| not invisible |

Drink it Dowwwwwn Zulu Warrior, Drink it Dowwwwwn Commander-in-Chief! Chief! Chief!

2009-07-30T10:03:00.001-06:00

Tonight, President Obama hosts Pint Night at the White House, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Sergeant James Crowley, and he will sit down over some beers and talk. The idea for pint night is Crowley’s, who answered President Obama’s telephone call in a Boston-area bar and suggested that all the parties in Gates-gate should just have a beer to seal the end of their personal investments in the controversy.

While these men will presumably reconcile their differences, the media ramping it back up, this time by recasting the entire event in ostensible less racialized terms and one that is, in fact, much more palatable to the dominant white majority. The new hypothesis goes like this: Gates is to blame because he is a classist liberal elite.

Consider the comments of Lennard J. Davis¹, a Marxist literary critic and disability-studies scholar who teaches at the University of Chicago, Obama’s home turf²:

If we make the assumption that racism was in play in this event, but that Crowley was not necessarily a racist, we might also assume that class and social status were at play as well. Professor Gates is probably one of the highest paid academics in the world. He is a superstar famous not only among scholars but known by the general public as well. As a black man, he might well be upset at his treatment [by Sgt. Crowley], but as a member of the power elite (Barack counts him as a friend, as does Oprah, Cornell West, and a host of other powerful people), he might well have been outraged to be treated just like another American citizen facing the indignity and affront of a police questioning.

Likewise, consider two op-ed pieces, the first from today’s Washington Post and syndicated nationwide:

In the conflict between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley over Gates' arrest at his own home, all parties in the national conversation believe they should be the teachers. The theme is, "No, you listen to me!"

Everybody seems to want to teach the need for respect: the respect owed by white police officers to black men, and the respect Harvard professors ought to show to cops doing their jobs.

…

Since everybody seems to turn autobiographical during these "teachable moments," I will exercise my right to do so, too. From the time I was in college in the late 1960s and early '70s, I have been incensed at the elitism so often shown by privileged liberals toward the white working class. And I felt this as someone on the left. (E.J. Dionne)

and the second from the Denver Post:

As the story unfolded, it became clear to fair-minded observers that Gates, not Crowley, was the antagonist in this affair.

…

Sure, Crowley could have stoically sucked up Gates' verbal abuse rather than arrest him for disorderly conduct. That's a discretionary call by an officer at the scene when an out- of-control citizen is acting in "contempt of cop." But Crowley's role was dwarfed by Gates' performance. And I do mean "performance." His reaction to Crowley from the outset ranged from irrational to hysterical to bizarre, including his childish slur about Crowley's mother. (Mike Rosen)

Consider Dionne. First, Dionne is very much a part of the class he reviles—a Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar, he teaches at Georgetown and writes for The Washington Post. Second, he decontextualizes the event in order to make his argument. Much has been made about a history of allegedly racist acts committed by members of the Cambridge PD who are white; therefore, in that context, Gates was not responding to an isolated incident but to another node in what is presumed to be a system of oppression.Third, well, I’ll get to the third point in a minute because it is what binds Davis, Dionne, and Rosen together so completely, and it is what is so dangerous in the current cultural imaginary that their pieces acknowledge, support, and disseminate.

Consider Rosen. Rosen is an “"advocate for generally right-center, mainstream conservative ideas” on the Denver-based 850 KOA talk-radio station. To give you an idea of how he imagines “right-center,” you might be interested to know that Rosen has filled Limbaugh’s seat on The Rush Limbaugh Show. Prior to lighting up your radio dial, this army veteran used his MBA as a corporate finance executive for Samsonite and Beatrice Foods.

Rosen’s op-ed piece should be of great use to composition and rhetoric teachers throughout the land, as it relies on fallacious argument throughout in order to try to make his points. First, it is not clear at all who was the antagonist in the Gates-Crowley situation—being verbally abusive is aggressive, but so is repeatedly demanding information from someone who has done nothing wrong even after he has provided identification. Moreover, Rosen suggests that anyone who does not see the situation in the same light he does is not “fair-minded,” which is right-wing radiospeak for “reverse racist” or simply “irrational,” a word that the right uses like Westmoreland used napalm³. What also strikes me is the default setting of the analysis: reconstruct the scene as a narrative with narratalogical conventions, meaning there must be a clearly defined protagonist, antagonist, conflict, etc. But what is most compelling about this incident are the clear-cut failures in certain aspects but the sweeping ambiguities in others.⁴ As Rosen argues that “Crowley could have stoically sucked up Gates' verbal abuse rather than arrest him for disorderly conduct,” he is already passing a judgment and making claims—a police officer is never the cause of the verbal outrage, that someone who bears a weapon in front of you should not be perceived as a threat or a possible form of abuse, and (most terrifying of all) that a citizen cannot exercise his or her rights of free speech. Granted, I wish the world (especially the United States) observed more decorous speech and treated its members with dignity, but in America you have the inalienable right to be distasteful, hateful, bigoted, and crass. U-S-A! U-S-A! Had Gates been any of those things, he would have, I believe, been within his rights.⁵ As far as Rosen’s sneering mention of “contempt of cop,” one should remember that Rosen is white, and as a white male he has never been the object of institutional racism or sexism. Therefore, his personal experiences with authority figures has never been negatively-impacted by them.

