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Where Have You Gone, Joe Dimaggio? (Civility is Real Dead)
Pre-Covid I walked into a café in Florence and said “Expresso, please.” The waitress replied “No, here we say buongiorno first, we smile, then we order. Try it, it is nice.” That is a civil place. America has become an uncivil place.Almost all of us are convinced this is a broken place; the problem is we differ violently over what is broken never mind how to fix it. Most of us are sure our schools are broken. This is a very fundamental thing for a society, as schools teach kids how to live with each others (“values.”) But we can’t even come close to agreeing which books to read in English class, never mind whether the whole education system is simply an expression of systemic racism, with racism baked into everything else from whose history to tell, to the role of demanding precision in math, to which historical figure’s name is on the school building.
The result is schooling by ideology. The wealthy choose among private schools, neat because it also means their kids don’t have to mingle with the poor kids. You can find a private school based on ideology, religion, a grab-and-go set of choices. Outside urban areas, middle class families buy their homes based on the public school that comes with them. If a family can move interstate, they can choose between the most conservative Texas public school and the most liberal school in the Bay Area, assuming conservative and liberal mean something clear enough anymore to act on. American children now get very different content educations, never mind qualities of education.
One thing schools used to universally try to do was teach “citizenship,” the role an individual plays in a democracy. The concept must have failed, because few of us believe our elections have much to do with democracy. Too many have simply given up to the point where if more than half of eligible voters show up for a presidential election it is newsworthy. The election outcome is only fair when our person wins, or when the winner is a woman or a POC not Dave Chappelle over a white man. The system for choosing has become so complex few of us fully understand it, from registering to vote to districting to the Electoral College. The result is a large number seeking ways to manipulate the system (some justifying modern manipulations because of past manipulations they find unjust), and a large number giving up and voting based simply on social media propaganda. That describes a dying democratic system.
Nobody expects much and is even then disappointed interacting with government. The lines are long at the DMV, the software to sign up for government programs doesn’t work, pressing button one for a representative is a fool’s quest. The only thing that generally works in day-to-day life is buying stuff. But buying things requires you to be on full alert lest an unchecked box commits you to a subscription, or an extended warranty you don’t want, or some ridiculous convenience fee. Of course even when the buying is easy the ending is broken. Signing up for cell service is swift online; ending that service requires long phone calls preceeded by long waits followed by “errors” which keep billing you for months.
Each of us at this moment is party to hundreds, maybe thousands, of legal agreements. We do have the choice of reading a multi-page contract in detail before renting a car, assuming of course we have the legal knowledge to actually understand the full implications of what we are agreeing to. We can refuse to sign, but find quickly living without a phone, car, home, or credit card in 2021 is borderline impossible. The choice is no choice.
All of this bleeds over into how we interact with each other. Never mind the street fights over black lives matter or the now scrums at political rallies. We don’t know how to discuss things, never mind disagree because we don’t just hate ideas, we hate the people who hold those ideas dear. What were once sincere beliefs now come in packages conveniently labeled “progressive” or “conservative,” no substitutions please. Commentary is just name calling and junior high-level mocking.
We’re often alone together. We avoid physical contact or even proximity with each other, even loved ones. We don’t share things. Our communal spaces like restaurants are divided up into mini-bubbles. We don’t speak to one another about small problems, we call the manager. When we run out of big issues we discover microaggressions. The range of topics of conversation closes down more and more for fear of offending someone, facing a summons to HR, or a lawsuit. People are more hesitant to give advice or discuss an opinion for fear of getting in some sort of trouble, or being canceled, or being told they are mansplaining. We casually discard real world friends on “social” media over the smallest thing.
We got rid of landlines because their primary purpose morphed into demanding we listen to ads at inconvenient times. Our cell call screening is spoofed so the phone’s primary purpose is to force us to listen to ads. Email is a struggle to use because much of it is forced advertising. We don’t check our voicemail because most of it is just forced advertising. We’re afraid to click on an article about insurance for fear our web experience will be clogged for days with forced ads. We have come to understand there is no way to opt out. We can no longer civilly just ask to be left alone.
