If you haven’t seen Daily Show contributor Wyatt Cenac’s hilarious trip to Boca, the video is worth a watch.
It also brings up a recurring if tangential line of thinking about the campaign: are old Jews in Florida going to mess this thing up for Obama? The answer, of course is no. While Aunt Millie and a couple
nutbags will no doubt voice their support for John McCain, trying to sell their racist aversion to Obama as an undying love for Hillary, the bottom line is that they, like Joe Lieberman, are Republicans, and should just come out and say so.
And while we’re at it, let’s also put the idea that older Jews are going to bolt where it belongs: along side the idea that progressives will move to Nader, or that McCain has any shot at not being crushed with young voters or labor. Obama will keep the base, and that includes the vast majority of Jewish voters. While Boca octogenarians may be a harder sell, they will be/are melting with nachas when reminded that Barack=Baruch.
[UPDATE: On the other hand, peep former NY Gov
Mario Cuomo still sitting on his hands…]
Last night, Ari and I watched Elia Kazan’s 1947 classic
A Gentleman’s Agreement, the story of a journalist, P. Schuyler Green (Gregory Peck), who pretends to be Jewish for a magazine series on anti-Semitism. When his son, Tommy, faces hateful words at school, Green is forced to explain to him what it means to be a Jew, and the importance of the separation of church and state. His simple words in explaining the Jeffersonian idea to Tommy drive home the simplicity of this idea, even in 1947. Have we made backwards strides?
Tommy: What’s anti-Semitism? Phil: Well, uh, that’s when some people don’t like other people just because they’re Jews. Tommy: Why not? Are Jews bad? Phil: Well, some are and some aren’t, just like with everyone else. Tommy: What are Jews, anyway? Phil: Well, uh, it’s like this. Remember last week when you asked me about that big church, and I told you there are all different kinds of churches? Well, the people who go to that particular church are called Catholics, and there are people who go to different churches and they’re called Protestants, and there are people who go to different churches and they’re called Jews, only they call their churches temples or synagogues. Tommy: Why don’t some people like those? Phil: Well, that’s a tough one to explain, Tommy. Some people hate Catholics, and some hate Jews. Tommy: And no one hates us ’cause we’re Americans? Phil: Well, no, that’s another thing again. See, you can be an American and a Catholic, or an American and a Protestant, or an American and a Jew. But look, Tommy, it’s like this: one thing’s your country, see like America or France or Germany or Russia. The flag is different, and the uniform is different, and the language is different. […] But the other thing is religion, like the Jewish or the Catholic or the Protestant religion, see that hasn’t anything to do with the flag, or the uniform, or the airplanes. Got it? Tommy: Yup!
Now change “Jew” to “Muslim,” and we’ve got a lesson pertinent to most present-day Americans.
I’ve often seen gentrification as a difficult problem to tackle. For many of my friends—young, working people trying to live in diverse areas and support themselves on small, non-profit or public service salaries—it is a struggle to find housing without becoming an agent of gentrification. But a
New York Times piece today about Mount Morris Park, a traditionally-black Harlem neighborhood, explores one of the uglier examples of that phenomenon.
Timothy Williams chronicles the recent dispute over the neighborhood’s Marcus Garvey Park where, since 1969, drummers from Africa and the Caribbean have played an important role in shaping the social fabric and dynamic of the place. “The musicians,” he explains, “who play until 10 p.m. every summer Saturday, are widely credited with helping to make the park safer over the years.”
Across the street from the park however, at 2002 Fifth Avenue, is “a new seven-story cream and red brick luxury co-op with a doorman, $1 million apartments and a lobby with a fireplace.” Predictably, there have been some disputes about the character of the neighborhood.
As I mentioned in
a prior post about the Garrahy Judicial Complex, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in that facility’s Courtroom 4C, where arraignments for RI’s 6th District take place. The judges at arraignment give a shpiel about the meaning and consequences of a plea whenever someone pleads out at that stage of the game, and I often take much of that shpiel for granted.
