Bush/Cheney 1984

For the bumper sticker, click here.

I know I have been away for a little while, but the spirit compels me to post two thoughts.

First of all, I know that people may have forgot during the consumer Christmas haze, but it appears we officially live in a dictatorship. It’s a little more pleasant than some because at least I can post on this blog, but I can no longer be sure at what cost. I can no longer have carefree telephone conversations or email exchanges without wondering who is listening, without worrying that I or the people I love are being monitored by Big Brother.

Props to Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts for dramatically stating the Bush administration’s unlawful violation of civil liberties. Congress should have never granted the Bush administration any special powers after 9/11, but even if they did, it does not cover such ridiculous dictatorial behavior as monitoring a range of groups and individuals with no clear terrorist aims, let alone clear ties to al-Qaeda. Thankfully Massachusetts (double props to the people of Massachusetts on this one) kept Kennedy around to remind us that “this is Big Brother run amok.” (click here for the link to the Los Angeles Times article with Kennedy’s quotation, with regard to his opposition to the renewal of the U.S.A. Patriot Act). By the way, isn't this why the constitution has this little thing called the impeachment process?

Read here for more information on the impeachment process in the U.S. Constitution; to see specifically which constitutional rights they have been violating check out the Bill of Rights, especially IV, V, and VI:

"Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."

That is why my opening picture is of the Benjamin Franklin quotation. I think it’s time this nation reflects not just on how well, if at all, our “democratic system” actually functions, but also, we must reflect upon what we mean by this “freedom” we love so dearly? Then we should start listening to the now cliché-Gandhi sentiment: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” This applies not just to individual behavior but to our own government; if we want to see a “free” world practicing “democracy,” maybe we should aim for making the U.S.A. safer for freedom and democracy too.

Dating Rules 2005

On a lighter note, props to Marc and Lauren for our discussion the other night. We have finally figured out exactly how to approach the issue of appropriate payment on dates. In normal first-date situations, s/he who asked is responsible for paying for the meal/festivities/etc. In later dates, the burgeoning couple is welcome to work out a system best suited to their individual tastes, although as a student with little money I am an advocate of the “pay-for-your-own” plan. Though unique situations can present themselves.

The “whoever asks” rule can get tricky when considering internet dating. In this situation, I really think it’s best that each pay for his/her own part of the date until a real dating situation has been established. I know a lot of girls have enjoyed internet dating because of the supply of free-food; however, I think that any woman who identifies herself as a feminist should be wary of such willingness to be so commodified on dates by the supposed purchasing power of men. I myself have often let men pay for a date, not wanting to seem rude and ungracious, and thus a new system for a new century should help us all figure this out better. I am not saying that all men pay for dinner because they have a desire to own something of the woman on that date; I think we just take for granted the capitalist relationship amongst certain constructions of masculinity and feminity on dates and it’s time for that to change. Especially if the woman in question has a steady income and the man on the internet date is a student with no steady income.

Finally, the “whoever asks” rule encounters the blind date situation. In this case, we believe that the “whoever asks” rule should be conservatively interpreted. The matchmaker should pay for the date of the poor set-up couple. Such a practice would have the added bonus of hindering careless matchmakers and their match-happy practitioning.

Happy New Year to all.

weekend in vegas

Below are two journal pieces that I meant to post last month about Vegas; they are just food for thought about Vegas and U.S. culture. Bear in mind that it was the first and only time I have ever been to Las Vegas unless you count the hour I spent in the airport transferring from one Southwest flight to another.

10.01.05

Well, here I am on the 17^th floor of a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, NV. I have an ideal view of I-15 and the towering glitz of the Vegas strip – Paris, New York, the Luxor, the Excalibur castle, all to my right, the coliseum of Caesar’s Palace in my direct line of sight. And below me, a fake tropical beach, four pools, two with waterfalls, one that looks like a fish from above.

Nowhere is like Vegas as far as I can tell. My first night here, I was completely overwhelmed; nothing can prepare you for the mix of revealingly-dressed young women, elderly couples, scantily clad women and men dancing atop bars to bad 90s music, and all the bells and whistles that haunt the lobby of the hotel/casino. All the noise, all the people. And this is as true at 10 am, even if less crowded, as it is at 11 pm. At night there are just more drunk people wandering around. Last night my aunt and I walked the strip. We saw brandy snifters and abandoned hurricane glasses, streets littered with the calling cards of legalized prostitution, young Latin American men and women handing these cards out to drunk men wandering past, 21-year old kids running around drunk and tightly dressed, a girl playing a television script on her boyfriend for talking to one of the attractive scantily clad hustling women.

