Speechless (because immigrants took my speech).

So, I saw this ad today on CNN. I don't even have any further commentary. I saw this fucking ad on CNN in the afternoon and that's crazy to me.

Gil Scott-Heron. April 1, 1949 - May 27, 2011.

Gil Scott-Heron died today. I don't know yet what was the cause of death, but that's another truth-teller in the grave too soon. At sixty-two years of age, forty-one years after the release of Small Talk at 125th and Lenox and forty after the groundbreaking Pieces of a Man, his words are still all too relevant and--as a nation in general--we have yet to listen. The Godfather of Rap, an unflinchingly prophetic critic of national entropy and persistent injustice, tragicomic to the bitter end. Listen to Gil Scott-Heron. I mean, listen to Gil Scott-Heron. May he rest in peace.

May 19.

May 19 is Malcolm X's birthday. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz would be turning 86 were he alive today. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be 82. Medgar Evers would be 85. Fred Hampton: 63. Bunchy Carter: 69.

All (and many others) were killed within a five year span at the peak of COINTELPRO's efforts to prevent the emergence of a "black messiah." That's not even conspiracy theory--that shit's in the file.

Their truncated efforts fomented the rumblings that Nixon used at the end of the 1960s to seize on fears of integration and black urban migration with the euphemism "Law and Order." That became Reagan's "Morning in America," with its wars on vague concepts and its rancid downward trickles.

But unless you grew up in a disenfranchised community with some sort of minority political agitation, making those connections is just not a valid part of the study of history. If it comes at all, most Americans will only ever get that part in college--and now the motherfuckers want to take that away. Intersections like these are not simple coincidences, folks: UC tuition might jump 32% if tax proposal fails, official says.  

Just because we can't point to some back room where one group of scary men in suits pulls all the world's strings doesn't mean the game's not rigged to work in the favor of a de facto aristocracy. 

How many investment bankers have you seen in handcuffs?

Maybe Ahab was right when he observed that "This whole act's immutably decreed." 

Maybe.

Why I refuse to celebrate.

"That is a subtle observation on the part of philosophy: you can both love virtue too much and behave with excess in an action which itself is just."

- Michel de Montaigne, On moderation

* * *

 "...but if we choose to enjoy things that are to be used, our advance is impeded and sometimes even diverted, and we are held back, or even put off, from attaining things which are to be enjoyed, because we are hamstrung by our love of lower things."

- St. Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine

* * *

yeah.

I took notes, I sat down, I got tired and frankly lost interest in the whole thing. I was going to compose this long argument about why I think it's wrong to celebrate even a justified death, how it demeans us as a society, how the sudden mainstreaming and approval of our tendency toward ultranationalist necrophilia gives me the creeps, how I don't want to be aligned with people who consider a mosque several blocks away from Ground Zero sacrilege and then go get drunk at Ground Zero and encourage drunken superpatriot college girls to flash their breasts...and so on. But Osama hatefuck fatigue has set in (exacerbated by Obama lovefest fatigue, which in this context is just as irritating), and I think we'd all be better served if I just linked to these remarkably thoughtful pieces by Mona Eltahawy at The Guardian and David Sirota at Salon.com. While you're at it, if you really want to see the depths to which people stoop during a civilization's decline, check this link to a Wonkette article about Osama's Dead merchandise. Maybe you can get your dog a shirt, or treat yourself to a trucker cap.

Or just take a look at the guy in the clip below. And if you don't see layer upon layer of horrifying irony here, may God help you.

Trump, Black King, Poker Face: The Anatomy of A Political Takedown.

Much has been made in recent days of President Obama’s roast of Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and rightfully so. It was brutally funny. Or was it hilariously brutal? In any case, it’s safe to say that anyone still supporting The Donald’s potential bid for the White House does so quietly and with some embarrassment. As host Seth Meyers noted at the dinner, Trump’s candidacy was—or is it still?—a joke. And although I’m not usually a vindictive person who relishes the humiliation of another human being, I can’t honestly say that I was anything but delighted to watch the smile fade from Trump’s face as he watched his grandiose political aspirations slip away in a hail of roaring laughter at his bombastic stupidity.

Then on Sunday an extra dimension was retroactively added to that verbal trouncing, as YouTubers everywhere returned to the video to re-watch it in light of current events. What one sees in that clip pre-May 1 is an intelligent politician delivering razor sharp punch lines with the cool assurance of a skilled orator holding the higher moral ground in an absurd situation. Post-May 1, it’s an intelligent politician delivering razor sharp punch lines with the cool assurance of a head-of-state staring down his detractors after secretly giving the order to eliminate the nation’s—perhaps the world’s—most vilified foe. Bloggers especially latched onto one clip of Obama laughing heartily at a quip by Seth Meyers about Osama bin Laden’s elusiveness, and the president was roundly applauded for maintaining his “poker face.” I’m not sure what else he was supposed to do, but it was really intriguing to watch amid the collective national fist-pumping over bin Laden’s death.