What ties these three figures together—the Marxist, the left-center journalist, and the conservative radio talk show host—is this: placing the yoke of classist elitism squarely on the shoulders of the left-leaning intellectuals. As if right-leaning intellectuals and professors—yes, they exist and in greater numbers than the right would have you believe, because if you knew then the “liberal universities” straw-man fallacy wouldn’t work anymore—aren’t as capable of elitism as anyone else. I know something about this. I am a left-leaning professor, and I, too, have shaken my head at colleagues who laugh at my Pittsburgh Steelers fanaticism even as they go glossy-eyed over obscure early-modern manuscripts. The difference is, I go glossy-eyed over that stuff, too. And many of my colleagues love sports. And we drink beer. And when we recreate, we get dirty. But sometimes we also go to the theater or attend a symphony because the theater is pretty cool and symphonic music can be beautiful—if you don’t believe me, just ask Metallica.

What all three of these articles miss is that class (i.e. money) trumps variable x, no matter what the profession, ideology, or any other consideration. If you are a classist, it doesn’t matter if you swing a hammer for a living or type a blog or teach a college class or run a conservative think tank—what matters is that you use your socio-economic status to devalue those who earn less, you valorize your aesthetic choices while you diminish theirs, and you look to those who earn more with desire that you often articulate outwardly as scorn because you need to validate where you’re at now.

Moreover, have we forgotten how closely connected racism and classism are?⁶ That ethnic and racial minorities are often considered to be lower-class, that a conventionally “successful” person who is a minority is often considered an anomaly and that he or she can still be—even in “post-racial America”—reduced to the color of his or her skin by a bigoted police officer, politician, bus driver, or anyone else in a position of authority? (Sorry, Rosen, but power does matter in these formulations, and if you’re black or white and unarmed while an armed police officer stands before you in your home, you do not have power and the line between “duty” and “oppression” becomes razor thin, which makes a police officer’s job extremely difficult.)

Before we turn Gates into the villain, here, let’s acknowledge that he cussed out Crowley’s “mama,” which is very unprofessional and rude, but let’s also acknowledge that Crowley’s arrest had so little justification that the CPD dropped the charges.⁷ Yeah, both actions are “bad,” but which one is worse, and by “worse” I mean “probably unconstitutional”?

So, when the triumvirate belly up to the White House picnic table with their families, they are inadvertently bringing all this with them. Cheers.

Please enjoy this hilarious excerpt from The Root responsibly, and check out the entire article:

The Recap

If Crowley has a sense of humor, he’ll bring Gates a six pack of Stone Brewing’s Arrogant Bastard Ale with a bow tied around it. Crowley doesn’t sound like much of a racist, but he at least has to ‘fess up: The real beef against Gates was “contempt of cop,” not the made-up “disorderly conduct.”

…

The Takeaway

If Gates has a sense of humor, he’ll bring a six pack of Rogue Brutal Bitter Ale in honor of his favorite “rogue” policeman. Sure, he had every right to fuss Crowley out in his own home, but Skip might also want to be that dude—every crew has one—the guy you hate to roll with to the club because you know you might have to throw fists on a humbug.

…

The Guest List

Gates reportedly drinks Beck’s—professor-speak for “Garçon, bring me a Cabernet, immediately.” Crowley likes Blue Moon—a girl beer. And Obama drinks Budweiser—the beer equivalent of wearing a flag pin. It’s apparent that these guys aren’t actually beer drinkers, so if Obama doesn’t want this to be a limp sausage fest, he needs some tapas, a lady DJ, a later start, a keg of Dogfish Head Raison D'êtres and a few more guests….

[Ed. Note: How “working class” is a beer that is served with an orange slice? Even my far-left-leaning-professorial-self rejects fruit in my beer.]

¹Full disclosure: I find Davis’ scholarship compelling. His studies on the history of the novel, the conventions of characterization, geographic description, and plot are tremendous tools to help think about the ideological work of the novel, and his term “dismodernism” may be a useful one for describing a system of thought that accepts bodily difference into its concept of normativity. Davis, though, is consistently strategic in his opinion making—whatever is dominant is to be refuted. Now, there is validity in doing what Michel Foucault called “negative work” when confronted with received wisdom; however, many scholars know that a fast track to publication is to be both intelligent and openly contrary. Contrariness, then, has become an intellectual gimmick (maybe it always has been), and Davis is a master of the strategy.

²Sorry, birthers.

³Gratuitous rhetorical flourish. See how annoying it is?

⁴Like life. Which is glossed over as we busily tag some as “evildoers” and others as “heroes.”

⁵These are the same laws that keep the Limbaugh’s and Rosen’s on the airwaves instead of being arrested for hate speech some of the time.

⁶It wasn’t that long ago that television pundits marveled that then-Senator Obama was “articulate,” even though every other candidate for nomination was also articulate.

⁷For those of you saying, the CPD didn’t have the time or resources to fight the legal battle, I’d like to remind you that you’re, in effect, justifying the police NOT enforcing the law, thereby arguing that the enforcement of law is subjective, not absolute, and therefore making your opposition’s argument w/r/t Crowley’s actions toward Gates in the first place.

Special thanks to my rugby-playing friends for teaching me the “Drink it Down” song lyric used and abused in the title, and another special thanks to a good friend in law enforcement who keeps this issue interesting in new ways in our correspondence.

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

2009-07-21T10:05:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

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

This Article Is Not about Disability

2009-07-20T08:18:00.001-06:00

This morning’s Denver Post runs the following headline: Lakewood cop helps boy get wheelchair.

When the owners of the [stolen] car, Joel Hidalgo, 31, and his wife, Esmeralda Torres, 29, arrived, Fairbanks greeted them and noticed they had left their young son in the car.

"The mother started crying that the wheelchair had been stolen from the car," Fairbanks recalled. "While she was crying, I looked over at the little boy and it just hit me that he was just the sweetest little kid."

Lt. Fairbanks went out of his way to find someone (Peter Kopp, Kids' Mobility Network) to donate a wheelchair to the family, helping the son to have greater access and mobility again. Fairbanks is a hero, but not exactly for the reasons the article implies.

