Debra J. Dickerson will blog for Beliefnet during the week of May 16, 2005, taking up where Swami Uptown left off. Dickerson is an award-winning essayist and author who writes about race, gender, and poverty in publications such as Beliefnet, The Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The Nation, The New Republic, Vibe, Essence, and more. A former Salon columnist and senior editor at US News and World Report, Dickerson won the New York Association of Black Journalists' first place award for personal commentary in 1999. Her 2000 memoir, "An American Story," was a New York Times Notable Book. Her second book, "The End of Blackness" was published in January 2004 and is now in its third printing.Marriage Is Thicker than Water
The New York Times reports:
JUST because Karl Decker Hayes was a cruel husband doesn't mean he should die alone. So concluded his ex-wife, Millie Hayes, 67, an antiques shop owner in Monroe, La., who recalled living with a man so controlling he picked out her car and her clothes, and checked the walls for smudges after she cleaned house. They divorced in 1998.My mom's a real trendsetter. She did this back in 1977. My father was hospitalized with lung cancer for five strained, bitter years after she left him. To put it mildly, he was a tyrant. But she stunned me the other day by casually mentioning that, brought low by his ill health, he confessed to her that because of his behavior, there was no one to take care of him. She'd told him she was going to take care of him once he left the hospital. She wasn't just saying it to comfort him. She actually meant it. When I seemed stunned, she just said, "Six kids and thirty years together, Debbie. That's... something."
"I despised what he had done to me," said Ms. Hayes, who, despite it all, became her ex-husband's caregiver when he developed Alzheimer's three years ago. "There is nobody else."
Her efforts are part of an emerging theme as the country ages.
In scenes exhibiting a vivid range of feelings - acrimony, compassion, rekindled love, abiding friendship - sick and dying Americans are being cared for by former spouses.
Ok. My mom is a saint. She is one of those rare Christians who make me envious of their faith because of its affect on her.
But my ex? Take your vitamins, that's all I can say.
Past Her Prime
A press release annouces:
"FORMER BLACK PANTHER CHALLENGES CONFEDERATE ESTABLISHMENT IN BID FOR MAYOR OF BRUNSWICK, GEORGIA
"Elaine Brown to hold a press conference and officially open her campaign headquarters on May 19 at 10:00 a.m.
"In an effort to become the first black and first woman mayor of the predominantly-black port city of Brunswick, Georgia, Elaine Brown, author and former chairman of the Black Panther Party, will formally announce her candidacy on May 19th -- the birthday of Malcolm X -- at 10:00 a.m. at her campaign headquarters at 2802 Altama Avenue in Brunswick.
"Under the campaign slogan "Empowering the People! Sharing the Wealth!" Brown says she wants to displace "the Confederate establishment" as much as the present administration wants to displace the black population of Brunswick."
I hope she loses.
There was a time in the mid-90s while a law student that I stood in line for 2 hours in the Cambridge cold to hear this woman speak. It was events like hearing her that forced me farther and farther from the black left. Not to the right, just away from the moribund black left that she typifies: paranoid, racist, hate-filled, morally ossified, self-hating expressed as militance, separatist, divisive (a word I normally attack as a ruse for silencing minorities, but it fits here). Basically dumb, but the worst kind: stupidity that thinks it's genius. She doesn't love black people so much as she hates whites. She'd step right past a hungry black kid to harangue a rich white man.
Last year, the two of us participated in a radio debate, or at least I did. I talked about the reasons affirmative action was problematic and what alternatives might look like. I talked about the need to move from organizing around whites' menial sins (e.g. purse clutching, security guard eyeballing) to an inward focus geared toward tangible improvement of the black community, like charter schools and security patrols. What she did was list names that took the place of ideas: "You're just another Clarence Thomas, Stanley Crouch, Armstrong Williams, house nigger."
"Ok, what's your plan Elaine?"
"Uncle Tom."
"Is this how you lead the Panthers?"
"Ward Connerly."
"How is this in anyway helpful?"
"Sell out."
"Hating white folks is not a program, Elaine."
