Acephalous

Because everybody knows there's no casual racism or misogyny on the right.

I went over to Althouse's and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare "April Fools'!" Please ignore comments in which someone talks about trading in white women for Filipina because the former can't be trained; calls strangers "cunts" in front of their kids or justifies calling strangers "cunts" in front of their kids on account of "Alinksyite incivility collapsing into mutual incivility"; sings about it being "time to give the country to the darkies" or advocates that popular means good; claims that there were tea bags at the Boston Tea Party or blames the firing of Don Imus on "the Progressive Jews and the non-Jewish Left" because they were all written by an undercover agent in it for the lulz

Those good folks only wrote those terrible things because I baited them.

Update.  If you haven't read the LGM version of this post you might not realize that, despite how obvious the game I played was, Althouse managed to pwn herself.

Update II.  Performance art!

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

Stuff White People Like Stealing

Considering that

• two Jews from the Bronx, Bill Finger and Robert Kahn (Bob Kane) created Batman
• two Jews in Cleveland, Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, created Superman
• a Jew from Washington Heights, Mortimer Weisinger, created Green Arrow and co-created Aquaman
• another Jew from Washington Heights, Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee), teamed up with a Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), to create the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, Galactus, Doctor Doom, and Iron Man
• a few decades earlier, a Jew from Rochester, Joseph Simon, had also partnered with Kurtzberg, and together they'd created Captain America
• another Brooklyn Jew, William Eisner, is possibly the most important comic artist ever (dayenu); arguably invented the graphic novel (dayenu); wrote two of the most influential theoretical books about comics (dayenu); and has the award for creative achievement in the medium named after him

would it be fair to say that white people stole superheroes from the Jews the same way they'd stolen rock 'n roll from black people?*

*Not really.  This is territory is trod plenty and well, but it's worth rehearsing: Elvis Presley borrowed rock 'n roll from black people, and always returned as much of it as he could promptly and with gratitude.  But he could never give it all back, because from the perspective of white America, it tainted him: anyone that the New York Times could call, as it did Elvis in 1956, a "blues shouter ... imbued with the spirit and style of those Negro singers" clearly had dangerous and unsavory associations. That same year, the Chicago Defender pushed the issue of this affinity to the fore in articles like "Arrival of Elvis Presley No Puzzle to T-Bone Fans," in which Presley's speech was rendered in Negro dialect: "Yew-oo ain't nuthin but a houn' dawg," the paper has him singing; later, he explains his style by saying "Ah'm jus' singin' the only way ah know how."  Claiming, as Eric Lott did in Love and Theft, that Elvis was no better than a Nineteenth Century minstrel; or, as people generally do, that he stole rock 'n roll from black people, misses the point: many black intellectuals, following the lead of black musicians, not only praised Elvis for respecting their tradition, they loved the fact that, via Elvis, that tradition had been embraced by the sons and daughters of die-hard Dixiecrats.  One editorial in the Defender (that I can't relocate at the moment) was a series of winks, nods, and nudges about ceremony in Tupelo at which John Rankin, reputed to be the last white man to utter the word "nigger" in anger at a black man on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, was forced to bestow some sort of honor on Tupelo's most famous son.**

**I'm not sure why the footnote is that much more substantial and academic than the post it qualifies, but I figure that if I can get away with it in a dissertation, I can get away with it on a blog.

On the significance of J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

Learning that J.D. Salinger died a day after learning that Howard Zinn had qualifies as a sufficiently surreal experience for that type of person who very much resembles me.  Catcher in the Rye taught me how to channel my anger into antisocial behaviors—reading books in my bedroom foremost among them—but as I read it with the same critical acumen that led me to wear out not one but two VHS copies of Pump Up the Volume, the less I say about the book the better.  (That and it violates the Five Year Rule three times over.) 

Within two years of reading Salinger, I'd affected all the trappings of The Young Punk Who Would Be Vegan and read A People's History of the United States, but unlike Salinger's novel, Zinn's history resonated with me until my sophomore year of college, when I was disabused of its importance by the man himself.  I had attended a lecture of his and somehow weaseled my way into a dinner that followed.  I told him how significant A People's History had been to my political and intellectual development and that I had read it four or five times and that I was about to start it again when he stopped me short:

"My little book has served its purpose," he told me.  "Perhaps it's time you started on the bibliography." 

