Police Lies, Girl Dies: The Murder of 7-year-old Aiyana Jones: video tells what the police officer (terrorist) won't

Video

TV crew may have captured shooting of Mich. girl

Events leading up to the shooting death of a seven-year-old girl at the hands of a Detroit officer may have been videotaped by a crime-reality series camera crew that was with police as they searched a family home for a homicide suspect.

[26 May 2010 Update which I found on La Reyna's Journal, here, on Aiyana's funeral.]

I remember when "the OJ case" broke, and white Amerikkka refused to believe--REFUSED TO BELIEVE--that white het male supremacist police forces across the country DO NOT serve the African American community. They assault and harass the African American community, with tremendous force, gun power, might, local and State protection. I was younger and, in some sense, whiter. There was no question in my mind that O.J. Simpson murdered two people: his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and the man who, along with Nicole, fought to stop him, Ron Goldman. I also have no trouble at all believing any husband has the privacy and institutionalised, and sometimes religion-backed power to murder their wive, or rape her, or abuse her in any number of ways. I believe O.J. Simpson murdered two people, and was a man who abused a woman, to death. And I believe the LAPD and many other police departments across the U.R.A., are racist as hell, and Arizona is going to continue to prove it. So, tragically, does this case here, in which a police officer fired into the home of a girl, killing her. 

I doubt, though, that in fifteen or twenty years, white Amerikkka will remember the name of Aiyana Jones. Maybe that's partly because there are too many names Black girls and women murdered men, including by WHM supremacist police forces across the U.R.A. But I hope we do remember her and don't let her death be "just one more casualty"--for there is nothing casual at all about killing a girl. Will white history books tell the story of this "noncombatant" child paying the price The White Man has placed and kept over the head of each and every person of color to be forced onto or off of this land? Will her name go down in history as the case that broke loose the grip of the bloody strangling hands of white people who, I fear, won't let go until every last person of color is either enslaved or dead. With regard to Arizona's newest racist policies, Jessica Yee asked on a feminist magazine website what constitutes a social justice or human rights issue being feminist. I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I can say this, to every profeminist man out there: the murder of Black girls by white male supremacist police officers counts as a profeminist issue. Genocide and gynocide are bound to each other in practices and policies supported by whites and men in "my" country. How, one might ask, is the murder by the police of Aiyana Jones NOT a profeminist issue? And in what reality are these police officers and the ones who supported the bombing of MOVE members, not terrorists endangering the lives of U.S. citizens? And why won't the U.S. government respond with force against "our" terrorists the way they do, increasingly indiscriminately, against Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and Arab people anywhere?

Click on the title just below to link back to where I first read this story, which is where the video above was found also.

Aiyana Jones case, attorney says Video shows police fired into Detroit home

By COREY WILLIAMS and ED WHITE

The Associated Press
Tuesday, May 18, 2010; 12:39 AM 

DETROIT -- Police who carried out a raid on a family home that left a 7-year-old girl dead over the weekend were accompanied by a camera crew for a reality television show, and an attorney says video of the siege contradicts the police account of what happened.

Geoffrey Fieger, an attorney for the family of young Aiyana Jones, said he has seen three or four minutes of video of the raid, although he declined to say whether it was shot by the crew for the A&E series "The First 48," which has been shadowing Detroit homicide detectives for months.

Police have said officers threw a flash grenade through the first-floor window of the two-family home, and that an officer's gun discharged, killing the girl, during a struggle or after colliding with the girl's grandmother inside the home.

But Fieger said the video shows an officer lobbing the grenade and then shooting into the home from the porch.

"There is no question about what happened because it's in the videotape," Fieger said. "It's not an accident. It's not a mistake. There was no altercation."

"Aiyana Jones was shot from outside on the porch. The videotape shows clearly the officer throwing through the window a stun grenade-type explosive and then within milliseconds of throwing that, firing a shot from outside the home," he said.

A&E spokesman Dan Silberman said neither he nor anyone else from the network would comment about the case, and he denied a request by The Associated Press for the footage.

Detroit police were trying to obtain the film crew's footage, Assistant Chief Ralph Godbee said Monday.
Fieger said the investigation into what happened during the raid "needed to go no further than the videotape."

"The videotape shows clearly that the assistant police chief and the officers on the scene are engaging in an intentional cover up of the events," Fieger said. He said more than one camera was recording at the scene, and that the footage includes sound.

Police arrested the target of the raid, a 34-year-old man suspected of killing a 17-year-old boy, in the upstairs unit in the two-family home. Police had warrants to search both properties, and family members of the slain girl were seen going in and out of both on Monday. The suspect has not been charged, and it was not immediately clear what relationship he had to the slain girl.

The case has been handed over to the Michigan State Police to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said Monday.

Gail Dines on Playboy and How Pornography Hijacked Our Sexuality

This is the cover of Gail Dines' most recent book:

What follows is from CounterPunch, *here*. But first, a photograph of the author.

[photo of Gail Dines is from here]

May 17, 2010

"Then the Shutter Falls, You See All In 3D ... "

Not Your Father's Playboy

By GAIL DINES
Playboy’s June issue features a 3D centerfold - complete with the requisite geeky 3D spectacles. This latest gimmick, just a few months after their Marge Simpson feature, speaks to desperate times for the magazine. Hollywood certainly got a boost from Avatar’s 3D experience, but Playboy’s circulation has plummeted from more than 3 million in 2006 to about 1.5 million today, and is never going to be a favorite with the younger porn crowd. Playboy’s trademark soft-focus images, even in 3D, of women wearing coy smiles and little else, are no match for the industrial strength porn that is now all over the internet. Boys and men brought up in the internet age have very different tastes than their fathers, whose own access to porn was limited by the amount they could pilfer from their fathers or older brothers. Today, access is unlimited anytime anyplace, from computer screens to cellphones, and this  cheap, anonymous accessibility has sent demand soaring. 