"We knew how to deal with Negroes like you during the Movement."
Never look up to people. They always let you down.
That's not from any actual transcript, it's just to give you an idea of what it's like to try and work for the actual development of the black community rather than just for the destruction of America.
I actually wanted to cry. This is a woman who is treated like a queen among the black left. Young women like myself literally wept in her presence and asked for her blessing as we headed out into the world of race politics. This woman was the Chairman of the Black Panthers (if you detect approval on my part, you're right). She faced down racist white cops and midnight raids, so why can't she be required to explain her ideas or, god forbid, actually engage with someone else's?
She is typical of much of what remains of a once glorious, thoughtful Civil Rights Movement - self-satisfied has-beens who ludicrously bring Cointelpro into every conversation to feed their self-importance and collect fat speaking fee checks to denounce America and blacks who dare to require them to explain themselves.
She is as bad for the black community as for America itself. She doesn't want equality. She wants blacks to be the new Massa.
Cuz Driving Wasn't Already Dangerous Enough
Coming soon to a cell phone near you: mobile porn.
For once, the rest of the world is ahead of us on something: smut.
Pornography helped drive the early adoption of new technologies such as the VCR and the Internet. Now, wireless providers in many countries are counting on sex to spur the use of their broadband cell phone services.
"Customers of French operator Orange, for instance, can view video clips on their cell phones from the company's wireless portal that feature women in the shower or cavorting half-naked on the beach at sunset. Orange, a unit of France Telecom SA, says as much as a quarter of all videos accessed from its portal are erotic -- the equivalent of about 3,330 hours of viewing each month.
Los Angeles-based Vivid Entertainment Group Inc., a major producer of porn films, provides erotic video games to many large European operators, and plans a service that lets subscribers have live sex chats with women they can view on video. When Vodafone Group PLC launched Vivid's series of EroTrix games in Germany, Greece and Portugal, there were 30,000 downloads in the first two months, says Steven Hirsch, Vivid's co-founder.
Starting in June, cell phone users in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia will be able to chat with Vivienne, a "virtual girlfriend" created by Artificial Life Inc., a Hong Kong-based maker of interactive games. She says on her Web site, www.v-girl.com, that she won't have real or cyber sex with her admirers. But "we can have exciting conversations about all sorts of things," she says." Pretty soon, I guess we'll be longing for the days when the guy next to you on the train was screaming into his cell. Now, he'll be watching some XXX action on his cell and...
Hell on Wheels
The Supreme Court is set to review the rights of disabled prisoners:
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide if states and counties can be sued for not accommodating disabled prisoners, a big-money question for governments already strapped for cash.
The court already has held that people in state prisons are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Now the justices will consider whether prisoners can sue for damages under the ADA, a law meant to ensure equal treatment for the disabled in many areas of life.
Supporters of the law contend that the threat of damages is needed to force states and local governments to comply.
[...] States repeatedly have clashed with the federal government over their liability under the 1990 disabilities law. They claim immunity from lawsuits because the Constitution says a state government cannot be sued in federal court without its consent.
Justices have sharply disagreed on when states are immune.
Last May, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that states can be sued over inaccessible courthouses. Among the dissenters was Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who has championed states rights.
[...] "It's not a very sympathetic population," he said. What's either the most enraging or the saddest about this is the fact that we begin the discussion with the acknowledgement that jails and prisons are already required to be accessible. The issue is whether we as a people, through the Supreme Court, will force the nation's jailers, the people who punish those who flout our laws, to abide by the law. When Tony Goodman, the paraplegic inmate who's filing suit because his cell doesn't allow his wheelchair to turn around, assaulted his girlfriend and sold coke, the government didn't argue that prosecuting so many crimes was "a big-money question for governments already strapped for cash" as it does with abiding by the ADA.
Is this a conversation we really need to have, whether prisoners, whether humans, should be able to access any place they must visit? For a nation which is so religiously self-congratulatory, I continue to be amazed by our inhumanity. Trust me, I do a lot of prison reporting--even if Tony Goodman gets a bigger cell and can get himself to the bathroom so he no longer has to sit in his own waste till help comes--he will be suffering in prison. Perhaps moreso given his vulnerability.
