The Magical World of White Trash Intellectualism

A New Lord's Prayer

2010-08-25T08:56:00.002-04:00

Our God

who art in all appropriateness

an overweight Black lesbian.

Thy bus doth come

thy will be done

though it is running ten minutes behind again.

Forgive us our trespasses

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And please tear down all the No Trespassing signs.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And let it be not only the Wonder Bread

of survival and sustenance,

but the manna of laughter and creativity.

Lead us not into the temptations of mindlessness and mendacity,

but deliver us from evil

and the myriad paths to soul death.

For thine is the power, the glory,

and the free lunch.

Amen.

Law and Disorder in Johannesburg with Louis Theroux

2010-08-08T03:21:00.000-04:00

Louis Theroux Law and Disorder in Johannesburg Part 1 of 6
Uploaded by Nofear442. - News videos from around the world.

Jackie and Dunlap weight in on the NAACP and the Tea Party

2010-08-04T23:02:00.003-04:00

Red State Update has been bringing America great video clips that satirize American politics, pop culture, white trash, the generally conservative political climate in the South, and lots of other great stuff for some time now. Here's a recent one exploring the meanings of race and the overabundance of Frankenstein spin-off movies:

Logorama

2010-08-01T04:42:00.004-04:00

Lograma is a short animated film that won awards at both the Cannes Film Festival and the 2009 Academy Awards. It is noteworthy that film was French-made, as it takes on America in a pretty serious way.

The film is a take-off on the incredible saturation of our society by marketing and corporate logos. All of the characters and almost all of the scenery in the film are composed of such. Set in an apocalyptic L.A. Which is, I think, the most appropriate choice of setting, L.A. being the ultimate 20th century American city. Tinseltown gave us Hollywood, incredible extremes of wealth and poverty, and suburban sprawl like it had never been seen before. And a growing sense of cultural unreality.

Here's the fim in all its 16 minutes of poignant glory. As media commentary website baekdal.com notes, the film seems to draw more than a little inspiration from Pulp Fiction. Ronald McDonald plays the villain - a criminal pursued by violent cops. And general Tarantino-eqsue mayhem ensues:

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.

Wade Davis on Endangered Cultures

2010-07-31T01:50:00.005-04:00

ganked from TED.com.

Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist, anthropologist, and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.

This speech is, like the best of TED's content, passionate, accessible, moving, and informative. What every professional educator, writer, and intellectual should strive for in my opinion.

The Top 10 Words of the '80s, and a little history of the English language

2010-07-31T00:30:00.008-04:00

I love language. That's a part of the reason I currently work as an English teacher. And why I write this blog. And also why I have Merriam-Webster Online bookmarked in Safari. Oh yeah, I'm pretty nerdy too.

(Yes, I have a mac. Don't think I'm pretentious. I just like that they don't get viruses. My first one - a secondhand G3 I got for $500 - lasted six years.)

Anyways language is important. It is the one of the most tangible products of how people think, live, work, and what they believe. An expression of who a people are at a moment in time and space. Language is a window into a culture's soul. Its the vehicle we use to convey our feelings. The format we employ to say the things that ache to be said.

As a case study, South African Afrikaans-speakers see their language as a critical part of their cultural identity. They have literally fought wars to prevent the extinction of their mother tongue. In 1879 Afrikaner politician Stephanus Jacobus du Toit said, "The language of a nation expresses the character of that nation. Deprive a nation of the vehicle of its thoughts and you deprive it of the wisdom of its ancestors." I think about that one a lot. Its very true. Once a people lose their language they are cut off from their collective past.

Every year hundreds of human languages die forever. Go extinct like the dinosaurs. In Australia there are aging Aborigine folk who are the sole surviving speaker of a soon-to-be-dead language. They literally have no one left with whom they can communicate in the language of their childhoods. Speaking on this topic, anthropologist Wade Davis quipped in a 2007 TED talk that, "Every language is an old growth forest of the mind."

English is unlike most other languages in that it changes rapidly. We have a lot of slang. We make up new words all the time. And we absorb them from other people. Look how many words have come and gone for marijuana in North America in the past century. Louie Armstrong called it muggles. The Beatniks called it tea, the hippies called it grass, Jimmy Buffet has been calling it reefer for decades, reggae fans prefer the more benevolent herb, and weed and pot been longtime favorites. America's number one illegal drug generally has more names than anyone can keep track of.

Words come and go and change all the time. Chaucer's 14th-century Canterbury Tales reads like another language today. English has changed that much in 600 years. And popular speech is changing even faster nowadays. People who grew up listening to the Isley Brothers say things like, "Dig this! My friend Bobby just told me...". One generation's popular speech sounds colorfully unusual to the next.

To get all historical for a moment, this phenomenon exists partly because English itself is a bastard language. Born out of the unholy union/ linguistic clusterfuck that occurred in the wake of numerous conquests. First the Danes and Vikings came in and got all medieval on some Gaelic speakers. Then the Romans showed up with big swords and armies and stuff and made the intelligentsia - and The Church - speak Latin. Then the French came in and made French the language of government. And then the English took over half the world with the cunning use of flags and guns (and the unintentional use of microbes) and got words from everywhere.

You can see these waves of invasion and cultural exchange in words and terms from different points in time. The English word for house - about as basic and archetypal word as you can find - is pretty much the same as the German word haus. This dates back into the murky primordial languge goo of the common Germanic roots of Old English, Danish, and German.

Once the Romans showed up in Britain they made people get all Latinized, and gave us the many words we have from Latin. Basic, common words like agriculture, village, and marine. They also started a tradition of using Latin to make up words for new stuff that no one knew what to call. Like orthodontist and cosmos. The Romans also gave us pretty much all of our prefixes and suffixes: pre-, post-, anti-, ultra-, etc.

Then the French invaded England. Led by William the Conqueror. Well, that's his English name. The French call him Guillaume le Conquérant. The King and his victorious followers instituted French-speaking government. So everybody who wanted to be successful or important had to switch to French. (Kinda like what happened when the English made Indians learn their language in North America.) Thus many words having to do with old school government come from French. Like war, noble, princess, hostage, general, property, arrest, and indictment. And tons of other words from French worked their way into everyday speech: imagine, table, mathematics, compliment, bureau, cravat, rotisserie, chef, bizarre, banquet, money, and entrepreneur.

And then English-speakers went to new places (usually with lots of guns) and saw new things and made/stole/borrowed new words: skunk, moose, pajamas, malaria, tobacco, maharaja, Nigeria, Mississippi. And along the way they made new things: typewriter, stethoscope, linsey-woolsey.

So by the time the U.S.A became a world power in the twentieth century there was already this really long tradition of making up new words on a daily basis. And accepting pretty much any new cool-sounding word that came along.

So, ganked from Merriam-Webster's website - to use a 90's slang verb - here is:

The Top Ten Words of the '80's:

Hip-Hop
"Just when you thought all music was starting to sound alike, along came the 'hip hop' sound of New York, thrusting the art of rapping into the limelight.... [It] promises to be the most popular music form since rock 'n' roll." — Jet magazine, May 27, 1985
Originating in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip-hop went global by the end of the '80s.
So how did it get its name?
According to one explanation, the term pairs the hip that means "trendy" or "fashionable" with the leaping movement hop.
According to another, a member of the pioneering rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was teasing a friend who was going into the army, repeating the hip/hop/hip/hop his friend would soon be marching to, and then vocally playing off that – in a way that later got incorporated into other songs and eventually gave the music its name.

Balsamic
Probably no single item represented the decade's interest in gourmet food as much as balsamic vinegar.
Balsamic comes from the Italian word for "curative," because the vinegar is traditionally thought to aid digestion. (A few sips of balsamic vinegar are sometimes taken after a meal, as a digestif.)
Either way, people went crazy for it. As the Boston Globe explained,
"Balsamic vinegar is like no other vinegar you have ever tasted. At its best it is aromatic, syrupy, dense, dark and creamy like honey; concentrated, mellow and slightly sweet with a sharp roundness that only hints of vinegar." (August 1985)

Apartheid
"The urge to punish South Africa for apartheid is now palpable throughout the United States. Americans want to destroy this abhorrent structure of racism or disown its sponsors' claimed kinship with Western culture." — Editorial, New York Times, June 9, 1985
Protests against apartheid, which means "apartness" in Afrikaans, heated up in 1970s South Africa. In the 1980s, the rest of the world joined in – with disinvestments, sanctions, and boycotts.
Anti-Apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990; apartheid officially came to an end four years later.

Perm
"[Bon Jovi]'s a great looking guy. And he's got a new perm." — Spin magazine, December 1986
Consider also: Madonna's poodle look, the "bubble" hairdos of Bananarama, and Michael Jackson's glossy Jheri curls on the Thrillervideo.
Yet the general technique had been around a long time.
The permanent wave ("a long-lasting hair wave or straightening produced by mechanical and chemical means") was invented in the early 1900s by a German immigrant to the UK. Karl Nessler took his invention to the US in 1915.
The perm has been in and out of style since then, but perhaps never rose to greater heights than it did in the '80s.

Crack
One theory is that its name comes from the crackling noise produced when it's heated, but it also suggests an impact on people's lives.
Crack became a major issue in the 1980s.
As the New York Times reported,
"Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d [said] today that the use of crack, a highly addictive form of cocaine, appeared to be a 'crisis of epidemic proportions in some areas' and urged creation of 24 special crack task forces around the country." — Philip Shenon, October 3, 1986

Yuppie
Powered by the bull market of the '80s and a post-Hippie embrace of materialism, yuppie symbolized a new style of consumer.
Merriam-Webster's definition – "a young college-educated adult who is employed in a well-paying profession and who lives and works in or near a large city" – doesn't convey the emotions (envy, scorn, etc.) the label generated.
The term was also a source of amusement.
As Time magazine asked, "Who are all those upwardly mobile folk with designer water, running shoes, pickled parquet floors and $450,000 condos in semislum buildings? Yuppies, of course ..." (January 9, 1984)

Glasnost
For the USSR, the traumas of the 1980s included fighting a losing battle in Afghanistan after invading the country in 1979; being dubbed an "evil empire" by President Ronald Reagan; and dealing with a horrific nuclear power plant accident in Chernobyl.
In an effort to save the empire, in 1985, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the bold new policy of glasnost. Literally "publicity" in Russian, glasnost permitted new levels of freedom of speech.
It also became a buzzword of the decade. For instance, as Peoplemagazine reported,
"... the first Russian dancer permitted to perform again with a Soviet company after defecting, Makarova would become a remarkable human symbol of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev's daring design for a more open Soviet society." — Susan Schindehette, August 22, 1988

Postmodern
A cultural theory that escaped from 1970s academia, postmodernismwent mainstream in the '80s.
It became widely (and often vaguely) used as a label for art, music, film, and more.
Merriam-Webster defines postmodern this way: "relating to ... any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)."
As the Los Angeles Times observed, "In fashion, as in food, the new adjective describing the new look is Post-Modern. Even a hair salon boasted in a recent advertisement in LA Style that it specialized in 'Post-Modern' hairdos." — Nikki Finke, Sept. 12, 1988

Safe Sex
"The best way to stop the spread of deadly AIDS is for the government to persuade Americans to 'develop a socially acceptable type of sex – safe sex,' the head of the Centers for Disease Control said Sunday." — Sean McCormally, United Press International, August 11, 1985
After first appearing in print in 1983, safe sex became a watchword of the decade.
Merriam-Webster dispassionately defines it as, "sexual activity and especially sexual intercourse in which various measures (as the use of latex condoms or the practice of monogamy) are taken to avoid disease (as AIDS) transmitted by sexual contact."

