Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Archive for the ‘News & Politics’ Category

You know, for a while I thought it was pretty cool how Obama was seasoning the regular, boring-ass presidential handshake with a subtle, and culturally appropriate, sign of humility.

Predictably, the right-wingers got all over this, talking shit about how it was a “sign of weakness” and interpreting it as not-only-literal-bowing, but also a figurative “bowing down” to foreign governments. I, on the other hand, took it as a refreshing change from how our last president handled foreign leaders:

The problem is that Obama keeps doing it. And, now that it’s lost its initial novelty charm, it’s starting to seem—not like a sign of weakness—but like sign of try-hard cultural sensitivity. Everyone has witnessed one of those moments. It’s like that scene in the movies when the idiot brother rehearses for weeks to greet the Greek parents in their native tongue, but instead of saying, “it’s a honor to meet you and your family,” he accidentally says, “your wife looks ripe for the taking.”

All of this bowing is a recipe for disaster. What’s going to happen when Obama goes to shake the Emperor of Japan’s hand again and the Emperor—thinking he’s doing the culturally appropriate thing—slaps Obama’s hand right-quick, forcing a de factor low-five, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air style? Or, what if Hu Jintao busts out with a “whattup brotha’, hollaback at me,” on a White House voicemail message?

But, who knows, maybe that’s Obama’s intention.

The more I think about it, the more the punk-ass kid that demanded that Joe Biden apologize for telling Barack Obama that Healthcare reform was a “big fuckin’ deal” (McKay Hatch) reminds me of one of Ned Flanders’s kids.

First of all, the physical resemblance is hard to ignore.

Then there’s the fixation on hokey t-shirts that do your talking for you (Note: he mailed Joe Biden one of those shitty t-shirts he’s wearing).

Now, I’m learning that McKay Hatch is the brainwashed child attack-dog for his Mormon family, a family that shares a family-tree branch with right-wing Utah Senator, and overall unsavory turd, Orrin Hatch—a guy that once claimed the U.S. Constitution was “ambiguous” on the matter of polygamy and is a descendant of polygamists himself.

So that completes the picture. Lame, indoctrinated religious wingnut? Check. This little shit is Rod Flanders.

Dear Little Turd (a.k.a. McKay Hatch):

I recently saw some news story where you “demand” that I apologize for audibly whispering that Healthcare Reform was a “big fuckin’ deal” to my boss during a press conference.

If I remember correctly, this is how that historic moment went down:

Ah, that was sweet. But this is what you, “McKay Hatch,” had to say about that. What kind of girl name is McKay anyway? That’s a fuckin’ last name, not a first name. And you’re one Mc away from just being Kay. (Not to mention one G from being you-know-what.)

Joe Mother-Fuckin’ Biden

Let’s face it: Dubya has had a serious ass-kicking coming to him for a long time. How he continues to elude it, even after this latest stunt, I don’t know.

During one of his recent, well-publicized humanitarian visits to Haiti with Bill Clinton, Bush appears to wipe his hand on Clinton’s shirt after shaking some Haitians’ hands. The jury is still out on whether this was some subtly racist shit (which I would argue it probably is). But one thing is clear: I would have beat his ass.

I’d put up with a lot of things–including ruining 230-plus years of (overall) national progress—but not this shit.

I actually had something like this happen to me when I was in the 7th grade.

I was minding my own junior-high-school business at my locker, when this second-string friend of mine—a White kid whose name I’ve permanently forgotten—came up to me to show me how dirty his hands had gotten at recess. (Admittedly, this kind of shit was impressive to me in the 7th grade.) With no warning, he proceeded to wipe said filthy hands on my beautiful (white) Kentucky Wildcats basketball t-shirt.

It was on like Donkey Kong.

I quickly balled a tight fist and, unfortunately, swung wildly at his head, in a deserved—but reckless—act of retribution. I nicked his blond hair, but before I could follow it up with a clean corrective measure, I was being hauled away to the authorities by the fastest-moving (and strongest) fat lady I’d ever encountered.

I tried, in vain, to present the hand prints on my shirt as evidence, and justification, to the Vice Principal. It wasn’t working. He started talking suspension for the both of us, though he was leaning noticeably harder on me. I don’t blame him. The other guy was blond and I was an just some ethnic kid with a dirty shirt.

When he left the room to assemble the necessary paperwork, I did what any good criminal does: I conspired with my co-offender. “We’re both screwed, man, unless we act like good friends that just had a stupid misunderstanding.” In the end, the cops bought our story and we got off scot-free.

But I’ll tell you one thing: like Bush, that punk kid was asking for an ass-kicking.

Even if I don’t always approve, I generally understand the things Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa does. This time around, it’s neither. This fool is trippin’.

In a recent statement, he’s excoriated some teachers at a South Los Angeles elementary school for encouraging some of their students to celebrate O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman, and RuPaul at a Black History Month event.