When Playboy first came out in 1953, many thought that Hefner was on his way to prison and the magazine was destined to die a quick death. Instead, Hefner became a media celebrity and Playboy was such a success that it helped to lay the foundation for a multi-billion dollar porn industry. What made it a success was the willingness of companies to advertise in Playboy. While skittish at first about placing their ads in a porn magazine, within a few years of publication Playboy was seen as a perfect environment by corporations to advertise products aimed at the upwardly mobile middle-class male. Flush with ad dollars, Playboy seemed untouchable in the 1950s and 60s as it built an international empire. 

In 1969 a full page ad appeared in the New York Times featuring a bunny in the crosshairs of a rifle. The caption read “we’re going rabbit hunting.” This was an ad for Penthouse magazine, which would hit the newsstands later that year. The next few years saw Playboy and Penthouse battle it out to see which one could be the best selling porn magazine in this country. Their theater of war was the female body, with each trying to produce the more sexually explicit magazine. In August 1971, Penthouse carried its first full-frontal centerfold and in January 1972 Playboy did the same.  

The real winner of this conflict was a strip club owner from Ohio. Always the savvy businessman, Larry Flynt saw that the Playboy and Penthouse war had pushed the envelope on what was considered acceptable mainstream porn imagers, and Hustler was born in 1974. Known for its explicit imagery, its tasteless humor and its overt contempt for women, Hustler set a new standard for the porn industry that ultimately helped open up the hardcore market. By the time the internet hit, these three magazines had laid the economic, legal and cultural groundwork for the images that now make up much of the mainstream porn industry. 

What is out there today may shock many not familiar with porn websites. As boys and men click around today’s popular sites they are assaulted by images of body-punishing sex that pushes women’s bodies to their limit. Gone are the coy smiles and in their place are women saying they love it and begging for more. But if you look carefully, some are grimacing, others crying and many look uncomfortable as their body is penetrated, pummeled and pounded by any number of men as they call her a whore or a slut. This is available to anyone who can turn on a computer. 

Called Gonzo by the industry, it is not your father’s Playboy. It is cruel and brutal and it creates a taste for harder and harder porn. One Gonzo producer told Adult Video News that “One of the things about today’s porn and the extreme market, the gonzo market, so many fans want to see much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something different.” This is a real problem for the industry because it has done just about everything you can do to a woman’s body. When I interviewed producers at the Adult Entertainment Expo held every year in Las Vegas, they told me that this was an industry fast running out of ideas. This particular producer’s latest movie showed a woman being anally penetrated as she lay in a coffin.

In this world, Playboy seems rather quaint in its sexism.  It is a throwback to a bygone era when men had their porn delivered in brown paper envelopes. Playboy helped pave the way for today’s porn and during the process, made itself obsolete. 

Gail Dines is a professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College and chair of American Studies. A nationally known lecturer and author, she is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture. Her new book, Pornland: How Pornography Has Hijacked out Sexuality, will be published in July by Beacon Press.  She can be contacted at gdines@wheelock.edu

I Spit in the Global White Man's Eye: Dr. Patrick D. Hazard Apparently didn't get his Doctorate in Literature or, even, Reading Comprehension

  [This poster is from here]

(I can think of many people I'd place much higher up the Rampant Egomania List than Barry Manilow, Celine Dion, and Rick James. Bill O'Reilly, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, to name but four.)

I'll own right away that I've rather had it with white male academic blowhards. Forgive the redundancy in the moniker. Academic blowhards inevitably means white men of a certain "station", in my experience of them. The "station" they seem to get off at or collective move to is Egoville, which is a traveling town perpetually roaming around somewhere in the white, white West.

I recently had an interaction with a Men's Studies dood that confirmed most of what I know to be an unfortunate consequence of a life spent with one's head up the Ass of The Academy. And let me be clear: I don't mean all college or university education when I speak derisively of The Academy. T.A. has specific meaning for me; it is the social place, among the self-appointed intellectual elites, where white male supremacy is maintained and self-promoted as Intellectual Greatness, Brilliance, and Genius. It is the educational sphere and network, where back-patting and psyche-stroking are taken to the most aptitudinally nepotistic levels. (Go ahead and check it, you PhDs of Presumptuous Phuckery. "Aptitudinally" is a word in the English lexicon.) You aren't "anybody" unless you're read "so and so". And "so and so" is inevitably someone who was deeply profoundly, influenced by a "great" dead white man.

The Men's Studies prof had the nerve to argue in his own "profeminist" favor by quoting Rousseau. Because, well, only Great White Men uttered anything worth quoting about "The Human Condition". I called his ass out on it, and he got about as miffed and defensively offensive as anyone I'd encountered who is supposed to be able to engage on "a more disciplined intellectual level". Alas, those letters after the name, or the prefixes before it, do tend to fall away as soon as someone calls you on your flagrant use of bare-naked privilege.

But let us return now to the one living "Dr." Patrick D. Hazard, who is obviously eager to toot his own academic horn and poof up his über-privileged white male supremacist feathers by dredging up his own writings from decades prior. As you'll see, he is clearly capable of English speaking, if not English comprehension. He resides, when not traveling the world after he "took early retirement" (the smug fuck), in Weimar, Germany.