While Mike McPhee, the author, uses pathos (or emotional appeal, for the non-rhetorically minded) to capture the reader (in the second sentence we learn that Jesus Hidalgo has cerebral palsy; he is described, on sight, as being “the sweetest little kid), the real ugliness of the situation is not that a young wheelchair-user had his wheelchair stolen, but that the cost of a wheelchair is a barrier to many who would otherwise use them to navigate our built environment.

Thus, this story is not exactly about disability, but about the market. Lt. Fairbanks knew the right thing to do was to restore Jesus’ independence and autonomy, so he found someone who would buck the market and give away a wheelchair. Although Jesus is only seven, his situation suggests some realities for the community of people with disabilities.

In 2000, the unemployment rate for adults with disabilities who wanted to work was 9.5 percent (the same rate across the U.S. in July 2009, the very same apoplexy-inducing number) compared to 3.4% for the entire U.S. population, and over 30% of those who did work did so at or below the poverty line¹. Now, combine those numbers with the fact that in order to receive any federal benefits, a person with a disability must be unemployed, and you begin to see how the employment gap further disables the disability community. What do I mean? If a particular wheelchair costs $5,000, and you (an adult PWD (person with a disability)) work yet live at the poverty line, which for a single-person household is (buckle up) $10,400, and your job prevents you from collecting benefits under current federal regulations, you can see spending 50% of your annual income on the device that helps you go from the car or bus to the front door of your place of employment just does not seem tenable.

Ultimately, McPhee builds this story around the concept of charity (which strikes me as a wicked phonetic pun), too long the position dominant culture takes toward people with impairments, and suggests that the lesson to be learned is that we should be charitable to those less fortunate, when in fact we should be trying to insure access, access to spaces and to the tools that enable mobility. In fact, this story is about socio-economic status.

Truly, the Denver Post has told a good story for many reasons—too often we only hear about the bad cops; too often we do not hear about the life experiences of people with disabilities—but when we read these kinds of stories, so often laden with uni-focal pathos, we might read them as instances of overdetermination, situations or identities that are not reducible to one term (disability) but are articulations of many causes that together give rise to the situation presented before us.

¹Work in America: M-Z. Carl E. Van Horn, Herbert A. Schaffner.

Kettle. “Pot.” Black.

2009-07-17T12:09:00.002-06:00

Amid the uproar over the nomination of Honorable Sonia Sotomayor—the “reverse racist” and “hack,” at least to Rush Limbaugh, a deejay who should know about qualifications for the bench (I believe they taught that lesson during one of the two semesters he attended Southeast Missouri State University before dropping out¹)—Republican critics have been unable to assail her on her record: it is impeccable. Instead, they have attacked her for one sentence in one speech and for one court decision.

The sentence: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life” (Berkeley Law lecture, 2001).

The case: Ricci v. DeStefano.

But these two criticisms are not the point of this post.² Senator Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III (R-Alabama and new ranking member of the Judiciary Committee) is.

In a recent interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer, Sessions said:

"[Sotomayor] criticized the idea that a woman and a man would reach the same result," something he said is "philosophically incompatible with the American system."

"I am really flabbergasted by the depth and consistency of her philosophical critique of the ideal of impartial justice," he said.

Aside from misrepresenting (or simply not understanding) her positions (see the footnotes), Sen. Sessions knows first hand the trials and tribulations of being nominated to the federal bench. His was an unsuccessful appointment to the U.S. District Court in Alabama by President Reagan in 1986. As Sarah Wildman reported in The Atlantic:

Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as "un-American" when "they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions" in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to "pop off" on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a "disgrace to his race" for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes "loose with [his] tongue." He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.

It got worse. Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." Sessions claimed the comment was clearly said in jest. Figures didn't see it that way. Sessions, he said, had called him "boy" and, after overhearing him chastise a secretary, warned him to "be careful what you say to white folks."³

The entire article contains many more examples that demonstrate why Sessions is an authority on racism, although they simultaneously argue his inability to know it when he sees it.

For a party in crisis, Sessions seems like a curious choice for standard-bearer especially on this issue.

Especially when, for Justice Samuel Alito, making decisions based upon ethnicity is cool (source Glenn Greenwald).

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Sam Alito used his opening statement to emphasize how his experience as an Italian-American influences his judicial decision-making (video is here):

But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, "You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country" . . . .

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.

Two weeks ago, Alito cast the deciding vote in Ricci v. DeStefano, an intensely contested affirmative action case. He did so by ruling in favor of the Italian-American firefighters, finding that they were unlawfully discriminated against, even though the district court judge who heard all the evidence and the three-judge appellate panel ruled against them and dismissed their case. Notably, the majority Supreme Court opinion Alito joined (.pdf) began by highlighting not the relevant legal doctrine, but rather, the emotional factors that made the Italian-American-plaintiffs empathetic.

Did Alito's Italian-American ethnic background cause him to cast his vote in favor of the Italian-American plaintiffs? Has anyone raised that question? Given that he himself said that he "do[es] take that into account" -- and given that Sonia Sotomayor spent 6 straight hours today being accused by GOP Senators and Fox News commentators of allowing her Puerto Rican heritage to lead her to discriminate against white litigants -- why isn't that question being asked about Alito's vote in Ricci?

Two words, Glenn: Rocky. Balboa.

¹He may feel he is an expert, though, because his family is loaded with Reagan-appointed judges (cousins, uncles, etc.), part of the 200+ judicial appointment juggernaut that conservatives tend to forget when a Democratic president appoints, say, anyone.