PC
"In 1982 a cascade of computers beeped and blipped their way into the American office, the American school, the American home. The 'information revolution' that futurists have long predicted has arrived.... The creamy white [IBM] PC (for personal computer), introduced in August 1981, has set a standard of excellence for the industry." — Time, January 3, 1983
And so the word PC, which originally designated a particular IBM model, became the general term for the whole category of personal computers.
Since then, of course, IBM has stopped making PCs, and PC's meaning has become less encompassing: it now generally refers to a machine running Windows.
(Meanwhile, PC meaning "politically correct" would have to wait for another decade.)

Citybeat runs retarded drivel once again

2010-07-29T00:08:00.008-04:00

Around Cincinnati there is a free alt-weekly called Citybeat. As a teenager living way far away from the city I used to drive for a half-hour just to get my hands on a copy. I treasured its music and events listings and scoured it regularly for news from the city. I thought it was urbane and sophisticated.

And then I went to college. And realized that while the paper may be a noble effort - Jesus, anything being printed in Southwest Ohio that's less Republican and more intelligent than the Cincinnati Enquirer is a godsend - it has its shortcomings.

Here's a recent piece that has a bunch of my urban hipster/student/artist/bohemian/activist friends all up in a tizzy:

Cincinnati's Just OK

By K. Bunthoff

Dearest Cincinnati,

After nearly eight years, I’m afraid our relationship just isn’t working out. I’m sorry, it’s not you. It’s me.

I like you and all. You’re fun, unique and quirky. How can I put this? I just don’t love you. I think I should start seeing other cities. You really deserve better — someone who’s charmed by your quirks and appreciates the real you. Someone who’s happy waking up here each day.

I’ve seen plenty of people with those “I Love Cincinnati” bumper stickers. Maybe you need more people like them. Their stickers proclaim their fervent admiration. I don’t know any of them, but maybe they’re the answer to some of your challenges. They’re driving all over the place, loving you day after day.

When I see those stickers, I crane my neck a bit to get a decent look at who’s driving, trying to size up your devoted fans. What makes them tick? Every time I read “I Love Cincinnati,” I feel like I’m either missing something or it’s really just a joke.

What makes their affection possible? How can they appreciate your highlights and file the rest under “Not My Problem”? I’m beginning to think it’s one of three things: (1) blindness; (2) selective vision; or (3) suburban distance.

I’m ready to kick our relationship down a notch.

Now don’t go crying on me. We’ve had some good times. Some great neighbors. Terrific restaurants. Great food at Findlay Market. Plenty of parks. Great museums and arts. An incredible public library. The great church I belong to. I’m sure I can think of other things I love about you, but I’m sort of on the spot here and my mind’s going blank.

Living in Clifton, when I was in school, was great — well, at least until a band of dope peddlers moved into my building.

When it looked like my husband and I would be here for the long haul, we decided to stay urban. When we were house hunting, we swore we wouldn’t become a family that fled to the suburbs. We thought city life was a healthy, honest dose of reality that kept us grounded. We liked sticking close to bus routes. Our experiences here and elsewhere, with years of car-free commuting, had been enjoyable and low-stress.

But we’re not rich. Like many other young families we looked to the maligned, more forthright, western side of town. We moved to Westwood, into a house, and a neighborhood we could comfortably afford. Our house is decent, and so is our neighborhood. Our neighbors are great. We’re close to bus routes, public libraries, grocery stores and nearly everything we need (except for Indian restaurants, which haven’t made it to the West Side yet). We’re in a walkable community, which is what we refused to give up when we moved from Clifton.

But our oasis is just too small, and city life is just too close for comfort. When we venture out of the city, we keep seeing what we’re missing.

I’ve been telling myself for years that you’re a diamond in the rough. But let me be honest: Your rough exterior really gets in the way of, well, whatever might be obscured beneath it.

I’m sorry, Cincinnati, but it’s the company you keep that I just can’t stand any longer.

When they ride the bus, they curse into their cell phones for everyone to hear. When they drive, they speed and pull stunts. Some drive jalopies that aren’t roadworthy. When it snows, they don’t shovel their walks. When they walk or ride or drive, they litter. When they’re on the playground, they scrawl obscenities. When they’re walking, they’re blurting obscenities. They treat their kids poorly in public. When they shop, they try to make off with the shopping carts. Some of them sell drugs. Others buy drugs.

I see it all. That’s life in a city. But I see it too often.

I’m sorry. I know people have different ways of living, but this is not what I want my children to learn as “normal.” These folks might not be the bumper-sticker people, but there are plenty of them to go around.

I know your weary visage is due in part to modest means — just not enough money to go around — but what burns me up are the countless people who regularly make poor decisions about how they live and how they treat each other. I’m tired of living so close to so many with priorities so different from mine. And I’m bluer than blue, politically speaking.

It makes me so mad I could spit. Or I could move.

So I think we should just be friends. I’ll still visit and all, but it’s better if I don’t live so close. And you don’t need to keep worrying about me or anything. I’ll be fine.

I really think your motto, which would be in Latin, of course, like any solid motto, could be something like “It’s not pretty, but its home.” Or “It could be worse.” Or “We’re trying.” Or “As good as it gets.”
I know your motto is really “Juncta Juvant,” which means “Strength in Unity.” But I’m wimping out. My team spirit has dissipated and I’m trying to be realistic about this.

Something like “Cincinnati’s just OK” works for me. Even though we’re in a long-term relationship, I’m just not committed to this thing anymore. You can do so much better than me. You deserve someone patient and forgiving — really forgiving — someone who loves you just the way you are.

CONTACT K. BUNTHOFF: letters@citybeat.com

And here's a quick response by yours truly. This article has more problems than there are rust holes in all the pickup beds of blue collar America. But a few major issues really stood out to me:

Citybeat is not to be trusted, generally. I realized this when they gave "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"" a D in the movie ratings section in 2001. And they run mostly half-baked nonsense. Like this.
Westwood is an aging neighborhood that is in the process of turning over from white to Black and becoming poorer. The housing stock is aging (read: cheap) and the neighborhood has been slowly deteriorating for decades. I don't know why some yuppie from Clifton would move there and then be shocked that her impoverished neighbors act like poor people. And do things like stealing shopping carts and swearing in public. Welcome to reality as lived by the less privileged in America.
The author asserts defensively that she is indeed a liberal and makes vague gestures in the way of sympathy for the less fortunate. But her attitude is blatantly condescending and judgmental. She accuses her neighbors of having differing priorities and using bad judgement. Which is entirely subjective. She fails to recognize that working class culture is, in many ways, fundamentally different than middle class culture. Cultures cannot be evaluated with a moralistic yardstick. They just are. That's called ethnocentrism. And if she's talking about working class Black folk, then she's on some racist bullshit.
This is a fabulous example of how middle class white people like to hold up their avowed liberalism as proof that they are not racist/classist/sexist/bigoted/ignorant/condescending to the less educated/wealthy/empowered/white. Although they may be deeply ignorant of why Other people do things differently and have widely divergent values. I am also more than a little bothered by the author's broad use of "they" - which sounds suspiciously like classic under-the-rug/elephant-in-the-room/we're-too-polite-and-dignified-to-admit-we're-racist Midwestern racism. Because now that racist white people can't use slurs they just imply the same meaning with the angry use of "they" and "them" and hate-filled eye contact. When talking to other white people.
I am intrigued by the author's comment that the West Side is more "forthright". In light of Cincinnati's intense East Side/West Side enmity them sound like fightin' words to me.
And how the fuck is Westwood more "forthright" than say another aging and working class inner ring suburban neighborhood elsewhere - say Pleasant Ridge or Madisonville. I am fairly certain something as abstract and moralistic as "forthrightness" cannot possibly be applied to an entire neighborhood with any degree of intelligence or meaning.
Cincinnati has dramatically less street crime, public urination, littering, graffiti, and drug dealing than the hip urban metropolises that perhaps the author wishes she lived in. Like New York. Which has famous hipster neighborhoods like Williamsburg, and also horrendous ghettos like the South Bronx.
Undignified and unsophisticated blue-collar/working class/poor/trashy/ghetto people are everywhere! You can never escape us! We will be peeing in alleys and swearing on buses until the end of time! We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Without us the world would come screeching to a halt. Like the American Indians say about white people - and like Ma Joad said in her impassioned monologue at the end of The Grapes of Wrath - we will be here long after you are gone. Our unsightly jalopies may die miserable deaths, but we are much hardier. We're the people; we just keep on keepin' on.

Earl Hickey's list

2010-07-28T08:35:00.004-04:00

The premise of the show My Name is Earl is basically this: an uneducated petty thief with a super white trash ex-wife, a borderline retarded helpless man-child brother, and some colorful friends comes to a rather unique understanding of the Eastern principle of karma. And then decides to turn his life around by cosmically righting the myriad wrongs he has committed.

I love the show, but then I'm a sucker for anything in the genre - namely anything poking fun at white trash. The show is also interesting because it maintains a slightly complicated relationship with popular stereotypes of working class people. Joy is the original trailer park queen trashy bitch from hell. Her Black husband Darnell is a mild-mannered bartender, but is later revealed to have been trained as a secret agent and to have been part of the federal witness protection program. Patty the Daytime hooker - because most regular hookers only work at night - is your basic washed up nasty ole professional ho. But she is also revealed to speak Bengali and posses a master's degree. Sure, these idiosyncrecies make the show more quirky and entertaining. But they also weave a delicate dance of celebrating and simultaneously undermining stereotypes about America's underclass folk.

In the opening credits Earl recounts waking up in the hospital after being hit by a car and making a list of past transgressions he vows to atone for.

The list is referred to constantly in the show, but never really shown in in its entirety. Which is basically the same literary ploy as the show's intentionally ambiguous location, Camden County. Which die-hard fans have placed around Connecticut, and also located in the Central Time Zone. Although the many outdoor scenes were filmed in California.

So here's the list, as seen from the show's opening theme:

56. stole liquor from liquor store

57. told Joy Dan Dodd messed himself

58. fixed a high school football game

59. everything I did to Dad

60. pulled fire alarm

61. stole Mom's car (but I gave it back)

62. faked death to break up with a girl

63. wasted electricity

64. spray painted the bridge

65. cost Dad the election

66. let mice out at school play

67. stole beer from a golfer

68. blew up mailboxes

69. cheated on school tests a LOT

I am impressed to note that the most of these items are actually used in the plots of numerous episodes. Way to go Greg Garcia.

On a sadder note, it turns out the show's former pro-skater male lead, Jason Lee, is a scientologist. Somehow I expected more from a man who looks so good sporting that mustache from behind the wheel of an El Camino.

Damn scientologists. I guess celebrities really are dumb. 'Cause who the fuck else would sign up for such an obvious cult/scam/pyramid scheme?

'Mein Kampf' by David Lerner

2010-07-28T07:22:00.001-04:00

“Gary Snyder lives in the country. He wakes up in the morning and listens to birds. We live in the city.”