This is a biographical sketch of him I found *here*. One imagines he might feel a tad too much like the emperor without attire should his name get mentioned without some academic letters before or after it.

Dr.Patrick D.Hazard was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he was found in an abandoned Kellogg’s Corn Flakes carton. His Ph.D. (1957) is interdisciplinary in American Civilization: two fields in Am Lit, his specialty; Am Art and Architecture, Am Philosophy and its European antecedents; Am Economic History.

    He has a special interest in the humanities and mass media, for which he held a Ford Fellowship  in New York (1955-56),where he became radio TV editor of Scholastic Teacher 1955-61), Carnegie Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania 1957-59 to create a new course on “The Mass Society” for the Department of American Civilization (1957-59), wrote the first curriculum of the Annenberg School  of Communications at Penn (1959-61), where he taught the history of mass media, until appointed first director of the Institute of American Studies at the East West Center, U. of Hawaii, Honolulu (1961-62), and taught Am Lit, film, and media at Arcadia U,1962-82, after which he took early retirement to begin a second career as a cultural critic.

    He has written for newspapers in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Butte, Salt Lake City, Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Oakland, Tokyo, and London. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, American Heritage, Variety, Asahi Evening News, and The European. He has done radio for NPR, advised Time Life and Encyclopedia Films which BBC films to distribute in America, and wrote a quarterly summary for Contrasts, the TV magazine of  British Film. He has appeared on two TV series for University of the Air, WFIL-TV,Philadelphia.

    For the past ten years he has lived in Weimar, Germany, where he has a German wife, Hildegard, and a 17-month-old son, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Hazard. He has just finished a book on Walter Gropius, Bauhaus: Myths and Realities. He is now working on an autobiography, Dumb Irish Luck: A Memoir of Serendipities, and an anthology of 50 years of his thinking, Hazard-at-Large”: A Humanist in Mass Culture, 1955-2005.

I'll admit right away to having exceptionally (and fortunately) limited exposure to his apparently massive (or is it bloated) intellect. This swollen, turgid intellect, on display in a blogpost copied and pasted below, shows off his stunning levels of ignorance and arrogance: the conjoined twins of the social dominants' collective consciousness. Such a combination does nothing to assuage those of us who have known HaShoah survivors that the Good Citizens of Germany have learned much since their parents and grandparents murdered millions of people. Then again, this man isn't German. He's an ex-patriot of the U.S. I'll wager that the Germans have learned more than have U.S. white male citizens about our own fathers', grandfathers', and great grandfathers' atrocities, committed on far greater and grander and deadlier scales, both in the past and through to this day.

While there are, no doubt, some academically trained U.S., German, and other non-euro white men who care deeply about both the arts and humanity, who demonstrate a reasonable commitment to fairly discussing members of oppressed classes as fully human, deep thinking people--perhaps even capable of greatness, brilliance, and genius--Dr. Patrick D. Hazard is not among them. I conclude this based on how he obnoxiously presents himself and describes others below (him).

Pat Hazard seems to care far more about putting down some feminists while getting terribly excited about obstrusive human female nipples and magnificent representations of "the vulva". Men, in increasingly bizarre ways, seem to be obsessed  with parts of women's bodies and oblivious to the harm done to women of only discussing women as if they were a body part here or there. What a waste of a "higher" education.

Dr. Patrick D. Hazard has this to say about himself:

"I read, write, and roam from my villa in Weimar where I live with my Ossi Frau Hilly and my three year old third son, Danny."

His blog is called "My Global Eye" and you can find the post I'm responding to *here*. The post follows. And after that, a response from... guess who?

Monday, 17 May 2010

A Kook's Tour of St. Paul's Art

In the melioristic tradition of "if you're stuck with lemons, make lemonade," St. Paul turns both frozen cheeks each end of January and stages an icy Winter Festival (Jan. 24-Feb. 4--phone 612-297-6985). I was recently spying there to see what the chicken-hearted, hot-blooded indoor types like myself could do to get in out of the cold. Here's the thaw plan.

The Minnesota Museum of Art has three irresistible shows on view for the temperature-timid. Begin at the Landmark Center, that floriously recycled Romanesque old Federal Building kitty-corner from the St. Paul Hotel on Rice Park. Benjamin Thompson's Ordway Theatre and Music Center and a beaux artsy Public Library complete the neighbors on the square at Fifth and Market.

Both the SPPL and the Landmark Center are prim pickup points for the free weeklies and other cultural orientation materials that distinguish St. Paul as one of the grandest self-promoting cities in the country.

The Landmark has (until January 28) a perfectly splendid show on one of my favorite sculptors, Gaston Lachaise, under the randy rubric, "20th Century Venus: Sculptures and Drawings by GL." Man, was that guy into nipples and labia. With one fell swoop of his pen his establishes the most erectile nipples in the long and often aroused history of femininity. The labia and monses also positively throb with a sweet sensuality.

I learned from the captions that this Paris-born and -educated genius (his woodworking father moved to the capital from the Auvergne) fell in love with a Canadian woman ten years his senior in the Luxembourg Gardens and lusted after her as far as Boston, where his money ran out.

He soon met and became the main aide of Paul Manship--he of the Rockefeller Center-sans Golden Prometheus. e.e. cummings, that funky poet who wished he was a better painter than he was, touted GL's early work in the influential Dial magazine. Lachaise did reliefs for the RCA Building in 1930, large plaster reliefs for Chicago's Century of Progress in 1932, reliefs for Rockefeller Center's International Building in 1934. Hell, while most American artists were on WPA relief, he sculpted reliefs for more than good dough.

