Monday, August 31, 2015

Not Your Grandfather's Racism

While waiting for the next black male to be, ahem, "shot while resisting arrest", let us turn our eyes to the current Repugnican front-runners, to see which of them is the prettiest in the land.

Donald Trump, in all his nativist glory, ejected a Univision reporter (one of the most respected journalists in the US Latino community, as well as in his - formerly - native Mexico) from one of his town hall meetings because Jorge Ramos asked him if he thought all this "Mexicans are rapists, murderers, drug dealers and thieves" talk might be misconstrued by some. This would include the moron who suggested Mr. Ramos go back to his own country - apparently unaware that the US IS Mr. Ramos' country. Mr. Ramos was invited back on the condition that he keep his damn mouth shut.

The Donald, of course, wants to end birthright citizenship, which would impact a whole lot more than a few Latinos in this nation. We're talking every immigrant from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, to name but a few places where we (us, the US, that is) made life such a hellhole, that they came here to escape the oppression that we either supported or made worse by being as culturally insensitive as we possibly could, driving the local rulers insane, or condemning absolutely everything about Western culture, making life untenable for US supporters in those nations. So they came here.

And he wants to send them back.

Others have different ideas:

Pyush "Bobby Brady" Jindal thinks that, so long as someone comes to America and adopts everything that's bad about America, as well as a proper American accent, well, they can stay. If all they're going to do is pick our food, well, fuck them, send 'em back; taking jobs away from Americans, after all (who don't actually want to do those jobs all that much). If you're a Hindu, you should convert to Christianity, change your name to something innocuous and bland (maybe "Gilligan"), and make sure you talk like an angry fifth-grader.

Mr. Christie has now doubled down on treating legal immigrants the same way that Fed-Ex tracks packages. When Chris "the apple has fallen a bit far from the tree" Wallace mentions that these folks don't have numbers tattooed on their wrists (you know, the ones the Jews in the Holocaust DID have), Mr. Christie reiterates that yes, people aren't packages ("Don't be ridiculous" - really?), but we should still figure out how to track people like Fed-Ex tracks packages. RFID chip, implanted when they pass through customs, Mr. Christie?, or maybe we could hide them in jelly doughnuts as a gift when they arrive (but then, how many chips would YOU have roiling around in your guts, Mr. Christie?)

Mr. Walker wants to review the possibility of putting up a wall between us and Canada. 5,525 miles of a wall. I think the Canadians might approve of this, since a few of their (already low-count) gun homicides seem to be perpetrated by Americans who cross the border. But the pricetag? Who can say? It will probably have to be sourced to someone like Halliburton, so that Dick Cheney's walking, talking corpse can make another few billion to leave to his daughters when they can finally figure what kind of metal the bullet has to be in order to kill him.

That these candidates are taken seriously by anyone in the mainstream media is, of course, concerning, but unfortunately we have to take them seriously, since such a large part of the population has polled that they'd vote for 'em. That should always give one pause. To know, not just believe, that a large part of this country (which claims to be "not racist") is this racist. How quantifiable IS racism anyway? If you think that we're NOT a racist country because we elected a black President, understand that when more people vote, the wind almost always swings democratic. After George W Bush, everyone wanted the Dem in office - they didn't care if he/she/it was black or white or green or Satan. We ended up with a very cool cat, to say the least, and my favorite president so far this century.

What I'm hoping is that we do elect Bernie. He seems to be polling pretty damn well. Clinton is, I'm sorry, so hated by the Right that they will do everything they can to dump mud or blood on her head, until enough people believe it, and then vote for whatever asinine twat finally made it out of the clown car. O'Malley is one of the worst tools for fixing racism in this nation. He invented the whole CrimeStat/ComStat methodology that has proven so disastrous to community policing. And Joe Biden? I'm not sure what he's thinking, and I know he really wants the job, but they're going to nail him for kissing Barack Obama's you-know-what for eight years. They will pile as much filth on him as they would Clinton, simply because he represents the Obama legacy.

Clinton could still win it if The Donald decides to run as an Independent, thus splitting the Republican vote between the stupid and the self-deluded. I leave it to you to decide who those are.