²With respect to her statement about a “wise Latina woman,” over 30 years of feminist scholarship has amply demonstrated the importance of standpoint with respect to issues of discrimination—marked as Other by dominant culture, any person whose identity has been constructed as beyond-the-pale by dominant culture has a unique ability to interrogate that culture’s dominant ideology in a way those whom the ideology validates simply do not. Why? Those who are valorized by dominant culture rarely if ever see that ideology work against them. The ideology—and this is the nature of hegemonic ideology, a la Antonio Gramsci—makes itself seem natural, common-sense based, and most of the people who the ideology favors do not consciously participate in the marginalization of and discrimination against others. Such unconscious participation is a product of institutional racism, sexism, ableism, and so on. For most of us—who institutionally marginalize one or more groups without meaning to—the worst part of the issue is the denial that such institutional discrimination exists and the reluctance to acknowledge one’s own complicity with that ideology (let alone changing one’s behavior).

In short, to really breakdown these institutionalized, hegemonic ideologies of oppression, we all have to do what Michel Foucault calls “negative work,” meaning we must question the validity of our own beliefs, disrupt the seemingly-causal narrative of history, and imagine how, in our given historical moment, a given belief, action, or utterance is made possible.

Ricci v DeStefano, however, is fascinating, and not just for the reasons the mainstream media has been touting. Consider this, from Media dis&dat:

People for the American Way, a liberal group, noted July 13 that Ricci got his firefighting job in New Haven "by claiming discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects Americans from discrimination over disabilities." Ricci has dyslexia, a learning disability that impairs the ability to read.

First, dyslexia and the people who have it are routinely disserviced by this oversimplification of it. Second, the perspective of this article (and rightly so, to a point) is to suggest that Ricci is being represented by this “liberal group” as an emblem of all people with disabilities, in that he is self-focused and narcissistic (meaning, he is so wrapped up in his own narrative and suffering that he does not or cannot see the issues of others without disabilities around him). Agreed.

However, and here’s what the article does not really account for, from all accounts and details of the case, he IS self-focused. Discriminated against because of deficits attributed to his dyslexia, Ricci was able to use the ADA of 1990 to get his job in the first place. However, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (under which Sotomayor ruled on the case before it went to the U.S. Supreme Court) upheld the New Haven' Fire Department’s decision to abandon the results of the written and oral examinations (as designed by I/O Solutions ("IOS")) for Captain and Lieutenant positions.

Most accounts explain the NHFD’s motivations thusly (and here comes a general paraphrase of most spokesholes): The NHFD was afraid, because none of the top scorers who would receive promotion for the results were minority candidates, that they would be sued. This sentiment prestructures the reader or listener (i.e. you, me, and Joe the Plumber) to the idea that candidates who are minorities will sue your business or government agency for discrimination and win no matter the validity of the claim, now doesn’t it? What if, though, the tests were designed (inadvertently or otherwise) on standards that seem “natural” due to institutional racism? If so, aren’t certain candidates being discriminated against? Admittedly, the NHFD seems to have acted out of hysteria, not interest in making sure their firefighters were being treated equally, and examples like this are what conservatives always cite when speaking ill of affirmative action (Ricci v DeStefano will be with us for awhile, folks).

But back to Ricci. As a person who at first was denied his job because of a perceived lack of ability due to a biological characteristic, he might be expected to be sensitive to other minority groups’ oppression at the hands of a dominant majority. He might be expected to believe that there could be merit to the claims that the test was an unfair measure because it did not account for deficits that could be attributed to culture, not biology. Moreover, Ricci exemplifies the problem with disability identity group formation—the tendency to see one’s problems as different and individual, not part of a large social bloc of the oppressed.

³ Like Stevens, I have often been disappointed by Caucasian Americans for their pot-smoking, but mainly when it interferes with my ability to navigate quickly out of a parking spot at Red Rocks Amphitheater or to purchase stamps at the local post office.

Ballad of the Amputee: The Song Remains the Same

2009-07-13T12:30:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-06-26T08:23:00.002-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dismodern Bodcast Goes Live

2009-03-17T09:21:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

BBC Goes "Overboard," Hires TV Presenter with Visible Impairment

2009-02-26T08:33:00.001-07:00

Cerrie Burrell, a new presenter featured on the BBC's children's network CBeebies, may be enjoying her new position, but she also finds herself at the center of a controversy. Some British parents have been objected to her inclusion in programming, one even claiming in an e-mail that, "'I didn't want to let my children watch the filler bits on the bedtime hour last night because I know it would have played on my eldest daughter's mind and possibly caused sleep problems'" (MSNBC.com).

Citing the BBC, MSNBC.com claims,

most viewers have been supportive of Burnell, who took over a daily slot [...] at the beginning of February with Alex Winters. But a handful have written to the station complaining about her disability. Some say she may frighten the children. Others accuse the network of going overboard in the interests of diversity. Some say they don’t want to have to address such issues with very young children.

Admittedly, parenting is a tough responsibility, and viewers' attitudes toward Burnell's body will likely force a conversation in any home where her spot on CBeebies is viewed, and in 2009 it seems there are more "parental debriefings" required than ever before. Amid the bustle of our daily lives, who among us wishes for an additional, intense situation that we alone must negotiate and at such high stakes: establishing a child's view of a group of people, the personal tightrope walk of managing our internal perceptions and beliefs either against or with social codes and an inclusive ideal.

To all those parents, we sympathize, but get over yourself.

Would you allow your child to be terrified of a man who is black?¹ Would you allow your child to be terrified of a female who is bisexual? Personally, I am terrified of close-minded bigots, but I understand that a democratic society affords one the space to be a bigot; I would just never condone or support it. (I suppose, in this regard, I'm intolerant. Sue me.)

Yet each time we turn our heads, resist or ignore the opportunity to punch a hole in ableist normativity, we are collusive with a systemic model, an ideology, that actively marginalizes people because of their bodies and their bodies alone.