The Philadelphia Art Alliance enjoys the distinction of giving the Deco-dent relief picturer his first one-man in 1932. MOMA in New York gave him a retro in 1935, the year he died. The Minnesota Museum of Art has the neat idea of getting its patrons to kick in enough dough (the museum is free) to buy a cast of his "Dolphins" (c. 1922), one of an edition of six, on display courtesy of the Kraushaar Gallery. I hope they make it.

Men who love women and their bodies we will always have with us, despite temporary aberrations like Andrea Dworkin and her fear-of-fucking cadre. ("Thou shalt not penetrate me," Ms. Dworkin moans, abusing herself selfishly.)

To prick her illusion, she should gaze at GL's "Dynamo Mother" (1933), which is all vulva, an expressionist romp over the woman's greatest blessing to man's kind: her capacity to nurture a fetus to term. Who cares about penis envy? GL's sculpture gave me instant vulva envy. Hey, if GL's love affair with the female body doesn't give you the esthetic hots, you deserve to die of the cold in St. Paul's exterior darkness.

Down the street, overlooking the river (yes, you geographically illiterate Americans, St. Paul is on the Mississippi), is the lovely Deco original Minnesota Museum of Art Jemne Building. It offers a great-view "Deco" restaurant on the fourth floor. Do a powerless lunch there. It also has two more first class art exhibitions.

"The American Landscape," a chrestomathy from Minnesota collections, has the usual national suspects, plus some unknown (to me, who is more than happy to have his ignorance relieved) locals--such as Mike Lynch (1938-  )--whose blue-pink cast "Elevator--29th and Harriet" (1988) is more than a Sheeler updating, it's local color, colored locally--and John Moore ("Quarry," 1987).

And by all means don't miss James Daugherty's "Will Canfield's House." Its Oscar Blemner-like composition and ominousness is delicious.

Wait. There's more. "The Silent Language of Dress" is the kind of show that takes only an attic-full of clothes from all over the globe and an energizing curatorial vision. My fave is an Ainu kimono, not like the first Aino kimono I ever saw--in the Batchelder Museum in Sapporo, Hokkaido, woven of elm bark!--but on the same track, of heavy hemp cloth. Oh, those Ainus were aesthetically hairy creatures, taking the delicate traditions of their Japanese Conquerors and goosing them up most lovingly. They flattered by weirdly misimitating.

And save some time for building inspections. Like the centennial-celebrating St. Paul's Building at Fifth and Wabasha. It's Richardsonianized red sandstone. How I love the aura of that era! 99% of American architecture since has been a precipitate drop into the pits of speculation and peculation. Yucko.

And don't fail to have breakfast at Mickey's Diner, a National Hysterical Building--although its cuisine is better. I always have the "twos" when I drop off the Greyhound across the street: two eggs, two sausages and two pancakes.

Down the street is the headquarters of Minnesota Public Radio, where you can buy Garrison Keilloriana by the freight carload. That's the World Trade Center across the street, and emblem of former mayor George Latimer's ambition to position his blue-collar city in the international markets.

A good cheap, central place to stay is the Civic Center Motel, kitty corner from the Civic Center, except when rock concerts or dog shows (I often confuse the two) prompt them to raise their $40ish rates. The airport is straight out that street, where a $12 cab ride will get you into a bed. A city bus will do the same a little slower for 75 cents.

And don't miss the Ramsey County Court House across the street from MMA/Jemne. In it is Carl Milles' greatest statue, the soaring Mexican onyx Peace Indian.

I love St. Paul, and not just because my granddaughter Sonia lives there. She's just the latest, sweetest frosting on a basically great cake. Other attractions are the Science Museum, the Minnesota Historical Society (and its James J. Hill house), Cass Gilbert's State Capitol, and much more.

Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark: Hazard-at-Large, January 24, 1990

Posted by Dr. Patrick D. Hazard at 00:01


Blogger Julian Real said...

Men who love women and their bodies we will always have with us, despite temporary aberrations like Andrea Dworkin and her fear-of-fucking cadre. ("Thou shalt not penetrate me," Ms. Dworkin moans, abusing herself selfishly.)

To prick her illusion, she should gaze at GL's "Dynamo Mother" (1933), which is all vulva, an expressionist romp over the woman's greatest blessing to man's kind: her capacity to nurture a fetus to term.

And you appear to be all dickhead, the white man's unkindest manifestation of P.R.I.C.K.dom.

You're silly description of Andrea Dworkin's work and perspective comes from what readings and interpretations of her own writings? Are they your own? Or do you satisfy your intellectual lack-of-curiosities by only skimming secondary sources? You really come across as extremely ignorant, the way people in the U.S. do who spout off what they heard on Fox News as Gospel Truth. The way perpetually hungry consumers of pornography do when describing what feminist antipornography activists allegedly did in the 1980s to try and "censor" pornographers. (As if.)

Are you trying to sound so ignorant? Or do you usually only have crickets chirping in lieu of readers to call you on the ridiculous stuff you publicly say? Oh, yes, you do admit this is "a kook's tour". You've certainly got that part right.

Do you also ridicule Foucault, Chomsky, and Churchill for their philosophical-political views--and in such a sloppy manner? Or do you just make a point to focus in an inanely critical way on feminists whose work you either haven't read at all, or don't or can't comprehend because of your own intellectual ineptitude?