– Kathleen Wood

all I want to do is
make poetry famous

all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick
I'd rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I'd rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I'd rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I've won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem "Autumn in the Spring"

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else's money

this ain't no party
this ain't no disco
this ain't no foolin a

grab-bag of
clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and
gracious theories about

how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a
machine gun

this ain't no
genteel evening over
cappuccino and bullshit

this ain't no life-affirming
our days have meaning
as we watch the flowers breath through our souls and
fall desperately in love

this ain't no letter-press, hand-me-down
wimpy beatnik festival of bitching about
the broken rainbow

it is a carnival of dread

it is a savage sideshow
about to move to the main arena

it is terror and wild beauty
walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road
as missiles scream, while a
sky the color of arterial blood
blinks on and off
like the lights on Broadway
after the last junkie's dead of AIDS

I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up
not to dandle it on my knee
like a retarded child with
beautiful eyes
but

throw it off a cliff into
icy seas and
see if the the motherfucker can swim for its life

because love is an excellent thing
surely we need it

but, my friends...

there is so much to hate These Days

that hatred is just love with a chip on its shoulder
a chip as big as the Ritz
and heavier than
all the bills I'll never pay

because they're after us
they're selling radioactive charm bracelets
and breakfast cereals that
lower your IQ by 50 points per mouthful
we get politicians who think
starting World War III
would be a good career move
we got beautiful women
with eyes like wet stones
peering out at us from the pages of
glassy magazines promising that they'll
fuck us till we shoot blood

if we'll just buy one of these beautiful switchblade knives

I've got mine

Ginsberg reads 'America'

2010-07-28T07:04:00.000-04:00

"A Vision in which America is Strong"

2010-07-27T08:39:00.007-04:00

I am holding in my hands a new article from the Korea Times, detailing how Korean multinational LG Chem is opening a massive $300.3 million plant in Holland, Michigan. The town that invented the 'What Would Jesus Do?' bracelet craze in 1989. The plant will churn out new lithium ion batteries for electric cars. Some will go into the new electric Chevy Volts. Which bankrupt and tottering GM is praying will somehow save it from the forces of entropy. And the creditors that are circling it like a pack of hungry wolves. GM was born in Michigan, and is now on life support.

The recent groundbreaking ceremony was unusual in that it was attended by President Obama. The pres called the new plant a symbol of America getting back on track, an image of jobs coming back from overseas. Which the state of Michigan needs, arguably, more than any other. Cities like Detroit and Flint have been bleeding jobs and people for a generation. Parts of the state look more like the Third World than the U.S. Midwest. Obama called the plant part of a new "vision in which America is strong".

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, first of all it is undoubtedly a positive good that jobs are coming back to Michigan in any way, shape, or form. Michigan has been hit hard by the forces of the recent recession and is still reeling from decades of protracted deindustrialization that has all but paralyzed many communities. Detroit built casinos to try to raise some cash after all the assembly line jobs evaporated, and Flint has no idea what to do with itself.

However, Direct Foreign Investment - when foreign companies build factories on our turf to make the stuff they sell us - is not as simple as that.

The American economy is attractive to foreign-owned multinational corporations for a number of reasons. Not least of which is that the U.S. is the largest consumer goods market in the world. To put it bluntly, we use buy, use, and waste more stuff than anyone else on the planet. In the history of the planet. We live to shop and spent our hearts out. We are overweight, out of shape, and many of us have bought and hoarded so much stuff that an entire industry of self-storage units has emerged to rent us space for the excess crap that won't even fit in our houses. We are also massively, shockingly in debt. Chinese peasants living on wages we can't imagine save a much larger percentage of their income than most Americans. We save less than anyone on the planet.

So foreign companies come to the U.S. and make things, and pay Americans a decent wage to make these things in their factories. Which they then sell back to us at a profit. Which is retained by the foreign company, and often ultimately reinvested in a foreign economy. This means that the wealth being produced by all this economic activity ends up in someone else's pockets at the end of the day. Honest-to-God red-blooded American workers may be putting the Toyotas together at the massive Japanese-owned plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. But the company is not American-owned.

There's nothing wrong with foreign companies operating in another economy. Japanese cars are great. So are German banks. And foreign firms have long operated in the U.S. I just want to point out that it can result in a net extraction of wealth. This is how American companies kept much of Central America under their boot heel for many decades. And how the British continued to make record profits off their former colonies even after official independence. And now perhaps the tides are turning - or beginning to turn - on the American Empire. Which has been strong-arming most of the world into buying our stuff and working in our overseas plants for many, many years.

It is also important to point out that while America is seen as a cash cow by foreign consumer goods manufacturers, this does not mean that we are necessarily as wealthy and powerful as we would often like to assume. Real wages in the U.S. have not only failed to keep up with cost of living for the past three and a half decades, they have actually fallen dramatically. Americans, on average, are making less now than in 1970 if you adjust for inflation.

And while Americans now own more stuff than ever before - witness the ubiquity of four-car families - we are paying a heavy price. We keep buying more and more stuff, and ultimately we cannot afford much of it. Even though we haven't really been earning more money our appetite for new luxury goods continues to expand. Jacuzzis were unheard of a generation or two ago. Now many people have them. The same goes for home entertainment systems and tv's in every room and lots of other stuff. The gap between our earnings and our expectations of consumption have therefore been made up with borrowed money.

Debt. Which we are now basically drowning in. The U.S. economy crashed like an over-hyped ocean liner in 2007 because too many banks were eagerly dispensing bad loans to subprime borrowers. Most Americans are heavily in debt to credit card companies that they wonder how they will ever pay off. Forbes reports that the percentage of recent college graduates defaulting on their student loans has jumped a whopping 38% in the past five years.

We are living on borrowed bucks. And someday, probably soon, that will most likely come back to haunt us.

Inter-Asian slavery?

2010-07-21T21:31:00.004-04:00

East Asia is rapidly becoming the powerhouse of the global economy. Japan has long been a wealthy and developed society, Korea is now relatively prosperous, and China looks to become the next world power. Very soon. Albeit one totally unlike any seen before: officially Communist, hyper-capitalist, and totally chaotic. China is currently building dozens of cities on its east coast from scratch. And China is such an incredibly populous county - 20% of the human race lives there - that the movement of inland peasants from their rural hometowns to the mushrooming cities on the east coast constitutes the largest human migration in history.

The economic future may belong to Asia. The New York Times reports that while ailing GM struggles to move cars back home, they are selling 20% of their new models in China. There are already 27 Buick dealerships in Shanghai. And this is only the beginning.

East Asia's geographic context is complex however. The region is surrounded on all sides by much poorer nations. As a result, countries like Korea that used to export cheap labor (to nations like Germany) now import cheap laborers from nations like Pakistan. China has long been an exporter of people, but that could change. And Japan has been importing labor and know-how for decades.

One of the symptoms of an affluent society in the twenty-first century is very low - or negative - population growth. Basically as people get more money and education they choose to have smaller families. In pre-Industrial-Revolution Europe most people lived on farms and needed huge families to help with the chores. Today however this is not the case, and most people only want one or two kids. Or no kids at all. This can cause, among other things, a rapidly aging society. The wealthy nations of Europe look forward to a future in which most of the population will be old, and this will be expensive and problematic. Senior citizens often don't work and may have health problems that could be a social and economic burden. And of course when most people are old and not working the labor market expands, especially for unskilled jobs. Europeans may end up having to import their workers from poorer nations and their former colonies, although many Europeans bristle and fume at the very idea. Witness France and Italy's recent evidencing of popular and virile anti-immigrant racism.

Another symptom of an affluent society is an unmet domestic need for cheap labor. In rich countries few people want to work in factories or on farms when they have better options - like college and white-collar careers. Why settle for being a drill press operator when you could be a surgeon? In the U.S. this economic need has long been meet by waves of arriving immigrants, who are willing to work cheap in hopes that their kids will do better. In Europe similar scenarios are often the case now as well. Portuguese workers perform much of the labor that goes into Luxembourg's famous high-grade steel. Polish immigrants staff hotels and restaurants in Ireland. Africans work in the olive groves of the Italian peninsula. Although, as mentioned above, this is phenomenon is accompanied by incredible social tensions.

All of these issues can converge in nasty ways. Rich societies may have a very real economic need for cheap labor that can only be met by importing foreign workers. However, public opinion may tend toward xenophobia, racism, and the like. This may allow people who should know better to turn a blind eye to the abuses that foreign workers may face at the hands of employers and society at large. All this leaves the workers in an incredibly uncomfortable and vulnerable - if not outright dangerous - situation. Living in a society that is hostile to you is incredibly difficult to begin with, as the works of American authors like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison will quickly attest. And living in a foreign country to begin with can also be trying, especially if you don't speak the language or have local friends. And most of the lower paying jobs of the world are fairly exhausting and can feel quite degrading at times, even in the best of circumstances. But when you are a foreign worker and no one gives a damn about you, you may find yourself living a harsh life - abused by greedy employers and disregarded by society.

And that's on a good day. In the early 80's Britain swung hard to the right under the reign of Margaret Thatcher. Nationalist rhetoric gained credibility, and ethnically Jamaican and South Asian Britons found themselves attacked by white supremacist skinhead thugs. In 2008 a man from Burkina-Faso was beaten to death by a shopkeeper in Milan after stealing a package of cookies. Foreigners who come to wealthy societies in desperate poverty may find themselves vulnerable to attack simply because of their differentness.

Japan is one of the wealthiest societies on earth, but also one of the most expensive countries to live in. The Japanese are famous for their high levels of education and work ethic. Japan is also a rapidly aging society. By 2055 some 40% of the nation will be 65 or older. This may require importing foreign workers to staff the factories and rice fields of the Japanese islands. Some employers are already using imported Southeast Asian workers.

Here's a video link from The New York Times detailing recent labor abuses, which a Japanese lawyer attests is little different in practice from human smuggling and modern slavery:

I am intrigued, as well as saddened, to note that the Japanese are using the same rhetoric formerly employed by slave-owning Europeans. White Americans used to keep their supposedly-freed slaves in bondage as "apprentices", claiming that they were receiving training in exchange for their sweat and endless toil. And European colonial powers often protested that they could not release the nations they controlled from their grip because they were not fit to govern themselves. At least not yet. Early on in the colonial struggle for independence many European powers claimed that they were merely ruling their subjects until they learned how to run things. That they were under some sort of tutelage regarding their own agency, which in fact boiled down to naked exploitation. This is basically the same logic that Japanese auto parts manufacturers use when they overwork and abuse their Phillipino workers and call it "technical training".

The Tea Party finally hits the fan?

2010-07-20T00:23:00.005-04:00

Today the NAACP spoke out against the Tea Party movement, calling on them to repudiate racist elements within their fold. The kind of people who yelled things like "monkey" at NAACP booth staff at the Black Family Reunion. And who hate the welfare state so much and based on so much misinformation that they blame African Americans for its existence. Despite the fact that most poor people in America are white - since we are the majority - and that therefore most people on food stamps, medicaid, and the like are not Black.

The Tea Party has responded to accusations of racism by the NAACP by calling them racist in turn. That's just cheap. In addition to non-sensical.

And these are the same people who picket events with signs like these, should there be any doubt that conservativism has been a comfortable home for America's racists since at least the Reagan Revolution. And that these people are figgin' nuts:

Here's the president of the NAACP chatting with a CNN commentator about the Tea Party's expulsion of racist wackjob/Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams. And Serius Radio conservative commentator David Webb explains how racism is "offensive" but not racist.

Postscript - both these videos are straight off the NAACP's website. This ain't some crazy YouTube thing somebody made up in a basement outside Milwaukee. Its for real.

Vaseline, postcolonial wackness, facebook, corporate greed, and Asian racism all get together and have a party

2010-07-19T22:43:00.007-04:00

This is all over the interweb, so I'm a little Johnny-come-lately here, but Vaseline has just released a new facebook app that allows people to digitally lighten their skin in their profile picture. The app's slogan is "Transform your Face on Facebook with Vaseline Men", and features the whitened visage of a Bollywood favorite.

It seems sad and strange nearly beyond belief that the racism invented by Europeans five centuries ago to mask the philosophical tracks of their global thuggery lives on in the high-tech, yet banal, world of social networking media. White supremacist capitalism just don't give up, does it...