I worked a minwage retail job that required getting used to women screaming at me because some item in the weekly ad wasn’t in stock. Previously, the last time anyone screamed right in my face was in high school, when a psychotic football coach thought it was the solution to a missed catch. We join in today classist sport testing how businesses care so little about their employees they’ll fire them if one of us makes a scene. We video everything in hopes of settling matters by embarrassing someone virally. People devote hours to digging through years of someone’s history to find something politically incorrect to destroy what’s left of their life. Complete strangers profanely yell at me because I wasn’t wearing a mask, or had the wrong mask, or wore it improperly in their opinion. People I didn’t know accused me of wanting to kill their children with a virus I don’t have. Others accuse me of hating them, or wanting them dead, if I make a bad word choice (even with the best of intentions, it seems purposefully hard to keep up) to describe their gender or race. Everyone not only thinks this behavior is OK, they believe it to be righteous. They assume ill intent on my side.
Force us together and we attack one another. Our masses of crazy people turn like the Walking Dead toward attacking Asians. Hate crime grows like mold. Road rage is our national sport. We refer endlessly to “communities” which are just anonymous associations of people online who claim to have been victims of something similar. Our discourse often begins with “As a…” to make clear the separateness of being one gender or another, or of having had the same disease. Our differences become the fuel of victimhood and we loathe solutions that make those victims feel less special. The most spoken sentence in America is now “You have no idea what it’s like to be me because I’m a…” despite some 300 million of us sharing the same living space.
More often than not the conclusion is violence. In a typical year, the FAA sees 100-150 formal cases of bad passenger behavior. But in 2021 so far the number jumped to 1,300, ever more remarkable since the number of passengers remains below pre-pandemic levels. Fliers know cabin attendants have become less civil alongside their passengers. What they take in abuse they return in passive aggressiveness.
The lack of civility spills over into communal living settings, like condo associations, which come up with increasingly complex rules on how to interact with each other as a stand-in to civility. Condo boards, elected to handle simple community business like renewing landscape contracts, have turned into bitchy little Vaticans. They respond to residents’ complaints with pages of rules about masks and gym use, never mind those multiple pages already in the handbook about pets and stuff hanging from the veranda railing. The answer always seems to try to quantify civility instead of asking for it. As the rules multiple the residents divide those with the vice principal’s voice backed up by the condo’s jailhouse lawyers versus those who stop reading after page 49 and just don’t care.
I’ve always loved the line from the Simon and Garfunkel song “Mrs. Robinson” that asks “Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio?” as the best example of what writers are supposed to do, show not tell. The line sums up a feeling in America that a more ordered time passed without demanding the listener chose if that was good or bad.
The yield of our behavior is a place where people don’t talk to each other, cannot agree on what their mutual problems are never mind how to solve them, a violent place, an unfriendly place, an uncivil place. Who wants to live like this? Judging by our actions, Americans. Ciao!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Asian Hate Crime or White Supremacy? No.
Following yet another mass shooting in America (Atlanta, not Boulder or any others this week), we turn to the most important question: how it can be politicized?
That means reflexively declaring the murders in Georgia a hate crime against Asians, triggered within a mentally ill white man by remarks Trump made months ago labeling COVID the “Wuhan Flu.” The women killed, with a mix of Korean and Chinese names, some of whom may have been American Citizens, simply are first turned into generic “Asians” by the media, and then ubiquitous victim-props of, well, Trump, white supremacy, maybe all Fox viewers. Of the eight shot, two, one-fourth, are not Asian at all and are quickly falling out of the media’s focal point as not tracking the narrative. Trump’s direct culpability may be grounds for another impeachment. The mass killing in Boulder, which appears mostly white-on-white, holds little interest for the nation.