If we allow that, how can any of us sleep at night?

¹What remains to be seen is who is actually terrified of the woman with an amputation, the child or the parent him- or herself? My money is on the latter, but not in a shriek-out-loud, lift-the-hem-of-one's-dress kind of way, but more in a my-body-won't-always-function-like-my-body-functions-now-and-oh-god-what-if-that-means-i'll-get-old-and-die?

We're baaaaaack.....

2009-02-26T08:08:00.001-07:00

After a long lay-off, Not Invisible is back. Look for frequent updates coming to your RSS-feed in the near future. ~Ed.

Reflection on the Election

2008-11-06T08:45:00.001-07:00

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate,--Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestous day.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Joe the Plumber: Modern Day Tom Joad

2008-10-15T21:40:00.001-06:00

The plumbing is alive tonight,
But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it
goes.
I'm sittin' down here in the cable news' light,
Searchin' for the ghost of Plumber Joe.

A Bunch of Hosers Boo Palin. What's that Aboot?

2008-10-11T22:40:00.001-06:00

Self-proclaimed hockey mom and vice-presidential hopeful dropped the first puck at tonight's (Sat, October 11, 2008) Philadelphia Fliers game. And the native's were restless.

It's weird, because Philly sports fans are usually so gracious. Pop quiz: Would Sarah Palin prefer Pat's or Gino's steaks? Let's go to the videotape!

[Ed. Note: If you want to know about Joey Vento, ask Joey Vento. He'll tell you all about Joey Vento. Favorite highlight: Joey Vento criticizing people who cannot speak English, and then spitting out absolute word salad. ]

Campaign or Pillow Fight? We Report, You Decide.

2008-10-11T12:31:00.001-06:00

The early part of October 2008 in the United States has been marked by the ugliest campaigning in decades. Just ask Cindy McCain. Mrs. McCain claimed that Senator Barack Obama's campaign was the "dirtiest campaign in American history" (The Tennessean via Huffingtonpost.com). [Ed. Note: Apparently Mrs. McCain was so corked on oxycotin in 2000 that she does not remember Bush₂'s South Carolina primary campaign against her husband, during which Bush₂'s camp claimed that Mrs. McCain was a drug addict and that their adopted Bangladeshi daughter was McCain's bi-racial illegitimate daughter. Either that or she thinks, you know, attacking a spouse and race-baiting is cool. Waaait a minute....]

Mrs. McCain did not mention how McCain and Palin supporters have recently taken to calling Senator Obama a "terrorist" at their rallies and even suggesting that someone should "kill him [Obama, not himself, alas]." In the days after her comment, videos of queues outside McCain and Palin rallies have captured that American tolerance that makes this country great.

McCain, however, is now feeling the backlash for the hate-mongering, as some in the media are comparing these tactics to "fascism" (Huffingtonpost.com but with sources in article). In response to this backlash, McCain now finds himself trying to defuse the hate in his crowds; on October 10th, McCain told his supporters to be "respectful" of Obama, that Obama is "decent," to a chorus of boos. [Ed. Note: At the Obama rallies I have attended, the crowd has always cheered when Obama praises McCain's military service to the country, but today, October 11th, apparently the crowd on hand in Philadelphia began booing Obama's gracious talk about McCain. Of course, no one in PA is bitter.]

Afraid that McCain was going to effectively throw in the towel now that, according to some polls, Obama has opened up a double-digit lead on McCain despite McCain's economic rescue plan that he worked out on some abacus or bought on eBay or something.

All the above is to get to this point, the crown jewel in unintended double entendre or accidental allusion or whatever: At a McCain townhall in MN, "One woman who said she had a lot of undecided neighbors said she wanted McCain to 'go to the mattresses' on in his third and final debate with Obama on Wednesday" (CNN.com). Now, my friend Brock would need go no further in his parsing than the obvious mis-quote of "go to the mat." If Brock were so inclinced, he might find a potential Freudian moment in that inaccurate quotation (or, perhaps, an unintended reference to a senior-citizen's bed time?).

However, while this Minnesotan (statistically speaking, she's probably a hockey mom but as for her being able to field-dress a moose, well, the numbers are fuzzy) mangled one cliche (coming into common usage around 1900, according the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms), she (most likely) inadvertently quoted the 1972 Academy Award-winning film The Godfather.

Sonny: No, no, no! No more! Not this time, consigliere. No more meetin's, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. You give 'em one message: I want Sollozzo. If not, it's all-out war; we go to the mattresses.

Apparently, Sonny's reference is to the 16th century practice of Italian nobility heading for safe haven in the country when violence broke out at home. In The Godfather, Sonny implies the same strategy if it's "all out war." In short, in asking McCain to stand firm, she suggested that he head for the hills. So be it. As Tom Hagen tells Sonny, "Some of the other families won't sit still for an all out war."

Probably the Best Sports-Politics Article of this Campaign Season

2008-10-11T10:22:00.001-06:00

ESPN trades in part on an antagonism with LeBron James. Bron-Bron appears in ESPN ads, Bron-Bron puts rear-ends in La-Z-Boys in front of NBA games broadcast on ESPN, Bron-Bron graces the cover of ESPN: The Magazine, and even when Bron-Bron was a high-school student, ESPN carried news about the Ohioan wunderkind on SportsCenter.

Yet, ESPN will, once a season or so, run a "news" segment on James's politics. As in, his lack of them. During those segments, ESPN contrasts Bron-Bron with Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown, whose careers as professional athletes are inextricable from their politics, and compares him to Michael Jordan, who infamously said, "Republicans buy sneakers, too." Overall, the suggestion is that Bron-Bron has a pulpit, and he should use it.¹

Nevermind the apolitical hypocrisy underlying the fact that the ESPNzone in Denver, site of the 2008 DNC, still shills an ESPN-brand tee in the window featuring a simulated ballot with three options: a donkey, an elephant, and ESPN (which happens to be checked).