He smiled and was about to say something else when he was whisked away by some other sycophant eager to bend his ear, but after talking to other people who had very similar conversations with him, I think I know what he was going to say: namely, that his "little book" was meant more as a point of departure than a destination.  Treating it the way Matt Damon's Good Will Hunting character did (and every newly-minted hipster firebrand does) violates the spirit of its polemic, because the book isn't meant to replace traditional histories so much as supplement them. 

For example, if the significance of the Christian tradition is given short-shrift in the book, it isn't because that tradition's unimportant to the development of the nation, but because a robust canon addressing that issue already exists.  Zinn never intended his book to be an education in itself, but many readers—especially non-serious ones involved in any of a variety of Zinn-friendly scenes—inflated its importance until it became the definitive source for the entirety of American history.  The extensive bibliography in the back-pages indicates that it had no pretensions of being anything of the sort.  

I could prattle on about its faults—foremost among them, Zinn's subscription to a dualism so powerful and pervasive that his accounts of internecine conflicts on the left border on unintelligible—but it is impossible to deny the attraction the book has for young adults whose knowledge of American history comes from the skeletal outlines of a public education.  The simplicity of its dualistic worldview appeals to the adolescent in the first throes of rebellion because that worldview is itself adolescent.  That sounds like an insult, but I mean it in the same sense that Zinn meant what he said to me: A People's History represents a stage in one's intellectual development. 

It was never intended to arrest it.

You can be a winner in the Game of Race!

Sarah Palin's latest pronouncement:

And that double standard is—and that hypocrisy is another reason why so many Americans are quite disgusted with the political games that are played, not only on both sides of the aisle, but in this case, on the left wing, what they are playing with this game of racism and kind of letting Harry Reid's comments slide, but having crucified Trent Lott for essentially along the same lines[.]

Harry Reid stated a political reality that only shocked people who are paid to feign shock: that Americans find black people with lighter skin tones who sound white are more likely to be elected than, say, Frank Pembleton, possibly the greatest character in the history of television. It's a sad truth that having dark skin and sounding different from white people impacts a candidate's electability, but it's a truth nonetheless. What Trent Lott said—what Palin believes to be "essentially along the same lines" of Reid's lamentable political truth—was that he was proud that Mississippi supported a segregationist candidate, and that the if the rest of the country had "followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Moreover, to this day Lott hasn't explained what exactly "all these problems" that would've been avoided had blacks been kept in their place actually are.

So, for Palin, acknowledging a sad political reality is the equivalent of wishing that the Civil Rights Movement had never happened because, for Palin, racism is a game. Not only is it a game, she unwittingly confesses that she and her fellow Republicans are currently very much playing it by themselves, and are annoyed that the Democrats refuse to play along by "kind of letting Harry Reid's comments slide." She wants to play Race because just this once, she believes her team can win. Is it any wonder the large majority of non-white Americans find her and her party reprehensible?

More on race and racialism in Avatar.

While the Na'vi may be blue, the people who played them are not. Consider:

1. Neytiri
2. Tsu'tey
3. Eytukan
4. Moat
5. Horse Clan Leader

It could be the case that all the other models for the Na'vi are white, but it seems clear to me that Cameron chose these actors for the central Na'vi characters according to racialized criteria; i.e. while he didn't necessarily choose them because they weren't white, his vision of a primitive, native culture didn't include white people. The representatives of humanity, however, were not only overwhelmingly white, even the exceptions played to stereotype: Dileep Rao played an Indian scientist and Michelle Rodriguez played a Latina tough.  My point in the previous Avatar post about the film indulging in the white fantasy of becoming the proverbial other is, then, made literal by Cameron's casting decisions: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver and Joel Moore play three white characters who inhabit bodies otherwise occupied only by actors of color. I'm not normally one to invest much of anything argumentative based on what happens on a casting couch, but in this case, Cameron tipped his hand with all the subtlety of an overconfident drunk: the purpose of the avatars is to place white brains in blue bodies that would otherwise be inhabited by black ones.

