TPM has caught the conservative movement with its racist pants down again. Actually, we saw so much racist garbage during the campaign from the low-information Base that it was no surprise to find out the Teabagger movement and is apesh*t not just about taxes, but the fact that we have a black president.
Via Jezebel, I see that Violet Blue has written an essay about why women don't watch more porn that shades into pressuring women who don't to feel bad about it, as if not enjoying a genre made mostly by men mostly for men makes you a prude. I know that's not her intention, and maybe it's just my mood, but I wasn't really persuaded by her piece, because she breezed over the hard questions, choosing instead to make women who are turned off by porn feel bad about it, like they're brainwashed by messages about how women are asexual. Continuing to beat back the slim and vanishing minority of feminists who think that non-misogynist porn is impossible is a strategy that's increasingly reading like a strawman to me, especially when I read stuff like this:
I hope it's not premature to start dancing on the grave marked "Right Wing Blogger Relevance", but reading this quick link from Atrios certainly made me strap on my dancing shoes. Somehow, it had passed my notice that Dan Rather is suing CBS for unlawful termination after they shit-canned him because the howling monkeys of the right thought they'd had a slam dunk in disproving a single document of many that proved that the Shrub used the National Guard to dodge the draft and then dodged the National Guard and hid behind his daddy to keep from having to be held responsible. The merits of their argument were minimal, and really all they wanted was to get Dan Rather fired by throwing a screaming temper tantrum, and using that as "proof" that they weren't a bunch of insecure cowards who get off on war, as long as they can safely view it on TV in the comfort of their own home, but were big, powerful people who can get you fired. Harassing people and trying to get them fired has since then been the right wing blogosphere's attempt to claim legitimacy as "citizen journalists". Yes, a title they adopted, despite the fact that their biggest victory was shutting down a real journalist for reporting the truth.
In my prior posts on the arrest of Harvard prof Henry Louis Gates in his own home by Cambridge police officer Sgt. James Crowley I have mentioned that class privilege plays a role in this debacle as much as race does. A lot of the debate about the incident dances around the topic but misses the big picture -- race and class are always factors because we are human beings colored by experiences and classification within this country's historical framework of those two elements.
Alas, they're too new/underground to be picked up by iTunes' Genius. But I figured I should share with you a band that Ross Lincoln turned me onto. La Roux is extremely slick, but in a good way, like the Pet Shop Boys. I'm making today's mix off them.
Original song: "Quicksand" by La Roux
1) "One Pure Thought"---Hot Chip
2) "Hearts On Fire"---Cut Copy
3) "Merrymaking At My Place"---Calvin Harris
4) "Etheric Device"---Glass Candy
5) "I Get Around"---Dragonette
6) "Mandarine"---Booka Shade
7) "Running Up That Hill"---Chromatics (Kate Bush cover)
8) "Jimmy"---M.I.A.
9) "Drugs In My Body"---Thieves Like Us
10) "Needy Girl"---Chromeo
More videos after the fold. Also, a tragic tale from Dusty's week.
Chromeo:
Thieves Like Us:
Glass Candy:
Sad, tragic story: I take Dusty out in the yard with me when I'm working on the garden, because it makes her happy to be outside and me happy to keep an eye on her. Molly goes, too, but in this heat, she usually does a perfunctory 30 second roll on the ground and then demands to be let back inside immediately. So I'm out there, and I have this bucket of compost tea I'm pouring over my vegetable plants when suddenly, Dusty walks right in front of me. Alas, it was too late to pull back and she got pretty well soaked on one side with compost tea. I tried hosing her down, with the hopes that this would encourage her to clean herself, and it did, but it was not enough. She smelled like shit. There was only one thing to do. Something that is, for me, about as weird and taboo as touching someone else's daemon in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.
We shampooed the cat.
I was worried she would attack me or Marc, who was holding her still while I scrubbed her and rinsed her off. But she mostly put her paws on the side of the tub and looked betrayed. It was a look to break your heart, it really was. But the process taught us some things about our cat, starting with the fact that her rotund appearance is due to excessively long fur for a tabby. Also, even though we joke about her having no neck, she does indeed have a neck. When Dusty is wet, she actually looks like any other short-haired, neck-having cat.
Of course, we had to towel her off before taking pictures, so we weren't complete assholes to her. So she's already re-fluffing at this point, but you can get an idea:
As you can tell by her being out and about within seconds of finishing her first and hopefully last bath, she forgave us immediately, proving that my cat is a pussy cat. She still smells vaguely of Clairol shampoo.
