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Thoughts on two very different films

Published at December 15, 2005 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

This post, and the next one I’m about to write, have been lingering for days. I feel like I’m posting all sorts of outdatedness, due to the busyness of life right now. Ah, well.

King Kong
It was (white) beauty killed the (black) beast…?

So, Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame has remade King Kong, as most of you probably know. And it’s been getting all sorts of rave reviews, or at least, most of the reviews that I’ve caught have been raving.

But, ever since I first heard about the film, I’ve been a little nervous. I’d never even seen the original King Kong in its entirety, but what I knew of it was enough to inspire some worries. Let’s see… a big, dark, savage ape falls in love with an extremely white woman, wreaks havoc left and right, and is taken down in the end? Hmm… do I smell a thinly-veiled, dubious racial subtext here?

Apparently, others agree, both about the racial subtext of the original and the carrying on of the tradition in Jackson’s remake. From the Village Voice review by J. Hoberman:

Jackson doesn’t really solve King Kong’s “native” problem—nor can he. The original was as much a symptom as a movie—the most extravagant cinematic expression of white supremacy made in America since The Birth of a Nation and perhaps the most delirious imperialist fantasy ever. Lose the spectacle of the white woman at the mercy of a savage horde and you lose the movie, although in keeping with Skull Island’s decor, Jackson recasts the indigenous people as a mob of slavering aboriginal zombie orcs.

So, my question is: come on, Peter Jackson. I love the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but every time I see your undeniably racialized depictions of Uruk-Hai and Haradrim, I kind of hate myself for loving it. What’s with your penchant for taking old, racist source material and retaining the worst of it? I understand and appreciate being true to the text, but does truth to the text trump being a wee bit less fucked up, especially when, by now, we should know better than Tolkien and the makers of the original King Kong?

Luckily for me, whereas I have a sustained love for and addiction to the LOTR movies despite the racial fuckedupedness, I have absolutely no interest in sitting through the 3-hour long tragic romance between a giant ape and a white girl.

…

Now, on to a tragic romance that I was very happy to sit through, and will most certainly purchase when it comes out on DVD: Brokeback Mountain.

the hottest gay cowboys in the world

I loved it. It was amazing and heartbreaking and beautifully shot. And, on top of all of that, it did not disappoint on the hotness factor. I love me some Jake Gyllenhaal, but Heath Ledger surprised the hell out of me with his excellent acting. I won’t say more so as not to spoil it for those of you who have not gotten to see it, but I will recommend that you do get to seeing it ASAP.

Una gran pendeja en Kansas City

Published at December 9, 2005 in boricua/latino and people of color. 6 Comments

It’s been a long time / I shouldn’t have left you / without a dope blog to … step to?

Anyhow.

I’ve been brought out of my blogging sabbatical by this article from the Washington Post this morning, which discusses how a Latino student in Kansas City was suspended from school by his principal for speaking a few words of Spanish in the hall.

Being the angry brown butch that I am, I decided that I need to give this sinvergüenza of a principal a piece of my boricua mind. So I did a little google research, found an email address, and sent the following off:

To Jennifer Watts:

I read about your suspension of a student for speaking Spanish in the hallway in this morning’s Washington Post. After reading the article, I felt compelled to write to you to express my utter outrage and disgust for your actions. The suspension of this student for speaking his native tongue was not only completely baseless, but also a thoroughly ignorant and racist act.

Like Zach Rubio, I am Latino, and I can barely speak my own language. It pains me to see that a boy like Zach, who actually can still speak his own language, is being discouraged from doing so by the very people who are supposed to be nurturing and educating him. I have been robbed of an integral part of my culture because of the insistence of Americans like you that I am in America and should therefore speak English.

Using that logic, I put forth to you that you are living on land that has been stolen from native peoples, and that you should therefore be speaking -their- languages, not English, a language that was foreign to this land before white Europeans came and colonized, pillaged, and wreaked genocide on the native people. Of course, since the United States has succeeded fairly well in its aim of total destruction of Native languages and culture, you might be hard pressed to find a tutor of one of the true native tongues of this country.