Can you summarize what the major points of analysis are by Dworkin of James Baldwin's novels and non-fiction essays in the "Communion" chapter of Intercourse, for example? (I doubt it, but I thought I'd at least offer you an opportunity to show that you are capable of reading and accurately assessing the meaning of her work.)
17 May 2010 09:25

How White Men Do Humor That Isn't Oppressive: Andy Samberg's "Great Day"

[I actually have no idea what Andy Samberg's sexual orientation is, in part because I've not read this interview with him from Out magazine. I'm assuming he's het, because I'd probably have heard about it if he was gay. Regardless, the cover image is from here.]

I am currently reading the book Dry, by Augusten Burroughs. He wrote the very successful Running With Scissors. RWS is about his mother's decision to give him to her male psychiatrist, to live in that man's home with his own family and a few of his patients. This is a memoir, a true story, written with the kind of humor people need to survive really traumatic experiences that aren't shared with a whole community. Writing has saved Augusten's life, I would imagine, but this white not-poor gay man almost didn't make it, as he was drinking so much that many don't live to discuss it, let alone remember it sufficiently to write a memoir about it. Dry is that memoir, that chapter of his early adult life, when he recognises how his drinking was impacting him, getting help, and figuring out how to live without alcohol.

To me, it is a classic Western white man's story. Because it is so centered on one person's life only tangentially about other people's lives. White men often live this way, I think. And the ubiquitous drinking and drugging that white men do does nothing to ensure they will have meaningful connections to others, but they will, no matter what, have their race and gender privileges. I find Augusten to be racist and misogynistic, and of course I am not at all surprised at either. I am only surprised when a white man isn't overtly racist and actively sexist. I am utterly shocked when I find out a white het man is accountable, really, truly, to the women in his life.

It is said, by those who do not know or do not have a sense of humor, that radical feminists don't have one either. Every radical feminist I know has a robust sense of humor that is rarely used to put other people down. I personally like women's humor about men, such as Rosanne Barr's early work, but the radical feminists I know are not prone to find other people's pain hilarious. Very generally speaking, men, it seems to me, find other people's pain hilarious. Men laugh when men get hurt, not women. Men laugh when frightened; women, not so much. Men make jokes about prison rape, not women. I've never heard a feminist woman laugh about prison rape. I've heard many antifeminist men laugh too many times about it to count. Who, then, is callous to men's pain? I'd argue it is men, not women, again, very generally speaking.

So many forms of suffering are abstract to men, that men can be extremely and normally callous. But some men get how some suffering has potential for humor, without exactly making fun of the person who is, really, in trouble.

Andy Samberg is a U.S. white, early thirtysomething LA/NYC kind of guy. Raised on the comically extreme antics of Mel Brooks, Andy is best known for his short films made for a program that needs all the help it can get, Saturday Night Live. What the show needs is non-white, non-male writers, and to stop their ridiculously racist skits. And to have female actors write their own comedy that is not just about wacky women or sidekicks for men's misogyny to bounce off of, or bluntly hit.

Andy does something else, often enough to catch my attention and warrant this post. Andy observes white het men and white het male culture with a keen eye for what's tragic, pathetic, and humorous about it. And there's PLENTY that's rife with pathos and humor, with atrocious undertones. Beneath white men's lives, however comical or tragic, is the river or sea of blood of all the people our people beaten, whipped, raped, tortured, and killed in generations past. Well, some of my people. Not so many of Andy's, actually, as he's Ashkenazic, so his family's history is probably escaping pogroms, as is part of mine. Well, unless some of our European Jewish family have gone to Israel and have behaved as white het male supremacists do, trying to control or succeeding in killing people of color, usually Palestinian, and by being misogynistic in all the horribly usual ways to women of several ethnicities.

But his family and mine don't come from Israel, and no one in my family has ever lived there. Which is no reason to not oppose Israel's racist apartheid policies. I do oppose them. Not much because I've never been there and don't know anyone who is Israeli or Palestinian. Well, that's not entirely true. I have met and had some deep conversation with one guy whose dad is U.S.-Palestinian (his mom is white/european). He is a DEVOUT Christian, in a really oppressive way--a basically white missionary preacher of The Truth of The Gospel According to him. He's recognised the utter arrogance of his ways, actually, and has stopped being so preachy. Thank G-d. (I've written all about that talk, here.)

Andy's humor has distinctly U.S. Jewish male elements; self-deprecation, never taking oneself seriously, mocking one's own life or the lives of those with similar privileges and social status. Which brings us to something that I think is both highly disturbing and very funny. What I often find funny about people's humor is  imagining them coming up with the material. The details, the building of little moments to tell one small story in a skit lasting only a couple of minutes or so. His humor has a certain quality that might also be termed "post-modern". I know too much about postmodernist philosophy and make a point to virtually never write about it, because its terminology is so annoying and boring to me. I don't think I've used "bodies" to mean people, or "discursive" to mean talking about something on this blog. I hope I haven't, anyway. What makes Samberg's humor quite different than what stand-ups do is that he's telling stories using so many elements--temporal and visual ones especially, that are as revealing as the words that accompany them. It's this fusion of words and images through an imaged period of time that strikes me in a piece like the borderline-sardonic "Great Day". Feel free to let me know what you like and don't like about this. In a later comment, if I remember to, I'll tell you what I see him saying about white het men. The video that follows is from here.

To All Men's Rights Activists: I DARE YOU to read this post and to QUOTE THIS: "People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals." -- Catharine MacKinnon

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Women's Day in Australia: Malalai Joya Announces that Sec. of State Hillary Clinton Lied to Afghan Women in Order to Continue Pres. Obama's Military Massacres in and Occupation of Afghanistan. Girls as Young as 11 are Being Raped by U.S. and NATO Men: WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE??!!