Much as we love to flaunt our Constitution, we continue to be loath to abide by it; I've actually had 'debates' with the Moral Majority crowd, which argued that inmates should be given nothing but the Bible. No exercise. No TV. No education. No psychological intervention. Just 5-10 with the good book and a blanket on a dirty floor to read it, functionally illiterate though most violent criminals are. When you point out that no one would resist such a plan more than prison guards, the only answer is a sanctimonious eye roll. Seems the guards, too, need instruction from our mullahs. The loss of liberty is the punishment for their crimes, not being on the receiving end of every heinous affront we can think of to dehumanize them. All I can think when I read about our prison system, as with our school system, is: shame on us.
Terrorism and Violence Are Bad... Unless There's Someone We Want Dead
It's just not even fun anymore to keep track of all of this administration's lies, hypocrisies and immorality. But somebody's gotta...
Reuters reports:
Cuban President Fidel Castro accused the U.S. government on Wednesday of wanting to protect an anti-Communist militant who was arrested in Miami and faces extradition to Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane. Castro angrily called the capture of Luis Posada Carriles by federal agents on Tuesday a `"farce, a great lie" and said the operation had been staged.In his spare time, this senior citizen blows up tourist spots in Cuba for the same reasons terrorists hijacked the Achille Lauro and attacked a hot spot on Bali. Only our reaction is different.
"It is evident that the purpose of the U.S. government is to protect Posada Carriles ... to avoid him going on trial and being punished," he said on a live television broadcast.
Cuban-born Posada, 77, a former CIA operative who has spent his life fighting Castro's rule, was arrested after emerging from hiding at a news conference. He had slipped into the United States from Mexico in March seeking political asylum.
"It was two months after Posada Carriles arrived and they say they discovered him yesterday. Who is going to believe that trick?" Castro raged.
Venezuela wants to extradite Posada, a Venezuelan citizen, to put him on trial for masterminding from Caracas the bombing of the Cubana airline plane off Barbados that killed 73 people."
But it's not just the government that shows its true colors here. Those Cuban Americans who laud Mr. Carriles and demand that the US protect him are not fit to call themselves Americans. Every time I hear about the violence associated with blacks and our supposed communal tolerance of it, I think of Mr. Carriles and the hero he is to so many Cuban Americans. I think about the crime-ridden white ghetto of South Boston where only rarely does a local cooperate with the police (see Michael MacDonald's excellent memoir). I think of Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion bomber, protected by a zone of silence that enabled him to hide in the God-fearing North Carolina mountains:
For months, maybe years, the fugitive hid near a small valley of brick houses and trailers, leading a life so reclusive he was nearly invisible - though neighbors suggest it wasn't just the chipmunks stealing all that squash from their gardens.
"In retrospect, it doesn't bother me," says Mary Pickens, who lives nearby. "He hadn't ever hurt anyone around here." It's quite likely that many of these neighbors actively helped Rudolph, larding their 'garbage' with goodies for him, turning a blind eye to his comings and goings, staying mum with the police even as they tutt-tutted over urban crime on the nightly news. Violence is anathema, unless it's against someone of whom you disapprove. But there is the annoying matter of our war on terror, the one on which we've spent 1600 American lives and an untold number of Iraqi ones. Your move, Mr. President.
When President Bush nominated John Bolton as our ambassador to the UN, the comedian Jon Stewart joked that soon, the president's balls would be visible from space.
Gentlemen, rev your telescopes.
Queer Babies for the Straight Chick
My friend David Plotz takes on the move to ban gay sperm from sperm banks:
"New F.D.A. safety and screening standards for sperm banks, which take effect next Wednesday, include strict requirements for testing and retesting donors for H.I.V. But the F.D.A. has also published an accompanying 'guidance' document advising banks to bar as donors men who have had sex with other men in the last five years, on the grounds that these men are at high risk for H.I.V. Though the guidance doesn't carry the force of regulation, many sperm banks have indicated that they will follow it. Gay groups including the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and Human Rights Campaign have protested, but so far in vain."