I sincerely hope that, if nothing else, you learn from this incident that blatant racism and discrimination is unacceptable in our schools. If you aren’t able to learn that, I hope that the school board of Kansas City is wise enough to remove you from your position as principal, since you are clearly unfit for the job.

Enojado y asqueado,
Jack …
Brooklyn, NY

Who knows if this woman will care about what I wrote, or if this email won’t just go off into the abyss of some unused email inbox. Regardless, it was very satisfying to hit the send button on this one.

The NY dailies: never flagging in their ability to annoy

Published at November 15, 2005 in global/international, mainstream media, people of color and racism. 3 Comments

During my morning commute, I regularly get assaulted by images and headlines from NY’s astoundingly obnoxious dailies, the Post and the Daily News. I generally do my best to avoid those papers, but with so many people holding them up in front of my face on the F train on my way into work, I just can’t help but see what garbage they’re spewing this time.

This morning was no exception.

First off – the cover of yesterday’s Post. I saw this yesterday and was troubled by it, but, luckily for me, some readers were a little behind, so I got to see it again this morning.

cover of the NY post

(click for a larger version)

The article itself begins:

The female half of a husband-and-wife suicide team yesterday calmly detailed her chilling role in the al Qaeda bombing at a Jordanian hotel wedding reception — even posing in her explosives vest on TV like a fashion model.

Note that the picture the Post selected for the cover was not a photo of the woman “posing in her explosives vest.” Rather, it’s a photograph of the woman in a headscarf. Maybe the Post didn’t intend to equate being “dressed to kill” with “wearing traditional Muslim garb,” but the connection is there on the cover, and a (possible) lack of intent doesn’t do away with that connection, especially when it’s an equation that’s so prevelant in our society.

Case in point: on yesterday’s edition of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Aman Mehrzai, a journalism student who witnessed last week’s protests and subsequent arrests outside of Colin Powell’s speech at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. In the preface to the interview, Goodman states that “confrontations occurred with the police and arrests were made. While the majority of those who engaged in confrontation were white, most of the people arrested were people of color.” Speaking about what he witnessed, Mehrzai says:

But there were many Middle Eastern people amongst the protesters, and they were dressed in Middle Eastern garb, and a lot of observers noticed that the confrontation between the Middle Easterners and the police were mainly verbal, and apparently what they are claiming – the police are claiming – that there were spotters who saw the Middle Easterners throwing things. But most of what everybody that I know saw, the actual confrontation was verbal, and out of all of the people who were apparently spotted, seven out of the — six out of the seven who were arrested on the outside were Muslim. And many of them were part of the MSA, and many of them were dressed in their Middle Eastern garb.

Again, traditional Muslim clothing is deemed a sign of propensity to violence, whether those wearing the clothing are actually violent or not.

Now, back to the Post.

This morningI also caught a glance of this headline:

NYPD BIAS SQUAD: White…

I couldn’t see the rest, but what little I could see made me say uh-oh right away. When I got to work I looked up the article (for which the NY Post website required me to register, grrr), and, surprise surprise, it was yet another article about “reverse discrimination.”

Three white female detectives were subjected to discrimination by a black commanding officer who stripped them of plum assignments and overtime pay in favor of their minority counterparts, a lawyer for the women told jurors yesterday.

“The evidence will show that the three women were discriminated against because of their race,” attorney Louis LaPietra said in opening statements as a trial began in Manhattan federal court.

Now, I don’t condone unfair treatment. If these women were truly treated unfairly, then there’s a problem there. And that’s a big if – because frankly, I wonder if these women were used to being on the “right” end of racial discrimination, and when suddenly things got a little more balanced out, they cried foul. Just sayin’.

But, regardless of whether or not these women were treated unfairly, I am immensely tired of hearing about “racial discrimination” against white folks. It seems like every time I turn around, there’s another story about white folks being treated oh-so-badly because they’re white.

People of color are treated badly because they’re not white a gazillion times a day. Why aren’t there a gazillion articles a day documenting every instance of true racism? Where’s the “NYPD Bias Squad” report about the people of color who are most certainly discriminated against both by and within the NYPD on the daily? Oh, that’s right, that’s just business as usual, no big deal, no surprise. But when the tables are turned and the white folks don’t get all of the perks and privileges they’re used to getting – well, that’s headline news.