For generations internalized racism and colorism has compelled many of the more melanin-endowed peoples of the world to spend tons of money on products designed to de-racinate their appearances and vie for the look of whiteness. Malcolm X burned his head straightening his hair with lye as an unenlightened youth. And today millions of people across the world support a vast market for skin-lightening creams, lotions, and other products. Many of these products are damaging and some are downright unsafe. This is all the sadder given that many of these people live in the Developing World and could often spend their money on better things. Like food maybe.

Dig this packaging: "healthy white skin lightening lotion". What the fuck is healthy about tryin' to look white - and spendin' money on it - when your natural color is brown?

The new fb app is being launched by Vaseline - which is owned by London and Rotterdam-based Unilever - to promote its skin-lightening creams for men. They sell well in India apparently, and feministing reminds readers that India has been a very colorist society for centuries, almost since before era of colonization. The beauty-value of whiteness is entrenched. And all this is a great example of not only how racism and capitalism work hand in hand, but also how popular corporte marketing techniques manipulate consumers' worst insecurities and anxieties in order to induce them to spend money unnecessarily on things that ultimately hurt them. Jezebel calls Vaseline's latest campaign 'crowdsourcing racism'. Unilever also owns Axe body spray, Hellman's mayo, Lipton's tea, and Dove soap, among other household names.

Sadly such attitudes about race and color are popular across Southern, Eastern, and South-Eastern Asia. I can definitely vouch for the preference for lighter skin in Korea, where I currently live and work. Women avoid the sun like the plague, carry parasols like Victorian upper class ladies, and spend lots on skin-lightening beauty products. Philipinos and Indians have much the same sentiment.

In this case many respected voices in popular culture and society took umbrage with Vaseline's whitenizing fb app, and it was immediately attacked. The Hindustan Times pronounces the campaign a basic failure. Look out for some kind of lame-ass apology or retraction in the near future. To be followed, doubtless, by a similarly brazen and racist stunt sometime soon after.

In the meantime white supremacy and money march on, arm in arm, toward our collective doom.

Sci Fi and social theorizing

2010-07-19T21:42:00.009-04:00

Been getting back into Science Fiction lately. I loved it as a kid, which is odd given that I have a complicated and distrustful relationship with technology. Basically I like the genre as a vehicle for exploring ideas, theories, reflections, and criticisms about society. Science fiction has always sought to get at some basic existential questions about what humanity is and how we have often failed, and sometimes triumphed, as a people. Walls have been broken down and statements made that might not have been possible in other, more standard, forms of storytelling. It is noteworthy, for example, that television's first interracial kiss happened on Star Trek. Today Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura's brief romantic interlude seems pretty tame - but in 1968 that shit was groundbreaking. Only a few months before that episode first aired, under the title Plato's Stepchildren, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been brutally murdered at a motel in Memphis. Immediately after King's death major race riots had broken out in Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and Washington. Black Power was in, the cities were smoldering, and American racial tensions were at an all time high.

Sci fi also often explores the ways that technology changes who we are. Which is huge in this day and age. The Sexual Revolution of the 60's and 70's (that many would argue is still underway) would not have happened without the emergence of The Pill right around the same time. Our lives and culture would be dramatically different without the myriad little things we use everyday that our ancestors had no exposure to. Space travel may not be as feasible as the pulp sci-fi writers of the 30's anticipated, but the social implications of things like ubiquitous computing - tech developments that actually did occur - were first explored in science fiction. One of the most thoughtful explorations of what the future internet might be like came from cyberpunk fiction icon William Gibson, who invented the word/concept of "cyberspace" in 1982.

I have been reading Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, and I really dig it. Butler was one of the few Black women writers to contribute famously to the genre. Her work often explores social themes that the many white male writers of sci fi chose to ignore. Like race, class, and gender.

In the book I am reading now future environmental crises have caused massive social fallout, with much of the burden falling - as it inevitably does - on people of color, women, children, and the poor. Her main character is a futuristic Black Baptist preacher's daughter who must lead a group of dystopian urban survivalist friends to safety. They are walking away from the waterless, drugged out, burned out, ultraviolent chaos that is dystopian L.A. The group trods North, toward a hoped-for sanctuary that they only know of from rumors - echoing the history of the Underground Railroad. They meet futuristic slaves who who have run away from corporate plantations, and the interracial band must defend themselves from attack and suspicion from all colors of people. Along the way they fight off junkie bandits, take in stray kids and escaping prostitutes, and struggle to avoid thugs and crazed arsonists. The woes of urban poverty writ large upon a very possible future landscape of environmental and social collapse. Its a great read. Butler is insightful, intelligent, and compassionate. The worst sci-fi is techno-violence porn wrapped in an actiony adventure story plot. Tired old-ass heroic cowboy movie shit with a techno twist. But Butler's work transcends all of this to become a poignant statement about who we collectively are, have been, and could become if we don't watch our asses.

And since I'm on the subject of sci fi, here's a space music video from Broken Bells for their track The Ghost Inside. Starring the ever-glamorous Christina Hendricks, of Mad Men fame:

R.I.P. Harvey Pekar, the world will miss you

2010-07-16T02:09:00.007-04:00

This week the world lost a great artist, a man like none other. Harvey Pekar was the born to Jewish immigrants from Poland in the latter years of the Great Depression. He grew up inner city Cleveland, where he spent a lot of time fighting on the streets as a kid. As an adult he spent most of his life working as a file clerk at the Cleveland Veterans Administration hospital, after dropping out of college and cycling through a number of awful jobs. Although frustrated by his life as a lowly wage slave Pekar was determined to not succumb. A lifelong afficionado of jazz, he collected rare records and wrote reviews about them for numerous publications. He later met cult underground comic book artist Robert Crumb - a fellow record collector - and decided to start working up some comic books about his life, and the lives of those he knew. His co-workers at the hospital, his friends, his family, and their ordinary worlds became the subjects of American Splendor, his long-running series of comic books about real-life salt-0f-the-earth people. About the trials and tribulations of being human. When Harvey came down with leukemia in later life the result was Our Cancer Year. Nothing was spared by what the New York Times termed his "relentlessly autobiographic" style.

Pekar spent his life documenting in art his struggle to make it through. To make ends meet, to survive living in places he termed "an epic ghetto", to not be driven mad by his dead-end low-paying job, to try to live a politically moral life, and to be an artist. His books are about life's endless little hassles and challenges, as well as larger existential questions. Trying to make rent every month and wondering what it all means.

While Pekar was growing up Cleveland - his hometown - was on its way down. The city emerged from World War a major industrial powerhouse, filled with steel mills and old brick factories that were still churning out goods. But after the war things slowed down, steel mills closed their doors, neighborhoods quickly fell apart, and race riots obliterated parts of the East Side. Unemployment, crime, and arson became commonplace. In 1969 the horribly polluted Cuyahoga river caught fire, leading the nation to dub Cleveland "the mistake on the lake" - the town where everything conceivable went wrong as hell. Today Cleveland is the number three poorest city in the U.S. Arguably, Cleveland is Ohio's answer to Detroit- America's urban decay poster child.

Here's some footage of what you may see driving around urban Cleveland, should you be curious:

Pekar was also noted for his politics. He was very consciously blue-collar all his life, and his work hinged on a his existence as a timeclock-punching everyman living in a very gritty town. Harvey was often bitter and indignant about the state of things in his world. He refused to make nice with wealth and power, and could be a real crotchety pain in the ass. In 1988 he got kicked off The Late Show by Dave Letterman after refusing to hush up about NBC's connections to GE and their greedy corporate shenanigans. Here's the footage of Harv' gettin' all cantankerous on Dave:

Harvey also worked with famous author/radio host Studs Terkel on a graphic adaptation of Working: people talk about what they do and how they feel about it - Stud's most famous volume. The book tells the stories of real people leading unglamorous lives, and recounts their experiences and reflections about what they find themselves doing to pay the bills. Or earn "some bread" as Harvey would say. In 2008 Harvey helped write Students For a Democratic Society: a graphic history, which was designed to introduce the exploits and struggles of the late great SDS to unfamiliar readers. I honestly didn't know much about them before I picked it up, and the book is a great introduction. After reading it I wondered where all my older relatives and friends were when SDS was protesting the Vietnam War and fighting for democracy. Then I remembered - mostly they were working.

In 2003 the film American Splendor, about Pekar's life and work, was released to mostly rave reviews. Paul Giamatti played Harvey and did a pretty great job capturing his shuffling, slouching, and grouching. It was a portrait of an artist with a troubled soul and a lot to say. The movie also notably captured a number of real-life Cleveland landmarks - including Shay's restaurant, a diner on St. Clair Avenue just east of downtown. Harvey ate there often, and the place is anything but swank or aristocratic. I hunkered down at the counter there a few times for a hot meal, and found the fare hearty and affordable. The accompanying atmosphere is Cleveland at its finest: aged and a coated in a patina of rust and grit and soot that just won't ever wash off.

Here's Harvey's eulogy from The Cleveland Plain Dealer, voicing the emotions of the city as it mourns the passing of one of its favorite sons:

Walker Evans

2010-07-11T08:12:00.004-04:00

Just came back from seeing the new Walker Evans exhibit at the Hanmi photo museum, Seoul's newest art museum.

If you never heard of Evans, he is one of the forefathers of social documentary photography. Along with legends like Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans set out to capture America during the throes of the tortuous Great Depression.

Basically when FDR got elected he promised to try to turn around the Depression. The New Deal. Part of the New Deal was handing money to artists to do what they did. Uncle Sam supported plays, murals, and concerts. And the Farm Security Administration sent photographers into impoverished stretches of our land to capture what life was like.

The results of their years of toil are some of the most compelling and important images in American history.

Here's a sampling of the myriad images Evans left us with:

From Walker Evans

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

2010-07-07T21:24:00.003-04:00

Robert Frost was born into this world in 1874 in San Francisco. Less than a decade after the close of the American Civil War. And only a generation after California became a state. At that time San Francisco had just exploded from a hamlet of just 500 souls to a city of 150,000. He later went back to his family's native New England and wrote his most famous poetry about rural life there. Having been born at the center of America's frontier activity Frost died at the outset of the Final Frontier, just a year after JFK announced his intention to put a man on the Moon. Frost was in his 80's when he spoke at Kennedy's inauguration.

Here's one of his most famous poems, The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The poem is most often interpreted as an ode to individualism and non-conformism. But critics hold that it has deeper, more ironic meanings. Having to do with personal myth-making and regret. The speaker could have taken either path and looked back on the experience nostalgically as having made him who he is. Click here for some critical essays.

Drawing Paralells

2010-07-06T07:53:00.002-04:00

'Bamboo Charlie' builds his private universe

2010-07-06T00:47:00.005-04:00

From the L.A. Times. Charles Ray Walker, 59 and originally from Houston, has lived in a neglected patch of ground beneath some highway interchanges in L.A. for years. Most people just call him Charlie. To most people his life sounds scary and sketchy and pathetic. But to Charlie, this world is his private paradise. He explains that he is here not because of drugs or a criminal past but because it is peaceful; it is his. He has planted gardens, commissioned murals, and collected all manner of discarded, but potentially beautiful, things.

David Harvey on Crises of Capitalism

2010-07-05T23:56:00.005-04:00

David Harvey is the most famous Geographer in the world. Having said that, the discipline is fairly unknown to most people. Even among academics. Its kind of like being the best midget throat singer. No one knows what the hell they do except their colleagues. I even had an advisor who was a social historian that had no idea what geographers do. And I am fairly sure the short answer to the inevitable question is that they pretty much study whatever they feel like. If you can map it, its geography. Which seems problematically catholic for a field of study, as the disciplines detractors are quick to point out.