We know this to be yet another a Trojan horse for the American mullahs to marginalize and even hound homosexuals to extinction because:
"...consumer choice is an incredibly powerful force for improving practices. Customers insist on safety and health, and banks compete vigorously to satisfy them. Banks have replaced fresh sperm with frozen, in order to have time to quarantine the sperm and retest the donor for H.I.V. They screen not only for H.I.V., but also for gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases that most of us have never heard of. Sperm banks force donors to pass a panel of genetic tests for cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, Fanconi anemia and other awful abnormalities. Banks take exhaustive medical histories, perform elaborate personality tests and require high standards of personal behavior. At California Cryobank, America's leading sperm collector, less than 5 percent of donor applicants make the cut. I would bet that the pool of American sperm donors - which includes gay donors who have passed all of these screens - is smarter, healthier, cleaner-living and freer of dread genetic defects than perhaps any group of men on earth."
It's downright frightening that a scientific body like the FDA needs to have simple matters of logic and medical practice explained to it by journalists. This isn't about health and safety. It's about politics and religion and whether gays have the right to exist civically as well as physically.
But my own argument--that the right is trying to 'disappear' gays--brings me up a little short. I've always believed that homosexuality can not possibly be a 'choice' because no one would choose (especially in, say, the 1950s) to be something so despised and oppressed. So then why would anyone 'choose' to have a potentially gay baby (by accepting gay sperm, however unscientific the notion might be)?
Why do we test fetuses and donors for abnormalities? So we can repair them either in the womb or in the Petri dish, so we can simply be prepared for the problems to come, or, as is probably the case most often, so we can abort the fetus or reject the donor. Should homosexuality be considered a defect? Not a defect that affects the body but one which affects the quality of life. If I had one deaf child, would I abort or genetically modify a second one with the same defect? What if it were cerebral palsy or autism? If so, does that mean I'm saying that my deaf, palsied or autistic child was a mistake, shouldn't exist? Would I accept gay sperm, even after it had passed the most rigorous health screening, even if the donor was a Nobel prize winning, Olympic medal having, virtuoso concert pianist? And if I would not, would it be because I wouldn't want my child to face the dangers that gays must everyday or would it be because, in my heart of hearts, I don't truly accept homosexuals as I so often proclaim?
I wonder if gay donors are identified as such and if so, how often the women pass on their otherwise outstanding sperm. Now that we're on this subject, I would imagine that most, if not all, non-black women pass on black sperm, however Einsteinian. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that even black women pass on black sperm (though it would surprise me to learn that more than a miniscule number of black women go this route). If so, would that be out of self-hatred or a maternal love that wants its child's life to be as easy as possible? Getting back to moral basics, how many people abort babies with the severe abnormalities cited above?
Perhaps my boy Plotzie should host a symposium for Beliefnet on exactly these questions. He has a new book out on the subject. I think we may all find out more than we want to about ourselves and what we truly believe.
The Dark Ages, Anyone?
Since my theme today seems to be the way in which sympathetic straights are implicated in homosexuals' problems, I ran across this in Dan Savage's [warning: EXTREMELY raunchy] sex advice column (the second item).
"...while we're on the subject of [the STD] HPV [the human papillomavirus]... Researchers have been hard at work on two vaccines for HPV, vaccines that could save thousands of women's lives. In clinical trials the vaccines have prevented 90 percent of new HPV infections. Good news, huh? Not for the religious right. Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told New Scientist magazine that "giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex."
"While the religious right's war on gay people gets all the headlines, their war on straight rights gains ground daily. They've destroyed sex education, undermined abortion rights, and successfully prevented emergency contraception from being made available over the counter. Now they're going to block the HPV vaccine. Why? Because the American Taliban would rather see sexually active women dead than vaccinated.