Kidding. Of course the anti-Asian hate crime politicization is wrong.
What we should agree is the proper politicization is guns are simply too easy to obtain in America. While the media was focused on the three quarters of the victims who were Asian, working hard not to say something cliched as they gleefully mispronounced the “foreign” names (#SAYHERNAME, nah, too hard) and reaffirmed sex work and the trafficking that drives it are A-OK (the media sang a different song about rub ‘n tug joints when Patriots owner Robert Kraft was caught in one), they wasted valuable time not tracking down the gun store where the killer got his weapon. They skipped the interview with the owner in a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert tee saying he had followed all the regulations, or maybe the bad dude at the gun show in his QAnon fan gear saying there were already too many laws against gun ownership. This could have been followed by a long discussion about whether the killer used an “assault rifle” or a “military-style weapon” and whether his clothing was “tactical.”
But that politicization would have meant leaving out the “this will keep happening until we get full socialized medicine, including mental health care” politicization. CNN would have wasted no time tracking down the killer’s neighbors, who would say either a) he was crazy as a drunk bedbug and everyone knew this was gonna happen someday or b) he was the quiet type, kept to himself, and that’s what worried them. Either way, had he lived in Sweden mental health care would have saved those poor Asians and any other races shot. With thoughts and prayers, we ask when will we learn, Chris, when will we learn? Back to you.
The mental health politicization is a good one because it dovetails well with the dangers of social media (it used to be heavy metal and satanism) and white supremacy politicization. No doubt the killer posted more than cuddly kitten pictures on his social media. This would all be tracked down by some Social Media Hate Crimes Task Force who would no doubt locate some pretty odd stuff online (bonus points if it was Parler.) If the guy had any friends/followers, at least one of them would be flashing some sign which we would assured was a symbol of white supremacy, such as scratching his nose. The links would be clear: social media causes white supremacy. The problem with this one is the victims are really not that important to the narrative, just background players, and America is demanding a racial angle to loop Trump’s viral remarks in.
Politicization in most any form also means the media can have fun being racist. Ignoring that many crimes against Asians appear to be perpetrated by blacks, the killer is not just white, he’s that kind of white — you know, the really bad kind, him being from the South, rocking that Joe Dirt cosplay look. And he was a Southern Baptist who told a roommate he worried about falling “out of God’s grace” for basically watching too much porn (bet it was the nasty stuff, too, not the good kind that encourages foreplay.) We all just know he has a confederate flag on his bumper, or tatted on his shoulder, or at least thought about getting one after he cashed his last welfare check whilst complaining about gay socialism.
Some deep-thinking Op-Ed will call him a part of a “maligned minority to purchase firearms in the fear of worse to come as the pandemic deepens.” Sooner or later we’ll learn the killer was afraid of losing his high status as a white man, marked by a lifestyle that included cheap massage parlors and a flip phone. All followed by someone calling white people a “public health crisis” and another chiming in “White fragility is a disease, and it just killed six Asian women.”
Every proper politicization benefits from a religious angle. So the NYT visited the killer’s church to reveal its “bylaws include a lengthy passage on marriage and sexuality that condemns ‘adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s sex.'” And the Times dug deep to find the church’s lead pastor preached a sermon about gender roles in September, drawing on a biblical passage which instructs women to dress modestly and to “learn in quietness and full submission.” For those reading outside of Austin or the coasts, that’s all progressive code to say the killer’s natural sexual urges were warped as a child by some messed up religious doctrine which is why he killed people, just like all those raised in a conservative church eventually get around to doing. Had he only been allowed to attend more drag queen reading events things might have ended differently. Religion radicalized him, like with ISIS.