I won $56 this morning. I think I have gotten all I need out of Vegas.

It is a beautiful area of the country. A stunning desert mountain region with this oasis of lush watered trees. The Bellagio has water works displays out front in the day. Yesterday one of them was played to the tune of “Proud to Be an American.” Because where else but the United States of America could you have such water displays in the desert.

And the desert – is that why the Ancient Near East is so played upon by so many of the casinos – the Luxor, the MGM Grand to a certain extent, Aladdin’s, the Mirage, the Sahara. Something about the ancient near eastern world bespeaks such opulence to the amnesiac American mind. Somewhere perhaps such desire for possession of this forgotten association launches the Bush family to seek more than just crude oil. Perhaps the Bible is not all the motivation – perhaps Babylon still rests as a center of wealth, of excess, of riches and personal freedoms beyond imagination, and perhaps that is why it occupies an imaginative space of desire.

Yet that is what makes Vegas so complex; it is here where all of the Hollywood-admitted-yet- “good-girl"- repressed desires of our Puritan capitalist selves are born out. We have watt after watt of electricity pumping at all hours where men’s and women’s bodies can be purchased and watched and videorecorded and where we can even get married or divorced in a rapid fashion; where thought is something to be done later. It is time to live on impulse now. Where we have all been trained to go and deposit coins since going to Showbiz Pizza or Chuck E. Cheese’s for our seventh birthdays. If they only had skee-ball, we would all be gamblers crashing before the casino giants.

At the same time Vegas is so refreshingly open and unabashed about its roles in the world. The Disney version of ancient Egypt, of New York, Paris, Venice, ancient Rome stands before us all to tour around, to imagine we live lives other than the ones we do. Vegas openly promises the escape and openly bears the falsity of it in the plastic statues. We all play scripts to excess here, just like the girl pushing her boyfriend for talking to the woman in red. We can relinquish all need to think our moments through, that is both the relief and the punishment of Vegas.

Yet, as I said, there is something so honest in such scriptedness. All of American life has become scripted of late. Very few moments happen in anyone’s life where they do not have the appropriate movie-popsong-television-realitytelevision script for the moment. Here it is an admittable fact of life.

And there are churches too. Nonpushy evangelicals standing on street-corners with “God Is…” pamphlets and priests standing quietly in the shade of the strip, collecting money for homeless shelters. Because Vegas has more homeless people too.

I cannot tell you what Vegas is. I can only tell you what happened to me. But it is 1:45 pm on Saturday now, and I sit in my room reading Orlando Patterson’s Freedom, doing homework, typing away at my computer.

10.02.05

Today, I had wanted to write about Penn and Teller. I saw them Friday night, and I wanted to discuss postmodern culture and my generation. What does it say that you can have magicians performing in Vegas for whom a large part of their act is showing how they do the “magic” they do, convincing you not to believe them or anyone who claims to be doing magic of all sorts, and more than that, convincing you to recognize the falsity of the entertainer-entertained exchange. Penn said point blank that “I am a liar.” They also did a little flag burning magic trick (without actually burning the flag) just to point out how meaningless the flag is next to the meaningful “freedom” of the bill of rights.

That is what I had wanted to write about today, so I felt an obligation to mention it. All I can think about though is what happened just before 2:30 am this morning.

Before starting this act of re-membering, I do want to question exactly what we value in capitalist freedom. Fresh from reading Orlando Patterson, I am forced to ask about the costs of “sovereignal” capitalist freedom – the desire to pursue your own freedom even beyond the point where you severely hinder the freedoms of others.

Early this morning, my family found itself the victim of a uniquely capitalist crime, and perhaps Vegas is home to all the sorrows of capitalism. The Marxian adage we might all want to think about is how capitalism makes people rich in needs. In Vegas, the need for more money is evident amidst all the flashing dollar amounts on every casino floor, even in the airport slot machines.