However, Joseph White, writing for the AP, has written a thoughtful article on the effect the current Obama-McCain contest resonates in NFL locker rooms, where no one present except maybe the boy shoveling up sweaty jocks into a laundry bin will save money under Obama's tax plan, while everyone (except said possibly-non-existent laundry boy) will save around a cool million under McCain's plan.²

While NFL players are all too often portrayed as frivolous or unintelligent, White's article shows how this race resonates in a meaningful way with many of them:

"We're right in the middle," said Washington Redskins veteran Philip Daniels. "We've all got family members that are not doing so well. Democrats would help them out, but Republicans would help us out." (Post-Gazette.com)

There it is in a nutshell. The article is fascinating in that is shows how some players who have come from modest beginnings hold onto that class awareness despite their astronomical contracts, while others have fully immersed themselves into a new social class (which may or may not fully accept them based upon race--for example, how many eyebrows would be raised if Jeff Feagles teed off at Augusta? How many if Adam Jones?).

Read the article.

¹ If one were inclined to cynicism, one might problematize ESPN's credibility on the subject: They want a kid who was pushed through high school, used as a cash cow for the St. Vincent-St. Mary high school athletic department, and drafted first overall into the NBA to offer his insight on national politics. It's a bit like asking Doogie Howser how to pick up chicks. [Ed. Note: This is a reference to a fictional child prodigy skipping his adolescence entirely and entering economic and professional adulthood, not some coded reference to NPH, which upon further consideration makes me think I should have just gone with a Tom Hanks-Big simile.]

² Yes, it is problematic that "save money" is synonymous with the much more general "benefit" in this discussion. As in, although you may pay more in taxes under Obama's plan, the lower- and middle-classes will receive much more help, making it less likely that some desperately marginalized lumpen will break into their (the players') homes on game day or gun them down outside an apartment building. Full disclosure: The editor believes a distinct and meaningful connection exists between the anxieties of poverty, the perceived and real lack of opportunities for so many Americans who earn the least, and the rage one feels when confronting the widening chasm between the material reality of most Americans and the wild extravagance exhibited by those who are paid to catch a football or baseball or to shoot a basket.

McCain Takes Presidential Debates Hostage

2008-09-24T17:51:00.001-06:00

In an unprecedented move, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona, Presidential hopeful) has suspended his campaign and withdrawn from the first scheduled presidential debate citing a need to return to Washington D.C. and work on the "historic" financial crisis (cut him some slack for forgetting about 1929's Great Depression; he wasn't even born until 1936).

A cynic might wonder, "After a 29-year career as a U.S. Senator, why is McCain suddenly getting to work on the economy?" My inside source (i.e. my brain) tells me McCain's decision is based on three major premises.

He will "lose" every debate. The September 26th debate scheduled to take place at the University of Mississippi is supposed to focus on National Security, a topic that the media consistently claims is McCain's strength [Ed. Note: I was a child for ten or twelve (okay, 29) years, but I am not an expert on children.]. However, with the Dow behaving like a Six-Flag's Thrill Ride, the debate would have to include talk about the economy, the topic that polls now show matters most to the electorate. Coincidentally, Obama is hammering McCain on the economy, with a new Washington Post-ABC News national poll suggesting that among likely voters, Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. (Now, remember: A "likely voter" is someone with an actual voting record; thus, all polls of "likely voters" do not count the hoards of new voters that Obama has drawn into the process.) Knowing that his moment of "strength" will become an hour of liability, McCain is extending the Palin-Cone-of-Silence to his own person, and he's using the debate as leverage to rush through a governmental economic bailout that most Americans do not support.
He is trying to project an image of someone who can help the economy. McCain has made more gaffes and mistaken comments about the economy than he has about Sunnis and Shias and Czechoslovakia and the Iraq-Afghanistan-border-that-most-everyone-else-calls-Iran combined. As per the Washington Post-ABC poll, McCain knows the American people think he's economically inept [Ed. Note: He did marry well, which should count for something. However, as is well-known, Cindy McCain’s assets are kept separate from her husband’s as per a prenuptial agreement. In my most despondent moments, I find glee in a potential campaign ad that might say something like, "McCain's wife won't trust him with her money. Why should you?"]. By presumably putting pressure on Congress to act—although, honestly, with Obama up in national polls across the board and the writing on the wall about who will win a debate between them, the Republicans know a debate will put the nail in the coffin and the Democrats know that Americans will see through McCain's political theater, so who really feels any pressure?—McCain thinks he can recast himself as an economic problem solver. To me, he seems like a political terrorist who is taking the process hostage. As Americans, we have a right to see the candidates debate, and as a sometimes-intelligent human, I want to know that a president can juggle two things at once, especially if one of those things is only standing up and talking about his or her ideas.
He is trying to save money. Part of McCain's "suspension" involves pulling his advertising. Consider this: Obama out-fundraises McCain. By huge margins. In fact, if Obama wanted to run an ad in every major market every 10 minutes from now until the election, he could probably afford it, and if he couldn't afford it right now he could probably get people to kick in enough money to do it. But he isn't doing that. So, with this fundraising, one has to expect that the week before the election will be an Obama-thon in every contested market, and McCain just doesn't have those resources. According to OpenSecrets.org, as of August 21, 2008, Obama had $77,404,118 cash on hand, while McCain had only $36,370,792. I'm no math guy, but Obama had over double the amount of money then, and he continues to raise money like he has a license to print it. When a few days remain and Obama wants to spread his message (or drown McCain's), he'll have the resources to do it.