Stop howling already: I know that, within the film, the purpose of the avatars is to allow humans to breathe on Pandora; however, the humans have masks that can and do fulfill that function. I also know that another purpose of the avatars was to allow human anthropologists to interact with the Na'vi, which is why the xenobotanist played by Sigourney Weaver establishes a planet-side school. For now, set aside Cameron's confused notion of what a botanist does, because while it suggests that his script is, at best, ignorant of departmental niceties or, at worse, internally inconsistent, it could also be the result of the Gaia metaphor, in which the population of the entire planet are semi-conscious functionaries of a fully-conscious tree.  (I kid!)  Focus instead on 1) the fact that the film is called Avatar, and 2) the likelihood that Cameron spent years developing this technology in order to avoid the throwaway line about terraforming required to account for the astonishing frequency of breathable atmospheres on far-flung planets. 

In short, if you believe that the existence of the avatars can be justified on the basis of inhospitable environs, you've not simply placed the cart before the horse, you've put the invention of the wheel before domestication of animals.  Because, as the title indicates, the avatars aren't incidental to the film: they're its raison d'être.  The whole point of the film is to stuff brains in those bodies, so which brains are stuffed into which bodies is not a minor point, it is the point. Moreover, within the narrative, the bodies they were being stuffed into were utterly infantilized: the Na'vi don't think for themselves, as even animal husbandry is beyond them. They require a direct neural connection in order to domesticate an animal.

That they teach humans to be similarly dependent upon a necessarily benevolent planet is, I understand, the point—but it is a terrible one if, as many claim, Cameron wanted to press a message of ecological interdependence.  The Na'vi possess all the agency of a leukocyte: they may respond individually, but they are not, properly speaking, individuals.  As progressive propaganda goes, this rises to the level of what conservatives believe our nefarious motives to be.  That the quasi-coherent leftist politics of the film are intended to be inspirational only makes this incoherence and, more importantly, its dubious racial politics all the worse, because "inculcating dubious racial politics in the next generation of environmental and anti-war activists" doesn't count as a victory for the forces of democratic freedom.  (Or only counts as one in that hilariously limited sense.)  Even in the film, as my friend Aaron argues, the result of such thinking is also infantilizing:

Jake Sully, in other words, is a Western fantasy of spoiled childhood: pure id, he revels in the toys that the world has provided for him without understanding that someone had to make them, without ever questioning his own right to have them. I think that’s why I don’t feel contempt for him, but visceral, gut-level, and troubling disgust. I recognize his desires, because we not only have to get past them to be adults, but because they stay with us. Perhaps we still are, on some level, the sociopaths we were when we were children (that I type this while home for the holidays, in the bedroom I occupied when I was seven, only seems appropriate). Yet it’s also one of the worst aspects of the American cultural tradition that going back to childhood is somehow the fountainhead of political virtue (see, for example, Jefferson, Thomas and Roosevelt, Theodore) because it’s so rarely the childhood of curiosity, games, and sociality that the tradition extols, but rather its reverse, a very particular fantasy of careless anti-social boyishness that tends into misogyny so easily because, to again refer us to Nina Baym, it feminizes the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” that we American boys must seek to be free of by lighting out for the territories.

Finally, let me clarify a few minor concerns about my previous Avatar post:

1. Just because I didn't remember every last detail drummed into my head over the course of three dull hours doesn't mean I didn't see the film.
2. Just because you do remember every last detail doesn't mean that your take on the film is more correct than mine.
3. I chose "JaMarcus Manning" as the figure of the white-brained, black-bodied quarterback because I'm from Louisiana and graduated from Louisiana State University.
4. I know the name "JaMarcus Manning" is racist, not because you told me it was, but because that was my point: the "black quarterback problem" is the result of racist expectations that were only ever operative because they were self-fulfilling.
5. If you take issue with a point I make, fine. If you accuse me of treating you like a student when I defend a point I make, you have issues. Leave me out of them, please, and just argue with me as you would any other stranger on the internet.

"Just take a left after the big black Mammy."