But why is this so satisfying to me? Am I relishing the fact that our awesome president finally has some points on the Republicans? Am I just really super excited that a terrible dude trained in the midst of a terrible idea died a terrible death during a terrible war, thus proving how fucking awesome America is and allowing me to finally be proud to be an Obama supporter because all this time I’ve felt effete and weak by not being able to express how badass a patriotic red-blooded American I can really be?

Well, no.

It can’t be a vindication of Obama’s policies that makes me smile, because I’ve been generally pretty dissatisfied—if not disgusted outright—with those. Corporate bailouts, our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gitmo, Race to the Top, the severely compromised health care plan, and a host of other letdowns have left me pretty disillusioned with an administration whose campaign stickers I still have by the stack somewhere in my apartment.

And it’s not because Osama bin Laden’s dead. I mean, I’m glad that a planner of and inspiration to mass murder is off the grid, and sure I take some pleasure in the fact that the guy was capped on a non-Republican’s watch.  But the Democrats don’t have—will never have—clean hands either, and I’m not about to engage in all this bloodthirsty fist-pumping about how great violence and death are when they’re justified (quick side note about that: what the fuck are you doing, American liberals? Have you only opposed violent rhetoric and stupid jingoism up until now because it wasn’t your team carrying it out? ).

No, what turned my frown upside down was something different, something most Americans would (wrongly) consider a separate issue. What I’ve relished in viewing upon viewing of this smackdown is the complete disregard it shows for the “race card” taboo in American politics. Of course, it wasn’t (couldn’t) be framed that way explicitly, but it was there—it couldn’t not be there, focused as it was on the Birther issue. The Birther movement is a racist movement, regardless of whatever else they try to say and how gingerly the media tries to dance around that fact when they give it airtime. It’s not a coincidence that “Birther” is one letter away from “Bircher”—these are xenophobic nativists and nothing more. President Obama will never be an American to them, just as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were treated as buffoons—African-Americans are not Americans to these folks, and non-Americans are hardly even people.

But you can’t say that. To point that out would be to “play the race card.” Because the racists are not playing the race card, they’re being “patriots” and “realists,” they’re being vigilant about the Constitution or looking out for American jobs. So the rest of us are supposed to keep our mouths shut. We’re supposed to grind our teeth in silence at Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, Jesse Helms’s hands, National Security PAC’s Willie Horton ad, John McCain’s Messiah commercials—but to point out the racist implications of each is going too far. That’s playing the “race card.”

So, to get this definition straight: playing on racial tensions and xenophobic fears, enacting racially discriminatory policies, employing racist rhetoric to appeal to a base of disgruntled sheeple is fair game. Pointing out these strategies and calling them for what they are: playing the race card.

It’s a clever metaphor, simultaneously implying a knockout quality and an unfair, forbidden advantage. So it’s both a trump card in the political game and a form of cheating. It’s as though, despite its power to win everything, it’s actually not part of this game, making it shameful to put it on the table. Of course, that’s bullshit. First, it’s incredibly rare that the perceived “race card” actually wins anything. Second, race is always already on the table—it’s only when we identify it that it becomes an issue.

What’s most troubling about this for me is that liberals play along. I think some of this is pure political pragmatism, but there’s something else going on: liberals (actually neoliberals, but let’s call them what they call themselves) relish their little victories. We really wanted to think we’d fixed racism when Obama won the election. We really like the idea that Brown v. Board of Education and the Voters’ Rights Act healed all those old wounds. Explain to a room full of white liberals how crack proliferated in American ghettos, why incarceration rates reveal a new form of Jim Crow, and watch how many squirm uncomfortably if not challenge you outright.

So the race card doesn’t get played not because it’s politically inexpedient. It’s politically inexpedient because half of the “left” in America is drinking the right’s Kool-Aid and allowing itself to be shamed into submission.

And that’s what made me love Obama’s roast of Donald Trump. He didn’t pull any punches and he didn’t leave the race card off the table. He slammed Trump, he mocked Michelle Bachmann for being an abject liar, he slammed FOX News for its idiotic coverage of every sensational tidbit they could scavenge from right wing hacks, and he didn’t let up until he’d essentially destroyed their ability to ever speak again on this issue. It was more than a series of political jokes, it was a rhetorical submission hold.

My reading is certainly open to disagreement, but I would direct detractors’ attention to the Lion King bit and ask that you consider all the implications of calling that the president’s birth video. In one crushing blow (and using a beloved Disney clip!) Obama brutally mocks rumors of his African birth, criticisms of his campaign’s messianic undertones, and questions of his leadership. It’s cocksure, brazen, and—to me, at least—glorious.