To be fair, there is debate within the oppression olympics community over which politicization scheme is best employed. “People on here literally debating if this was a misogynistic attack against women or a racist attack against Asians,” tweeted the founder of an Asian-American feminist and pop culture blog. “What if — wait for it — it was both.” Others also tried for a rich word tapestry of blame, coming up with “racialized misogyny” and “male supremacist terrorism.” One prominent feminist author wrote “I don’t care that the shooter told police his attack wasn’t ‘racially-motivated.’ This was a racist misogynist crime.” She also said “we should sideline white male reporters when it comes to mass shootings because they obviously can’t be objective.” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth agreed that the evidence be damned if it does not fit the storyline. She expressed doubts about FBI Director Chris Wray’s assessment that the shooting may not constitute a hate crime because “it looks racially motivated” to her from several hundred miles away.
After admitting “very little is known about the motives of the Atlanta gunman,” the Times quickly added “but organizations that track hate crimes have paid increasing attention to misogyny as a ‘gateway drug’ to other types of extremism, such as violent racism” (for younger readers, the term “gateway drug” was last used seriously by anti-marijuana crusaders in the 1980s certain one joint would have you addicted to heroin within a week.) An organization which claims to be a “grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition” tried for a Theory of Everything, stating “Whether or not they were actually sex workers or self-identified under that label, we know that as massage workers, they were subjected to sexualized violence stemming from the hatred of sex workers, Asian women, working class people, and immigrants.” The term for all this share-the-blame is “intersectionality” to deal with problems like racism and sexism that overlap to create Venn diagrams of social injustice and apparently endless commentary that itself is so full of hate.
And if the story of the media creating a racist narrative t fit their needs sounds familiar, it is. Remember the Covington kids, whom the media cast without evidence as racist bullies who attacked an elderly Native American. It was not true, there was no evidence to support it and much to show it was wrong, but the MSM went on anyway, all the way to losing a defamation lawsuit, to show those white, Catholic, MAGA youth were the bad guys.
And as if you needed more proof of how this works, pay attention to the relative lack of attention paid to the Boulder incident. Where are the rallies, the ethnic celebrities to tell us what to think? Is Biden enroute to Colorado to sing Amazing Grace? Unless the killer has a wacky manifesto in his closet, meh.
Back in Atlanta, there seems little interest in weeping for the dead, unless that act too can be used for some political purpose amid more performance art journalism. The politicization of tragedies is so instant and so ingrained, even as the narrative shifts with popular whims, that it prevents us from ever understanding what really happened. Nowhere will we let this thing just be what it is, as if it is not terrible enough on its own, yet another mentally ill person in a violent, hateful, soulless, divided society.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Ilhan Omar’s Hate Crime
The pattern is near-identical: a Muslim woman who has very publicly made defeating Islamophobia part of her political work suffers a hate crime after Trump’s election.
She reports the crime only through the media, who sends what she says viral without asking any critical questions, despite some issues that might be worth questioning. The story is added to the tally of such crimes, as another example of what people want to believe.
At issue? If a hate crime is real, it must be prosecuted publicly and aggressively. We live in a vulnerable, volatile time. Anyone who would commit a hate crime needs, within the law, to be made an example of, lest the next one be the spark that starts a larger fire. At the same time, if a hate crime did not occur, that too must be prosecuted fully. Every false or exaggerated report adds to the arsenal of false reports that negate real reports.
Ilhan Omar
Minnesota State Representative-elect Ilhan Omar in January will become the country’s first Somali-American state legislator. She was in Washington DC, including a visit to the White House, last week for a conference. In a post on Facebook and Twitter, Omar claimed she and her sister were victims of a hate crime by a D.C. cabdriver who picked the two women up as they exited the White House. The driver called her ISIS and threatened to remove her hijab.
No Police Report
In her Facebook posting immediately after the alleged incident, Omar stated she would only file a report with the police after she returned to Minnesota, citing concerns for her safety because the driver knew the location of her hotel.
Omar did not suffer any further harassment, and had no further contact with the driver. The story went viral.
Once back in Minnesota, Omar stated she changed her mind and would not file a police report. Instead, saying she “believes criminalizing hate is not a solution and will only strengthen individual malice,” Omar instead only reported the incident in an unspecified format with DC’s Department of For-Hire Vehicles and the DC Office of Human Rights.