An important part of what they must instruct the defendants is that any criminal conviction or guilty plea will affect any immigration status or proceedings. For many, this means that deportation is inevitable. One thing missing from the shpiel, however, is consideration of how a guilty plea and prison sentence will affect the defendant’s status in Family Court. All too often, defendants are counseled to accept a shorter sentence with time served only to be served with Family Court subpoenas on charges of neglect—neglect that occurs while these parents are behind bars—or deportation papers.
Colorlines magazine has a great piece this month on the intersection of systems—namely immigration, incarceration, and foster care. In “
When an Immigrant Mom Gets Arrested,” Julianne Ong Hing and Seth Wessler write:
Immigrant mothers are not the first to deal with the ways that different government agencies intersect, usually to their detriment. The experiences Black families have had with child welfare and criminal justice policy make clear what can happen to communities when family policy intersects with a set of other punitive policies.
On last night’s broadcast, a repeat from June 16, Colbert did the kind of thing that I almost never rely on white media figures to do. He was interviewing Kenneth Miller, who wrote a book about how the proponents of “intelligent design” are trying to teach creationism at schools. At one point, Miller compared creationists to women who fraudulently collect welfare checks, saying they’re asking for a government handout, “I would compare them to welfare queens,” he said.
Or so read the headline yesterday on one of my favorite blogs,
History Is a Weapon. And when you look at the late Senator’s resume, he’s left us little reason to mourn. Here are a few of his most remarkable achievements:
Fighting integration;
Opposing Martin Luther King day;
the Helms-Burton act, the centerpiece of the embargo against Cuba;
Disputing ALL Affirmative Action programs;
Voting to bail out the savings and loan industry AND to slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly, and wages for working families;
Hating all gay people;
Supporting apartheid in South Africa;
Routinely fighting against AIDS research from the beginning, blaming people suffering from the disease for it;
Leading the fight to discontinue Pell Grants for inmates;
And, in 1993, singing Dixie to the first African American senator, Carol Mosely-Braun, and promising to make her “cry.”
I think HIAW sums it up well, when they proclaim: “Hell burns hotter tonight.” Want some more inspiring food for thought? Check out “
The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” a speech given by Frederick Douglass in Rochester on July 5, 1852.
I can’t believe I missed this in the New York Times yesterday:
”Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit”
In a sublimely perverse, supremely hilarious article that at first glance seems like something ripped straight from the Onion, the Times reports on Max Mosley, president of a formula one governing body, who was recently revealed to have participated in “a depraved Nazi sadomasochistic orgy” with five prostitutes in London’s Chelsea district.
According to the Times:
The video showed Mr. Mosley counting in German — “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!” — as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women.
“She needs more of ze punishment!” he cried in German-accented English. One woman appeared to search his hair for lice while another called off items on an inspection list.
But, wait–it gets better:
Family history has added to the notoriety: Mr. Mosley, 67, is the younger son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, whose secret wedding in Berlin in October 1936 was held at the home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and included Hitler as a guest of honor.
Anyone catch this? Recently,
Condoleeza Rice briefly stopped being a tool to describe the difficulties with discussing race in America, calling Obama’s speech “important” and slavery America’s “birth defect.”
“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”
As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.”
“That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today,” she said
This was all too much for Lou Dobbs to handle, and in the heat of his slobbery tirade about how “he doesn’t have a problem,” the King of Xenophobia gave us all a nice lesson in self-hoisted petards when he pretty much said that these “cotton picking black politicians are being ridiculous,” presumably in calling for a probing dialogue about race in America.
Human-rights violations around the world, from the ongoing genocide in Darfur to human trafficking in Eastern Europe, will be the focus of the third annual Brown University Human Rights Film Festival, running Thursday through Sunday.
