It's no fun to be a racial scold. And it feels pretty ridiculous when I've vociferously defended Resident Evil 5 from charges of racism---maybe more than it deserves. But among the many good things about the end of the Dubya regime, one benefit is that I'll no longer have to watch liberals wandering into genuinely icky minstrel-show territory.
The most recent sample is Will Ferrell's one-man show: "You're Welcome America - A Final Night with George W Bush", which was shot for broadcast on HBO. For the most part, it's a fairly entertaining piece---though the jokes are mostly just recitations from the Harper's Index, Ferrell's Bush impression has always been eerily spot-on. It's not just the accent, though he does do a lovely job of nailing the way Bush's affected drawl slips and slides depending on his self-image. What Ferrell gets is Bush's belligerent confusion, the way his slitted eyes seemed to be looking equally for a brawl or an escape. No matter how much I hated the guy, I always felt a little bad for him too---deep down, he seemed to know how out of his depth he was, and much of his cowboy toughness was a transparent cover for his well-deserved insecurity.
All that's fine, and good, and pretty funny. The problematic part comes about halfway through, as Bush/Ferrell is going through his memories of the members of his cabinet (you already see where this is going, right?). There's fairly standard jokes about Wolfowitz, Rummy, and a pretty funny bit about tickling Richard Perle's jowls to make him giggle. But then he turns to Condoleeza Rice, and things get profoundly icky, as an African-American woman dressed up like Condi comes out and does a music-video lambada with Bush.
Allow me to proffer a suggestion to comedians who would like to not be racist assholes: If your gag involves an African-American woman doing a hoochie-mama dance, think twice. If your gag involves a powerful African-American woman being turned into a white man's sexual fantasy, think three times.
The worst part---what makes it not funny along with racist---is that the tired sex-mammy stereotype doesn't map onto Condi at all. What's striking about Condi is her icy hatred, the way she would always flash the stink-eye when she thought no one was looking. Building jokes around her evil-nun persona could be plenty funny, and you could even get some comedy gold out of the contrast between Bush thinking of her as a warm mammy, and her actual chilly deadliness---like everyone in the Bush administration, she seems to have specialized in carefully manipulating the dauphin.
But presenting her as a gyrating stripper doesn't map onto her as a person---it's simply the most available stereotype of a black woman under 50. That's what makes it racist as well as bad comedy; it's hard to believe a pro like Ferrell could come up with something both less funny and more egregious than the Right's ugly-Chelsa jokes, but he did.
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
You've given me hate when I know there is love
The thing is, I basically enjoy Roy Edroso's alicublog. It's relentless mockery of those with different beliefs than mine is kind of a guilty pleasure, but most conservative writers are so willfully ignorant, so deliberately crazy, and so cynically disingenuous that I just don't feel bad when they're treated with the same kind of contempt that they show for their readers.
But man, did the latest post piss me off! Mocking the pundits convinced that we can save Iran with Twitter is well and good. And mocking the pundits insisting that Obama needs to insert himself into Iran's election process is well-deserved. But when you just write off Iran as "a theocratic shithole going through a paroxysm", that's when I get off the bus. There's just something so ugly about casually dismissing an entire country, one which has produced some of the major artworks of the last fifteen years, as well as the last few thousand---it's lazy, it's parochial, and it's flat-out racist.
Not that any objections will be raised in the comments, of course. Some websites get even better in their comments section, but alicublog's comments make me wonder if I'm wrong to like the site at all---it's mostly just Two Minutes Hate, plus constant dittoheady bleatings of "what a great post, roy!" and royal court verbal mincing as everyone competes to come up with the funniest comparison of Jonah Goldberg to a tube of biscuit dough.
I probably shouldn't have bothered sticking my beak in---no one responds well to being told they're sounding like Mark Fuhrman (not even Mark Fuhrman!), and the cocooned posse at alicublog is about as likely to say "gosh, we are being dicks" as the readership at RedState. But it was still kind of astounding to see that when one suggests that some nominal sense of solidarity with an oppressed people trying to throw off their government might preclude dismissing their entire country, the response was a lot of carping about Iraq. Iraq is, of course, the opposite of the situation in Iran---a foreign power marching in to impose itself through warfare, rather than a bottom-up rebellion of the people.
It's not unlike the grim experience of reading the diaries of Roy's hero, H.L. Mencken, and seeing how easily contempt for the boobosie could turn into contempt for ignorant negros, filthy chinese, penny-pinching jews, and everyone else who wasn't H.L. Mencken. It demonstrates neatly the limits of the "I'm not a racist, I hate everybody equally" argument---a white guy turning his vast intellectual contempt on poor brown people is just plain different, because history is different, and a denial of that deserves the same respect as "why ain't there no White History Month?" arguments.