Yet another reason to hate FOX

Published at November 13, 2005 in Uncategorized. 9 Comments

As if we didn’t have enough reasons to hate FOX…

the cast of Arrested Development

They’ve gone and cancelled Arrested Development, which I would put right up there with Desparate Housewives as one of the best shows currently on network television. (I can’t talk about cable since I haven’t had it in years.)

Those bastards!

WARNING TO DESPARATE HOUSEWIVES FANS: definite spoilers in the comments. Beware, if you haven’t seen last night’s episode yet!

The downward spiral of the Civil Rights Division

Published at November 13, 2005 in people of color and politics/government. 2 Comments

Seems that the recent behavior of the Justice Department is part of a greater trend towards conservatism and a not-so-gradual rollback of what little progress has been made towards true equality and civil rights. From Prometheus 6: Civil Rights Focus Shift Roils Staff At Justice:

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation’s anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees.

Nearly 20 percent of the division’s lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration’s conservative views on civil rights laws. Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out of hiring and major policy decisions, including approvals of controversial GOP redistricting plans in Mississippi and Texas.

At the same time, prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40 percent over the past five years, according to department statistics. Dozens of lawyers find themselves handling appeals of deportation orders and other immigration matters instead of civil rights cases.

It’s also clear that conservatives who never much liked civil rights legislation in the first place are now doing all they can to twist it so that it can be used for their own, decidedly unjust purposes.

The Bush administration has filed only three lawsuits — all of them this year — under the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination against minority voters, and none of them involves discrimination against blacks. The initial case was the Justice Department’s first reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi of discriminating against white voters.

The bastardization of civil rights

Published at November 11, 2005 in people of color and politics/government. 2 Comments

Few organizations make me as angry and disgusted as the Center for “Equal Opportunity”. Their website claims that their mission is to “to the promotion of colorblind equal opportunity and racial harmony.” How do they work towards this mission? Primarily, by promoting a twisted bastardization of civil rights thinking and legislation through lawsuits against colleges and universities with educational programs that encourage and assist people of color, women, and other underrepresented groups.

This despicable organization has enlisted the US Justice Department in its crusade. The civil rights division of the Justice Dept is threatening to sue Southern Illinois University if they do not end three graduate fellowship programs for people of color and women. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

In a move Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said “just doesn’t make sense,” the U.S. Justice Department charged that three SIU programs that aim to increase minority enrollment in graduate school exclude whites, other minorities and males, in violation of Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act.

“The University has engaged in a pattern or practice of intentional discrimination against whites, non-preferred minorities and males,” says a Justice Department letter sent to the university last week and obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

Reports like this make me quiver with fury, quite literally. It is horrifying and rage-inducing to see civil rights legislation – designed to protect the rights of people of color, women, and other groups who have been long oppressed by American goverment society – be so twisted, so bastardized, so perverted in the wrong way by racist conservatives, the CEO and the Bush Administration foremost amongst them. That the damned civil rights division of the Justice Department has been subverted into a tool for gradually dismantling what little progress has been made to redress centuries of racist and sexist damage inflicted upon people of color and women by and in this country – well, it’s just mindbogglingly wrong.

These people just can’t stand to see people of color get any reparations whatsoever for the evils that our society perpetrates upon us. I mean, they’re crying bloody murder over SIU’s programs when, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, only eight percent of SIU students are Black or Latino. Yes, clearly, grave discrimination is going on against the huge proportion of the SIU population that is white.

This sort of bullshit recently touched close to home, when the CEO went after my alma mater. You see, Swarthmore College, along with nearby Bryn Mawr and Haverford, used to participate in a wonderful program, the Tri-College Institute. Tri-Co was a program for incoming freshmen of color, an extra period of orientation for students about to enter the very white world of these three colleges. I participated in Tri-Co in 1998, and it was an invaluable experience for me. Tri-Co provided my first real chance to look at racism and understand it for what it is. It also gave me my first opportunity in a long time to be in an environment where I was surrounded by other people of color, after attending a very white high school and being friends with mostly white girls. For the first time ever, I was around many people of color, even many Latinos, my age. And I also got to learn a lot from the older students who ran Tri-Co – mostly amazing, politicized folks who helped me get engaged with POC organizations and activism on campus. After Tri-Co, I made a lot more friends and did wind up with quite a few white friends, but I also never lost the bonds of friendship that were formed at Tri-Co, and I think that made a tremendous difference in my time at Swarthmore.