But anyways Harvey has been one of the leading lights in social theory for the past half-century. He is currently a professor of Anthropology, and is sometimes described as a Sociologist. He wrote great books like Social Justice and the City, The New Imperialism, and A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Here he is talking about some of the issues neoliberal capitalism has heaped upon us. I think its a pretty fetching set of analyses. I was particularly interested in his take on the roots of the cultural value of homeownership in the U.S., and his argument that capitalism merely geographically redistributes its problems. Having grown up looking at collapsing barns and abandoned factories that one really rings home for me.

Harvey also has a long-runnning and widely popular free online course devoted to the study of Marx's Capital. Click here for his website.

Beyond McDonald's - What's wrong with multi-national corporations?

2010-07-04T23:36:00.001-04:00

Here's a fun website I stumbled onto today! Click anywhere below for the link:

Whats Wrong With Multinationals?

Together, backed by governmental institutions, big businesses constitutes a fabric of exploitation and oppression to benefit those few with access to the profits and control the levers of decision-making.

We all know the results - wage slavery, hunger, break up of the independence and self-sufficiency of local communities, abuse of resources, despoliation of the environment and the suppression of people's genuine needs and desires.

[ Extensive range of outside links (over 600!) to other kicking sites ]

	Oppressive regimes The direct or indirect economic support provided by individual companies doing business in or with oppressive regimes can help to prolong the political status quo and reduce the impact of consumer boycotts and economic sanctions intended to influence the behviour of the authorities. The human rights organisation Amnesty International have criticised regimes for the following; torture, extra-judicial executions or dissappearances, prisoners of conscience, and for frequent official violence against the public. In a recent campaign, Amnesty International recently selected the most 'oppressive' 40 regimes based on those activities for special attention. Although there is obviously valid dispute as to exactly what can be defined as an oppressive regime (human right abuses are carried out in the majority of countries to a lesser or greater extent), it seems reasonable to conclude that those most criticised by Amnesty International are among the most brutal and oppressive.
	Irresponsible Marketing - (McLibel issue) When profits are considered more important than all else, some companies market products that are dangerous or detrimental to physical health. Tobacco companies, pharmaceutical companies, pesticide manufactures and companies making breast milk substitutes for the Third World are examples of frequent transgressors. McDonald's promotion of a diet widely thought to cause deasease, is a good example of irresponsible marketing.
	Armaments Here we identify companies involved in the manufacture or supply of weapons and/or other combat related equipent. Such companies are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people each year in civil wars, tribal disputes, drive-by shooting, etc. and the fatal injury of thousands more inoccents caused by devices such as anti-personel mines etc.
	Environmental destruction - (McLibel issue) Critisisms leveled at a company or industry for its activities which pollute or damage the enviroment, are covered in this catagory. Although products produced in an enviromentaly unfriendly way may appear at first to be cheaper, the cost to the purchaser is not the final cost. Damage to the enviroment is paid for by increases in ill health, and irreversable loss of biodiversity.
	Animal suffering - (McLibel issue) Animal testing, Factory Farming and other animal rights related concerns are covered by this catagory. Inhuman farming techniques, pointless animal experimentation and needless suffering and all issues which an increasing number of people express concern about and yet few know about the involvement of the companies that they support each day as a result of their purchases.
	Employment - (McLibel issue) Here you will find reference to a companies record of treatment of employes, its handling of trade disputes, industrial action and other union activities. Critisism of low pay or dangerous working conditions are also to be found here.
	Land Rights Indigenous peoples have often been forced from their land or been seriously disrupted in order to facilitate corporate operations. The opinion of local people is rarely considered a major issue to big business.
	Censorship and free-speech - (McLibel issue) The McLibel case itself is the best example of corporate censorship. Other examples of corporate threats to free-speech are easily found.

Excuse me Margaret???

2010-07-04T00:27:00.011-04:00

I dig a lot of the things that Margaret Cho does. She is a smart, funny, and interesting woman. She confronts stereotypes about Asian Americans, attacks homophobia, and does things like bitching about how George Bush got elected on a platform of misinformation and hate. Rock on.

But she also says a few things here that really kinda rub me the wrong way:

Now I hate that motherfucker George Bush just as much as any proud liberal transsexual riding a rainbow parade float while decked out in leather bondage gear. And waving an American flag, hopefully. But in the above clip I feel like Cho calls up some tired stereotypes in rather cavalier and sloppy fashion. Namely she collapses the following identities into a pancake of misconceptions and stereotypes:

Southern folk
the working class
rural people

And what's up with that impersonation at the end when she's talking about Michael's and Pottery Barn? I can't tell if she's supposed to be Southern or Black. If it's former then she really needs to do her homework on that accent. And if its the latter then it's pretty damn ugly from a racial perspective.

This brings up a few issues I have been feeling for a few years. And that very few people I have met seem to really recognize.

I have been blessed, in my twenty-odd years on this earth, to know many people who have had the courage to define their sexuality (and gender) on their own terms. Relatives, friends, neighbors, co-workers, teachers, classmates, and colleagues. From them I feel privileged to have learned many things about the world, and about myself. Homophobia and sexism and rigid ideas about who we all are in terms of the whole man-woman continuum, and who we want to do it with, are limiting and oppressive to all of us. I'm basically a straight white guy, but I have no interest in being such in the destructive ways that I saw my older male relatives and neighbors living their lives. I know that GLBTQ folk have enriched and educated the hell out of my world.

But I can't help but feel like there is a serious, troubling, and ugly rift in the supposed-to-be-unified rainbow quilt of We-Are-The-World progressive multicultural consciousness. Specifically I have met many people who are deeply and personally committed to ending the oppression and hatred of GLBTQ folk, but that are sometimes surprisingly ignorant of issues connected to race - and even more so class.

What's up with that?

Margaret Cho's polemic is a perfect example. She trots out the popular stereotype of the bigoted, white trash, Southern, bible-thumping American redneck. Who lives, no less, in a trailer park. As I stated above this totally collapses the identities of rural people, the working class, and Southerners into a pancake of stereotypical bigotry.

And those, more or less, are my people.

We're not all assholes! Some of us voted the other way and protested the war and raised hell. And had to fight off half our families over the shit to boot. We get no love.

Stereotyping all those groups as is just as stupid and morally reprehensible as stereotyping Margaret for being Asian. Or Barrack Obama for his color. And making fun of them for living, say, in a trailer is just downright classist. Martin Luther King died leading a protest in Washington designed to raise consciousness about American poverty. How is this shit okay in our country today?

Southerners are sensitive to Yankee perceptions of them as backwards weirdos. Working class folk are sensitive about being made fun of by their social betters. And rural people are pretty much not really taken seriously by anyone important in America - with the noted exception of fundamentalist religious leaders and conservative politicians who want their money and/or votes. I feel like their voices are not recognized very often in liberal circles. They are often cast as enemies or lowlifes not worth listening to.

This really bothers me on a personal level. And it concerns me intellectually. Because I know that conservative commentators/professional assholes like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have been waging a war of misinformation for many years trying to convince the American working class that liberals hate them. That liberalism is elitist and weird and disconnected from the problems in their lives. If educated and upper middle class liberals bash working class people with worn-out stereotypes of them then we are just throwing gasoline on our collective house fire. This is not the way to win friends and influence people in the truck stops and factories and sidewalkless neighborhoods of America.

I'll be the first to admit that my culture has issues. I left home as soon as I could because I craved education, and a new life away from my admittedly provincial and somewhat intellectually and artistically bereft hometown. I was surprised to find that after I had been gone for some years that I actually missed a few things. My people need education and shit, but I am proud of where I come from. And I believe my culture does have redeeming qualities.

I grew up in a community marked by racism, homophobia, sexism, and poverty. But I can't help but feel like collapsing all of these issues together into one big ball of shit that we can all agree to hate - and then giving it a bucktoothed hillbilly cartoon face - is really, really ignorant.

Bigotry is stupid. And evil. But just because someone lives in a trailer park or speaks in an accent doesn't make them the enemy. Does Margaret Cho know that there are gay trailer parks? That there are many people in states like Tennessee that are not hatemongers? Does she know that there are working class openly gay people who speak very much like that trashy accent she was making fun of? Why are they excluded from her righteous indignation?

And that joke about incest, well that's just nasty. Hillbillies have been getting jabbed with that one for generations. And it just ain't true.

One of my biggest issues with many educated and/or upper middle class liberals I have met in the last decade is that I find some of them have a propensity to really hate on people who are less privileged when it comes to politics. They stereotype us sometimes. And that's a cheap trick. Intellectually and politically.

Moreover, given the progressive ideals of inclusion and acceptance it seems incredibly hypocritical. In one of my favorite books, White Trash: race and class in America, cult film director John Waters is quoted as saying that "...white trash is the last racist thing anyone can say in America." I also have a close friend who hails from the mountains of Southwest Virginia. After coming North for college he often found his speech and his culture mocked and insulted by his teachers and classmates. And these were people who prided themselves on their anti-racist liberalism. He complained that "hillbillies are the only minority group everyone's allowed to make fun of." I think both of these observations are poignant and patently true.

A big part of my attraction to progressive politics was its ethos of anti-racism. But race is a made-up social construction. Scientifically speaking the shit is not real; biologically race doesn't exist. White people made it up back in the day so they could justify doing some really awful shit. Race is very real in society though. Just ask a Black man in prison. And race is bound up intractably with issues of class. Right now Black America is in the midst of some internal soul-searching over what it means to be Black in twenty-first century Amerikkka and to not live in poverty. Because for the past few centuries to be Black was, more or less, to be poor as hell. In the temple of progressive politics that historical experience is honored - as it should be. However, I can't help but notice that the voices of poor and Southern and Appalachian whites who have many of the same experiences are often disregarded at best. And hated on at worst.

We're not all bigoted assholes. Some us really wanna change things. And lemme tell ya - that's an uphill battle in lots of places less liberal, educated, and affluent than Ms. Cho's native San Francisco. Which is the third-richest city the U.S. In 2004 the median household income there was just over $60,000 a year. Meanwhile in Memphis and Detroit people were earning about half that. I can't help but wonder if the voice of persecuted gay outrage might sound slightly different coming from one of those locales. I bet it doesn't make fun of accents.

If racism stopped being acceptable before I was born - and I'm damn near thirty - then why is it still okay to make fun of poor people in America?

Margaret Cho on Race

2010-07-03T23:16:00.008-04:00

Margaret Cho was born in California to Korean American immigrant parents. She grew up in an old hippie neighborhood in San Francisco, and has basically become a gay icon. Cho has commented often on social and political issues in her work, especially those pertaining to sexuality and race.

So here's Cho on race and being Asian American:

And her she is with a funny bit about being a sometime gay woman:

'South of the Border'

2010-06-29T04:58:00.007-04:00

Apparently Oliver Stone just made a new movie about resistance to U.S. imperialism in Latin America: South of the Border. Personally, I haven't seen that many of Stone's movies. I wasn't that into his movie about Bush, 2008's W. I mean Emperor Bush II was eminently hatable, but the movie was just kind of like 'yep, he's an asshole.' I felt like the scenes where Stone had his Bush mumbling grossly though a mouthfull of food and talking to his wife while taking a shit were just a little, well, coarse. I mean the man's stupidity gave all his detractors such a mother lode of material. Moreover portraying George W. as a man with appalling manners is missing the point. Damn near everything he did as a national leader was utterly despicable and flagrantly iniquitous.

