that has approximately the same percentage of African-American players. Thus, by examining his actual discourse, Imus does not criticize Rutgers players because they are African American, but because, in part, of how they adorn themselves.⁶ This distinction is subtle, but important.

Few listeners or viewers could endure the usage of "jigaboos" without raising an eyebrow or spitting out their coffee, yet the usage of "Jigaboos versus the Wannabes" is also problematic for non-racist reasons. "Jigaboo" is unequivocally a racial slur aimed at dehumanizing an African American by defining him or her as a caricature built upon presumptive physical features.⁷ However, this usage comes in the form of a quotation from a Spike Lee film, School Daze, in which Lee lampoons intra-racial conflicts on a college campus. In the same way that wide usage of the word "nigger" in various media reporting on or disseminating hip-hop music and culture has brought this inflammatory slur into common, but contentious, usage once again, Lee's satirical usage has as a byproduct the effect of rendering the term "jigaboo" acceptable for continued ironic usage. That this term in this particular instance was uttered by a Caucasian male is not insignificant.

Finally, Imus and company claim that the Rutgers women's team looks like the Toronto Raptors, an NBA franchise composed entirely of males. Here, Rosenberg is claiming that Rutgers appear presumptively mannish. While this is, perhaps, offensive with respect to gender, this claim in no way suggests a racial bias.⁸

Imus's claims, and his colleagues' claims, were tasteless. However, when ESPN-columnist Jemele Hill asks her readers to "Take a stand against indecency and cruelty," one wonders what form that stand should take.⁹ In a preemptive strike against a part of this very argument, Hill claims:

I'm still boiling because too many people continue to defend Imus behind lame free-speech arguments -- remember, speech is free, but consequences are not -- and the idea that black women just don't know a good joke when they hear one. Tell you what, if this "nappy-headed ho" comment is as harmless as some of you say it is, say that phrase to your wives and girlfriends tonight (or even a woman on the street). If they laugh, I'll write an entire column about how humorless I am. (Hill)

In part, I agree with her. The comments are demeaning to these specific women: they claim that the women on the Rutgers team are ugly and that they look like men. The comments are not funny. However, these two facts do not supersede the First Amendment (although in recent years the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are often treated like so many comic strips adhering to the skin of Sill-Putty), and Hill's claims amount to legislation based upon matters of taste.

Under the U.S. Constitution, Americans are granted the freedom to be tasteless, mean-spirited, and abrasive. The guarantee of these freedoms comes part and parcel with the guarantee for other, more socially-acceptable freedoms. A person's right to be a dullard, a bore, a misogynist, a racist, a [fill in your own unpleasant iteration of humanity], is held to be unrestrictable, for in time tastes change and today's enlightened discourse might become tomorrow's restrictive language (one need only think about early twentieth-century eugenics discourse as a model of "progressive thinking" turned atrocity-in-waiting). If one determined legality based upon contingent tastes in a given time, one shudders to think about the advances in gender and racial equality that would not have occurred in a largely patriarchal and racist America.¹⁰

Thus, calling for Imus's termination because of alleged racially-insensitive commentary misses the mark. Termination is an overly-simplified solution to a larger problem. An intelligent discourse about the impropriety of his remarks, a public condemnation of his actions (which is taking place through his two-week suspension that is, conveniently, only to begin next week after stations and networks can figure out what to air in his absence) will do more to eliminate these kinds of sentiments and their easy enunciation in the future than simply sacking him.

Let's imagine this hypothetical situation: A group of white supremacists take offense at Reverend Al Sharpton's pro-African American discourse and his criticism of racially-biased speech and demand his immediate resignation or removal from office. As a culture, we would dismiss this claim outright not just because white supremacy is at the forefront of cultural distaste (and is often linked to measurable detrimental effects upon minority cultures), but because their claim has no constitutional or legal basis; it is made upon taste alone, and we would dismiss it outright due to its foundation. Organize, we might tell them (if we acknowledged them at all), and have him voted out if you feel so strongly.

Consider the reaction to Doctor Laura Schlessinger's anti-gay comments on her syndicated talk-radio show. Because of her tasteless remarks, critics called for a boycott of her show and her show's sponsors, and this opposition had measurable success. Not only was Doctor Laura censured for her remarks (remarks which she is fully free to espouse despite how hurtful they might be), but the assumptions conditioning her discourse were brought into the national consciousness and productive discussions resulted from them.

Ideally, the aftermath of Imus' apology and his meetings with Sharpton, the players, and so on, will result in a wider understanding of the implications of all our utterances and an attempt to choose language that most-accurately reflects what we are trying to say. Although with the popularity of comics like alleged-plagiarist Carlos Mencia, a comic who "reclaims" ethnicity and race by utilizing many racist assumptions in his jokes (and let's not even mention the way he targets people with disabilities, because, well, no one cares about them, right?) the outlook is not so bright.

If Imus, in the future, does not change, those of us who disagree with the spirit of his discourse will shake our collective head sadly. If, however, he does change and racial tolerance is in some way advocated to his broad audience, real progress will have been made.

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¹ The WNBA itself adds to this confusion, often promoting its players, and thereby itself, based upon their mediagenecity: players in presumably seductive outfits who claim that they aren't "as sweet as you think," etc.

² Candace Parker, the media focal point on the Tennessee Lady Vols, is a phenomenal player, capable of taking over a game and dominating opposing teams. She is, however, surrounded by other standout players, like Shannon Bobbitt and Aleix Hornbuckle, that allow her to dominate. Look for Parker on the cover of the SI Commemorative Issue.

³The correct Spike Lee joint is, of course, School Daze.

⁴ Davis, April. "Debate continues about boundaries for inflammatory talk radio." First Amendment Center 28 July 2000. 10 April 2007. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=6162

⁵ Chiachiere, Ryan. "Imus called women's basketball team 'nappy-headed hos.'" Media Matters for America 4 Apr. 2007. 10 Apr. 2007. http://mediamatters.org/items/200704040011

⁶ The Lady Volunteers may be equally tattooed as Rutgers, but based upon what Imus and company actually said, the perception is that they are not. New Critical theory has taught us nothing if not to distrust and discount an author's intent.

⁷ The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first usage of this term in the 1909 Weston & Barnes song "I've Got Rings on My Fingers."

⁸In fact, the Toronto Raptors are arguably the most heterogeneous team in the NBA; the roster is comprised of a mix of races and ethnicities, including African American, Caucasian, Spanish, Slovenia, and Italian.

⁹ Hill, Jemele. "Take a stand against indecency and cruelty." ESPN.com: Page 2 10 Apr. 2007. 10 Apr. 2007. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hill/070410

¹⁰Hill is not without contemporary precedent. The logic of her argument is preceded by President Bush's withdrawal of the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty: "'The 1972 ABM treaty was signed by the United States and the Soviet Union at a much different time, in a vastly different world,' [Bush] said" (CNN.com).

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Full Disclosure: I do not listen to Imus (or any other shock-jock, for that matter). I think he is impossibly sanctimonious (a common trait among pundits and shock jocks alike), and that characteristic, mixed with his patent non-funny banter, makes me turn the dial or the television station each time I hear or see him.