Ultimately, the voters will decide what to make of McCain's emergency suspension to deal with this crisis. However, with McCain-Palin's recent track record with the media, I'm pretty sure I have a sense of how this move will play. Swan song, anyone?

[Update: Now, the McCain camp suggests that the Biden-Palin debate be postponed to accomodate McCain's cut-n-run. So, point #4 might be that Palin is having trouble learning the playbook.]

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

2008-09-17T11:30:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miracles of Modern Science

2008-08-01T14:04:00.001-06:00

Now that it is August, we can turn our attention away from the Presidential race, the plummeting economy, the two wars we're fighting, and focus solely on what's important: NFL training camp.

This first whiff of pro football (sorry AFL, I don't care how many "bowls" you've had) has gone straight to everyone's head, including the writers and editors at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Second-rounder Limas Sweed was recently diagnosed with astigmatism, and just look at the rapturous, mystified coverage:

When the Steelers still weren't satisfied with how Sweed was picking up the ball during practice, they sent him for another eye exam.

Sweed said the eye doctor had him look through a number of different lenses before finding the right prescription for what he has.

"The last thing he clicked, I could see perfect, clear," Sweed said. "No squinting, nothing."

Are you rapt by the expose on the techniques of optometry? Do you like how the writer makes that last click ("better with one...or two? One...or two? Now better with A...or B? A...or B?") so dramatic? I know I do!

PS: Let's go, Steelers!

The Travesties of Pittsburgh

2008-07-24T11:09:00.001-06:00

Michael Chabon is the M. Night Shyamalan of American literary fiction. You read or see one, you've read or seen them all. While viewers of a Shyamalan film expect some "twist" that will (attempt to) make them reconsider the entire film, Chabon's readers can count on one character wrestling with and having an epiphany about his non-normative sexuality. And a lot of crying.

Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, received tremendous acclaim. Of the novel, poet Carolyn Forche wrote, "Simply the best novel I've read in years....It will takes its place beside On the Road and Catcher in the Rye," while in its reviews of the Playboy magazine repeatedly compared Chabon to F.Scott Fitzgerald and the novel to Gatsby.¹

He was heralded by the gay community for the book, but what made this novel so groundbreaking became the hook upon which he hung Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, so one wonders if Chabon was just savvy, trying to corner a market, with Mysteries.

This year will see the release of the film adaptation of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and while the novel is a great first novel, the film-makers have decided to basically rewrite the whole thing, excising what is most interesting about the novel. Bravo.

Throughout the novel, the protagonist Art Bechstein is pulled between Phlox Lombardi (Mena Suvari), a kind-of-femme-fatale, and Arthur LeComte, a gay man whom he meets in the library. Another storyline follows the character of Cleveland Arning (Peter Sarsgaard²), a hero who is crashing, but the emotional freight of the work is Bechstein's attempt to understand his sexuality.

The film makers have decided, apparently, that the character of Arthur LeComte was superfluous, that he somehow got in the way of the real story, when in the novel LeComte pulls the strings on almost every event that takes place. A LeComte-less film can only mean that the screenplay takes tremendous liberties with everything else: LeComte introduces Bechstein to Phlox, LeComte introduces Bechstein to Jane Bellweather (Sienna Miller), LeComte has been a lifelong friend of Cleveland. These people would never know one another without LeComte.

A quick look at MysteriesofPittsburgh.com tells you all you need to know: the introductory scene is set at a punk show (not in the novel), which one assumes will draw Bechstein, Phlox, Jane, and Cleveland together. When and where this revision will end is anyone's guess.

One wonders how well Chabon has taken to this treatment of his work. To loosely paraphrase Hemingway, when a novel is adapted into a film, the novelist drives past the studio, throws the novel over the wall, catches the sack of money thrown back, and then drives off. Although maybe Chabon's just happy to see one of his stories play out with what has become his stock gimmick.

¹ Playboy is pretty close to truth, in that Chabon lifts so much directly from Gatsby. See Gatsby's Jordan Baker, the female professional golfer that captures Nick's attention, and Mysteries' Jane Bellweather, who Art first sees driving golf balls.

²Spellcheck wanted to correct "Sarsgaard" to "rearguard."

[Note: Because every website is currently running an article about Sienna Miller, this film came to mind. When I checked imdb.com and the official website to see the full cast, I saw the absence of Arthur ~ Ed.]

La Lucha Continua, Señor Beck

2008-07-17T09:20:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BTW: Who knew they made patriotic Cosby sweaters?

Messenger, DOA

2008-05-30T12:12:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¹"Casabianca," by Elizabeth Bishop

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

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

²CNN Tuesday, May 27, 2008.

Sobchak 2008

2008-05-29T11:52:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was when she was winning.

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

Snuff: Winner, 2008 AVN Award for Best Banal Feature

2008-05-21T10:25:00.001-06:00

Snuff, the ninth novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the "edgy" writer of Fight Club (Shhhh!), Choke, Invisible Monsters, etc., needs a "fluffer," in the parlance of our times. In his previous work, Palahniuk has taken us into the (then fictional) world of underground fights clubs, into the offices of real-estate agents who specialize in flipping haunted houses, and into a commercial-jetliner cockpit with a recovering religious zealot/celebrity who is bent on committing suicide by taking down the plane (after all the passengers have disembarked). In other words, uncommon territory.

In Snuff, Palahniuk takes the reader into the snack-food filled, bronzer-stained green room on the set for World Whore Three, the final "gang bang" film made by Cassie Wright. Wright is a porn star beyond her prime, and during her marathon session with 600 men (she's trying to set the world record) she hopes to die either by a vaginal embolism or through the last-resort cyanide pill she asks Mr. 600 to bring in his locket. Unfortunately, the green room is not unfamiliar territory for Palahniuk's readers, even though many, one may hazard a guess, have never set foot in any green room let alone one on the set of a blue movie.