Those would be directions given to me the first time I tried to visit my in-laws without the wife there to navigate.  I hadn't a clue what he meant.  Then, as I crested a hill south of Natchez, I suddenly did:

Texas advertises itself as a "Whole 'Nother Country," but that's only true if you live off a farm-to-market road.  Houston's sprawl is as uniformly bland as the city that extends from Los Angeles to San Diego; but in the actual South, even the metropolitan areas surprise you. 

This is my way of saying: as I'm writing from a location where the power—much less the internet—is intermittent, I'm not going to be able to address the arguments in Avatar thread for a couple of days.  I will do so soon, though, as I value your new low opinion of me. 

Intentions be damned, Avatar is racist (as is praying for and/or to "JaMarcus Manning").

Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist.  Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists).  Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material.  This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it's that too.  I'll address the racial politics more in a moment, but let me address the portrayal of the military (much bemoaned here) first:

It all adds up to crossing a line that I’ve never experienced in a major American film: drawing the audience to cheer the brutal deaths of Americans who are clearly symbolizing the military.

Blackwater/Xe Services LLC is not the military.  Mercenaries are not symbols of the military.  They are a perversion of the military.  James Cameron has an unabashed love for the military (Aliens, The Abyss, etc.) but that love does not extend to those who make war for profit.  It's obvious that the only authentic military man in the film is the protagonist, Jake Sully, who lost his legs in a legitimate conflict.  He turns from the soulless mercenary-logic like a good proxy for the audience, and this is where the racial politics become problematic. 

The titular "avatars" are genetically designed Na'vi bodies that can be remotely piloted by people like Sully with the intent of studying the natives.  (Think anthropological immersion at its most literal.)  The Na'vi are not merely distrustful of "the space people," they're inherently xenophobic, incapable of trusting any sentient being that doesn't look like them.  If that mistrust is justified for some other reason (like a hairy first contact), the film never mentions it, meaning (in a classic case of projection) the humans assume that the Na'vi will be xenophobic before they even meet them.

But the racial essentialism of the film creates a whopper of an unintended thematic irony.*  The planet and everything on it do not simply coexist in a harmonious balance of the New Age variety: they are hard-wired into a single neural network that makes the entire planet into a single entity and "the space people" less like a colonizing mercenary force than a disease.  The humans are to be resisted not because they are economic imperialists (though they are) and not because they glory in militaristic combat (though they do) but because they are different.  They do not belong to the planet and therefore there is no possibility for peaceful coexistence.  The only way humans can be accepted is for them to forsake their humanity and become Na'vi.  (Think literal assimilation.) 

This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling.  The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens.  In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible ... and those assumptions are racist.  In football terms, this is a variation of the black quarterback "problem."

For decades, coaches and scouts wished they could find a black body with a white brain in it.  ("If only someone could find a way to stuff Peyton Manning's brain into JaMarcus Russell's body!")  The essentialist logic at play there is obvious: black people are more athletic than white, and white people are smarter than black.  No matter how descriptive these people thought they were being, in truth they were creating the conditions they claimed to describe: black quarterbacks were increasingly valued for raw athleticism, white athletes for their pocket presence and tactical acumen.  That's an expectations game based on racist expectations ... and it works according to the same logic behind the narrative of Avatar. 

*I'm analogizing race and species here because Cameron's space fable encourages me to do so with all the subtlety of a fry pan upside my head.

I'm not saying Republicans prefer tokenism to diversity...

...but in the series of photographs of Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele and his interns that shani-o linked to this afternoon, we have:

1. Steele and a white guy
2. Steele and a white guy
3. Steele and a white guy
4. Steele and a white woman
5. Steele and a white woman
6. Steele and an Asian-American guy
7. Steele and a white guy
8. Steele and a white woman
9. Steele and a white woman
10. Steele and six white guys, five white women, and one black guy
11. Steele and a white guy
12. Steele and a white guy
13. Steele and a white guy
14. Steele and a white woman
15. Steele and a white guy
16. Steele and a white woman
17. Steele and a white guy

Of the 28 interns Steele posed with, a full 93 percent of them are specularly (and most are spectacularly) white. This isn't to say that the Republican National Committee has a racist internship program; after all, the "diversity" of his interns is also a reflection of the diversity of the applicant pool. Given the lengths to which the GOP goes to appear more inclusive than it actually is, I'm inclined to think those may have been the only non-white people who applied.