It is perhaps not surprising then that sleeping in a Vegas hotel, I woke up to find my aunt screaming at an intruder, an intruder who entered while we slept and had just enough time to steal all my aunt’s cash before bolting out of the room. Luckily nothing worse happened to any of us, even though my aunt chased the woman and her male partner down the hallway.

I feel, however, that this incident was not the only aspect of capitalist sorrows to haunt my family in the early morning hours. The hotel in its greed to protect itself either from culpability (and thus a possible lawsuit) or from some sort of financial scam was patronizing in handling my distraught aunt, my mother, and myself. At first, security tried to tell us not to call the police, that the police would not care about a crime of this minor magnitude. When my mother expressed her legal certainty that this was not the case, the police were called, and a wonderful policeman did a much better job of talking the morning’s events through with my distraught aunt. The hotel, who had no security cameras on the floors or in the stairwells offered us no support other than to give us a new room.

There is no solution, no simple justice equation, no answer to mistakes that were made, whether they be not bolting a door, not having security cameras, or being desperate enough for money to break into someone else's room and take it. I write this not to provide answers or even to expect their appearance; I write in the hope to share my own query about costs the deepest longing for capitalistically construed sovereignal freedom with others and to seek opinions in response.

don't forget to blame your enemies...

AP photo from here.

To give money to the Red Cross, click here:

When disaster strikes human beings always seem to need meaning. I have no wisdom to offer today, no way of finding meaning. I have only outrage that people would claim any of those suffering right now have earned it. Today I read a blogger on the right who accuses New Orleans of earning this tragedy because of their “liberal” ways. Then I read a comment from someone on the left saying that the South earned this because they voted for Bush.

Tragedy is tragic because it’s not fair. It does not happen to people who earned it. So many of those suffering in Louisiana and Mississippi right now are people who were too poor to leave.

I spent two weeks in New Orleans when my aunt used to live there, in 2001. I loved the city. Of the cities I have been to in the U.S.A., New Orleans had the warmest, friendliest population overall. A great variety of people lived there from all religious/ethnic/political stripes. Did people on the religious right deserve mother nature’s wrath because of other people? Does the socialist who only uses public transit deserve to die in a flood because some people voted for Bush?

In truth, Bush did slash funding to SELA (for more information click here) in order to divert money to the war in Iraq, and yes, this probably made things worse for New Orleans (not to mention a lot of the rest of the South than it needed to be). Yet I do not believe that it is the responsibility of people in New Orleans or Gulfport to pay for all of our collective sins (yes I mean all of us who get in our car in the morning and contribute to global warming or all of us who consistently vote for politicians that do not care about state-funded emergency programs). Even Abraham argued to God that a city should be spared if there are “twenty righteous” to be found there (Genesis 18:16ff).

While my own beliefs do hold us as a nation accountable for our contribution to global warming, which has had global weather effects this year on a terrifying scale, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is tragedy because there is no reason to who suffers and who is spared, no logical system of picking out who is righteous and can be saved and who is not and so must be punished.

If you have read this far, may I again urge you to help people with whatever money you may have. Click here for FEMA’s list of donation sites.

Et tu Los Angeles Times?

Much to my horror and sadness, this past weekend the Los Angeles Times made good on its threat to dismantle the opinion section and reinvent the wheel, as it were, with the cutesy “Current” section. Now, I really was hoping that I would like this change, that I could see some cool twenty-first century vision in this new endeavor. My favorite part of the entire new section was, however, Jamie Court’s critique of the section as a blogotorial. I guess I should give props to Bob Sipchen for at least running that piece.

I know that the Los Angeles Times has had to face decreased circulation (note some of the interesting connections made about the mid-90s problems in the hyper-linked piece) and the advertising boycotts of the automotive industry. The Los Angeles Times’ response is, apparently, to change itself to fit some profile seemingly more desirable to the public and General Motors. People who pride themselves on their “free” media should question not only the damage done by our government to the first amendment but the damage done by a kind of unethically protected capitalism (Adam Smith, by the way, thought morality was kind of essential for capitalism – if you don’t believe me, feel free to pick up his writings or a book by Larry Rasmussen). I know that I’m an idealist, but some part of me likes to think that we all still should do things for truth and justice first and capitalist greed somewhere considerably further down the line.