As far as I’m concerned, all of this turns on race—John McCain’s “The One” ad, which mocked Obama’s “messiah” status, was little more than a thinly veiled critique of an “uppity” negro. Questions of the president’s leadership are certainly merited, but much of that discourse has adopted the assumptions and rhetorical strategies of the Birther movement, which is pure xenophobia, and a huge segment of our population ate it up.

It’s that segment of the population that Obama’s speech really nailed. If anything, Trump was cancelled out and shown to be a political zero, FOX and Bachmann were called out for the stupidity we knew about all along—those are easy. But without Trump or Bachmann the idiots in our nation will carry on. They’ll find new leaders to spit vitriol and preach hate in the name of Christian love, so who cares about Trump and Bachmann.

What this speech really accomplished was a takedown of a form of political discourse, exposing a powerful ideology as nothing but stupid bigotry. Obama stood before the nation, looked half of it in the eye, and issued a smiling but serious “Fuck you.”

Does that mean they’ll go away? No. But at least I know that, for all the other shit he does wrong, this president can take a stand in the culture wars and be on the right side of history. Whether he’ll continue to do that remains to be seen, but for about five minutes, as the Black King trumped the Trump with a race card, it felt pretty good.

Two fun facts.

#1
"There are only two things more beautiful than a gun: a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere. Ever had a good...Swiss watch?"

- Cherry Valance (John Ireland), Red River, 1948

Seeing these sexy dudes size up each other's guns made the Duke feel all funny inside.

#2

At the start of filming for the 1948 Howard Hawks film Red River (which I reluctantly watched and thoroughly enjoyed thanks to the great Roberto), there was concern that John Wayne and Montgomery Clift would not get along due to their matching outspokenness on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They agreed to steer clear of politics on set, but Wayne and Walter Brennan both made it a point to avoid Clift off-camera because he was a known homosexual. Shit really hit the fan when a rumor made it to the Duke that Monty was having an affair with John Ireland, at which point the Santa Ana Airport's namesake actually lobbied to have his costar fired.

So I can be dragged kicking and screaming into admitting that John Wayne made some (some!) really good films, but I maintain that the guy was a complete jerk-off. 

Thank you, Public Enemy.

"This land was made for you and me."

"Go home!"

In response to the video of their hate speech having gone viral, the purveyors of OC’s ugliest fighting words have gone on the defensive, with Ed Royce condemning hate speech and distancing himself from the nastiest bits of that video while reminding us that the speakers at the CAIR event were deserving of criticism. Deborah Pauly says her words were taken out of context by deceptive editing, and Gary Miller continues to cower in the shadows.

To be fair, Royce’s distancing of himself temporally from the screaming hate-gasm makes sense: it’s clear from the video that the elected officials in question spoke during the late afternoon, whereas the shrieking took place at night.

The problem with using that fact as a defense is that the video has audio, and in it Royce sure seems happy to receive applause from these same people whose beliefs he now claims to find detestable.

But, Royce reminds us, event guest Abdel Malek Ali is himself still a pretty detestable figure; and it’s true that the man’s said some detestable things in his loud and strange career. Yet despite what these speakers and a few fringe right wing blogs and organizations would like to have us believe, neither he nor his fellow speaker Siraj Wahhaj have any links to terrorist organizations.

As for Pauly’s statements, she’s right: the video is heavily edited. So if her words were taken out of context, then it should be easy enough to see how wrong we’ve all been about her. All we need is the full video, or a transcript of her speech.

Interestingly enough, despite the pride Pauly’s shown for participating in the event (see her twitter feed—or, you know, don’t), she’s refused to release a written transcript of her speech. Furthermore, the blogs defending her as having been taken out of context (you can google them, I’m not giving those fools traffic) when she seemed to be advocating the murder of Muslims don’t bother to show her in context.

Why might that be?

Perhaps it’s because the full video (posted below—Pauly starts around 00:43) doesn’t exonerate Pauly of the charge of wholesale Islamophobia. Yes, when she talks about Marines sending “these terrorists” to paradise, one might (but one also might just as easily not) infer that she’s talking about actual terrorists. However, what emerges from watching her entire speech is a sense of just how completely she lumps all Muslims together as a terroristic monolith. If anything, context worsens the impact by making it clear how inclusive her vision really is.

That’s all I’ll say about it. I'm sleepy and tired, and besides, you can see for yourself how the thing unfolds "in context." I have no reservations about continuing to call these people hate-mongering cowards and laughing bitterly at the irony of their freedom jabber. 

OC = Outrageous Cowardice?

