Monk

I think we will get down Maureen Dowd's column on Obama's victory, with that liberal note that the minorities, gays, and women want to see Obama bringing about more change indeed, that it is not enough for us to see our first black president: we want a rebirth of America, an America that is of, by, and for all the people.

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I remember the Central Park jogger case, of twenty years ago, when I was still a student myself, the white yuppie woman who got set upon by a group of black youths, raped and beaten to an inch of her life. Going by the media, people feared a new, dark trend: wilding. There is a story in the Times today on it. Ken Burns, the famous documentarian who got big after his Civil War series, has a new documentary on it.

I apparently missed some of the more recent developments in the case: “The convictions were overturned in 2002, after a serial rapist and murderer, who had staged a similar attack in the park just 48 hours before the one on the jogger, stepped forward to admit his crime, saying that he had acted alone.” Of course, this is not such an unfamiliar pattern in American justice and American society, though I am sure it is not just American, but a world thing, with America just making it more of a black and white thing, rather than the more general rich and poor thing.

(source: The New York Times)

I see some of our high-minded hate-speech laws, this time in England, are abuzz in the news again. A columnist, Victoria Coren, is in some trouble and may wind up in jail. Why? Because she wrote a bit too provocatively and broadly about her displeasure with Lucy Liu playing the role of Watson in the highly beloved English classic story of Sherlock Holmes for an American TV series titled “Elementary”. According to Ms. Coren, these are the two paragraphs that she wrote in a column that are the source of her legal troubles:

"Lucy Liu [told] the Times, 'It was a very big deal for me to play an Asian-American in Charlie's Angels; Watson's ethnicity is also a big deal', as if someone had bet her £100 that she couldn't cause at least three Conan Doyle fans to suffer a pulmonary embolism.

"Personally, I'd like to press Liu's face into a bowl of cold pea soup for that statement. It's not just her failure to distinguish between creating a new character and mangling a beloved old one (Tread softly! You tread on my dreams!), but the triumphant tone over such an appalling and offensive racial change. Let me be clear: I rather like the idea of an Asian Watson, but American? God save us all."

If Ms. Coren were a man, I could see more cause for a little teacup tempest on account of the violent imagery she takes up, but the fact that she is a woman would seem to take some of the heat of her statement away - who doesn’t like a good catfight?

More seriously, I am just reminded why I like our First Amendment. Personally, I could see a law proscribing what I would call ‘true’ hate speech, namely speech that calls for violence against others, especially against minority groups, including the outright elimination of groups, something much clearer like this. Though, even here, I could accept such speech if it were at least veiled in fiction; I wouldn’t care to ban “The Turner Diaries” for example. If a people are not above such hate-mongering, I don’t think a few criminal laws proscribing speech will help very much.

Now, I can see regulating such speech and books, by not allowing them a popular platform, such as school libraries and network television or mainstream theaters and auditoriums, but not much more than this. It’s just that the idea of turning mere speech into a crime makes me wince. Writers try to be provocative, or at least the best of them do, and it is not like life is all about love and rainbows. I hate the idea of chilling free speech, creating a situation where a person behind a keyboard has to wonder if he might be crossing a line, “Should I take back that bit about pressing her face into a bowl of soup? Should I just forget about the whole angle about an Asian taking such pride in appropriating a classic English role?” These may not be entirely wholesome thoughts, and let the writer risk losing popularity and readers. But I feel like it is safe to say that she is not a criminal. She may actually be more of a racist than she likes to think, but she is no criminal, at least not on account of these paragraphs.

(Source: News-LJ)

"The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."

-- Lindsey Graham

Well, I guess that's why Republicans have to play games with the vote, and why they have been getting more desperate about supressing the vote.

Well, it's nice to see that the Republican convention is well underway and the weather has held up for them.

I don’t like the expression First World Problems. It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World Problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World Problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

-- Teju Cole

Ouch!! Talk about being pwnd! It was a fun meme while it lasted, though.

MARIKANA, South Africa — South African police fired on machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine here Thursday, leaving a field strewn with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality. [...]

The strike and the government’s iron-fisted response are emblematic of the frustration with the slow pace of transforming South Africa’s largely white-owned business establishment and the growing perception that the A.N.C. and its allies have become too cozy with big business. As a result, many people here, especially the young, have looked for more radical solutions.

-- lydia Polgreen at The New York Times

It is not easy to keep the global marketplace running smoothly. At least it is not all white policemen mowing down black laborers. Such is progress in our world.

New SuperPAC, FightBigotry.com, Smears President Obama For ‘Racism Against White Folks’

FightBigotry.com, a new Super PAC registered with the Federal Election Commission this week, makes no bones about its aim. It intends to run an attack ad that it says will hit President Barack Obama for “his disturbing, yet crystal-clear pattern of tacitly defending black racism against white folks before and since being elected president.”

-- News-LJ

I've been braced for this steel-cage match to get going. I'm surprised it is taking so long to see the kicks to the groin and the choke holds. But I suppose these things usually don't get cooking until after the conventions. This autumn is going to be good, especially if you are more into violence and cruelty than in democratic discussions and debate. I suppose it is better than when the Rome republic was falling, when armies would be battling in the streets.

Mr. Timothy Olmstead is no 'Welcome Back, Kotter". He's not Jewish, for instance. But he does have a whacky sense of humor.

_ _ _

Olmsted resigned after the district placed him on paid leave in the spring after parents complained that he called black students "fat, black and stupid" and told them, "you will never amount to anything" and "you only have one parent," WCCO reported.

The teacher also allegedly forced black students to sit in the back of the classroom, or sit with their desks facing the wall.

"He told the whole entire class that it is easier for him to teach rich white folks than poor black people," Tolbert told WCCO.

[...]

But the educator has a record of controversy. The St. Paul School District reported in 2002 that Olmsted gave a sixth grade girl a birthday card with sexual innuendos, and requested that she read it to the class. He was also accused of giving a graphic description of castrating horses and throwing testicles into a field to feed cats.

-- News-LJ

The Sikh temple shooter, Michael Page, is reported to have been a part of the white supremacist hate rock scene, and here is an interesting take on that scene.

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[Hate rock's] heyday ... roughly spanned the mid-90s. In its first three years of operation, Resistance was selling nearly 100,000 CDs and cassette tapes a year. Spurred by Burdi’s success, several record labels like Panzerfaust and Label 56 began to make the music available to the world via the largely anonymous marketplace of the internet. While skinhead bands sometimes struggled to find audiences in the U.S., they found legions of fans in Europe. The aftermath of the Cold War found many young Europeans clamoring for nationalism and an outlet for anti-immigrant hate, creating a concert market for American hate rock bands.

In musical terms, the central irony of hate rock is that it is fundamentally black music.

Anchored in the 12-bar blues, the music of white supremacy is, formally speaking, a tribute to Chuck Berry as much as anything else. But such irony is lost on most hate rockers, or at least it’s beside the point. (Just try to explain to a neo-Nazi fan of Gaelic music that the Irish were not considered “white” a hundred years ago.) Their goal is simple: to express the alienation and frustration of straight white males who feel the loss of their special rights and privileges, using the most hyper-masculine, aggressive mode available to them.

-- Randy Blazak