Monday, May 11, 2015

A Riotous Spring

The death of _minority individual_ in the _medium to large urban center_ by the _local law enforcement agency_ is becoming the simplest article to write. Since everything is on the internet these days, they usually include a viral video that generally proves that the story given by the police is at odds with reality.

When will the police realized that almost everyone is watching, almost all the time?

In the following days, the article about riots in _medium to large urban center_, sparked by the relative inaction by the DA's office, is also becoming easy to write. Very telegenic to boot - all that lovely fire, the sparkles of splintered glass in the street, the occasional spectacle of the police arresting someone for watching - something for everyone. It's all a big wet dream for CNN, Fox, local news, etc.

The worst aspect of this is that eventually it all begins to smush together, like roadkill that has been run over by one too many semi trucks. It becomes part of the noise of daily life, and when something becomes noise, it becomes something we can ignore. It no longer looks like a dead deer (which is sad); it more closely resembles reddish oatmeal, and we no longer recognize anything worthy of concern. Just like watching Detroit crumble from afar, the death of innocent minorities is something that (generally) happens far away from the rest of us. It's becoming too late to do anything.

All of the laudable goals within the Obama administration, such as buying every cop a body camera, are worth doing, but only if they're done everywhere. As a technology geek, I can tell you that technology works only as well as the end-user wants it to work. If they don't want it to work, they will kludge it up so it doesn't. As someone once said, making something idiot proof is difficult, because we're really good at making idiots. You can force them to wear body cameras, you can force the body camera to turn on when certain other pieces of hardware are activated (such as sirens or lights or stepping out of the car), but that can always be overridden by someone determined to do so. Even if the cop on the line doesn't know how to do it, the internet is full of guys who will help them figure out how to disable it, even to the point of making it a one-time glitch (or whatever "easy out" they need it to be). This is not to say we shouldn't do it. I would never argue against preventative measures, because there will be honest cops who might be saved from lynching with body cam footage, as well as the bad cops who will be caught by it. But no one should expect this to work perfectly. And it needs to be deployed in every precinct, on every cop, deputy, statie, etc.

Black homelessness, joblessness, and hopelessness are the final stages of the initial drive to destroy their culture through slavery, and the institutional racism that followed continues to overburden that part of our society. We have been systematically ripping up the avenues that the lower and middle classes had for gainful employment and/or advancement within society, and the African-American population of this nation is always last in line when things do get fixed. While we might bring back manufacturing and infrastructure jobs to the nation, should the unthinkable happen and Bernie Sanders becomes President, even that won't be enough for permanent, gainful employment for everyone. So many systems are being automated, eventually we will be hard-pressed to employ everyone full time. But instead of primarily hitting minority communities hard, it will hit everyone.

Everyone who isn't rich, that is.

Seems these days everyone in the dystopian future is young and attractive. Hunger Games, Divergent, The Seeker, etc., all young people, breaking out of the repressive shell that society has deemed appropriate for them. I suspect they will actually look more like me - middle aged, a bit portly, wandering into the grey haze of afternoon with no job, no money, no prospects, and believing that this wasn't what was meant to happen, that all those votes for the Democrats somehow still didn't manifest a good outcome, because nothing that has to happen in four or even eight years is worth doing well, and nothing that has to last for a hundred years is worth starting. Only science and the arts take the long view, and who takes those longhairs seriously anyway? Sure they can do their multi-decade experiments in outer space, because once it's out of the atmosphere, it hardly costs anything to maintain it or monitor it, and no one down here gets hurt. But something that has to last for a long time on Earth? Costs too much and requires too much maintenance. Who's going to pay for that?

If middle-class white folks truly had to worry about whether or not their children had a future that wasn't The Hunger Games. would they act? Are we all frogs in the great pot of cold water, waiting for the heat to be turned up under us? The African-American community has started noticing the temperature, and they're not putting up with it, but then they've been shat on forever, they know they're the first frogs in the pot. The real middle class in America has only just begun to notice that we're all in the same pot.