The former has the power to suspend a driver after a hearing. It is unclear what enforcement powers the Human Rights office has. Under the heading of “Reporting Taxicab and Vehicle-For-Hire Discrimination,” the Office focuses on denials of service, if, for example, a taxi refuses to pick up a passenger who is handicapped. Omar’s situation does not seem to be addressed.
Questions
— Omar did not address the fact that by posting the incident to Facebook, as well as doing interviews with The Rachel Maddow Show and others, she more than alerted the driver. If he wanted revenge or to attack her, there it was.
— She also did not address that by choosing not to report the act immediately to the police, the driver would be free to continue to harass other Muslim women. In fact, since there was no arrest, he is driving around DC right now. Perhaps he even seeks out Muslim women passengers as targets? Omar seems to have a responsibility here to other women and the public she is ignoring.
— Omar has not provided information about the cab she took, nor a fuller description of the driver who in her statement she described only as an “African immigrant.” Since she was picked up outside the White House, a fully surveilled area, it seems likely Omar’s cab and driver would be relatively easy to identify. Unless the driver told her “I am an immigrant,” it is unclear how Omar would know he was not born in the United States.
— Omar has not explained how the driver might have been able to remove her headcovering given the plexiglass barrier in DC cabs.
BONUS: Omar is in the midst of a swirl of accusations related to marriage fraud she may have committed for immigration purposes. See here and here.
BONUS: Here’s an example of a newspaper who actually pulled a story after realizing it could not verify what happened. But oh, the story was about a guy playing Santa Claus at a sick kid’s bedside, not an alleged hate crime…
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
‘Christian’ Church Halts Woman’s Funeral Midway Because She Was Gay
Religion is not about hate. It is not about intolerance. It should never be used to harm innocents. Believers need to be very suspect of those who quote holy words to justify such things.
Je Suis Vanessa Collier
Hundreds of Vanessa Collier’s friends and family gathered Saturday at New Hope Ministries, sitting before an open casket that held the woman they loved, when suddenly the minister overseeing her funeral stopped the service.
An hour-long viewing of Collier’s body had just finished and the memorial service was 15 minutes underway when Chavez stopped it.
The memorial could not continue, Pastor Ray Chavez said, as long as pictures of Collier with the love of her life, the spouse she shared two children with, were to be displayed. Chavez said there could be no images of Collier with her wife, Christina. There could be no indication that Collier was gay. Because, Christianity.
Hate Crime
Chavez, who apparently read one line out of the Bible’s Old Testament and completely missed the entire point of love, caring, tolerance and peace in the entire freaking New Testament, committed a hate crime. He harmed every grieving friend and relative of the deceased, and harmed her children. “It was humiliating,” said Victoria Quintana, Collier’s longtime friend. “It was devastating.”Those who loved Collier picked up programs, flowers and eventually the dead woman’s casket itself, hand-carrying them to a mortuary across the street.
A representative for New Hope Ministries declined to comment before hanging up on a Denver Post reporter on Tuesday. A biography on the church website says Chavez founded the ministry in 1981 with his wife, Lola. It says the church “is a place where those bound by drugs, alcohol, gangs and violence can find an ‘Ounce of Hope.'”
About four dozen supporters of Ms. Collier and her family gathered outside of the church in protest, chanting “Give us an apology!” and “Shame on Pastor Ray!” Security guards were stationed in front of the building to ensure none of the marchers made their way onto the property.
Collier’s friends say they still haven’t been reimbursed by New Hope Ministry for the cost of the funeral.
Unclear from news reports is how the church was unaware that the deceased was a gay woman, and why that only became apparent to the hateful pastor well into the memorial service.
And hey, if you have thoughts you’d like to share with the pastor, he and his church can be contacted online.
Here is Pastor Chavez and what I assume is his hetero spouse:
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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