You should watch the video posted at the bottom of this blog entry. It's difficult to swallow, but I recommend that you take it in. Sit through all five minutes and fifty-two seconds of rabid, uninhibited hate, just so you know what still persists--with enthusiastic support from elected officials--in a region that never sickens of lauding itself for being one of the most tolerant and diverse in the United States.

Listen to demonstrators tell American citizens to "go back home," taunt them by insulting the Prophet Muhammad, accuse them of spousal abuse and child rape.

"All terrorists go to heaven."

Watch Villa Park councilwoman Deborah Pauly stand in front of a fundraiser for women’s shelters and homeless relief and call it “pure, unadulterated evil.” Listen to her refer to its attendees (private citizens, including whole families enduring harassment by a mob of bigots) as “these terrorists” and elicit raucous applause by saying that she knows some Marines who would be "happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in Paradise.” Remember, many of "these terrorists" are children, nearly all of them American citizens.

"Tolerance is intolerable."

Let Congressman Ed Royce's wisdom wash over you as he maintains that tolerance for those of different cultures and creeds from our own is what's wrong with modern America. See if he convinces you that his condemnation of a fundraiser to help abused women and the homeless is part of a principled stance against an "odious" ideology, a stance culled from "critical judgment" against the paralysis inflicted on Americans by multiculturalism.

Bask in the accolades of Congressman Gary Miller, who showed up just to give everyone a flag and let them know how proud he is of them for employing intimidation tactics on entire families at a charity event, all in the name of not letting "people we disagree with" destroy this fine nation.

"David Duke? Doesn't ring a bell."

Pauly can publicly hint at death threats to private citizens, Royce and Miller can stoke that fire by declaring a lawful assembly an assault on the very principles of a free nation, but Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas is using your tax dollars to prosecute eleven Muslim college students for speaking their minds to a public official.

Does this pass as fiscal or social responsibility?

Congressman Royce should be reminded that nobody has ever successfully protected anything with cowardice, and this is simple cowardice.

Congressman Miller may be interested to know (of course, perhaps I'm giving him too much benefit of doubt) that the Ku Klux Klan also passes out flags and Bibles. They don't wipe away the taint of moronic bigotry.

Councilwoman Pauly should be investigated by the Department of Homeland Security for advocating terrorist acts against American citizens, or at least checked into an asylum.

These people are cowards. They're bullies who take solace in the roar of angry crowds against those whose voices they mute with xenophobic shrieking. And lest anyone object that they don't represent Orange County residents at large, let me note that they quite literally do exactly that. It's their job. These are not wackos on the fringes, these are your elected officials, Orange County, and you're with them or against them.

So pick a side.

Contact Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly: http://www.villapark.org/citycouncil.html
Or follow her on twitter! Yay! http://twitter.com/YnotDebPauly

Contact Representative Ed Royce: https://royce.house.gov/Contact/ZipCheck.htm

Contact Representative Gary Miller: http://garymiller.house.gov/Contact/

Contact District Attorney Tony Rackauckas: http://orangecountyda.com/home/index.asp?page=43

Bigots and brains.

Last week, Iowa psychiatrist and Republican Congressional candidate Pat Bertroche advocated tagging illegal immigrants with microchips.

This week psychologist and Christian crusader against the disease of homosexuality, George Rekers, got caught with a male prostitute. It's like clockwork with these family values guys.

In his own defense, Mr. Rekers told the popular gay blog Joe. My. God. that he was--like Jesus--hanging out with a sinner so as to convince him of the error of his ways and nurse him back to spiritual health. That doesn't exactly match the original story that the good doctor didn't know "Lucien" was even gay, that the young man was hired as a "travel assistant" to carry luggage, but I guess Rekers could have come to the realization of what had happened and then clicked into salvation mode.  I suppose that he might have initially missed the fact that rentboy.com is a website for finding "rentboys." And hey, maybe he thinks it's normal for a luggage carrier to advertise that he has a "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)."

I'm sure this is just a big misunderstanding.

Notes on the State of Arizona.

Surprising no one by openly expanding its crusade to attack legal as well as illegal immigrants, Arizona will apparently be giving the boot to teachers with heavy accents and bad grammar. I look forward to seeing how Arizona decides which accents are heavy enough to qualify for job termination, which colloquialisms are "ungrammatical" enough, and how to enforce this without making it too obvious that they're just rounding up brown people.

On the other hand, the Phoenix Suns, or Los Suns de Phoenix, get an enthusiastic "hell yes" from this inconsequential peanut gallery inhabitant. Thank you, Robert Sarver. As much as I hate the use of Cinco de Mayo as an excuse for anything, any time your team wears these jerseys, I'm rooting for "Los Suns" against the bigotry of their own home state.

"If you wanna live here, learn it!"