[image of Hillary Clinton is from here]

What follows is from here]

Hillary lies again to Afghan women

Posted on 15 May 2010

Secretary of State Mrs. Hillary Rodham-Clinton has once again lied to Afghan women. She said that America will not abandon Afghan women. It already has. America has not kept its promises to the women of Afghanistan.

The youngest woman in the Afghan parliament has used International Women’s Day to slam the “disastrous conditions” for women in her country and ask Australians to help bring change.

Afghanistan’s Bravest Woman Malalai Joya:

• “Taliban are logistically & militarily growing stronger as each day dawns.”
•  “Afghan women and men are not ‘liberated’ at all”
• Woman Among the Warlords: The extraordinary story of an Afghan who dared to raise her voice
• Diary of Malalai Joya: ‘Raising My Voice’ against occupation of Afghanistan
• Malalai Joya: Afghanistan’s angry conscience
• “Afghanistan is getting progressively worse. We are caught between two enemies: Taliban and US/NATO forces” — Malalai Joya

Malalai Joya, 28, told a conference at Sydney’s Darling Harbour today there has been “no fundamental change in the plight of Afghan people” since the US removed the Taliban five years ago.

“Afghan women and men are not ‘liberated’ at all,” Joya said. “When the entire nation is living under the shadow of gun and warlordism, how can its women enjoy very basic freedoms?”

Joya said the women’s rights situation was as “catastrophic” as it was under the Taliban.

She gave the death of 18-year-old Samiya, who hanged herself before she was to be sold to a 60-year-old man, and the rape of children as young as 11 by the US and international troops as examples.

“No nation can donate liberation to another nation,” Joya said. “If Australian policy makers really want to help Afghan people and bring positive changes, they must allign their policies according to the aspirations and wishes of Afghan people, rather than becoming a tool to implement the wrong policies of the US government.”

Joya, who survived an assassination attempt after speaking out againgst Afghan warlords, said the suicide rate of Afghan women was at an all-time high. As many as 1.9 per cent of women die during childbirth.

To celebrate International Women’s Day in Sydney, festivals are underway in Liverpool and Cabramatta to mark the day. Female MP tells of rights ‘catastrophe’. Email Print Normal font Large font Yuko Narushima. March 8, 2007 – 1:04PM

Afghanistan’s Bravest Woman Malalai Joya: “Taliban are logistically & militarily growing stronger as each day dawns.” “Afghan women and men are not ‘liberated’ at all”

Malalai Joya is an angry woman. She’s angry about the war being carried out by the international coalition in her country, Afghanistan, angry about the UN bombs that are killing civilians in their villages, angry about calls for reconciliation with the Taliban and the war lords. “Stop the massacres in my country. Withdraw your foreign troops so we can stop Talibanization,” is what the young Afghan deputy tells Western public opinion.

WASHINGTON: Women’s rights will not be sacrificed in any settlement between the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Taliban militants, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said late on Thursday.

Clinton ruled out US support, or at least her own, for negotiations with anyone who would roll back advances for Afghan women achieved since the militant Islamic Taliban movement was ousted from power in 2001.

“There are certain conditions that have to be met,” to hold talks with insurgents about laying down arms, Clinton said during an appearance with Karzai. Karzai and a large delegation of government ministers and advisers, including several women, were finishing four days of talks in Washington.

Among the conditions for peace talks, midlevel Taliban leaders would have to renounce violence, cut ties with al-Qaeda and its affiliates and abide by Afghanistan’s laws and constitution, Clinton said.

“And on a personal note they must respect women’s rights.” Karzai nodded beside her but did not mention the women’s rights aspect of possible talks with the Taliban. The other conditions apply, he said.

The Taliban regime forced women to wear a traditional head-to-toe covering called a Burqa, forbade school for girls and beat women seen walking without being accompanied by a man. The Taliban has surged back over the past several years to become a persistent insurgency seeking Karzai’s overthrow. Insurgents and their sympathisers routinely intimidate or attack women who work outside the home, wear Western dress or try to attend school.

Clinton, whose bid for president in 2008 got further than any American woman before her, made a similar point when she met with Afghan women earlier Thursday at the State Department.

“We will not abandon you; we will stand with you always,” Clinton told three senior female Afghan officials who were part of Karzai’s delegation. The trip ends on Friday with Karzai’s visit to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division that is deploying en masse to Afghanistan.

Clinton said it was “essential that women’s rights and women’s opportunities are not sacrificed or trampled on in the reconciliation process.”

Karzai sought US blessing this week for wider talks with the Taliban when the time comes. President Barack Obama seemed noncommittal during a White House news conference with Karzai on Wednesday. Saturday, May 15, 2010

Here’s how Joya sums it up in her own words:

“The people of Afghanistan are fed up with the occupation of their country and with the corrupt, Mafia-state of Hamid Karzai and the warlords and drug lords backed by NATO…. It is clear now that the real motive of the U.S. and its allies, hidden behind the so-called “war on terror,” was to convert Afghanistan into a military base in Central Asia and the capital of the world’s opium drug trade. Ordinary Afghan people are being used in this chess game, and western taxpayers’ money and the blood of soldiers is being wasted on this agenda that will only further destabilize the region….Afghan and American lives are being needlessly lost.