My disappointment in the Los Angeles Times is not just that it would so willingly compromise its content for money the week that the White House press corps actually exercised its spine. It is also that the Los Angeles Times dumbed the opinion section down – they did not just change the content, or institute a more conservative bias, they literally dumbed it down. That’s right, because you, me, and GM and more likely to give our money to a dumber Los Angeles Times. Not only did the new Current section include some less than cogent arguments like “Box office Blues Stem from Blue-State Bigotry,” it included pieces that truly do qualify as “blogotorials.” What place does Joel Stein’s little rant about Hogwarts’ fans being stupid (to which I just have to say, “I’m rubber and you’re glue”) have in a reputable national paper? Should not the Los Angeles Times actually challenge us to think about government, politics, global affaris, etc.? A blog is the perfect place for a terse emotional rant on some obscure point of ire; that’s why I am writing this here and now. I, however, would not advise the Los Angeles Times to publish this my blogpost, no matter how deftly I use the English language.

While I do believe there could be some good in making the opinion section more interactive, I just wish the Los Angeles Times had not sacrificed some great content that really made me confront some crucial issues in the world. I am sad to say good-bye to one of my favorite Sunday morning activities: actually sitting with well-researched, written, and argued opinion pieces that could grant me interesting and different perspectives on the world around me, pieces that could challenge my beliefs and make me think about the truly newsworthy events of the week. I guess I am just going to have to rely on actual blogs for that now.

Patriotic Paradox #12,374

While the House of Representatives has sought to make the burning of the flag of the U.S.A. unconstitutional, Jessica Simpson can wear a cut-up version of the flag as a string bikini. It is considered not just patriotic, but a great reason to "be American."

Backlash Redux

Last Friday Maureen Dowd wrote an editorial for the New York Times describing the tendency of men to prefer subservient women who are caretakers to accomplished, successful women. She discussed the popularity of these portrayals in recent Hollywood cinema, with Spanglish as her test case.

As the daughter of a successful and loving single mother as well as a woman of partially Latin American descent, my objections to Spanglish are legion.

First, as Dowd argues, the Mexican mother-as-maid (Paz Vega) is pitted against the cold-career-woman-white mother (Tea Leoni) for the love of their mutual daughters (Shelbie Bruce and Sarah Steele) and the love of Leoni’s husband (Adam Sandler). In this equation, Leoni appears to be the woman who got it all wrong; her perfectionism and career focus has made her an insensitive mother and an unloving, self-absorbed wife. Meanwhile, Vega becomes the very ideal of the loving, caring mother with whom Sandler falls in love. Women are taught a very cool lesson here, either be a subservient, sensitive, passionate caretaker, or be a cold, self-absorbed, career woman who could lose her husband to her maid.

This tale is made all the worse because of the particular stereotypes now attached to Latina women-as-maids: fiery passion (she yells at Sandler in Spanish at one point) paired with subservience to their men and profound maternal instinct (largely because of the stereotype that Latino males are absentee fathers, also played upon in this movie as I will discuss momentarily).

The involvement of Vega’s daughter (Shelbie Bruce) in the tale only adds to my disgust. The entire movie is narrated through the prism of the daughter’s application essay to Princeton. When Vega moves in with the family for the summer, Bruce is quite charmed by Leoni, who manages to get Bruce a scholarship to the prestigious private high school Leoni’s own children attend. Leoni and Bruce, both strong and intelligent women, seem to find quite the affinity with each other. Meanwhile, Vega rails against it and eventually quits her job in part because she wants to insure that Bruce ends up like her and not like Leoni. Bruce then narrates in her essay that an acceptance to Princeton would not define her because her identity is rooted in her mother. While I agree that an acceptance to Princeton should not define anyone’s life, rooting her identity as being Vega especially in contrast to Leoni is to accept the myth of Western society perpetuated in this film: men can have it all, women can’t. And listen well, Latinas, remaining true to your culture means not being learned or successful; it means remembering your place in structures of white patriarchal dominance. As Musa Dube said of Pocahontas, Vega and Bruce’s characters are clearly the products of the colonizer’s pen.

The glaring abuse of the colonizer’s pen deepens when employing the stereotype of the macho Latino father who abandoned Vega and Bruce. His absence only serves to demonstrate Sandler’s unstoppable goodness as the successful, loving, white male father who did not desert his cruel wife even after she cheated on him.