If Tim James (see below) had been the governor of California in the mid-eighties to early nineties, I would never have had a ride home from school. So, from personal experience, I can think of at least one problem Alabama's fixin' to take on if it adopts measures that don't consider how and why people immigrate but instead punish those (legal as well as illegal) who are already here.



And then there's Iowa Congressional candidate Pat Bertroche, with this genius idea, which I'm pretty sure betrays a misunderstanding of how pet microchips work, but certainly betrays a lack of basic human decency:

I think we should catch 'em, we should document 'em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can't I microchip an illegal?

Oh, America. We just don't learn anything ever, do we?

all illustrations lifted from http://www.latinamericanstudies.org

Live, from America's anus.

I complained about this recently and then rejoiced over the governor's rather unsatisfactorily reasoned but still welcome veto. Well, the steaming turds that comprise Oklahoma's legislature have voted to override the veto to pass a law which states that, if a woman wants to undergo a perfectly legal procedure, she must publish private information to a government database, subject herself to medical advice with a clear political agenda, and consent to an invasive, medically unnecessary procedure. The law also protects doctors from malpractice lawsuits that might be brought against them for failing to inform pregnant women of fetal birth defects, with the intent of protecting doctors whose purpose for lying is to lessen the likelihood of choosing abortion.

image: detail from Examination of a Witch by TH Matteson (1853)

"where the wind comes sweeping down the plain"

Are online sex offender registries morally and ethically wrong? It's one of those questions I hate considering because part of me wants to say yes but, frankly, I've always felt a little uncomfortable arguing in favor of that particular brand of criminal. So I won't; but I will say that modern equivalents of the pillory seem contrary to the freedom laundry list that politicians love to rattle off when declaring American superiority to every other nation in the world.

Whatever, though. They're sex offenders, right? Rapists, child molesters. Fuck 'em. But what if we started putting non-criminals in the stocks? People who have broken no laws, but may have transgressed the principles of a particular segment of the population? What if we just disregarded law altogether and prioritized the legislation of morality? And what if said legislation was enforced by public humiliation? And what if that public humiliation was accompanied by physical violation? Something like--just letting the imagination run wild now--vaginal probes?

Nonsense. Measures like that would never be enacted. Not in America. Not in the 21st century. Nah.

**UPDATE: Bill vetoed by the governor**

"People, you know, begin to act crazy."

**Quick update: since no footage has emerged showing John Lewis or Barney Frank enduring this alleged abuse, many online debates about this topic center on whether it actually happened. Although I'll take Frank's or Lewis's word over that of an angry mob, this objection can't just be dismissed. However, I'd like to point out that Nunes's comments (below) don't speculate as to the veracity of his colleagues' claims, but instead simply defend the foaming at the mouth of raging crowds. So, just for the sake of argument, let's suppose that this particular incident didn't happen as claimed. There is still plenty of documented evidence of these protesters employing xenophobic speech acts which--when perpetrated by angry mobs--would constitute a serious threat to their chosen targets. And that is what Devin Nunes defends in this interview.**

I've never written to a member of Congress, but this morning I saw this and damn near lost my mind.



So, fully expecting to be ignored by the honorable representative from California, I've decided to make this an open letter. For all five of you. 

Dear Congressman Nunes,

I write you today as a fellow Portuguese-American resident of California to address your recent appearance on C-SPAN, in which you defended the aggressive actions of some Tea Party protesters toward your own colleagues as an expression of free speech and a reaction to "totalitarian tactics." Putting aside for a moment the fact that these two sorts of action are mutually exclusive—rendering your defense incoherent—I would like to point out that your stated position on this matter contained some glaring inaccuracies and baffling inconsistencies, and carries with it some dangerous implications.

The first problem is your generous interpretation of the First Amendment. One might assume that a man in your position would be familiar with the limitations of our freedom of speech, often illustrated by the cliché that nobody has the right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The point, of course, is that nobody has the right to speech which puts others at risk of physical harm. Now, I don’t dispute anyone’s right to an unfortunate vocabulary, but there is quite a difference between friendly conversation amongst bigots and a hostile crowd yelling “Nigger!” and “Faggot!” at vastly outnumbered targets. Furthermore, no stretch of the imagination would lead to the conclusion that the First Amendment extends its protections to spitting on anyone.

Perhaps you're right that the actions of a few overzealous demonstrators should not color our view of 20,000 angry tea drinkers (and such generalizations being null, we can also discard as nonsense your broad comments about the strategies of “the left”), but it is well within living memory that those same words were commonly hurled by angry mobs at people who ended up at the ends of ropes. Just as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater would create an unsafe environment for the theater’s inhabitants, it is entirely fair for an African-American and a homosexual to feel seriously threatened by even a handful of people yelling the terms that you seem to think are protected under the First Amendment just because 20,000 people didn't chant them in unison.