Its been a minute, but I can say the last time I saw his older move Salvador I was really into that. Ollie had Richard Boyle playing a fucked up American photojournalist in the midst of the chaos of the Salvadoran Civil War. They don't teach kids about shit like this in school, but the U.S. really fucked some shit up when we armed insane fascist guerrillas to fight populist Marxist rebels. Ronald Reagan loved their evil asses. (It was on the DL of course, like when the Great Communicator illegally sold weapons to Iran to raise money for psycho Nicaraguan death squads.) The film includes a reenactment of the assassination of Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero, which took place during broad daylight in the national cathedral. Romero was in the middle of saying mass when they gunned him down in front of his congregation in the spring of 1980. That's what happens when you love Socialism, said Uncle Sam with a big-ass stick. 75,000 people died during the 12-year conflict.

Like Huey said on The Boondocks, "Jesus was Black, Ronald Reagan was the Devil, and the government is lying about 9/11!" Never trust the Man.

In his new film Stone returns to some related subject matter. Namely how Yanqui imperialists seem bound and determined to keep Latin Americans under their bootheel. He interviews some of the leaders of the nations of the South American continent. Including noted America-basher Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, a man fascists like Fox News would have you believe is the Spanish-speaking Osama bin Laden. Also Evo Morales, the first non-white president of overwhelmingly Amerindian Bolivia. Evo also happens to be the leader of the Bolivian Movimiento al Socialismo, a leftist party which has memorably pissed off the U.S. by standing up for poor Bolivian farmers. And Stone chats with Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former union organizer who resisted military dictatorship. A notably non-democratic form of government that was widespread in the Southern Cone during the past century. Such regimes usually received fat stacks of cash, and other forms of aid, from the U.S. of course.

Most white Americans have no idea, but the U.S. has lots of blood on its hands in Latin America. Ollie's movies may be brash, but he's trying to get the message out.

Haven't seen South of the Border yet, but I hope to. Here's the trailer:

Smoking

2010-06-28T22:10:00.006-04:00

I was born wet and naked into

the last American decade

in which people could smoke in shopping centers

I remember seeing my fellow shoppers

adorned with mullets

and lounging on blonde oak benches

next to tall ashtrays

smoking

luxuriously they thought

While overweight truck drivers

with bulging guts lumbered by

leaning osteoperotically on their shopping carts

Pacing like bovine

their eyes were fixed on some slightly distant

but immediately attainable shopping goal

Looking back

It didn't seem all that great really

to sit there in the air conditioning

watching all this

smoking in front of the ninety nine cent store

Walt Whitman in service of Levi's

2010-06-27T04:25:00.008-04:00

In the late 1960's the anti-war movement, the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights/Black Power movements, the Women's Lib movement, and the emerging Gay Rights movements were congealing into a massive assault on the frontal lobe of traditional conservative America. The kids were taking to the streets protesting everything. They were turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Iconic Beat writer Allen Ginsberg crafted epic poems about his life as a bearded, balding, drug-loving unapologetic gay Jewish hippie. He read epic poems of his like Howl and Kaddish for very long stretches to packed audiences at venues across the county. The literary establishment was shocked and discomfited by his work. But they couldn't deny that hordes of people were paying good money just to sit in theater seats and hear poetry read aloud. Something that seldom happens in our modern world.

But before Ginsberg and the Beats there was Walt Whitman. America's original gay bearded hippie poet. Walt was born on Long Island in 1819 and died in Camden in 1892. During his life Whitman opposed slavery and alcohol, served as a nurse in the Civil War, and wrote about having love affairs with men in a time when this was illegal and dangerous as hell. He is generally considered the father of free verse.

As many of us remember Levis' aired several commercials over the last couple years using a few of his poems. They were stirring. I was surprised, and a little embarrassed, that I actually liked them. I take anti-consumerism fairly seriously and am inherently suspicious of anything I hear from tv. But the shit was really artistic. It was just fucking pretty. At the time I remarked to a friend that I liked these Levi's commercials. And she told me that I was a tool and that the poetry was probably just some fake shit they made up. Which I later learned is untrue. Whitman is for rizzle.

This one was my favorite. I'm a sucker for black and white photography. And scratchy records too. It is believed that the voice over is an early wax phonograph recording of Whitman himself reading an excerpt from his poem 'America'. That's some crazy shit to me. To hear a man's voice from 120 years ago. That's like getting a telegram from a serviceman fighting on the western front in World War I delivered to your front door some quiet unsuspecting afternoon.

Here's the poem in written form:

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

And here's the other commercial:

Whitman lived in a time when the great American frontier was still being tamed. Conestoga wagons crossing the plains, cowboys and Indians, and all that shit. To authors like Ishmael Reed this was part of a great conquest, and the resulting treasured national myth omits important voices. For example, no matter what you see John Wayne doing lookin' all heroic and shit on TMC reruns the fact is that historically most cowboys were Black. And to peoples like the Lakota Sioux, the 'taming of the West' was an outright holocaust. Being white and all Whitman saw this unfolding drama the way we are mostly taught to see it in school. As a triumphant and romantic marching forward of Progress and Civilization. The massive territorial advance of what bell hooks likes to call "white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy".

Now that I think about it a poem written about our beloved national myth of the romantic, rugged, and hardy pioneer is really appropriate for this purpose. A commerical. This one was made to sell jeans. Which were invented for the gold prospectors who flooded into California in the mid-1800's. Which was one of the more dramatic chapters of the European capitalist imperial conquest of indigenous and mestizo North America. The old myth just keeps on going, and the politico-economic system does too. One chapter of the master narrative supports another. American imperial capitalism is looking back at itself nostalgically.

Walt might wrong, or at least biased, about some history. But it is undeniable that Whitman's prose is well-crafted. Here's the poem in its lengthy entirety:

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
blood intervein'd,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
(bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv'd and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call--hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!--swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

A remembered lesson about art teachers

2010-06-26T08:22:00.004-04:00

When I was in the 6th grade

I joined the school band

Maybe it was fifth

I wanted to play the trumpet

because I loved Louis Armstrong

who none of my classmates had ever heard of

They liked Metallica and Brooks and Dunn

I was a weird kid

what can I say

And I wanted to puff out my cheeks

like Satchmo did

when he played

He looked like a musical genius

impersonating a blowfish

It seemed so classic

But the band teacher said

This was bad embouchure

But

I protested

that was how Louis Armstrong played

Well

she said

with the amused grin that adults give strange semi-precocious children

you're not Louis Armstrong

I quit soon after this incident

The teacher quit too

got married

moved to an old red brick house across the street from the school

and settled down to raising babies

Apparently her devotion to music was lukewarm

I should have recognized this for what it was

Because I have heard it a hundred times

People who teach art, and music, and writing

always tell you that you have to follow

The Rules

But then they teach about all the really great

dead artists

that you should admire

And who broke every damn rule they rule could find

Whupped ass and took names

But they tell also you that you aren't like them

so you have to fall in line

and be like all the other people

who study art, music, and writing

who are mostly as boring

and uninspired

as a dried up can of leftover housepaint

And whose work is equally milktoasty and dull

Perhaps I should have recognized this

for what it was

just more

bullshit

A Shout-out to Shuron

2010-06-25T22:09:00.011-04:00

Ever hear of a company named Shuron Ltd.?

Well, if you like vintage glasses you should have. Look 'em up if you find yourself unacquainted. Click here for their website.

They were founded in 1865, at the close of the American Civil War. Which is, incidentally, a long-ass time ago for a still-existant American manufacturing company to come into being. I believe they started around Rochester NY, where they were headquartered for many years.

They also make a lotta cool old-school frames. Which are hard as hell to find, and which they have basically been making forever. Like these :

They also invented browline glasses in 1947. Browlines were all the rage in the 50's. They still have mad retro appeal and have been worn by everyone from Michel Foucault to Malcolm X to Tom Hanks (in Catch Me If You Can) to Kanye West to Colonel Harlan Sanders - who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken. Also the Dali Lama and Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs. Their eternal coolness is vouchsafed by the laundry list of famous badasses who have sported them. On stage, screen, and real life.

Shuron started it all. And they are one of the few companies still making browlines. Actually you'd be hard-pressed to find them anywhere else. Unless you hit up some antique malls. And older frames are often fragile. And hard to fix if they ever break. Parts are hard to come by. And most opticians will treat like you are crazy when you want help with shit like that.

Shuron's buddy-holly-esque Freeway model is also mad cool. (The ones shown first at the top.) The main browline model is the Ronsir. Which comes with in a wide variety of options and color choices. Shuron also makes these awesome clip-ons. (seen below) I have a set and am very happy with them. Since wearing sunglasses over your really cool glasses is just a shame. And because my eyes are weak as hell.

aqua teen hunger force, postmodern critical theory, and white racial ignorance

2010-06-24T00:25:00.010-04:00

Lately as I sit in my small apartment in Northeast Asia I've been watching downloaded tv shows. 'Cause I have no tv and there ain't much else to do sometimes. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is among the shows I've been looking at. I like the show. It employs a lot of postmodern literary devices that I find interesting. The characters are bizarre as hell. The plots are interesting too. They're all ostensibly classic comic-book-style mystery capers - but then they are never really resolved. Usually the plots just get weirder and weirder and then just sorta stop in a place that makes no sense. Which is a nice metaphor for the loss of objective truth I think we live in the midst of. The creeping feeling many of us have that there are very few hallowed truths out there we can still put stock in. Stories that don't go where they should and then fall down drunk are great metaphors for an artistic/intellectual statement. Namely, that all the good stories our culture used to tell don't really hold water anymore. Also, I find it interesting that the show takes place in a burned out suburban neighborhood in New Jersey. And that the characters live in torn up little houses and that their possessions are about one step away from garbage. This is a nice, if at this point commonplace, allegory for questioning the supremacy and ultimate victoriousness of white American civilization. I love it that the supposed heros hang out with a nasty fat guy in a wife beater and fight over pathetic worthless bullshit. And accomplish nothing. Plus I think the shit is funny.

I've been looking for some critical essays about Aqua Teen Hunger Force, because I wanna understand how it fits into some models of postmodern literary theory. Which I want to bone up on. As I was doing so I stumbled onto this argument here. On some Adult Swim board. Once again people who look like me are an embarrassing disappointment.

Basically some white dude is slamming postmodernism and saying that it ends up protecting and giving justification to horrible things that happen in other cultures. Because he thinks whiny liberals are always making sorry excuses for the barbaric practices of non-Europeans. As an example he mentions how fundamentalist Saudi Arabia executes gay people. Sounds to me like he's tiptoeing in the direction of the White Man's Burden or the obligation of America to 'civilize' the rest of the world. Or some kinda similar ol' bullshit.

Dude goes on to mention that postmodernists spend too much time whining about how America is a racist country and that everyone needs to stop bitching about shit that ended like 4 generations ago.

My question is when what ended? Slavery? Fuck...

'Cause the Emancipation Proclamation didn't end racism. It just meant that slavemasters had to switch tactics. Black sharecroppers in the depression-era Deep South were anything but free people, decades after slavery ended. But racism ain't just a Southern problem, like many white northerners have often believed. Malcolm X noted that he had spent his whole life in the North and that his feelings about the White Devil were based on his traumatic and horrendous experiences there.

Nor is racism something that only happened long ago and far-way in the 19th century. Racism is everywhere. All the time. Its in the water in our collective American aquarium. It never ended. Ending slavery didn't end the fact that many white Americans believe malicious and false things about Black folk. And that they built institutions based on ideas that are factually wrong and morally despicable. And that those institutions continue to work against the empowerment of African Americans and other non-whites and minorities in countless ways. Sometimes in huge obvious ways. And more often in thousands of tiny little ones that may be difficult to pinpoint or document. And of course the titanic social inequity created by a history slavery and racial oppression just keeps on rolling along. Communities scarred by centuries of terrorization, oppression, and searing poverty continue to experience incredible hardship. And often hate from without and chaos from within.