"Hello, straight people? If you don't want to live in a world where you need a license from the likes of Bridget Maher to have sex, premarital or otherwise, you had better start speaking up. Most of you seem content to merely rubberneck while gay people have the shit kicked out of us, and while that's maddening, I suppose it's understandable. It's not your fight. But what explains your passivity when your own rights are being attacked?"
Good question.
If young women hadn't already broken in that 'license to engage in premarital sex' there wouldn't be what Savage describes as the STD supernova that HPV has long been; eighty per cent of women have it, if asymptomatically. Given that, it seems to me that the religious right wants to punish the 'sinners' and control non-believers much more than it wants to treat treatable illness. Like Savage, I actually believe they think the terrible suffering that can come with untreated STDs are God's will (so why treat smokers or the obese?). They want to make their theology law, sorta the same rationale that leads us to run a prison system medieval in its culture. Damn prevention and rehabilitation! Let's wait till some hopeless kid who never had a chance kills someone and then lock him up in a hellhole from which he will emerge, if he ever does, lost to humanity. Same with sex. Let's deny the hot and horny information and protection, offering them a bed on the syphilis ward and public condemnation.
For all our talk about the death of science under extremist Islam, its not clear to me how gambits like this one, along with the attack on evolution, differ much from the mullahs who insist on teaching only the Qur'an, and that only to boys in countries without running water.
Black Mormon--An Oxymoron?
The Black Mormon (here and here) is an odd creature.
"Black and Mormon," a new book of essays, discusses the racism of the Mormon church and the blacks who cling to a religion which held as doctrine their inferiority and forbade them the priesthood until 1978. At that time, the Church lifted its ban but did not rescind it. It still has not, yet Black Mormons resist those who say they should force the Church to apologize for its racist past.
This would have to be an amazing book to allow me to make sense of that. In college, in 1978 coincidentally, I was assigned a book called "25 Books That Changed America." The Book of Mormon was of course one of the Chosen 25. Needless to say, I was a tad put out with the Latter Day Saints, but what can you expect from someone "cursed with a skin of blackness" as I am?
The only way I could be a Mormon is if they repudiated the ban and stated categorically that it had been wrong. Obviously this will never happen because it opens the door to admitting that they might be wrong about a few other things (like being baptized for your long dead relatives). Individual believers are required as a matter of faith to admit error and take responsibility for it, but, as with the pedophilia crisis and the Catholic Church, rarely does so.
To each his own, but Black Mormon strikes me as an oxymoron.
Birth From Within, Mind Games from Without
I'm on the 'mommy from the ghetto diet,' I eat whatever my kids don't finish because wasting food is a sin that will land you in the poor house. Tonight I had beefaroni with a fruit roll up garnish, 1/8 of a squished bandj and the backwash from 3 juice boxes I could hear sloshing in. My toddler bent my glasses so that not only am I a geek in bifocals but a geek in bifocals with tape on the handles. So I'm supposed to feel guilty for my c-sections, too?
A Slate article chronicles the latest band of Bible thumpers and New Agers hellbent on shaming women out of our Godgiven right to epidurals:
...a friend invited us to take a course she was teaching called Birthing From Within. The class discussed how to get through labor without pain medication, but purported to be open to either approach. The more I learned, however, the more this open-mindedness felt like a passive-aggressive tug toward natural childbirth. Birthing From Within aims to make women "powerful in birth"; it may instead undermine them.We are supposed to bring them forth in sorrow after all, right? Well, OK, I'm sorry all right. I'm sorry I looked and felt like a battle ship carrying my 9.5 lb son. I'm sorry my doctor told me, "Don't even think about it. You cried when you stubbed your toe on my office door." I'm sorry my daughter gave the doctor five when he checked my dilation and I had to be rushed to an emergency c-section before her other hand came through to give him the finger for making her mom wait so long for that sweet, sweet anesthesia. Breech each time. I'm sorry that the rest of the world can't leave my uterus alone. Don't they know expectant mommies have very important things to do, things that writhing in agony put a severe crimp in? Things like making sure we get exactly, precisely what we want as gifts:
Maybe it is another example of big city neuroticism. Or maybe it is the ultimate in practicality. But the Ludwigs and the Rosenbaums are among a growing number of Manhattan parents-to-be who do not learn the sex of their baby early, but still want the nursery decorated when baby arrives. So they choose two sets of furniture, clothing and bedding, then ask the store owners to call their obstetrician to find out whether to submit the order in pink or blue.I'm guessing these chicks had epidurals.