If I may expand a bit on the issue of nonexistent theater fires, it's interesting to note that there is more to that example than the practical issue of causing panic. It's generally assumed that yelling “Fire!” in a theater which is actually on fire would be constitutionally protected, even though it's just as likely to cause panic. There is, then, a second component at work, which we might consider a moral component: panic is not the issue per se, but rather unwarranted panic based on a false alarm, which puts people at undue risk of physical injury.

This brings me to the other statement you made with which I take issue: that this exercise of free speech was a reaction to “totalitarian tactics.” Again, let me reiterate my desire to steer clear of the laughably dissonant image of 20,000 people exercising free speech on the Capitol steps of a nation in the grip of a totalitarian regime. That will not be the topic of this letter, so I'll refrain from commenting on how ridiculous it is. I do, however, wonder what exactly you mean by “totalitarian tactics.” I can understand opposition to the health care reform bill, and I would be willing to listen to anyone with legitimate arguments as to why it constitutes bad policy, but I have a difficult time understanding how exactly any of this is being carried out through the modus operandi of totalitarian regimes. I have heard folks describe reconciliation as overreaching, and I can see how it might cause frustration for people who disagree with the measures it enacts, but surely it's no more “totalitarian” now than it was the three times it was used during the Bush administration. So as I pick through my limited knowledge of the proceedings in Washington, I can't help wondering whether your accusation of totalitarianism amounts to much more than that dangerous and dishonest alarm sounded to cause panic among theater-goers.

You see, Congressman, when I think of “totalitarian tactics,” I think of the stuff my parents and grandparents left behind in Salazar’s Portugal: secret police, intimidation of dissenters, rampant censorship, secret interrogations, unaccountable torture, invasion of privacy—some of which, come to think of it, resemble tactics that you supported when you voted for an extension of the PATRIOT Act or against Congressman Holt’s Amendment to HR 2647. So I would like to know how you reconcile these baseless accusations with your own actions in the legislature.

As mentioned before, I write to you as a Portuguese-American. If the disingenuous statements of politicians always prompted me to write letters, I would never get anything else done; and your words matter to me primarily because you're a person representing the interests of my community in a district in which I have many friends and family members. I am an avowed member of that “left” which you so glibly wrote off as some silly fringe group, but I have supported Republican candidates in my hometown. I have also worked closely with them for shared goals (political and otherwise), and although we agree on precious little, I think you would be hard-pressed to find one of them who would deny my dedication to the community or my passion in pursuing a more just and functioning democracy.

It is as a Portuguese-American that I would like to express my disappointment with your C-SPAN interview. Rather than denouncing the actions of extremists you defended them based on an incorrect, selective, and dangerous interpretation of one of our nation’s most cherished liberties. You deceptively implied that acts which threaten the safety of individuals are excusable so long as they're only carried out by a small group of people. You deliberately mischaracterized the actions of your own colleagues in an attempt to incite panic over a threat that does not exist, just to pander to the heightened rhetoric of the most insane factions of your party. As an American, I'm concerned—but that's nothing new. As a Portuguese-American, I'm embarrassed and ashamed, and I hope that in the future you will word your opposition with a little more nuance and a lot more prudence.

Sincerely,

BJG

Now.

One day you'll have to explain to your kids why yesterday mattered as much as it did. With time you may need to be reminded why even some Republican pundits got teary-eyed. It's much more than just white liberal guilt. That guilt has a source, and that source has to be remembered. Some of it still has yet to be addressed.

I found this clip online of Kenneth Clark interviewing James Baldwin some time in the 1960's. I think it provides an important perspective on what happened last night and why all those popping champagne bottles were absolutely justified. But it also provides some perspective on the daunting amount of work still to be done in the area of justice and equality with regards to all people. Baldwin fit into more than one disenfranchised demographic, and his words here on how to look at radical movements (specifically radical Islam, although not the kind we yap about these days) are just as relevant--and just as ignored--as they were then. It's a devastating and beautiful interview.

Thinking locally.

A seventeen year-old boy was shot and killed last week in north Artesia (also known by its gang territory eponym, "Chivas") riding his bike at 1 am under the 91 freeway overpass, a spot I've drunkenly stumbled through countless times on my way home from hotel parties. There's plenty of unsavory activity going on around there much of the time, but I've never actually had problems. Of course, it's rather obvious that I'm not in a gang. By all indications, this poor kid unfortunately had some gang associations even though he wasn't a member. He "looked like" a gangster, which is to say that he dressed the part. It seems he would probably have eventually outgrown that madness if he'd survived, but he rode his bike at the wrong time and was caught up in a rough spot when someone from somewhere else was on the prowl.

Just like that. Candles, crosses, flowers and metallic balloons in a morbid little bunch under the overpass, right under the spot where homeless people piss. A boy died there.