RE: Racism and Race-baiting

Update. If you came from over here, you need to note two things: first, that Patrick's only talking about the title of my post, which is odd, because in the body of the post the sarcasm of the title becomes absolutely clear.  So clear, the clarification below is really only for people who only read the title of my original post. Second, Patrick completely ignores the argument of both the original post and this one.  Make what you will of his silence as regards anything other than the sarcastic title of the original post.

Update 2. My oh my, but is Jeff Goldstein an idiot.  He believes that this post is a response not to the post linked to and discussed at length in it, but to something Darleen wrote.  (I suppose he doesn't know what "a side note" is.)  Also, in another bit of proof of him having quit me, he stops posting get-rich-quick schemes and writes a diatribe against someone or other.  (No link, though, to avoid generating an automatic trackback.) 

Via an email conversation, it's come to my attention that if you only read the title of this post, you'd come away with the impression that I was slagging Ed Morrissey for race-baiting.  Because that charge is so loaded, I want to make it absolutely clear that I wasn't.  As the body of the post makes plain, I was pointing out that conservative bloggers are in the unenviable position of race-baiting by default, because no matter what grounds they criticize Obama on, a vocal portion of their commentariat will respond with unveiled racism. 

The example in that post was how a debate over the definition of "diagnosis" devolved into 1) a series of racially-charged remarks about the appearance of Michelle Obama, and 2) a series of complaints that such remarks were being deleted by a moderator eager to distance himself from the racism of his readers. 

By virtue of the fact that anything Ed Morrissey and his ilk write will bait racists into revealing themselves in the comments, every post of his is race-baiting.  I mean that not as a condemnation of Morrissey, but of the vocal subsect of the conservative commentariat who force writers like Morrissey into the unenviable position of race-baiting by default.  Were I forced into a situation in which every word I wrote required a strongly-worded caveat about not responding like a racist, I'm not sure what I do (or even if I could continue to write). 

It goes without saying that not every critique of the administration is racially motivated.  Nor am I even saying that every critique made by openly racist groups is racially motivated—a devout klansman might object to the stimulus on sound philosophical principle—but I am saying that a swath of the conservative commentariat is increasingly annoyed that other conservatives are muzzling their brazenly recidivist reasons for criticizing the current administration. 

On a side note, I found a video of Darleen Click and William Jacobson refuting my previous posts on race:

William A. Jacobson likes making my points for me.

Which is unfortunate, because I'm about to call him illiterate. He claims that I argued that Sarah Palin and her supporters are "racist because there were so few non-whites pictured in the available photos." I did nothing of the sort. My claim, as you can tell by the words I used to write it, was that the "images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch" demonstrates that "her own handlers consider her appeal limited to white people." I even emphasized that first statement in the post, which as we all know is the online equivalent of burying it under a rock behind the fire-pit in someone else's backyard. ("Officer, you can search my property, absolutely, but I assure you that you won't find any claims here.") You would think that a law professor would be able to recognize an argument when he saw one, but apparently not, which is why he provides evidence that bolsters mine. He quotes a reporter from MSNBC:

"I can tell you this crowd today was very, very diverse, a lot of people from different races, ages, all coming to see Palin and wanting get a glimpse of who this lady is that says that she's going rogue."

If this is true—and for the moment, I grant that it is—then Palin and her handlers are deliberately not posting pictures of the many non-white people who attend her events. That, Mr. Jacobson, is the sort of evidence that someone like me would use in support of my claim that the pictures posted to her page are designed to appeal to a specific audience. Because I don't trust you with logic, I will draw the obvious inference for you: Palin's people are excluding photographs of the non-white people who attend her appearances because those photographs aren't intended to appeal to a non-white audience.

Which was my original point.

You do realize that you're helping me out here, Mr. Jacobson, don't you?