People Who Are Going To Hell
Women who leave their gym bags on the precious few benches in the locker room and watch me hop around naked and dripping on one foot trying to get dressed.
Women who pee on toilet seats and/or do not flush, somehow feeling the need to flee from their own runoff like the plague that it might actually portend for the next user. Women whose rumps are so dainty they may not touch public porcelain but whose sensibilities are degraded enough to leave their pee for me to sit in.
Anyone who has ever driven in front of me in traffic.
Men who can master the interminable origami required to don a tie but cannot manhandle a new roll of toilet paper onto the spindle.
Whoever it was that hurt Alanis Morrisette enough to force her to write the coda to You Ought To Know, "Your House" (must be heard to be believed).
Anyone who feels compelled to shout out answers to the moronic trivia questions that precede movies and then chortle at the brilliance required to know that the movie Patton was about, duh, Patton. These are the same folks who chew their $40 oceans of popcorn loudly and vigorously enough to require closed captions and spit shields for their neighbors.
People who do not cover their mouths when they yawn and force me to look into the mouth of hell.
Every cell phone user but me.
Every mom but me because my children really are drop-dead gorgeous, wunderkind geniuses and the reincarnation of Albert Einstein and Mother Theresa's lovechild.
The Quitter with Guts
While I have my problems with his work, I have slowly come to appreciate the brilliance of Dave Chappelle, star of the eponymous runaway hit on Comedy Central. Funny as he is, biting as his commentary can be, he has a tendency towards Farrelly Brothers-type gross-out humor that regularly makes me wince and put down the chicken leg I'd been gnawing on. He has featured boogers, homeless drug addicts defecating outdoors, a VD puppet show with singing herpes, and a QVC spoof with bikini models in need of bikini waxes. This type of humor is no doubt memorized and chanted by bonged-out college boys from sea to shining sea. But when he's not high (a state he's apparently frequently in), Chappelle can mesmerize. Of course, it's his racial commentary that most rivets. He's famous for characters like the blind Klan leader who doesn't know he's black and who divorces his own wife as a nigger lover once he finds out. He spoofed the sacrosanct Civil Rights Movement by doing a fake documentary on the first 'shit-in' of a black man in a 50s whites only bathroom. Love him or hate him, he makes you think.
Boy was so good, they paid him $50 million to keep doing it. So why did he run away?
The rumors that have been circulating for a few weeks finally metastasized and Chappelle admitted that he had more or less fled the country. The pressures of his new found fame and enormous wealth had sucker punched him and, believe it or not, he was afraid of losing his soul.
I don't know when I've heard a public figure speak so believably from the soul about the spiritual crises which can so easily overtake those who have the kinds of options and opportunities Chappelle earned for himself:
This is Chappelle's second trip to South Africa. He first came to Durban, and visited Salim, in 2000. Chappelle won't tell me exactly how he met Salim but describes him as a family friend. A soft-spoken Muslim, Salim seems also to be something of a sounding board to Chappelle, who converted to Islam several years ago. While Chappelle is not doing a formal religious course in Durban, says Salim, who wore a simple cotton robe and hung back through the interview and photo shoot and only spoke when I asked him a question, "if he wants to talk religion then I'm there as someone to talk to." Says Chappelle: "This is kind of my spot where I can come to fill my spirit back up. Sometimes you neglect these things if you are running on a corporate schedule." The crux of his crisis seems to boil down to his almost obsessive need to "check my intentions." He uses the phrase a few times during the interview and explains that it means really making sure that he's doing what he's doing for the right reasons.