The Devil Came on Horseback, a first-person account by a former U.S. Marine of Sudanese government-backed attacks on black Africans living in the Darfur region, will be the first film in the program at 6:45 p.m. Thursday in Sayles Hall. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, who wrote about events he witnessed in Darfur on several visits, will speak.
A teenager allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail outside a long-vacant Jewish temple in South Providence early yesterday, but the police caught him and two of his apparent accomplices. The teens apparently intended to toss the Molotov cocktail into a vacant lot across the street from the temple in order to enjoy the sight of it shattering and flaming, but it was hastily cast aside onto the grass outside the temple when a police cruiser approached, the police said.
While the progressive gamers over at
Breakthrough are producing
socially conscious video games like “ICED” (I Can End Deportation), others have more…problematic ideas on what constitutes an exciting and appropriate video game. I was appalled to come across “
Prison Tycoon,” produced by the folks over at
ValuSoft. For all those kids who dream big and say, “When I grow up, I’m going to have my own
private prison,” this game is for you. The game’s tagline:
YOU are the WARDEN… THEIR future is in YOUR hands… Rehabilitate them… or BREAK them…
The game allows users to build and design the layout of their prison, cultivate their managerial skills by maintaining discipline over their inmates, raise funds to improve the quality of their prisons, and determine the extent to which they will punish or rehabilitate their offenders. As you advance in the game, you gain privileges like increasing the security of your prison from minimum to maximum, building a death row, and sending in guards to enforce your rules by any means necessary. The game incorporates key elements such as location, race, religion, gang affiliation, and aggression.
Anyone else extremely troubled by this? Joe B., I know you’ve got something to say about this one…
Obama’s
speech yesterday addressing race and the manufactured Jeremiah Wright controversy was brilliant and moving. Whether you agree with that assessment or see him as a crafty politician giving another pretty speech, it is notable for the fact that he actually dared to speak to the voters about a difficult issue as if they were mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.
It is unfortunate that we have to praise him for what should be the standard in American political discourse, but the fact remains that such forthright maturity is decidedly not the standard. All that remains to be seen is whether the voters (and pundits, and media, and his political opponents) actually are mature adults capable of nuanced understanding and rational discussion.
Thanks to tipster Bill M. for alerting us to this story:
Chinese Laundry, which opened March 11th at
121 North Main Street (right in my neighborhood!), is not receiving the warm welcome for which its owner,
Chow Fun Food Group owner
John Elkhay, had hoped. The restaurant, which
claims to offer, “a modern pan Asian dining experience with an intoxicating vibe, incredible worldly flavors, and a sensual, sophisticated atmosphere,” opened amidst a firestorm of controversy.
John Elkhay, who has brought fun, trendy restaurants to the Providence dining scene, arrived at his VIP party on Friday night after a stressful and unexpected debate that emerged in the blogosphere earlier in the day. An ad for his newest restaurant, Chinese Laundry, in Providence Monthly featured the naked torso of a woman and the words “See what you are missing.” It caught the eye of a student at Brown University who referred it to a blog written by a self-proclaimed “angry Asian-American woman.”
In a letter to the Brown community, Brown President Ruth J. Simmons addresses
the Molotov incident:
March 16, 2008
Members of the Brown Community,
Early Saturday, Providence Police notified our Public Safety Department that two incendiary devices were thrown at the off-campus residence of an employee of Brown/RISD Hillel. While the motivation for this incident is unclear at this time, I am concerned about any acts of violence affecting members of our community. I want you to know what we are doing to assist Hillel and the employee in this situation.
Russell Carey and his staff are working with the director of Hillel to address any safety concerns at the Brown/RISD building as well as to secure alternative housing for the employee. I have assured the director that we will do anything possible to assist students and staff who may fear similar acts. At the same time, although this took place off-campus, we are trying to determine if there is more that we can do to prevent this kind of activity from recurring.
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In a letter to the Brown community, Brown President Ruth J. Simmons addresses