Last year, the CEO decided to set its sights on Tri-Co. Enabled in their bigotry by the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling on affirmative action practices at the University of Michigan (which state that “race could be included as a factor in determining admissions, but not the sole factor”), the CEO sent a letter threatening legal action against Haverford College if Tri-Co continued to be limited to people of color. Disappointingly, Swarthmore and the other schools didn’t put up much of a fight, promptly opening participation in Tri-Co to all students.

The Swarthmore deans defended the decision, saying that “there will not be a major shift in the focus of the program… the one difference will be that there will be white students included in the program.” Um… hello? That one shift is just about the most major shift one could make to the program. It changes everything, making it nothing like the program that I found so valuable when I attended it.

At least SIU has a chancellor who says he supports the programs, and also has the benefit of a kick-ass supporter in the form of Senator Barack Obama. Let’s hope they manage to hold out against the Evil Empire’s assault on the true spirit of civil rights.

Slightly disturbing; also, the required post-election snippet

Published at November 10, 2005 in mainstream media, nyc, politics/government and queer. Closed

Today, while reading this ABC news article about al Qaeda’s attempted justification of the bombings in Jordan, I glanced down at the bottom of the screen and noticed the “Most Sent Headlines” section:

  • Can Your Cat Make You Crazy?
  • Cat Show Plans Memorial Service for Dog
  • Warm, Fuzzy Winter Bra Unveiled in Japan

Apparently, ABC News readers have some strange priorities when it comes to the news that matters most.

So, Ferrer and Mattera lost. Sigh. Not that it either result was terribly surprising – I had very little hope for Mattera’s campaign, and things weren’t looking so good for Ferrer for quite a while. Well, at least this year’s results aren’t heartbreaking like last year’s were. Republicans lost many key elections, and we even had a state (Maine) vote in favor of the rights of queer folks for a change. (Texas, of course, came through strong for the homophobic, rabid right.)

Voting mishaps to avoid

Published at November 8, 2005 in me, nyc and politics/government. Closed

First off – I hope y’all either voted already, or are planning to later! As the social justice calendar on my wall says, “Vote, but realize it is a small part of being a citizen and creating a truly democratic system.” Hell yeah.

Also, for New Yorkers who have not yet voted: note that the ballot proposals are located on the far right of the voting booth panel thingie. Don’t forget to look there.

This morning, I went to the polling place with my girlfriend. On the way there, we discussed the ballot proposals, how confusing they were, and how we planned to vote. She went into the booth before me and took a while in there (she was writing in Norman Siegal for Public Advocate, and write-in votes are tricky!) When she finally came out, I poked fun at her for taking so long, then stepped through the curtain.

And then I panicked.

Pull the red lever which way? Did I do it right? Did I already mess up? OK, Jack, calm down. It’s not all that hard. OK. Where are my candidates? Did I vote for Bloomberg by accident? What the hell is this mess over here where all the third party candidates are? Did I vote for the Green Party candidate or for the Libertarian? Did I remember to vote for folks under Working Party instead of Democratic? Ack. Ack. Ack.

Finally, I pulled the lever back, felt exhilarated at my participation in the democratic process, and went on my merry way to work.

I got to work, started speaking with my coworker about the elections, and suddenly had a Homer-Simpson-slap-my-forehead-moment:

I didn’t vote on the ballot proposals.

I never even saw them! And in my voting-booth-induced panic and confusion, I didn’t even remember to look for them! AUUUUGH!

I know, I know. My votes on the ballot proposals (probably no but maybe yes, yes, no, no) most likely would not have made much of a difference in the end. But still!

I think this speaks to the need for some changes in those damned voting booths. I’ve been inside of them maybe four or five times now, and they still make me all nervous and scared of making a mistakes. Imagine new voters! Imagine folks who aren’t extremely comfortable with the English language! Imagine people with impaired vision!