“Afghans live under the shadow of the gun with the most corrupt government in the world.”– Malalai Joya

• The US occupation has not brought security to Afghan women
• Total collapse in Afghanistan:-Chasing the ghosts of the “Ho Chi Minh” …
• Afghanistan’s Bravest Woman Malalai Joya: “Taliban are logistically & m…

JOYA’S SOLUTION: “Withdraw All Foreign Troops”

Malalai Joya: “Some people say that when the troops withdraw, a civil war will break out. Often this prospect is raised by people who ignore the vicious conflict and humanitarian disaster that is already occurring in Afghanistan. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people. The terrible civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal certainly could never justify… the destruction and death caused by that decade-long occupation.” (p 217)…Today we live under the shadow of the gun with the most corrupt and unpopular government in the world. (p 211)

This Just In, no, OUT, From The Atlantic: On Gay Actors Playing It Straight

[image of not the current cover of The Atlantic magazine offline is from here]

Okay, A.R.P. peeps. Here's the latest analysis on dominant culture and "gay" stuff. My comment is at the bottom. Why is it ALWAYS last?! Well, better last than "DNF"... Get used to it. Sites like the one you're about to see love the abbreviations. (SYTYCD = So You Think You Can Dance. That's the only one I'm giving ya.)

But before we get to that, I'll try and answer some of the pressing questions raised on that past cover above.

SHOULD WOMEN RULE THE WORLD? Yes. (Why can't all questions be this easy to answer?)

WILL BLOGS KILL WRITING? No, video games already did writing in. Anyway, blogging is to writing what reality tv is to reality. Only much more varied and therefore better. And without commercials including infomercials.

SHOULD CHILDREN HAVE SEX CHANGES? If the change is to not having to be one or the other that's assigned and enforced? Definitely. But not with knives. Just with radical ideological and institutional change.

CAN CANADA SAVE AN AMERICAN FOOTBALL TEAM? "America" includes Canada. Whether Canadian football = soccer, I can't say. Can Canada save a U.S. football team? Is THAT what they're asking? The answer is: who cares? Canadians care about hockey, and the U.S. cares about baseball and basketball... OH, and warfare, racism, and sex tourism, of course.

IS CREDIT DEBT A GOOD THING? Only if by "a good thing" you mean "not a good thing".

I can't make out the other questions, but I see the whitest, most conservative "liberal" gay man's name listed there on the "far left". (Funny that.) It's "Andrew Sullivan". Don't get me started on him or we'll be here until a week from Thursday. His idea of "gay politics"... please. I told you: DON'T get me started!!

But this DOES makes for a lovely segue, or shall I say, "segay"? Okay, okay. Segue. Geesh. You readers are so persnickety sometimes. Not as persnickety as moi, of course.

Of Course Gay Actors Can Play Straight
MAY 15 2010, 8:00 AM ET

Derek Thompson is a staff editor at Atlantic Business, where he writes about economics, business and technology. Derek has also written for BusinessWeek and Slate.

Newsweek's Ramin Setoodeh wrote an article a few weeks ago arguing that gay actors had a hard time playing straight people, and the outcry basically broke the Internet. Blogs ripped Setoodeh into confetti. Actress Kristin Chenoweth called him "horrendously homophobic." Glee creator Ryan Murphy called for his fans to boycott Newsweek.

Setoodeh's argument was silly. The response was silly, too. Setoodeh saw a play called Promises, Promises starring Sean Hayes (the best friend from Will & Grace) and didn't think Hayes was a convincing straight guy. Also, he watched an episode of Glee and thought another gay actor playing straight came off like a "theater queen." In the real world, two unconvincing performances in a week is, you know, two unconvincing performances in a week. For Setoodeh, it was part of a larger trend: gay actors can't play straight!

He probably should have kept the thought to himself. Or rented Return of the King. Gay actors play straight all the time: Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother; David Hyde Pierce in Frasier; Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings, and X-Men, and everything.

Gay actors face serious challenges in film and television. The last thing they need is Newsweek knocking their chops because a couple of them weren't sufficiently macho in musicals some guy saw last week.

But the response to Setoodeh's article has veered into weird territory, too. West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin, in an articulate piece, challenged the idea that "playing gay" is even a thing.

An actor, no matter which sex they're attracted to, can't "play" gay or "play" straight. Gay and straight aren't actable things. You can act effeminate and you can act macho (though macho usually ends up reading as gay), but an actor can't play gay or straight anymore than they can play Catholic. The most disturbing thing to me about this episode is that the theater critic for Newsweek didn't know that.

Oh, come on. You can't say gay isn't actable in the same sentence you say overly macho acting reads as gay. Either there exists a certain set of characteristics, expressions, and vocal modulations that can indicate sexual orientation to an audience or there aren't. And it's pretty clear that there are.

When Ricky Martin told the world he was gay, the Internet's collective reaction was some variation of: "duh." We didn't know Ricky. Why were we so certain he was gay? Well, we just ... knew! It was the way he ... danced? ... sang? ...shook his bon bon? Who knows. But it turns out there's a science behind what some folks call gaydar. One study found that 75 percent of gay men sounded gay to a general audience over tape-recordings. The biological and cultural implications of that finding deserve a fuller treatment, but for the purposes of our discussion, suffice it to say that it is a finding. Gaydar detects some sort of gendermap of characteristics that can indicate homosexuality. And actors draw on this "gendermap" of characteristics to play gay -- or straight. Is it terribly homophobic to point that out?

At the heart of Setoodeh's piece is idea that gay and straight people act a certain way, and that actors who are well-known to be gay might have a higher bar to clear to be persuasively hetero. I don't disagree.