When we moved to Artesia (1988) a fifteen year-old was murdered in gang violence right around the corner from our house. Things like that happened pretty often for a few years, then it calmed down. Apparently it's picking up again (economic patterns neatly parallel the ebb and flow). Still, for the most part, Artesia's a really nice place to live. Even back when that fifteen year-old was shot, most parts of Artesia were perfectly safe to walk around in at night. They wouldn't usually bug you unless you were from another gang.

Yet to watch local news coverage right now is to think that Artesia is crawling with murderous thugs. North Artesia especially is a bloodbath. There's a subtext to every local TV station report that paints the people under and around the freeway as savages. This image really bothered a relative of mine, not for the sake of the north side but for the city's reputation as a whole. "They're making Artesia sound like some crazy, dangerous place," he complained. "Like it's Watts or something." I asked if it had ever occurred to him that maybe he only thinks of Watts that way because the news coverage of Watts has always been just like it is right now for Artesia. "Oh, well, yeah maybe," he replied, "but you know what I mean."

Yeah. I know what you mean. (...sigh...)

An innocent game of cards.

John McCain’s camp has recently injected life into its campaign by running two shamelessly crass ads that question—with no substance at all—whether Barack Obama is fit to lead. And when I say no substance, I mean just that: none.

“The One,” which would have the Christian Right burning Obama in effigy had it come from his campaign, doesn’t even aspire to a level of bullshit befitting a general election. In one minute and fourteen seconds of what looks like a public access channel’s reminder that trash pickup procedure has changed, the ad says nothing about Obama’s policies and only mentions McCain to let us know who paid for the commercial. My favorite part is when it quotes Obama making fun of the very type of ad in which the quote is being shown to demonstrate his arrogance—that is, unless we’re to believe that Obama honestly told a crowd that the clouds would open up and God would demand that we vote for him. Hmm…

Then, of course, there’s the furor over “Celeb,” which has even inspired a rebuttal by Princess Hilton herself. This one at least takes some shots at Obama’s energy policy and his alleged pledge to raise taxes. It stretches the truth, of course—Obama plans to repeal Bush’s tax cuts and raise taxes on the richest two percent of Americans, not raise taxes across the board—but at least it tells big league lies and delivers them with somewhat better production value than its Old Testament cousin. The gist of the commercial: Obama’s just another pretty face, but his fiscal and energy policies are unreasonable. Thus he is not fit to lead.

As for McCain’s decision to lampoon the daughter of big name donors (the Hiltons have donated the maximum $4,600 to his campaign), well, some might say it bespeaks a lack of honor, but that’s just crazy talk. The man’s a veteran! A former POW! How dare we question his integrity? He’s just tough as nails, and these soy-latte-drinking Hollywood types better just deal with it! Because he’s a real man! Like us! Fine, fine, but I’ll tell you what: he ain’t like me or anyone I grew up with. I’m not married to a multi-millionaire brewing heiress, I don’t wear $500 shoes, and I’ve never courted those Hollywood types or media folk by whom McCain seemingly feels so jilted. Or perhaps we’re supposed to have forgotten that McCain was himself a media darling admired by celebrities not too long ago. Maybe he’s sad that he never got to take those shoes to the Playboy Mansion.

So, ignoring the whole “celeb” portion of the ad, how about the bit that touches on Obama’s energy policy? How irresponsible, really, is it for a presidential candidate to oppose offshore drilling during an energy crisis? The overwhelming majority of discourse on the topic would have us believe that the answer to this question relies on whether you place greater value on the environment or on the economy, but that is a deceptive move.

The assumption that offshore drilling would significantly lower the price of gas hinges on the mistaken (and, frankly, ridiculous) supposition that somehow that oil will be reserved for domestic use and that oil companies will not use it to capitalize on the exploding demand for oil in China and India. One need only look at Exxon-Mobil’s recent reporting of record profits—followed by a buyout of $8 billion of its own stocks as a cash reward to shareholders—to decide whether oil companies are so altruistic. Of course, they have their moments of charity. For example, as soon as McCain changed his stance on offshore drilling (surprise! He was against it once!), his campaign received $1.1 million in donations from oil companies that had previously given him next to nothing. The truth is that offshore drilling will provide a drop in the ocean of the world’s oil supply, providing increased profits to oil companies with little benefit to consumers and plenty of taxpayer-funded cleanup in the future.

Of course, it’s politically efficacious to cite the most simplistic version of supply and demand in order to get Americans on the side of producing more, more, more, and so of course polls now show over sixty percent of our countrymen/women calling for increased drilling. In response to this wave of support for a bad idea, Obama has shifted his stated views, cautiously floating the notion of maybe drilling in the future.

