April 2007

I got an email from Babe the Blue Ox recently, and he said:

I write about the fatal weakness in the hillary candidacy. My thinking is that people really will vote for a woman, and the opponent will be weak, and everybody in America wishes her husband was still president. But, there is one potentially insurmountable obstacle: she has to have a running mate, and the public is going to experience deep mental trauma at the prospect of a man, any man, playing #2 to a woman. The juvenile american mind will see them as a kind of “couple,” and in that context she will be cemented as a ball-busting battle-axe, and the VP will carry a mantle of shame, and people will have a secret revulsion that will result in a last minute inability to pull the lever in the voting booth.

But I think the solution really is Obama. The reason is, his blackness, jackie robinson-ness, his “rock star-ness” (why does everyone say this “rock star” thing about him? Does it just mean he’s hot? He does have a kind of balls, I mean really in a sexual sense, that we haven’t seen since Kennedy. But mainly, I think there is a subtle displacement here, where “rock star” stands for the real referent “sports star.” The concepts of “Tiger Woods” and “Barack Obama” have secretly become confused in the collective psyche.), these category memberships overwhelm and obscure his “maleness,” so that hillary can get away with it.

Kinky, don’t make me come kick your ass. Sorry you’re close and personal with the big jerk there, but if you won’t let sleeping dogs lie, I gotta come after ya. First of all, I view your charactarizing the name-calling of the Rutgers University black varsity basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” as ridiculous is the very problem we’re trying to address here. They made it all the way to the finals on hard work, scholarship, integrity and guts. It’s way beyond ridiculous. It’s a national dialog we’re in, we are trying to say it is not OK to knock people down like that. I don’t care a whit about whatever extraneous information you’re about to impart on me on what a righteous dude Imus really is, he’s made a career of being a shock jock, and he was an asshole for doing what he did and you’re one for trying to minimize it. It’s not ridiculous to synthesize the key problem this country has in one offhand comment; it’s criminal. And don’t excuse it as an accident. The guy’s a pro. It was calculated to hurt and to be funny, and it did and I’m sure to a few Bubba’s it was, but the bottom line was that it revealed more than the guy bargained for. Don’t make light of it. It made reference to a major belief in this country, that black people are scum. Remember Earl Butt’s comment, which really was a joke, about black men wanting loose shoes and a warm place to take a dump? Or Al Campanis’s comment that black people lack the fundamentals to be baseball managers? They both deserved to be fired for those comments, and were, but they aren’t nearly as harsh as Imus’s. Butt’s was referencing an already existing joke. And Bavasi said he meant that blacks never got the education or training to be managers, which considering that he’s the guy who brought up Jackie Robinson, I believe him. But tough; he still deserved to lose his job. Why? Cuz white people brought hundreds of thousands of black people over from Africa on slave ships, and you gotta deal with that fact. Whitey whipped and beat and sold human beings as property for hundreds of years, then treated them literally as 2nd class citizens for most of the remaining time. Once you’ve got that kind of a track record, you gotta skate on thin ice for awhile. It’s only right. It’s not ridiculous; it’s deadly serious. And it’s exactly what we don’t need. It fuels the flames of hate, and it’s not OK.

Your next point, that rappers make similar references, is actually not quite true, but anyway, so what? Two wrongs don’t make a right. Who cares if there’s a double standard.

Now on to your last point, raging against people (who are trying to protect people) as being PC. You write: “Political correctness, a term first used by Joseph Stalin, has trivialized, sanitized and homogenized America, transforming us into a nation of chain establishments and chain people.” I beg to differ. I think political correctness, Stalin notwithstanding, has saved this country. Political correctness says it’s not OK to rip people apart in public and deny them their humanity based on the color of their skin. America was created for the sole purpose of what today we would call being politically correct. Politically correct is one of those funny Republican words, like pro-life, or right to life, that makes you think you don’t want to be on the wrong side of it. PC makes it sound like it’s a sissy thing. An uptight thing. Freedom on one side — PC on the other. But let’s really look at what PC means.

Thanks to the constitution, and supreme court rulings upholding it, it’s politically correct not to torture people. Also not to wiretap people, or search their homes without a search warrant. The Miranda Act, that forced cops to read people their rights before beating the shit out of them was one of the great politically correct acts of this country. Outlawing hate sppech: policitally correct The Emancipation Proclamation, saying black people were’t actually 3/5ths a person: a great act of politicaly correctness. Giving women the right to vote: politically correct. Not calling Japanese people Japs, or outlawing signs that said: no jews, no dogs, no niggers, which my father remembers seeing all around Florida. That’s the Policitaly Correct police doing their job. The voting rights act, saying you couldtn’t administer a test to black people to see if they were allowed vote, also politically correct. It goes on and on. All the way back to the Pilgrims, coming to a new land where they could be free to worship as they wished, is really a desire to live in a land where there was respect for others, which is all the PC thing really amounts to.

See, PC is not about intolerance. It’s about ensuring conditions where we actually can and do tolerate each other. PC is not about stopping people from being free. It’s about stopping people who want to stop people from being free. To be PC is to question when we allow it to be OK to oppress each other. “The PC police are telling me I can’t go fag bashing!” Yes! Exactly! They are limiting your freedom to be intolerant! This is a very complex notion in America, but it has a long philosophical background: you’re free except to the extent you limit others’ freedom. Or stating it backwareds, the only thing it’s OK to hate is hate.

Kinky’s piece to me really misses the point. There’s nothing in it that addresses the core issue: There are some lines that when you cross them, they stay crossed. My grandpa used to always say: you can’t take back something you said. True enough.