David Foster Wallace argued that the danger of television wasn't that people would believe its lies; it was that people would learn early on that they were always being lied to, and a sneer would become the only expression available. Over at alicublog, where they've gone from laughing at those with inflated pretensions of doing political good to laughing at the very concept of political good, it's like watching a baby turn into a wizened old bastard in high-speed timelapse. If the revolution in Iran fails, it'll be business as usual. But if it succeeds---and I'm still willing to hope it does---than the people now mocking Andrew Sullivan for doing more to aggregate information than any other westerner will... okay, not feel ashamed of themselves, because they're visibly incapable of shame, but at least be left behind at history's highway rest stop, where they will bitch about the bathrooms until a farmer shoots them.
But man, did the latest post piss me off! Mocking the pundits convinced that we can save Iran with Twitter is well and good. And mocking the pundits insisting that Obama needs to insert himself into Iran's election process is well-deserved. But when you just write off Iran as "a theocratic shithole going through a paroxysm", that's when I get off the bus. There's just something so ugly about casually dismissing an entire country, one which has produced some of the major artworks of the last fifteen years, as well as the last few thousand---it's lazy, it's parochial, and it's flat-out racist.
Not that any objections will be raised in the comments, of course. Some websites get even better in their comments section, but alicublog's comments make me wonder if I'm wrong to like the site at all---it's mostly just Two Minutes Hate, plus constant dittoheady bleatings of "what a great post, roy!" and royal court verbal mincing as everyone competes to come up with the funniest comparison of Jonah Goldberg to a tube of biscuit dough.
I probably shouldn't have bothered sticking my beak in---no one responds well to being told they're sounding like Mark Fuhrman (not even Mark Fuhrman!), and the cocooned posse at alicublog is about as likely to say "gosh, we are being dicks" as the readership at RedState. But it was still kind of astounding to see that when one suggests that some nominal sense of solidarity with an oppressed people trying to throw off their government might preclude dismissing their entire country, the response was a lot of carping about Iraq. Iraq is, of course, the opposite of the situation in Iran---a foreign power marching in to impose itself through warfare, rather than a bottom-up rebellion of the people.
It's not unlike the grim experience of reading the diaries of Roy's hero, H.L. Mencken, and seeing how easily contempt for the boobosie could turn into contempt for ignorant negros, filthy chinese, penny-pinching jews, and everyone else who wasn't H.L. Mencken. It demonstrates neatly the limits of the "I'm not a racist, I hate everybody equally" argument---a white guy turning his vast intellectual contempt on poor brown people is just plain different, because history is different, and a denial of that deserves the same respect as "why ain't there no White History Month?" arguments.
David Foster Wallace argued that the danger of television wasn't that people would believe its lies; it was that people would learn early on that they were always being lied to, and a sneer would become the only expression available. Over at alicublog, where they've gone from laughing at those with inflated pretensions of doing political good to laughing at the very concept of political good, it's like watching a baby turn into a wizened old bastard in high-speed timelapse. If the revolution in Iran fails, it'll be business as usual. But if it succeeds---and I'm still willing to hope it does---than the people now mocking Andrew Sullivan for doing more to aggregate information than any other westerner will... okay, not feel ashamed of themselves, because they're visibly incapable of shame, but at least be left behind at history's highway rest stop, where they will bitch about the bathrooms until a farmer shoots them.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Christ, now Twitter's good for something?
It's astounding how fast Twitter has gone from being a digital frisbee, good mostly for one-liners and embarrassment, to a central tool of a people's uprising, of such importance that it could legitimately change the course of human events if it goes down for 90 minutes (and anyone reading this on June 16, write in now and tell them not to freakin' do that!).
What brought Twitter from Ashton Kutcher to Herbert Morrison wasn't so much the service as the technology on which it piggybacks. Someday our phones may all be browsers and our wishes all horses, but right now the most ubiquitous tool for global communication is the cheap-ass cell phone. By allowing for easy sending and receiving via a technology with far more market penetration than smartphones (once again proving that smart is the antonym of ubiquitous), Twitter first became a handy way to tell the dudes that you were gonna be at the quad, and then became the best means for those dodging bullets in Tehran to tell the world what's going on.
Even if the media wasn't so pathetically dropping the ball on coverage, Twitter would still be the best way to find out what's happening right now. Not the best tool for understanding what's going on in Iran---there's no way to know what tweets are just rumor-mongering or disinformation, especially in the absence of visuals---but certainly the best way for those on the scene to do live reporting, and for those interested to see that reporting.