The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics superstar’s life 16 years ago Monday.“I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn’t working on a black man. I was working on another human being,” Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward’s fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.
It’s a date Crowley still can recite by rote - and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete. “Some people were saying ‘There’s the guy who killed Reggie Lewis’ afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights,” he said.
Crowley, 42, said he’s not a racist, despite how some have cast his actions in the Gates case. “Those who know me know I’m not,” he said.
Needless to say, I was laughing so hard at this that I had tears streaming down my face. OK. How many ways is this man's reasoning absolute jackassery. As a campus police officer who is trained in CPR, did he think he had the option to refuse to give mouth-to-mouth to Lewis? Are we supposed to think he was so heroic that he was willing to touch his mouth to the lips of a black man in front of all those people? Honestly, this only raises some seriously uncomfortable questions about Crowley's thinking if he's using this to somehow "prove" he isn't racist. For instance, Lewis was a superstar, a black man, and, as Crowley observed, a human being. One presumes all human beings are equal and he would be comfortable with giving mouth to mouth to, say, RuPaul, or Halle Berry, or the janitor who sweeps the courts after a game. It's all good, right? I don't know what this cop is trying to get at with this tale -- to show he's down with the brown?
The real issue here, and it will likely not be discussed nearly as much as the race angle, is the class angle. Professor Gates, during his angry tête-à-tête with Crowley, tossed down the "don't you know who I am" card (to be precise, in the report it says Gates told him he had "no idea who he was messing with"). I know that I can't stand it when people in Gates's position and station drop that sh*t as a trump card (trust me, I see it first-hand all the time in academia to name one field), so imagine this officer, who clearly is in a different socioeconomic universe than Gates. It's one thing to be a famous black b-baller dying on the floor, it's another matter altogether when the other person might be perceived as a spoiled academic who's looking down at you and verbally abusing you.
Now that is no excuse for Crowley's incomprehensible arrest of Gates for yelling at him after the prof had already provided two forms of ID to prove who he is and that he lived in the residence, it's simply another factor that must be considered in this mess -- something that will obviously receive less play in the press than race, since class is also a third rail topic much of the time.
What do you think?
Oh, and about the Gates case, Crowley doesn't offer an apology of any kind.
Though he harbors no “ill feelings toward the professor,” a calm, resolute Crowley said no mea culpa will be forthcoming. “I just have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “It will never happen.”
Irene Monroe, who guest posts every so often at my pad, also shares her view of Cambridge, its police and how race and class are at play in this incident.
Living while Black in Cambridge
Rev. Irene Monroe
None of us African-American residents of Cambridge are surprised or shocked by the humiliation and harassment Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 58, of Harvard University encountered at the hands of Cambridge police.
My partner, Dr.Thea James, an Emergency Room physician who would drive from home to work was stopped all the time for “driving while black.” And when the Cambridge cops realized she’s a woman, and a lesbian one at that, their unbridled homophobia surfaces. Thea now takes the bus.
My girlfriend’s kids and their friends hang out at the Cambridge’s Galleria Mall like kids do. The Cambridge police in the mall stop my girlfriend’s kids and their friends; one white and two Asians are not, because “shopping while black” is always mistaken as shoplifting.
More below the fold. Irene Monroe continues:
These constant shakedowns of us have been deliberately on the down low to the public because Cambridge, proudly dubbed as "The People's Republic of Cambridge, is ranked as one of the most liberal cities in America. And with two of the country's premier institutions of higher learning - Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology- that draw students and scholars from around the world, Cambridge's showcase of diversity and multiculturalism rivals that of the U.N.
Cambridge is also proudly known for a lot of firsts in this country. For example, it was the first city in Massachusetts to issue a legal application for same-sex marriage. It’s the first major city in the country to elect an African American openly gay mayor -Ken Reeves. And Cambridge elected its first African American openly lesbian mayor in the country this year with E. Denise Simmons. Deval Patrick is the first African American governor of Massachusetts.
Cambridge is no doubt a progressive city. However, when you scratch below Cambridge's surface there is also a liberal racism that is as pernicious, vile, and intolerant as Southern racism. But unlike Southern racism that sees race and tries to keep blacks in their place, liberal racism claims it does not. Ironically, however, Cambridge's liberal ruling class maintains its racial boundaries not by designated “colored” water fountains, toilets or restaurants, but rather by its zip codes, major street intersections known as squares, like the renown Harvard Square; and residential border areas that are designated numbers, like the notorious Area 4, a predominately black poor and working-class enclave.