This is the kind of ignorant shit that white people say all the time that makes my blood boil. And because the people who challenge them usually aren't from middle-class suburbs like they are they think that their ideological opponents have no intellectual credentials. That their ideas and experiences are invalid. And that, my friends, is patently offensive. And dick as hell.

To these scowling deniers of American social realities I would like to say the following:

Have you ever felt scared driving through the ghetto by yourself?

Sure, we all have. Hell, people that grew up in the ghetto feel uncomfortable there a lot of the time. It'd be crazy not to. Its dangerous as hell. Half the homeless carry guns. Crackheads are all over the place doing sketchy-ass things. Thieves, junkies, gangsters, you name it. People are armed and dangerous and on drugs and out of their minds.

Now, what color are many of these people? They are mostly not white.

And why is this?

Perhaps they made bad life decisions. Maybe they dropped out of high school. Got hooked on drugs. Have a criminal record. Et cetera.

But why do such life trajectories - and all manner of social and personal and financial and legal woes, everything from high blood pressure to low SAT scores - disproportionately affect African Americans. And other historically fucked over non-white minorities?

Could it be because of the lingering shadow of 500 years of racist-ass politics?

Lets consider an opposite example. Take Nelson Rockefeller. Ever hear of him? The name of the show 30 Rock is a take-off on its fictional location in Rockefeller Plaza. A major New York City landmark that Nelson personally developed and made a shit-ton of money off of. Lots of other stuff in New York is named after him too. He was the governor there for 14 years. And he was also the vice president under Gerald Ford.

Obviously Nelson Rockefeller was a bright and talented guy. He rose to great success and left his mark upon the world. However, let's consider where he came from. His grandfather founded the biggest oil company in the history of the world. Standard Oil. The family had more money than they knew what to do with and their kids went to the best schools and knew all the right people. They could wipe their ass with hundred dollar bills if they felt like it. If Nelson's parents had been crackheads or winos or just ordinary people from someplace like the South Bronx he probably wouldn't have been so successful.

We are all, to at least some extent, who we were raised to be. We can struggle mightily, but overall most of us are pretty much products of our environment and our families and our backgrounds. We may be chagrinned by being reminded that we have the same mannerisms as our parents. We usually carry with us - at least unconsciously - many of the personality traits, values, and ideas of the people who raised us. We inhabit worlds shaped and bounded by the experiences of our communities and our ancestors. We live in the culture they left us with.

Also, racism and bigotry are not the same things. When Archie Bunker shot his mouth off on tv while loafing around on loud plaid furniture in the 70's that was bigotry. When some little kids went to bed hungry last week and then fell asleep listening to gun shots because their great-great-great-grandparents were enslaved that is structural racism. And it is impossible and unconscionable to deny that the menacing and miserable spectacle of Black poverty is a direct result of the inhuman treatment that African Americans endured for centuries here in North America.

Most poor people were raised poor. Most rich people were raised rich. And most peoples who have been denied opportunities in the past in totally disproportionate ways are still struggling mightily.

And Amerikkka is racist as hell. The fact that you even think that shit is all in the past is proof. Just because you went to college doesn't mean you know the truth. Truth is subjective. History is always written by the victors. And white people have been running most of the world for the last couple hundred years. And doing a shitty-ass job if you ask me. The people they fucked over to get rich may have some different stories to tell than what has generally been accepted. Read some damn books for yourself - The Autobiography of Malcolm X ain't a bad place to start. And then make an effort to ask some less fortunate people about the shit they deal with on a daily basis. And what they think about the world we all live in. They may not have educations, but they probably know things about the world that a roomful of PhD's don't know jack about.

SCTV: the original jeopardy parody

2010-06-23T23:33:00.006-04:00

So, I've been re-connecting with my childhood love of Second City Television, otherwise known as SCTV. The show aired in Canadia in the 70's and launched such stars as Rick Moranis, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Cathryn O'Hara, Dave Thomas, and Martin Short. It was absofuckinglutley brilliant sketch comedy. Like early Saturday Night Live, before it got all shitty and watered down and there were way too many lame spin-of movies. How the fuck did Blues Brothers 2000 make $28 million - John Belushi is dead assholes! The premise of SCTV was that viewers were tuning into a small bootleg tv station based in an ambiguously sited town named Melonville. The station made all of its own shows, and they were usually chintzy and totally bizarre. This formula may have later been used by Weird Al in his cult movie UHF.

I just stumbled on this skit. Which makes me think that SNL's much beloved Celebrity Jeopardy was pretty much a rip off of some Canadian humor from back in the day. Its the same formula. SNL just used celebrity impersonations rather than weird unknown characters:

And in the way of comparison, here's Celebrity Jeopardy. Which is more familiar to most young people. Apparently the real celebrity jeopardy clips keep getting yanked from youtube for copyright violation. So I all I could get was this shitty bootleg version. I smell some major artistic appropriation happening here. Then again, Darrell Hammond's Sean Connery was a highly original bit of comedic genius.

on making art

2010-06-23T08:27:00.005-04:00

art is ethereal

it cannot be measured or quantified

you can't weigh it by the pound

it cannot be stored in a vault

or it dies like a crimson orchid locked in a dark closet

it cannot be caught in a mason jar like a firefly on a warm june evening

it cannot be tamed

sometimes it can't even have a name

it simply appears one morning like a baby in a basket on your doorstep

a serendipitous apparition

it comes with no instruction manual

and even if it did the manual would be wrong and clumsy

full of typos and punctuation mistakes

it would say 'insert tab a into slot b'

but there would be no slot b

and maybe tab a would turn out to be a reuben sandwich

making art is like trying to roller skate underwater

mistakes will be made

but they may be indistinguishable from graceful acts of brief genius

and in the end

if every cell in your body is bursting with life

all the while

it makes no difference

Fuck vinyl siding

2010-06-23T08:12:00.007-04:00

I just logged into facebook for a sec (goddamned facebook) and I saw a picture of an old high school classmate standing next to her husband and a house clad in vinyl siding. Or maybe a doublewide. Either way:

Fuck vinyl siding

nobody wants vinyl siding

that shit is a compromise all the way down

goddamn fake wood grain

and shit

nobody ever planned

for vinyl siding

its like your teenager

getting knocked up

all over the outside of your fucking house

where all the neighbors can see

nobody ever actually wanted

vinyl siding

they just resigned themselves

to its eventuality

its like marrying

someone you don't love

just because you don't want to die alone

vinyl siding never looked classy

i mean

jesus

that shit

is plastic

its like having a house

coated in used sandwich bags

would you shingle a roof

with legos

or empty two-liters?

fuck no

you've got standards and shit

vinyl siding is a symbolic abomination

a representation of all that is

ersatz

chintzy

and stupid

in America

vinyl siding means

you fucked up

and you don't even know it

it means you gave in

it means

you sold out

you let the government

steal your thoughts

while you slept

shoulda been wearing

a tin foil hat

i always do

fuck vinyl siding

Recapturing the Banjo

2010-06-21T08:26:00.014-04:00

The Banjo is, in essence, an African instrument. Devotees of the more rustic strains of American country music, and old white people in general, may be surprised by this fact.

It was created in the New World by enslaved African Americans, in the image of instruments they had known in homelands they had been torn away from. Caught up in what some Black scholars have insisted should rightly be called the African Holocaust. As we all know, over the course of centuries millions of human beings were stolen from their people and reduced to chattel. Worked to death, tortured, raped, murdered, and terrorized. Modern Amerikkka's dramatic and undeniable racial injustices are the direct legacy of this political economy. Which was massively profitable. Many historians argue that it was slavery - and not ingenuity, natural resources, hard work, or anything else we can be proud of - that really propelled the U.S. into becoming a great industrial power. In the early 1800's the U.S.A. was insignificant, a newly independent colonial backwater perched on the edge of a vast wilderness. Within two centuries it had become the most wealthy industrialized nation on earth. And the banjo was there all along, being strummed in the background by the marginalized.

The Banjo's likely parents include the Senegambian spike folk lute, the akonting, and a similar instrument from Mali called the xalam. Early banjos were sometimes made out of gourds, like the calabash instruments of West Africa. Some think it has roots that go all the way back to Egypt. No one knows where the name 'banjo' came from. It could be Mbundu; it could be Portuguese. In the New World traditions from Europe and Africa morphed and fused, and were reborn in new incarnations. The banjo became a popular early - and distinctly American - folk instrument. A tangible product of the massive mixing of peoples and cultures, the like of which the world had never seen before. From this great synthesis came new artforms that eventually became the heartbeat of popular music around the world: blues, gospel, jazz, swing, rock and roll, soul, funk, and hip hop. It is also impossible to avoid pointing out that all of these artforms were founded in large part by innovative African American artists.

The banjo's story is unique though. It followed a trajectory unlike that of other instruments or forms of music. It emerged in the slaveholding colonial days and took wide variety of early forms. It was popular among a wide range of early Americans, but most popular among Black folk. Then in the 1830's an early blackface performer named Joel Sweeney popularized it on the later-notorious minstrel show circuit. He even toured in Europe with an overtly racist blackface act. Performers like Sweeney introduced racist stereotypes from the US to the world at large. And helped give the N-word global popularity among Europeans. Notably, their trademark instrument was the banjo. An indelible link was formed between the banjo and racist caricatures. It survives to this day.

Thus the banjo came to be associated early on with racist white depictions of African American culture. In the wake of such malevolent cultural appropriation it fell out of use among Black folk, and today it is most associated with bluegrass music. The music of almost exclusively white Appalachians. Movies like Deliverance gave us images of degenerate inbred mountaineers plucking banjo strings on the porches of their lonely and decrepit cabins.

In the span of a few generations the banjo went from being a uniquely African American-created instrument, to an icon of institutional racism and hateful stereotypes. Today the banjo is approximately as popular among Black folk as white robes with pointy hoods, bloodhounds, sickle cell anemia, and getting pulled over by cops for no real reason.

In her book Rice noted Affrilachian poet Nikky Finney wrote about feeling conflicted for always harboring a seemingly anomalous love for country music. It was, she wrote, "the music of my enemies". Country songs were too often the anthems of those who would seek to destroy and dehumanize African American people. The musical equivalent of the Confederate flag. Ray Charles grew up in Jim Crow North Florida and also loved a lot of country songs. People often wondered why. He explained that he just loved a song with a good story.

It is a terrible thing for an entire artform to be so smeared by associations with an ugly and malevolent past that it becomes entirely disregarded or impossible to appreciate. Can bad history invalidate good art? Then again the determining factors in what makes art good, bad, or irrelevant are entirely subjective. And culturally specific...

American folk music - in all its many veins - is part and parcel of what makes us who we are as a collective nation. A people. Our identity is bound up in music, food, culture, and the like that are unique to us because we are such a polyglot. The racist fore-bearers of white America were often terrified by the possibility of miscegenation among their descendants; race mixing among their progeny was their worst nightmare. But in the end our admixture is our greatest asset.

The question begs to be asked - can the banjo be salvaged from its racism-smeared past? In a larger context, can country music itself be disassociated with stereotyped rural white ignorance and racism in the collective American consciousness?