[...] His religion is also crucial. "I don't normally talk about my religion publicly because I don't want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing. And I believe it is a beautiful religion if you learn it the right way. It's a lifelong effort. Your religion is your standard. Coming here I don't have the distractions of fame. It quiets the ego down. I'm interested in the kind of person I've got to become. I want to be well rounded and the industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well balanced. I've got to check my intentions, man. Perhaps this is unsurprising from a man who was accompanied to perform in comedy clubs at 14 by his Unitarian minister mother. I'm guessing that Salim is--like Chappelle--an orthodox Muslim and bewildered, if even aware, by the theology of the Nation of Islam. Oh to be a fly on the wall of their religious discussions. I'd pay money to hear Chappelle expound on his spirituality. Isn't it funny how you only want to hear about religion from those in public life least interested in talking about it?
My slowly evolving take on Chappelle (I was disgusted by his show when it premiered and didn't tune in again for two years, and then only on assignment) is that he is one of the most intellectually bold, honest and thoughtful cultural commentators on the scene. This episode confirms that: "I'm interested in the kind of person I've got to become." I can't imagine that I've ever read a sentiment like this in the popular press from a celebrity. Given Chappelle's centrality in the youth culture, let's hope our worst fears have always been true: that our children do what they see their celebrities doing. If so, we'll come home to find Junior meditating and little Susie engaging her teachers in discussions on the meaning of life and the demands of an artist's conscience.
Your Mom Is a Luxury
No, wait. Their moms are.
Prison officials in Altoona, PA are charging inmates, with 72 kids between them, $50 to see their children. Justifiable economically, says the chief, but also morally because, "The fee...also cuts down on frivolous visits." No word on whether these folks make one penny per hour pressing license plates or two.
Jews and Mint Juleps
Call me a nerd (why not, my own mother does), but I find history to be so much more interesting than fiction. What I especially like is the panoramic view it gives us of our neuroses and delusions. When the usual suspects sneer at multiculturalism, it just does a body good to happen upon tidbits like this, about Jews in the old South.
The first Jewish settlements of note in the South were those of Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina in the closing decades of the 17th century. The numbers were minuscule - barely a handful of families - but in general Jewish immigration to the U.S. was virtually non-existent: even a hundred years later, at the time of the Revolutionary War, the country was home to no more than 2,500 Jews, most of them residing in the Northeast.Last election cycle, candidates were scrambling to find their 'inner Jew,' (low in the article) long dead relatives to make them look less white and privileged. Let the search begin for Jewish ancestors who wore kosher coonskin!
Slowly, though, a Jewish presence was making itself felt in the lower colonies well in advance of the mass immigrations from Europe that commenced in the late 1800`s. In 1783, for example, Isaiah Isaacs and Jacob Cohen, a pair of Jewish merchants from Richmond, Virginia, commissioned the legendary explorer Daniel Boone to charter thousands of acres of land in Kentucky, thereby helping to open the vast, previously unclaimed territories of the West.
On the back of the receipt Boone signed in exchange for his cash payment, Isaacs noted and dated the translation in Yiddish - a historical tidbit left unmentioned in the various movie and television accounts of Boone`s exploits.
Know what else I find interesting about this article? The phraseology. Jews helped "open" the West. I'm thinking the redskins might use a different verb. So what we have here is an example of demanding nativist praise while airbrushing unpleasantness from the past--is this evidence that Jews have become officially 'white?'
A Bishop with Backbone
In his new book "The Sins of Scripture," Bishop John Shelby Spong says his mission is "to force the Christian Church to face its own terrifying history that so often has been justified by quotations from 'the Scriptures.'"
Deep as we are in the throes of our never ending culture wars, we'll all no doubt be talking about this book. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof weighed in this weekend. According to Kristof, the book "examines why the Bible - for all its message of love and charity - has often been used through history to oppose democracy and women's rights, to justify slavery and even mass murder."