That is not to say that the current GOP Twitterspoogefest isn't as completely stupid as most every idea that comes from the GOP. Twitter is very good for realtime organizing, but the Republican party doesn't need organizing in the sense of "get 1,000 people to meet in the middle of Grozny", they need organizing like "let's get a party leader who's neither a clown, a fraud, or a sociopath." They also need a more compelling message than the one they've got, which they won't find at under 140 characters---that's plenty of space for their current message, but then, that's the problem.
What brought Twitter from Ashton Kutcher to Herbert Morrison wasn't so much the service as the technology on which it piggybacks. Someday our phones may all be browsers and our wishes all horses, but right now the most ubiquitous tool for global communication is the cheap-ass cell phone. By allowing for easy sending and receiving via a technology with far more market penetration than smartphones (once again proving that smart is the antonym of ubiquitous), Twitter first became a handy way to tell the dudes that you were gonna be at the quad, and then became the best means for those dodging bullets in Tehran to tell the world what's going on.
Even if the media wasn't so pathetically dropping the ball on coverage, Twitter would still be the best way to find out what's happening right now. Not the best tool for understanding what's going on in Iran---there's no way to know what tweets are just rumor-mongering or disinformation, especially in the absence of visuals---but certainly the best way for those on the scene to do live reporting, and for those interested to see that reporting.
That is not to say that the current GOP Twitterspoogefest isn't as completely stupid as most every idea that comes from the GOP. Twitter is very good for realtime organizing, but the Republican party doesn't need organizing in the sense of "get 1,000 people to meet in the middle of Grozny", they need organizing like "let's get a party leader who's neither a clown, a fraud, or a sociopath." They also need a more compelling message than the one they've got, which they won't find at under 140 characters---that's plenty of space for their current message, but then, that's the problem.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Like A Faceful of Seawater
As Hannibal used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together."
The executive-pay restrictions on the bank bailout money seem to have done exactly what they were supposed to do---not so much keep bankers from getting big bonuses on the taxpayer's dime (though that's nice too), but rather to make them really, really *want* to pay the money back. It seems like the Obama team learned one big lesson from the S&L bailout: rich people hate repaying loans.
So the money lets everyone ride out the real-estate valuation crisis, and then gets paid back promptly, with a little profit on top. More loans should work out this well! Rightie outlets are saying the banks were healthy all along, and only took the money because the government forced them, but considering that Hot Air's list of poor, oppressed institutions being forced to play sick for nanny includes epically-dysfunctional Citigroup, I would take those claims with enough salt to preserve beef. Their complaints that the Treasury is holding onto warrants for bank stock---in effect, engaging in stock speculation---strikes me as a feature, not a bug. Instead of just giving away money, the government gets the money back when things calm down; poetically, they get it back thanks to the health of the banks they saved. Again, this is in pleasant contrast to the S&L bailout, where the banks simply collapsed, costing the government truckloads of FDIC money which was pure loss, never, like my hairline, to return.
If conservatives took deficits as seriously as they say they do, they'd regard this as a great success, but then they'd also be cursing Reagan and praising Clinton and we'd all be wearing shoes on our heads and taking bears to church, so... nevermind.
The executive-pay restrictions on the bank bailout money seem to have done exactly what they were supposed to do---not so much keep bankers from getting big bonuses on the taxpayer's dime (though that's nice too), but rather to make them really, really *want* to pay the money back. It seems like the Obama team learned one big lesson from the S&L bailout: rich people hate repaying loans.
So the money lets everyone ride out the real-estate valuation crisis, and then gets paid back promptly, with a little profit on top. More loans should work out this well! Rightie outlets are saying the banks were healthy all along, and only took the money because the government forced them, but considering that Hot Air's list of poor, oppressed institutions being forced to play sick for nanny includes epically-dysfunctional Citigroup, I would take those claims with enough salt to preserve beef. Their complaints that the Treasury is holding onto warrants for bank stock---in effect, engaging in stock speculation---strikes me as a feature, not a bug. Instead of just giving away money, the government gets the money back when things calm down; poetically, they get it back thanks to the health of the banks they saved. Again, this is in pleasant contrast to the S&L bailout, where the banks simply collapsed, costing the government truckloads of FDIC money which was pure loss, never, like my hairline, to return.
If conservatives took deficits as seriously as they say they do, they'd regard this as a great success, but then they'd also be cursing Reagan and praising Clinton and we'd all be wearing shoes on our heads and taking bears to church, so... nevermind.
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