At least one artist has been making an attempt to reconnect the banjo with it's original, pre-minstrel show, roots. Noted blues artist Otis Taylor put out an album in 2008 called Recapturing the Banjo. The album contains songs with titles like "Ten Million Slaves" and makes a distinct departure from the banjo's usual image. Taylor is a bluesman by trade and he does things with the banjo that few artists have until very recently. Moreover that few Black artists have in general. Taylor's five-string banjo performs a driving funk beat on the song "Prophet's Mission". Taylor and company also cover classic rock hits like "Walk right in" and Jimi Hendrix's "Hey Joe."

Overall I think the album is great and greatly under-appreciated. Downbeat magazine called "Recapturing the Banjo" the Blues CD of the Year in 2008, saying "there may not be a better roots album released this year." This is banjo music as perhaps it has never been heard before. Informed by the rich sounds of blues, jazz, funk, soul, rock, and even a little hip hop. This is banjo music that has broken bread with radical political agitators, traveled the world, attended demonstrations, and probably dropped acid. Moreover, it is reconnected with the larger canon of American popular sound that is our gift to the world. America's greatest legacy, arguably, lies in our music.

Listen for yourself. The banjo can only be an instrument - both figuratively and literally - of the lingering stench of Jim Crow if we let it. It is, after all, an African instrument.

Performance Art and The Culture Wars

2010-06-20T02:04:00.010-04:00

So, I was just on facebook talking to an old friend. And I was asking him if he had seen the recent Yes Men movie The Yes Men Fix the World.

I'm kinda on the fence about some of the stunts they pulled in the film, but I generally agree with the points they were trying to make. Like how somebody in the rich-ass West should help the Bhopal victims poised by Union Carbide decades ago. And how the US Department of Housing should be providing housing to poor people, rather than kicking them out and tearing down their homes. Y'know since they are the US Department of Housing, not the US Department of Making Sure Poor People And Slumlords Get Together For A Picnic.

I looked them up on wikistupidia real fast to check the title, and I ran across another wikipedia stub to a group called Bureacrash. Apparently they're like the radical conservative pro-capitalist foil to The Yes Men.

They also sell t-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with this design:

Their main stunt so far seems to be throwing red paint on The Yes Men after their cover story blew up while they were trying to get interviews at the Cato Institute.

They have been described as "a gang of libertarian college kids who prank leftists at major international events by taking the implications of their policies to absurd extremes, which the lefties tend to not even notice"

Libertarian performance art? Conservative culture jamming?

What the fuck??!

The Jesco White movie

2010-06-19T03:15:00.008-04:00

As a keen-eyed observer of American pop culture I tend to pay special attention to the depictions of hillbillies, white trash, and other assorted groups that comprise the pasty pale underbelly of white American culture. I am interested for a few reasons. Partly because its entertaining. And partly because I have a vested intellectual interest in observing how the world sees us.

I was therefore quite interested in the recent film White Lightnin', a movie that tells the story of Jesco White. Of the famous and talented White family of Bandytown, West Virginia. Jesco and some of his kinfolk also starred in the 1991 cult documentary short Dancing Outlaw. The movie was made by Vice Films, the same people who brought us such gems as The Vice Guide to Liberia. An arm of the Vice magazine empire, most of their films seem to involve exploiting the shock value of works depicting impoverished and misery-stricken communities. And then repackaging that content and selling to hipsters. I feel pulled at both ends by this practice. I identify with the audience and the subject at the same time.

Jesco's dad, D. Ray, was a celebrated mountain dancer. A practitioner of a dying artform that can be traced back to the folk dancing of the British Isles, from whence came the fore-bearers of many Appalachians a few centuries ago. The family was poor, but they had music, and they had their community - afflicted though it was by searing poverty and resultant depression and drug abuse. Jesco grew up poor huffing lighter fluid for kicks. He got sent to jail early and often. The story takes off from there.

Here's the trailer:

And here's some home movie footage of the White family at an informal get-together. I don't know about you all, but this reminds me of high school:

Another poem

2010-06-19T02:39:00.003-04:00

If I taught Creative Writing

by Charles Bukowski

now, if you were teaching creative

writing, he asked, what would you

tell them?

I’d tell them to have an unhappy love

affair, hemorrhoids, bad teeth

and to drink cheap wine,

to keep switching the head of their

bed from wall to wall

and then I’d tell them to have

another unhappy love affair

and never to use a silk typewriter

ribbon,

avoid family picnics

or being photographed in a rose

garden;

read Hemingway only once,

skip Faulkner

ignore Gogol

stare at photos of Gertrude Stein

and read Sherwood Anderson in bed

while eating Ritz crackers,

realize that people who keep

talking about sexual liberation

are more frightened than you are.

listen to E. Power Biggs work the

organ on your radio while you’re

rolling Bull Durham in the dark

in a strange town

with one day left on the rent

after having given up

friends, relatives and jobs.

never consider yourself superior and /

or fair

and never try to be.

have another unhappy love affair.

watch a fly on a summer curtain.

never try to succeed.

don’t shoot pool.

be righteously angry when you

find your car has a flat tire.

take vitamins but don’t lift weights or jog.

then after all this

reverse the procedure.

have a good love affair.

and the thing

you might learn

is that nobody knows anything–

not the State, nor the mice

the garden hose or the North Star.

and if you ever catch me

teaching a creative writing class

and you read this back to me

I’ll give you a straight A

right up the pickle

barrel.

A poem

2010-06-19T02:31:00.003-04:00

Writing by Charles Bukowski

(I believe this was published in Betting On the Muse)

often it is the only
thing
between you and
impossibility.
no drink,
no woman's love,
no wealth
can
match it.
nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.
the hordes from
closing in.
it blasts the
darkness.
writing is the
ultimate
psychiatrist,
the kindliest
god of all the
gods.
writing stalks
death.
it knows no
quit.
and writing
laughs
at itself,
at pain.
it is the last
expectation,
the last
explanation.
that's
what it
is.

Jesus destroyed by lightning

2010-06-18T23:53:00.005-04:00

Well, its official. The Messiah was torched by an Act of God. Sound ironic to anyone?

For those of you hadn't noticed the 80-foot statue of the Son of God emerging from a pond next to I-75 near Mason, Ohio (between Dayton and Cincinnati) - well, its too late.

The much-beloved, and much-satirized, statue was a landmark in the area for years. It was erected by a megachurch built next to the freeway. Local residents and passersby called him 'Touchdown Jesus' because of his pose.

However, this past week 'Giant Jesus' was destroyed. He was struck by lightning and quickly burned to the ground. Apparently the King of Kings was not made of much more than styrofoam and shellac. Which any pyro adolescent will tell you goes up faster than you can say 'eternal salvation'.

Local news carried tongue-in-cheek articles all week. But now it has officially been reported on Roadside America, my favorite website for offbeat tourist attractions. Which, frankly I trust much more than any tri-state news source. Which is more of a statement about the deficiencies of the latter than anything.

Click here for Roadside America's article about Jesus' smoldering demise.

USA Today: America's most retarded news

2010-06-15T06:31:00.008-04:00

Hey there America!

Are you interested in the news? Like kinda interested, but not that interested?

Are you barely literate? Do you get confused or pissed off when you see big words like congressional, de facto, executive, or maple tree?

Its okay. Don't worry. Just drive your late-model SUV to the nearest strip mall equipped with a large corporate franchise restaurant - say Outback or T.G.I. Fridays - and pick up a copy of USA Today. They're cheap. And thin. No uppity-ass big fat New-York-Times-style backbreaker of a newspaper for you.

My dad loves Bob Evans. We used to eat there all the time. At a location next to a freeway onramp at Eastgate - a sprawling asphalt constellation of retail garbage set amid the general trashiness of exurban Clermont County. I like to call the area the armpit of Greater Cincinnati. All the chilly air conditioning and Dr. Pepper you can handle. And they bring you hot biscuits with your meal. You can douse them in honey poured from sticky little pitchers they stock at all the tables. What's not to love?

Generally while we were waiting for our gut-busting meal of downhome Southern Ohio soulfood my dad would stroll out to the ersatz front porch and eye the newspaper racks. Out there next to the overflowing ashtrays and the perennially empty and just-for-looks park benches. Cause who the hell wants to sit there looking at sweltering blacktop and parked cars next to a noisy-ass freeway? He'd feed a few quarters into the black-and-white USA Today machine. And then he would sit and scan the newspaper while we were waiting for our mashed potatoes and meatloaf to show up.

At the time I thought little of this. Mostly I was impressed that my dad dutifully read any newspaper on a regular basis. My background is fairly uneducated and not many people in my childhood read for fun.

Today I am an English teacher in Korea, and part of my job is teaching a discussion class. Basically Korean people pony up what I believe is decent money to sit in a room and talk to me - a native speaker of North American English. My role is basically to help them practice talking in English. (Although admittedly I have to put in some effort everyday to curb things like dropped consonants, grammatical slips, colloquialisms, colorful idiomatic expressions, slang, and words like 'ain't'.)

Everyday I have to give my discussion class an article to read and talk about. The challenge here is to find something that is engaging, but not boring. Not too short, but not too long. About five short paragraphs is great. Korea has three major English-language newspapers. And I usually scour their sites once or twice a week and print a bunch of short articles. I also try to mix in shorter pieces from sources like the BBC, the Onion, or other Western media providers. A co-worker also recommended USA Today. Their pieces work really well: they are short and simply written. No big fancy words like in the New York Times. No unfamiliar cultural references employed as metaphors like in the Washington Post.

USA Today is, in fact, so simply written that I was actually surprised. Granted, I hadn't looked at the paper in a decade or so. It wasn't on my radar as a student. But seriously, this shit is written on like a third-grade level. I felt like I was reading news for kids. Which is funny - I was actually looking for news for kids when I set out to find reliable places to download articles for my foreign students. Lo and behold - they fit the bill perfectly.

Here's a sample piece, an intro blurb from a recent article about a burgeoning solar industry in economically long-suffering Toledo, Ohio: "Toledo seeks to reinvent itself from Glass City to Solar City". Seriously? That's not even correct grammar! That shit sounds like a it was written by a C-student churning out a halfass paper for a 9th grade science class!

The article goes on: "The officials from government, academia and business who are steering Toledo's transformation call themselves "the partners" and meet monthly." Note that the largest words here are 'transformation' and 'academia'. I teach English from textbooks chock full of cheesy articles written in language like this. And lemme tell 'ya, it doesn't get much simpler.

After scanning the article and noticing a rather simplemindedly robotic lack of journalistic eloquence I scrolled down to the comments posted at the bottom of the page.

Here's a gem, apparently written in response to the article's mention of federal support for much-touted 'green jobs':

"President Obama needs to stop screwing around wiht our kid$ money!!!. He flyies all over th place in his taxpayer supported 747 while the govenrmnet spends all our taxs. We needs to stop all this porkbarrel, $$$pecial interest politic$ and get our goverment back to doing its job!!!"

I am refraining from commenting on the number of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax problems contained in those three sentences. Not to mention enmity.

As I read this I had the distinct thought that it could have in fact been written by a former manager of mine. A trollish man who I couldn't stand. Last summer I worked for a college-dropout ex-cop who was in charge of security at a drywall factory in Kentucky. And the guy had the intellectual faculties, not to mention social graces, of Rush Limbaugh after a bottle of Wild Turkey. Pretty much he spent all his time listening to talk radio and bitching about how the government was to blame for everything wrong in his sad little world. When I told him I studied history he tried to lend me a favorite documentary of his; it was supposed to prove that Osama bin Laden and the PLO had been secretly trained by the Nazis during World War II. He also smelled. He was obnoxious and dumb as a box of rocks.

This, apparently, is USA Today's prime demographic.

And this is part of why I felt the need to take a break from America.