The male cast of World War Three is predictably filled with aging male porn stars who don't seem to recognize their bodies have lost their youthful luster, pig-headed chauvanists, aspiring actors, and the sexually frustrated. Palahniuk gives the reader the exact cadre that the reader would have created had he or she been asked to do so. The catering is bad: no surprise. The set manager treats the men like cattle: no surprise.¹

In his non-fiction essay "Big Red Son," David Foster Wallace manages to surprise his readers with the truth more successfully than Palahniuk does with this fictional representation. In his essay, Wallace shows the absurdity, the depravity, but also the non-depraved humanity of the people who produce pornography. A country founded by Puritans, we are too ready to believe (erroneously) that people connected to pornography are pathetic degenerates; we are surprised to find out largely they are, in fact, just like the rest of us.

Palahniuk is at his best when he takes the reader into new places. However, in Snuff these moments most often do not deal directly with pornography, so Palahniuk uses them as small details of characterization, novelty pieces that ultimately do not advance the plot. What a shame.

In his book The Triggering Town, poet Richard Hugo distinguishes between the triggering subject and the generated subject in creative art. Hugo defines the triggering subject as that which the artist thinks he or she should be writing about, while the generated subject is what the act of writing reveals to be the actual, interesting subject of the piece. Hugo argues that the writer needs to drop the triggering subject when the generated subject arrives on the scene. In Snuff, a pornographic snuff-film is the obvious triggering subject (what Palahniuk wanted to write about), and no matter how many interesting generated subjects appear, Palahniuk never abandons his trigger. One could easily imagine reading a whole novel centered on Mr. 72, the adopted son of a mother who bakes erotic designer cakes and a father who is a model-train enthusiast:

My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking the tracks. .... All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create....

My adopted dad would use a single strand of mink hair to paint the number "312" across the tiny back of a street-gang figure. To make a member of the Vice Lords of Chicago. (35)

Moreover, Mr. 72's dad is likely a white supremacist who good-naturedly tries to indoctrinate his son:

If I stood next to him and put my hand on the basement work bench, if I held still, my adopted dad would paint the "WP" and "666" for White Power at the base of my thumb. Then he'd tell me, "Hurry and go wash your hands."

He'd say, "Don't let your mother see." (37-8)

In these two paragraphs, Palahniuk creates a world more lush, more full of promise that he does in the rest of the novel. Through Mr. 72's background, Palahniuk introduces his readers to a world they never knew existed (if it did not before, it now will soon; perhaps then Palahniuk will not be blamed for inspiring real fight clubs but applauded for fostering interest in a healthy, socially-acceptable hobby). A novel about an enclave of white-supremacist model-train enthusiasts? Where can I pre-order a copy? However, Palahniuk keeps the narrative firmly rooted in pedestrian pornography.²

For their edginess, Palahniuk's novels often end on a recontextualized upnote, and Snuff is no different. Without spoiling the end, let's say it's electrifying but uninspired.

At the last, Snuff reads like a book built on what the author hopes will be a clever plot, and like most plot-driven narratives (Palahniuk's included) the characters are barely realized and language takes a back seat to movement and development—one wonders if product-placement money motivated Palahniuk to name his male porn stars after brands of liquor (Branch Bacardi, Cord Cuervo, et. al), and one quickly tires of the clever faux-porn titles if only because they are significantly more clever (To Drill a Mockinbird, A Tale of Two Titties, Catch Her in the Eye) than any porn filmography ever conceived (the 2008 AVN Best Film award winner is named Layout [Ed. Note- Beach volleyball themed? Talk about gritty!].

If you are new to Palaniuk, start elsewhere in his catalog. If you are an avid fan of his work, I won't be surprised if Snuff doesn't get a rise out of you.

¹While one of these is Mr. 72, Darin Johnson (presumably not a porn name), who believes he is Cassie Wright's long-lost son, the reader is not surprised. Mr. 72 answers the casting call in order to "save" Wright, but when she tells him she actually had a daughter, he overcomes his erectile dysfunction and aggressively has sex with her, making her call for security to "get him off of [her]." Yet, if one had read a Palahniuk novel before, one would see this coming [Ed. Note - No he di'n't!] from the outset, for drastic character reversals are Palahniuk's trademark. For the same reasons, the identity of Wright's actual daughter is equally obvious to the reader.^a

^aTruth be told, I was immediately convinced that the stage manager was Wright's child, but as I, like Mr. 72, was under the impression that Wright had a son, I anticipated the stage manager had undergone a sexual-reassignment surgery (another Palahniuk stock device).

²One wonders if Palahniuk (or sympathetic reviewers) will cite the novel's banality as part of the point, an illustration of the state of culture that a graphic story about a 600-on-1 gang bang barely raises the pulse of most readers. (Don't get me wrong, I still imagine that fundamentalists will get hot and bothered, but discriminating readers who read broadly will likely find this book a bit ho-hum.)

Snuff
Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday
197 Pages

Palahniuk Puts the "Awesome" Back in "Viral"

2008-05-16T09:23:00.001-06:00

Here is the new, likely-NSFW, fairly-ribald, viral marketing effort for Chuck Palahniuk's next annual novel, Snuff (and he ain't talkin' 'bout no Kodiak, neither).¹

The trailer is for another Cassie Wright feature, the fictional Chitty-Chitty Gang Bang.

See the first video and read an description of Snuff here.

¹Word on the street is, the Scandinavian edition will be titled Snus.

Pistorius Can Run!

2008-05-16T08:56:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

According to an ESPN.com report:

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

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

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

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

2008-05-14T14:29:00.001-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

According to the Denver Post,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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