It did not matter that the call to police by a white woman, who doesn't live on the block let alone the area, stating that two African-American men were breaking and entering into one of the expensive homes on a tree-lined street was not only false but actually Gates's home. The woman’s call was her civic duty in preserving the neighborhood’s integrity. because after all this was happening in the zip code area of 02138, which is Harvard Square.
And it did not matter that once Gates validated his residency to the cop with a legitimate Harvard I.D. that the whole incident should have, at that very moment, ended. But instead the arresting officer called the Harvard University police to once again verify Gates occupancy in his own home.
Also, it did not matter that the suspected robber is a Harvard professor, public intellectual and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. (Some say this incident serves as a cautionary tale to those who want to now define America as being post-racial with the election of Obama.)
What was of great concern for both the white woman who called the police and the arresting office who eventually had to handcuff Gates was the shock and perhaps outrage they experienced seeing this unknown black man in this well-known, high income, and professional area of Cambridge breaking and entering into someone home’s and not in the city’s known and expected troubled spot- Area 4?
Segregation in this city is not only along race lines but also class. And poor working-class whites and white immigrants do not experience the fullness their white skin privilege would abundantly afford them if they too were part of Cambridge’s professional and/or moneyed class.
Area 4 has been labeled a troubled area of Cambridge, an area plagued with all the problems of urban blight and very little resources to ameliorate them. As a densely populated area, its average household income was $34,306 according the 2005 city census. Harvard Square, on the other hand, in the same year its average household income was $79,533.
Area 4 use to house the city’s police station. And white Cambridge police officers assigned to this area unabashedly target and harassingly patrol neighborhood blocks and activities of black male residents- young and old. And their reasons for doing so can easily be attributed to the Cambridge Police Department’s lack of funds in its budget to do cultural sensitivity trainings. But their reason is just as much about this country’s horrific racial legacy between the two groups as it is also about Cambridge's liberal ruling elite exploiting these tension by their claims to not see race, until of course, an unknown black man appears in their neighborhood
The tension escalated between Gates and Sgt. James Crowley when Gates flipped the script on him. As the person-in-questioned Gates exercised his legal right to also question:
“Is this happening because you're a white cop and I'm a black man? Is this why this interaction is still taking place? ''
The charges against Gates have been dropped. But many white Cantabrigians chiming in on this incident felt that Gates was being uppity, feeling entitled, and exploiting the race card.
And who would know better about this than them.
If you want to depress yourself this morning---and hey, being a political blog reader means you're not against the idea---please compare and contrast this interview with Nancy Pelosi about health care reform and this write-up of Obama's press conference. Obama's lack of enthusiasm on this issue is depressing on a personal level, since he's obviously such a fan of American values like ingenuity and self-improvement, and styles himself (rightly) of a prime example of someone who set out to accomplish great things and achieved it in a classic American fairy tale style. He should be the one who sees that health care access is one of the major obstacles for others who are trying to set out on their own path as he did. He should be the one who sees that the great sea of American ingenuity is being stifled, because employers are able wield the need for health care to get meek obedience instead of daring out of the American labor force. The ability to work for someone else for the Malcolm Gladwell-esque 10,000 hours and then strike out on your own as an innovator and entrepreneur has been snatched from people, because the only people who can count on having good enough health and minimal family obligations to take chances with health insurance coverage are really young people. The irony in him dwelling upon his excellent coverage is this---to get where he is today, he had to start taking the sort of employment risk (running for office) that most people his age really can't afford, unless they have a spouse like Michelle Obama who can extend coverage to them.
Below the fold are more invitees...it's too delicious. Disgraced Miss California and memoir-peddler Carrie Prejean is sure to entertain...I wonder what winger will try to sidle up to her...Billo? Rush? Guaranteed to show no interest: Mitch McConnell and Rick Perry. Gee, why wasn't Lindsay Graham invited?
BTW, this is the same conference site that SC Gov. Mark Sanford was excised from once his concubine exploratory mission was revealed.
Did I mention that Senator Paul Stanley was a Republican? I'm certain that goes without saying now, the list of Republican Sexual Hypocrites is so damn long.