I would not be as angered by this narrative if its portrayals were not such an accepted part of the reality I live. Many men I encounter assume this tale reveals a deep truth; an intelligent learned woman cannot be spiritual, passionate, or maternal. I have to disagree with this since my mother, who was a better mother than many stay-at-home moms I’ve heard of, is successful, learned, spiritual, passionate, and an excellent mother. Latino men are often erased from narratives as Latino/as are being broadly integrated (not just in CA, NY, or TX) into the front lines of the culture wars; with the re-election of Bush partially thanks to 44% of Latino/as, they are only bound to become more prominent.

What is most perennially upsetting to me is the way that women have always historically been pitted against each other, a strategy that could not work if women did not fall for it. I know a woman who chose not to pursue graduate work because she feared it would prevent her from having a husband and children. I fear that the anti-feminists have already won when we ourselves buy into these things.

Remembering class

Not having lived through all that much of the Cold War, I am not certain exactly what the lasting cultural impacts are upon U.S.A. culture. I hope that the popularity of Thomas Frank’s book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is helping to undo a certain popular aversion to Marxist critiques of U.S.A. culture.

Having grown up in Kansas, I have some difficulty finding Frank’s analysis so incredibly new. I am not certain why everyone is now making such a big deal about it. The only thing truly shocking to me about Frank’s work is that he tries to pass Kansas and Kansans off as a type through which we can understand the rest of the U.S.A. In all fairness, Kansans have been even more religiously zealous, from the first abolitionist settlers to Fred Phelps, than the rest of this already religious nation.

What I think is truly great about Frank’s analysis is that he does raise up a question that can apply to all of the U.S.A. How do the Republicans get lower middle class and working class people to vote for them? In order to engage this question, Frank had to assert a fact commonly ignored in U.S.A. culture, and he points this out himself. Despite all of our beliefs to the contrary and all our patriotic fondness for the capitalist system, class really does matter. By class, neither I nor Frank mean whether you use the salad fork to eat your entrée, or whether you prefer NASCAR to sailboat racing, we mean class in a redefined Marxist consumer analysis, one that has moved from the industrial age to the digital one – how much you make, what you can own, and what you can buy.

In a time when blue collar and now white collar jobs have disappeared or been outsourced overseas (California lost 25,000 jobs in December alone), the sense of the class divide between an elite and those who appear to be on the underside of the capitalist system, has become ever more crucial. Congratulations to Frank for recognizing this and putting words to it. Such a divide, one would think, would offer all those opponents of the WTO and IMF ample opportunity to go into these areas and rally people to the banner of changing the global-capitalist system.

Yet, the point that Frank makes in his book is not only that this did not happen but also that the conservatives have shaped the culture wars in such a way that this could not happen. For these people in Kansas, class is identified not by what you make but by what you buy with what you make and where you spend your Sundays. Frank recognizes the way this class-divide has been cast as an issue of “culture,” as one that will identify the wealthy well-educated Bush as “one of their own” but forget that someone like Bill Clinton really once was.

What Frank does not really do in this book, and what I wish I had some better suggestions for, is offer a solution. He suggests that the Democrats should talk to their base more, as if the working classes are still the Democrats’ base.

I think the problem is a wider cultural one requiring a much broader program than that. Not being a politician or a labor organizer, I am not certain how best to go making all the necessary changes. Obviously, the Democrats if they do not want to die out and merge with moderate Republicans, do need to redefine who they are and maybe try to become a party of the working and middle class again in a way that working and middle class people can actually recognize. Grassroots organizers really do need to renegotiate their spiel so that they can appear to belong to that Kansas culture just as much as Bush seems to. And these organizers need to be out in droves, which requires money, which requires the support of large businesses and wealthy patrons. For this, I do believe we need a return to Marx and the flaws of the Marxist system in order to understand how settling some of the problems of the class question are in everybody’s best interest.

Yet another problem is that of a broader cultural phenomenon. As Jared Diamond argues in _Collapse_, we need to reinvent how we see ourselves if we hope to survive. People living in the U.S.A. need to become willing to learn and then actually learn how to think long-term and think of ourselves as part of a global community. We need to learn to get along with neighbors and allies and people who think differently than we do. We need to let go of beliefs about “American exceptionalism.” How you manage to sell an identity change to the people who most tenaciously cling to Cold War and pre-Cold War views of U.S.A. identity and place in the world, I am not sure.