It's about time, no it's long overdue, that a committed Christian engaged in a frank, two-sided debate about exactly what it is that Christianity stands, and is responsible, for. One of the things that is so cynical, and even fascist, about Christians' demands for "respect" (I'll explain the sneer quotes in a minute) is that too often they refuse to explain themselves or defend their positions: quoting chapter and verse does not an argument make. (Another problem is their disdain of non-believers. Christians complain long and loud about their perception as dimwitted but are equally quick to dismiss non-believers as dense.) Indeed, what is so often presented as a request for respect is in reality a demand for reverence, (hence my sneer quotes), a tacit acknowledgement that Christians are on a higher plane than non-Christians (laughable when one puts a face--say, Ann Coulter--on Christianity).
So, bravo to the Bishsop for having the backbone to take a critical look at that which he reveres.
Who's Robbing Your Nana?
As the boomers age and retire, crime mutates to nip at their heels all the way to the grave. Stock swindles and scam investments will leave destitute many of the elderly who did the right thing and saved. And who masterminds the rip off? Scions of the country club, fat cats with cigars who think there's no racial profiling or that if there is, its blacks' own fault. That welfare moms are whores and irresponsible parents. People who fill the pews every Sunday and buy the uniforms for the local T-Ball league and live in neighborhoods with low crime rates.
But who is it that society looks down on? Who's the poster child for crime and amorality?
Referring to Worldcom and Enron and the like, Comedian Wanda Sykes joked that blacks might steal your car but white folks steal your future. Yeah, I'll go out on a limb and predict that the vast majority of those robbing grandma in their Brooks Brothers suits are rich, white, Republican, Christian men. When it turns out to be otherwise, when you can't guess which race or gender committed which crime, then non-white, non-Christian, non-men will know they've finally overcome.
What on Earth is Going on at the Air Force Academy?
First the rape scandal, now religious fascism. A chaplain even claims she was penalized for standing against it.
I find this evangelism surprising because the AF has a strict no-proselytizing policy and an even more strict system of informal checks and balances.
I remember when I was a 'butter bars' in the late '80s, somehow the office bull session turned to religion and got heated quickly. The major we worked for ran into the room from his office so fast, he was actually panting.
"NO PROSLETYZING!! NO PROSELYTIZING!!"
He looked so concerned, I thought he was going to make us all pinky swear.
GIs love to sit around comparing the hell hole they were serving in right then with the paradise they'd just come from, a place always known as `the real Air Force'. I think that finally I found that corner of the USAF to which this Brigadoon-y phrase actually applies: the Academy is not in the real Air Force. Couldn't be. The alcohol-fueled rapes? Yeah, that's pure GI. But no way Jose that anyone in the 'real Air Force', especially a commander, would allow this type of behavior. Why? Not because he or she disagrees (the military is overwhelmingly old school Protestant, near as I could tell) but because it causes problems in the ranks. No bombs would get put on target, no SOS (don't click if you mind vulgarity) would get cooked, no mail would get sorted, not with everyone spending their time either hunting down sinners or hiding from the mullahs.
That's why the military does so much better than the rest of America with race: all that matters is how well you do your job. Bringing any other considerations into the on-the-job mix hurts the mission, which is the GI horrible of horribles: Unsat (as in 'unsatisfactory'). Your supervisor can believe you're less than a generation away from ape ancestors or that you have white sheets with eyeholes in your trunk, but as long as you're a dedicated GI, you can handle snakes after your shift or speak in tongues in the chow line. Just make sure your gig line is straight and that your shoes shine.
So, the 'real Air Force' will make short work of this, if not the rape culture. While all 'butter bars' are deemed 'stupid by definition,' get teased by the non-comms and are kept on short leashes, those coming out of the service academies get the shortest leashes of all. Ah, the conventional wisdom.
No Buddhist Proselytizing
Here's another thought on the proselytizing issue: in the early '90's when I served (as a respectable captain, thank you) in Ankara, Turkey, I put up a flyer seeking other Buddhists to chill with. The base chaplain (whose name I've forgotten but he was a very nice Protestant) took my note down and admonished me. He hid behind Turkey's (non-Muslim) proselytizing law. I reminded him that I hadn't sought converts but practicing Buddhists to spend time with, but he still would not be swayed.
I believe I only faced overt oppression a few times during my 12 years on active duty. This was one of them.