He also claims that I "maliciously and falsely referred to one conservative blogger as a 'noted racist.'" But—no doubt for some reason other than it demonstrates that Riehl's a racist—he doesn't reproduce the link that I included to a post demonstrating that Riehl is, in fact, a racist. He also makes the classic debating mistake of assuming facts not in evidence when he claims that I only did so "because this is the internet, and no one is held accountable," his assumption being that were I to meet Riehl on the street, I wouldn't call him a racist. Of course, being that these words are also on the internet, I can't prove to his satisfaction that I wouldn't; however, in a different context, he would point out the fact that because I'm an academic who hangs out with folks like this, I spend all day calling everybody I pass on the street a racist, and since Riehl belongs to that category—how about a little freshman logic, Mr. Jacobson?

SEK calls all people who are on the street a racist.
Dan Riehl is a person on the street.
Therefore, SEK calls Dan Riehl a racist.

I would say that syllogism puts him in a bind, but I think we can safely assume that someone who believed my earlier posts were intended "to smear the crowds at Palin book signings" probably never took freshman logic, and thus isn't even aware that he's in one.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist, Part II

Instead of playing "Count the Non-White People!" with Sarah Palin's photographs of her appearance at Fort Bragg, I will present some statistics about the base and surrounding community:

If you don't take the shovels away from those racists, they'll never quit digging.

Should you like more proof of the dynamic I described in the previous post, you can find it (and my substantial response to it) here.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist.

In the comments to a long, inaccurate attack on those who consider Palin evidence that the conservative movement is trending stupid, Darleen Click claims that those who point out the extreme whiteness of Palin supporters "reveal a great more about [themselves] than Palin." Because such people notice race at all, they're insufficiently colorblind and therefore more racist than Click, who merely advocates creating and maintaining structural inequalities that disproportionately affect people who just happen to not be white.

Set aside for a moment the fact that Click labors under the delusion that noticing people of color is more racist than harming them and remember that 1) the figure she defends, Sarah Palin, is using her publicity tour as a prelude to a 2012 presidential bid launch, and 2) candidate Palin is posting photographs of the people she meets on her Facebook page, meaning that these are not images produced by a liberal media elite out to make her look like her appeal is limited to white people but images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch. Time to play "Count the Non-White People"!

Dan Riehl? Still a racist, only now a homophobic one.

Last month, I documented Dan Riehl's reaction to the perceived threat posed to him by, in his words, "pretty young, not that big [black] kids" who never confronted him. He responded, as conservatives of his stripe do, with some juvenile homophobic "humor." Point being, because I'm not inclined to give demonstrably puerile racists the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine my reaction when I read the following in his recent post about ACORN:

Breitbart's video busts told us what they do best. The pathetic part in all this is that they were not just allowed, but encouraged to run wild on taxpayer funding by corrupt liberals, including Obama. They should all hang together if you ask me. How long will it be before corrupt Democrats find a way to back door them the money? I bet they're accustomed to the back door. Maybe Barney Frank should spearhead the effort?

In the two short sentences I emphasized, Riehl manages to 1) invoke the language of lynching against the first black President and a predominantly black organization, and 2) equate illegal activity with the sexual practices of homosexual men. He will protest that the latter doesn't make him a homophobe (despite the overt association of homosexual sex with a criminal act) any more than his call for a metaphorical posse to host a metaphorical lynching is evidence of racism. He will be wrong: the fact that the first metaphor that occurs to him when criticizing blacks is a hanging party tells us that when he disagrees with blacks, he couches his disagreement in terms of stretched necks and strangled bodies. People for whom that is an instinctive response are people who are racists. Therefore ...

Exactly how long is a "coming year"?

I only ask because this plus this could make for quite the combination.

Be nice, now. The English language is not Ed Morrissey’s strong suit, and he at least makes a show of reining in the racist comments he knowingly baits from his audience.

Update. If you came from over here, you need to note two things: first, that Patrick's only talking about the title of this post, which is odd, because in the body of the post the sarcasm of the title becomes absolutely clear.  So clear, in fact, that my later clarification is really only for people who only read the title of this post. Second, Patrick completely ignores the argument of both this post and my clarification.  Make what you will of his silence as regards anything other than the sarcastic title of this post.