Julian Real's comment:
The whole matter doesn't only rest on what characteristics the viewer [read "presumed straight person"] is deciding is or isn't gay. Does [the straight] audience accept Jodie Foster as heterosexual--or not--in The Accused or Contact? Were Cher and Meryl Streep believable as a lesbian couple in Silkwood? (And why do straight men want ALL women to PLAY lesbian and no het man to BE gay? Hmmm. Answers may follow.)

The undercurrent, not quite spoken out loud, is that being gay ruins it for an audience who wants to believe het performances are for het actors--because heterosexuality in men is valued more. Hollywood doesn't have to give a..consider whether het actors playing lesbian and gay ruin it for us--lesbian and gay people. Reverse the sexual orientations of the entire discussion above this comment and see what gets revealed.

"The problem" is being gay, again. Why, through most of my life, has the only problem for straight actors playing lesbian or gay been how it would negatively impact their careers? Why did Ricky Martin have to wait so long to come out, and why do only white folks seem to reply "duh", while the rest of humanity gets the significance of a Latino performer coming out? Why aren't we as concerned with how unbelievable it is that out het actors just can't transcend our knowledge of them being THAT way for us to buy them in a role where they are not? If being gay wasn't stigmatised (and socially despised), we wouldn't care one way or the other. And if being a straight man wasn't naturalised (and socially adored), we would care more about the reverse happening.

This discussion could play out with regard to race in the U.S.: "we" (pssst: usually meaning whites) don't mind if non-Black actors play Black (think Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart) but when "we" (meaning Black people) do care, it's our problem, not whites'. And "we're" seen as irrationally complaining. (See this as an example: http://heatherwilliams.wordpress.com/2006/10/11...) Little white boys in the middle of the last century played "cowboys and Indians", without complaint from whites. But objecting to the objectionable Cleveland Indians logo and name is, well, really going too far. (You're seeing the pattern, I hope?) Non-Indigenous and non-Latina/o actors play American Indian and what the U.S. government calls "Hispanic". (Think Natalie Wood in West Side Story.) The audience is always presumed to be white and heterosexual, and too often, also male. And good luck to Taylor Lautner if he's typecast as "The Indian", because he'll be working on TV and major motion pictures once every decade.

And then there's the little matter of dominants getting almost all the damn acting jobs, so it's a little annoying, as well as economically impoverishing, when the dominants to be able to play it all and the socially subordinated are only allowed to play what they are seen to be by dominants (read: only gay/lesbian/Black/American Indian, never "just human").

All the whites are "we" again, unless otherwise indicated--just like in U.S. history books and the way whites tell stories... "So there were like five people shopping at the 7/11 and then this Black guy comes in... ". We couldn't possibly buy it if a Black actor wants to play a, you know, just plain ol' All American human. Because this is the point: het (and/or white and/or male) = the All American human, so the straight white U.S. male actor is believable, or hilarious, all the time as whatever kind of human he plays, but gay (and/or non-white and/or female) = that kind of human, who, once identified as that way cannot be unseen as that because that is them and they aren't "we". What we're all being told is that being "that way" isn't quite as human as being het/white/male. And, alarmingly, being Black truly isn't "as human" in the U.S. white imagination, as is being white. So whites, yes, can allow one another to play Black; and when and if they do so so stereotypically, whites don't complain: it wasn't primarily white opposition that stopped minstrel shows; it was the presence of African Americans as human beings who got to have a voice* that mattered almost as much as the white voices impacting white audiences bigotr..tastes. (*Just the one voice usually, maybe two: you know, Doc Martin and the Malcolm who wasn't in the middle.)

We're not supposed to negatively stereotype the dominants in any social hierarchy (like, say, as "always complaining about something", uppity, dirty, diseased, or terroristic), and if we do, we'll hear about it from the them who militantly refuse to be identified as a them. (If one more straight white guy tells me how negatively stereotyped he is on TV "all the darned time"... not realising exactly how many times The Greatest American Hero is on TV, doing everything, like reporting the evening news, selling trucks, judging singers, sportscasting, and getting honored for killing people of color... well, I won't scream, to spare you the reinforcement of a negative stereotype.) We're only supposed to negatively stereotype the socially subordinated in any hierarchy. Male contestants on SYTYCD are never told they're dancing it too straight. And what does *that* mean?! Ask me. I'm gay. I'll tell you. You het guys are most hilarious--or is it dangerous?--when you don't even know how friggin' straight you're acting.)

So men [straight or gay] who PLAY women don't play diversely human people--like say, women--but that's what we say the fellas are doing, without complaint by men. And WhiteStraightMale God-forbid if women complain about that, or, well, anything at all really. (Because that'd make her a [rhymes with kitsch]!) We say Robin Williams is hilarious when he "plays gay" but when he's hilarious when not playing gay, he's never hilarious *because* he's playing straight.

Being socially subordinated is an endless source of humor for social dominants. Just watch practically any SNL skit since the 1970s. Watch Bill Hader play the oh-so-gay kinky Manhattan club reviewer sitting next to *normal* Seth Meyers. Is Seth funny because he's not gay? Betty White as sort-of-Black = funny [to whites, who are the majority demographic who even watch that very racist program, without ever "complaining" about the racism]. But Betty White playing white? Wait, what does that even mean? How does a white person play white? Ask people who aren't white. Whiteness is, actually, utterly hilarious. I laugh all the time about it with my friends--the ones who are "non-white", that is. (The white ones just look all confused and irritated.)

The issue is who is socially statused and who is stigmatised, and we can't have stigmatised socially subordinated people play statused dominant ones, believably.