Flip-flop? Well, sure, if we’re to utilize such idiotic terms, then yes, I suppose this adheres to the definition of a, um, flip-flop. And a purely political one at that (as they all are). That’s a godsend for the Republican talk machine, since they can tarnish Obama’s golden boy image, but does anyone besides the Republicans really see a halo around Obama’s head?

I for one have plenty of complaints about Obama’s imperfections and can identify purely political causes for most of them. For starters, I don’t like ethanol as our primary choice for an alternative fuel, but I also understand that without pushing that button Obama would have had a very difficult time getting a key primary victory in Iowa. I don’t like that Obama passed up an opportunity to critique Israeli policy, choosing instead to run the same old tired lines about Israeli-American solidarity that nobody should even be questioning by now, but of course he was already having problems with the Jewish community. I don’t care for any politician that brings God into the campaign, but a homosexual Wiccan would probably have a better chance of winning the White House than an atheist, so the man’s got to prove his spiritual mettle.

Obama’s not perfect, but every dubious stance he takes is matched tenfold by John McCain and aimed at getting elected. I voted Nader in 2000 on principle, and frankly never felt too guilty about it—but this is another ballgame altogether, and McCain’s continuation of the Bush era scares me to death.

Besides, McCain’s record isn’t free of flipping or flopping. Just to run down a quick list:

-The “maverick” McCain opposed offshore drilling before the presidential candidate McCain favored it.
-McCain opposed ethanol and now favors it.
-McCain opposed Bush’s tax cuts, and now supports them.
-McCain now opposes the campaign finance reforms that he brought to the table with so much fanfare a few years ago.
-Remember when McCain was absolutely opposed to any form of torture? Yeah, me too.
-McCain once criticized Bush for visiting the notoriously racist and anti-Catholic Bob Jones University—now, he’s open to visiting the place himself.
-McCain was pro-choice, but has since gone pro-life (just in time, too!)
-McCain fought tooth and nail to prevent Arizona from celebrating the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday. Now? Well, that would just be political suicide.

But we can’t bring that up, because then we’re “playing the race card.”

That most toxic of all hands to be dealt, the race card, is obviously the domain of Barack Obama. At least that’s what McCain would have us believe. This came about because, in response to the aforementioned McCain ads, Obama remarked that his opponent would try to paint him as different-looking, with a funny name and nothing in common with the average voter. McCain’s rebuttal is to accuse Obama of focusing on race. But is Obama the one that brought race into the arena? And is he wrong in his characterization of McCain’s ads?

My answer to both questions would be a resolute “no.” The truth is that, devoid of any substance, McCain’s ads play strictly on the notion that many people look at Barack Obama and think him less “presidential” than McCain, more arrogant, more entitled, more elitist, more “Other.” McCain’s ads, especially “The One,” ask nothing more of Obama than “who the hell does he think he is?” And who does Obama think he is? A senator that opposed an unpopular war, a constitutional law professor at a time when the Constitution suffers daily assaults, a community organizer with a history of championing the poor and the middle class, a politician who has driven low-minded opponents to sheer exasperation by his lack of “dirt”? How did this activist for the downtrodden get painted as an elitist? What exactly makes a tireless worker who made good on the opportunities afforded him automatically don the label of entitlement? What has he done that makes him more arrogant than his temperamental opponent?

A couple of days ago David Gergen—a moderate analyst who has advised the administrations of Ford, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton—put McCain’s strategy in no uncertain terms:

I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, “The One,” that's code for, “he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.” Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that.

So who really played the “race card” in this recent dustup? Obama may have come closer to identifying it, but he was simply identifying his opponent’s strategy. In fact, the McCain camp knew all along who its audience in these ads was: those same folks that can’t stand to see a black man act “uppity,” those same folks for whom it matters that Obama’s middle name is Hussein, those same folks that have no time for substance and so rely on a centuries-old foundation of prejudice to inform their opinions. When analysts say Obama may not appeal to white blue collar voters, it’s because he’s black. Soccer moms? He’s black. Nascar dads? He’s black. Latinos? He’s black. Elderly Jews? He’s black and kind of Muslim-ish. There are plenty of reasons for McCain’s supporters to not vote for Obama, of course, but the recent ads address nothing so effectively as pure, ignorant xenophobia.

If that sounds too simplistic then I urge you to take a look at those ads and tell me if there’s anything about them that indicates an attempt at sophistication. The dirty work is done. McCain need not directly soil his hands, because the message is out. As the “Straight Talk Express” rolls on to engage proactive voters, ads like “Celeb” and “The One” will continue to appeal to the basest impulses of the less-informed.

Fortunately, I think, we live in a nation that has at least changed enough to not capitulate entirely to such a horrific plan of attack. Still, there is blood in the water, and I do believe I hear the sound of Swift Boats on the horizon.

illustration by Lukas Ketner