It seems Mr. Ed Morrissey caught President Obama fibbing again. See, Michelle Obama said this:

I will never forget the time eight years ago when Sasha was four months that she would not stop crying. And she was not a crier, so we knew something was wrong. So we fortunately were able to take her to our pediatrician that next morning. He examined her and same something’s wrong. We didn’t know what. But he told us that she could have meningitis. So we were terrified. He said, get to the emergency room right away.

Which the New York Times reported thus:

In her speech, Mrs. Obama also told the story of how her daughter Sasha would not stop crying when she was 4 months old. A doctor’s visit revealed she might have meningitis; she ultimately did not, but the illness produced a scare.

So far, so consistent: something was wrong with Sasha Obama; she was brought to a pediatrician; the pediatrician told her parents she could have meningitis and advised them to take her to the hospital. But Morrissey is suspicious because

[i]n a speech to nurses just eight days earlier, Barack Obama told the story quite a bit differently (emphasis mine):

When our youngest daughter, Sasha, was diagnosed with meningitis when she was just three months old, it was one of the scariest moments of my life. And we had to have a spinal tap administered and she ended up being in the hospital for three or four days. And it was touch and go, we didn’t know whether she’d be permanently affected by it. It was the nurses who walked us through what was happening and made sure that Sasha was okay.

Well, she wasn’t diagnosed with meningitis. How hard is it to get the facts straight so that both Obamas tell the same story?

I know what you’re thinking: this is the kind of close-reading I advocate doing in posts like this. Let it be known, however, that I do not believe paying close attention to language is enough: the conclusions drawn from that analysis abide by the basic rules of logic and the English language. So let me help Mr. Morrissey out:

Brief translation of today’s Sotomayor hearing for those of you without access to C-SPAN 71.

JON KYL (R): I want to go back through the—I’ve read your speeches, and I’ve read all of them several times.

[I am committed to maintaining the appearance that I possess the minimum degree of competence and responsibility required by my office.]

JON KYL (R): You’ve always been able to find a legal basis for every decision that you’ve rendered as a judge?

[By which I mean: I'll read a few speeches a few times, but I can't be bothered to do the work necessary to actually acquire the minimum degree of competence and responsibility required by my office.]

JON KYL (R): Issues which are similar is different, though, from an issue which is the same.

[Just in case I didn't make myself absolutely clear: I don't possess the minimum degree of competence and responsibility required by my office.]

The escape valve of the exotic Negro*

A friend forwards this old solicitation from writers to readers about what they want to see more of in comics:

Pure ridiculousness.  Everybody knows that "City Problems" are "Black People" . . .

---

*Via Lorraine Hansberry in The New Negro.

Mother Jones and the National Review on the dubious quality of Sotomayor’s prose: “This apple’s the worst orange I’ve ever tasted.”

This past week, the attacks on Sotomayor have turned from what she’s said to how she’s said it.  Conservatives began by hammering away at the “weird, unidiomatic constructions and errors of punctuation and grammar [in] her infamous 2001 ‘Wise Latina’ speech.”  Now, I advocate writing conference papers that “contain few expensive words and no Faulknerian feats of subordination” on the grounds that no human being—not even the academic ones—can parse grammatically complex arrangements of jargon on the fly, so I’m more attuned than most to the fact that what passes for grammatical in English as she is spoke doesn’t pass muster in English as she is wrote.  You can imagine, then, why I chafed at Heather McDonald’s criticism of Sotomayor’s unscripted speeches for containing errors endemic to spoken language.  Just because an unscripted speech is transcribed after the fact doesn’t make it written; or, as per my talk, just because it can be put to paper doesn’t mean it was meant to be read there.

Judging the quality of her prose from her speeches, as McDonald and fellow Bench Memos writer Ed Whelan did, is an intellectually dishonest exercise for the simple reason that nobody (outside of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) speaks in paragraphs. Not that this stops the other member of the Bench Memos team, Matthew J. Franck, from claiming Sotomayor “writes” sentences that were clearly spoken aloud; or that those sentences “begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all, or double back and contradict themselves,” i.e. that the transcription of her unscripted speech transcribed sentences that were clearly spoken aloud.