But I most definitely don’t want the fix to come in the form of electronic voting machines, at least not in their current form. From Democracy Now! a few days ago in a report on how the 2004 vote was may have been stolen :

Last week the Government Accountability Office – the investigative unit of Congress – issued a major report on the safety of electronic voting machines. Although the report has received little attention in the corporate media, its findings have startled critics of electronic voting. There are three main problems the GAO found with the machines: First, some electronic voting systems did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected. Second, it was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate. Third, vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.

Scary stuff, folks. Scary stuff.

Avian flu: who’s really at fault

Published at November 7, 2005 in global/international. 4 Comments

This morning, I stumbled across this article on avian flu and the US poultry industry’s response to it:

Asian governments must provide financial incentives and shut down as many backyard poultry farms as possible to halt the spread of bird flu, a leading U.S. poultry industry official said.

“We cannot control migratory birds but we can surely work hard to close down as many backyard farms as possible,” [Margaret Say, Southeast Asian director for the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council] told Reuters. “And we can do that only if backyard farmers are given an alternative source of living — some incentive to close down.”

Very convenient, I think, for the US poultry industry — which, as we all know, has been a paragon of healthy practices and good treatment of workers and animals alike — to be advocating for the elimination of an important part of the economy and way of life in Asia. Pinning it on the small guys is always easier than fessing up to the wreck that’s been created by the big guys. Additionally, these backyard farmers that the industrial poultry industry would like to shut down just happens to be their competition. But that’s just a coincidence, of course.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to Democracy Now, on which Amy Goodman was interviewing Mike Davis, author of a new book on avian flu entitled The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. He had this to say about the poultry industry, backyard farmers, and culpability in the resurgance of avian flu:

…the ecology of influenza, like other diseases, has changed dramatically in the last 10 or 15 years because of economic globalization, because of the breakdown of biological barriers between animal and human populations, because of air travel, because of urbanization, but in this case, above all, because of something called the “livestock revolution.” And that’s been the generalization around the world of the American model of poultry production, the Tyson model. Tyson is the giant poultry producer, one of the most exploitative corporations in the United States with just an appalling record of working conditions. Tyson kills several billion chickens a year. It’s created huge conurbations of chickens, unprecedented concentrations of chickens …

The corporate poultry industries have undertaken an international offensive, claiming that the fault resides entirely with the backyard producers, the tens of millions of small farmers across the world who have free-range chickens in constant contact with ducks and wild birds and children playing amongst them. And although this is part of the ecology of avian flu, the thing that has changed the way that flu emerges, that has amplified, I think, the danger and the speed with which it evolves, are these huge industrialized concentrations.

An almost perversely lighthearted PS given the subject matter above: I love Democracy Now. Though I heard about it constantly, I’d never listened to the show until a few weeks ago, and now it’s on my iPod almost every day on my way home from work. Not only is the news delivered by Goodman and Juan Gonzalez incredibly on-point and insightful, but, I must admit, I think Amy Goodman’s voice and delivery are totally hot. Yes, I’m a huge weirdo.

More Lies from BushCo

Published at November 7, 2005 in global/international, Iraq and politics/government. Closed

From Reuters AlertNet:

A captured al Qaeda operative who told U.S. authorities that Iraq had trained al Qaeda members to use unconventional weapons was identified as a probable liar months before the Bush administration began using his claims to make its case for war …

“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control,” the excerpts [of a Defense Intelligence Agency document dated February 2002] said.

Add another one to the pack of lies that the Bush Administration used to send this country to war (not that many of us ever believed any of it.) That last bit is especially telling, given that Iraq and al Qaeda have so often been depicted by our government and the mainstream media as being oh-so-similar, obvious allies in a radical Islamist plot against the West. No, not quite. For all of the many problems with Hussein’s regime, Iraq was a secular state prior to the US invasion – not a fact reflected in the rhetoric of the Bush regime, other pundits, and some of the mainstream media, all of whom continuously lump Iraq, Iran, al Qaeda, the rioting youth of France, and other groups together into one great big Muslim bogey-man, by virtue of their shared religion alone.

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