When I taught literary journalism, I always included Mark Singer’s profile of Errol Morris on the syllabus because it works both as an introduction to New Yorker-style profiles and a meta-methodological essay on how to approach transcriptions critically and responsibly.  Here’s Singer transcribing Florence Rasmussen’s speech in Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978):

If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another car. Ya . . . and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don’t know. These kids—the more you do for them . . . He’ s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old . . . I don’t see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars.

Singer responds to her outpouring by noting that

[w]ith an arresting instinct for symmetry, Florence Rasmussen manages to contradict most of what she has to say. It seems that she knows certain things, but then, in the next moment, she trots out contrary information[:] I’d like to drive my car; but I might not even have a car any longer, might have to buy a new one. I bought my son—O.K., he’s not my son, he’s my grandson—a new car; well, I didn’t pay for the whole thing, I gave him four hundred dollars, but anyway I want my money back.

As viewers of The Fog of War (2003) know, this technique works as powerfully on former Secretaries of Defense as elderly Floridians, not because either is particularly muddleheaded, but because Morris takes advantage of the infelicitous glitches that accompany the spontaneous production of spoken language.  McDonald, Whelan, and Franck seem not to understand how language works.  They scoured “virtually all [Sotomayor's unscripted] speeches on the Senate website” and discovered damning evidence that they were, in fact, unscripted speeches; then, they lambasted those transcripts of her unscripted speeches for failing to meet the standards demanded of the written word, which proved to them that Sotomayor is “a mediocrity as a writer.” Whelan even suggests she’s a hypocrite for “present[ing] herself as a stickler for good grammar” when her speeches contain constructions that would be ungainly, if not outright ungrammatical, on the page.  How about we hoist Whelan by his own petard?

Well, it’s an unguarded moment where she says what folks on the left think which, their job is to use judicial robes to make sound policy and the law is largely a vessel for them to fill with their own preferences.

Sure, very much along the same lines, talking about what he calls the criterion but which selecting judges.

Well, how is that honoring people who put their lives at risk in public service and, look, at 9/11 we understood for a while what firefighters do.

Whelan clearly offends Franck’s standards: he “writes sentences that begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all.” The first sentence subordinates a clause about as clunkily as you can imagine; then you read the second sentence, observe that it doesn’t even include the subordinate clause it introduces, and marvel at the paucity of your imagination.  I suppose that second sentence meets Franck’s standard on a technicality—the sentence defies the laws of grammar and stops before it has a chance to trail off without saying much of anything—but that third sentence turns on a dime “and, look,” informs us that we know “what firefighters do.” Does that count as “much of anything”?

They do eventually get around to criticizing Sotomayor’s prose on the basis of what she’s actually written: they find that while it’s not “ungrammatical,” it is “tedious and ‘impenetrable.’” That link leads to Stephanie Mencimer’s article in Mother Jones, in which she pings Sotomayor’s prose for “rarely hit[ting a] sort of breezy cadence [because she] devotes the bulk of her legal analysis to quotes from statutes, regulations, and other opinions ad nauseam[.]” How she’ll legislate from the bench when she’s busy citing dull precedent is as mysterious to me as, for example, how a prose-scold could write “quote” instead of “quotation” in the middle of a complaint or believe Diane Wood’s summary of Merchant of Venice signifies much of anything in the Age of Wikipedia.

In the end, the case against Sotomayor basically amounts to this: on the one hand, her speeches betray all the ungrammatical tics common to spoken language, and if you treat those speeches as prose, you must conclude that she’s a poor writer; on the other, the prose of her legal opinions isn’t ungrammatical, but because it betrays the tedious tics common to lawyerly prose, you must conclude she’s a poor writer.  You see where this is headed.  If word leaked out that “Ed Whelan” was actually Sotomayor’s pseudonym, the Bench Memos team would argue that, because Whelanmayor did all that I documented above, you must conclude that s/he’s a poor writer.  Were it then revealed that Whelanmayor did Diane Wood one better and actually wrote Merchant of Venice, the Bench Memos team would claim that, in light of the difficulty of Shakespelanmayor’s prose, the Western Canon requires immediate revision and you must conclude s/he’s a poor writer . . .

(x-posted.)