“I am shocked and outraged by the actions of these teachers at Wadsworth Elementary School,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “These teachers undermined the school’s well-intentioned celebration, and they did so at the expense of elementary school students. Their actions were not only cynical, but did a terrible disservice to the students.

Apparently while “other students were carrying pictures of President Obama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,” these kids were displaying pictures of their heroes.

The outrage seems pretty universal. The superintendent of schools, “community leaders,” and a bunch of organizations have spoken out against the teachers’ behavior. They’ve been suspended without pay and, from the looks of it, they’re going to get canned. At least that’s how it always seems to go with these kinds of things.

But this is straight-up bullshit.

Among the many problems with the way we educate kids these days is that we reward them for giving us the obvious-ass choice for things. We feed them the conventional answers and expect them to parrot the shit back to us. If anyone should disrupt that process, we come down on them like Australians on a bucket of chicken. Kids go to the retarded class and teachers get fired.

NBA Rebound, Defense, and Hustle King, Dennis "the Worm" Rodman

The way I see it, Barack Obama and MLK don’t need any more recognition. One of them already has a national holiday that kids get off of school. The other guy has a Nobel-fucking-Prize and is on TV every day.

I wouldn’t want my various kids learning the over-simplified, sterilized shit it took me years to purge out of my system: Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, “Indians” and Pilgrims got along just fine, and Abraham Lincoln “freed” the slaves.

These kids are learning a valuable lesson: life is messy and complicated. O.J. Simpson, Dennis “the Worm” Rodman, and RuPaul may not be a conventional heroes, but they’re real.

A couple of weeks ago, Ethnic Avenue reported on the sudden unshriveling of Obama’s kick-assery, after an extended, disappointing slumber. Since it was only a single week of ballsy, it was unclear at the time whether the whole thing was just a fluke, or the beginning of something big.

Well, the answer to that question has arrived in the form of a major oh-snap moment against his soundly defeated adversary, Old-Man McCain, at the Heathcare Reform Summit last week. In fact, Obama came down so swiftly and coldly, that I actually felt kind of sorry for the old bastard—despite his infinite dickiness and stupidity.

S-N-A-P. The first thing that came to mind after witnessing that massive dose of shut-the-fuck-up is this now-infamous Sean Connery moment (note Barbra Walters’s change of heart in the final seconds).

Whether Obama is having the Sean Connery Realization–that he’s “tried everything else” and that his beatdown is now “merited”–is unclear. But whatever it is, it’s certainly no fluke.

Barack, the Ethnic Smackdown is strong in you.

The Backstory

A few years ago, I had this millionaire, born-again Christian, asshole boss that was so consistently racist (like actually so), that he distorted my uncanny ability to detect racism for several years. He looked like a torn-up version of Lou Dobbs—if you can believe that.

He would say things out of the blue like, “You know, I hired you despite your accent.” Now, I’ll tell you that in subsequent polling, about 80 percent of people say I have no discernable accent. Another, 15 percent or so tell me I have a medley of American city accents. The other 5 percent is this guy. So, when he told me he hired me despite my accent, I figured that was code for, “I hired you despite your being brown,” a semi-obvious fact I appreciated.

It’s nice when people can overlook your flaws.

Over time, I developed a type of Stockholm Syndrome for the guy and our unhealthy relationship blossomed. We’d go to fancy, tax-deducted lunches together to plot out ways to make him even more money. He’d pay every time, and I came to know what a cheap-lunch-whore, entertaining a middle-aged Republican in exchange for the most expensive thing on the menu, must feel like.

Somewhere along the way, the guy got deluded into thinking he was a genius. And to prove his brilliance, he would bait me into conversations about politics. He’d repeat everything he’d heard on Fox News the night before, and I–like the idiot I was at the time–would try disprove him with reason, punctuated with arcane political theory and historical evidence. Definitely not recommended.

In a conversation about racial injustice in our criminal justice system, I pointed out to him that the jails were disproportionately filled with ethnic people.

He came back with, “Well, you’re the ones committing all the crimes.”

He should have been offensive, but he seemed pretty harmless at the time. Besides, the lunches were good.

Why I Told You All of That

Now fast forward to yesterday. I’m reading the news and I run into this story, where a twelve-year-old girl from New York got arrested, and taken away in handcuffs, for doodling on her desk.

Twelve-year-old Alexa Gonzalez scribbled “Lex was here 2/1/10″ on her desk Monday at Junior High School 190 in Queens. She also wrote “I love my friends Abby and Faith.”

The girl says the doodles could have been erased.

I immediately remembered my old boss and thought, you know what, that asshole was right. Lock the little bitch up. We are the ones committing all the crimes.

Every smack that goes up, must come down. And, even though Obama’s hand seems to have floated in the air for like a year, it came down correspondingly hard and crisp across the collective orange face of the Republican party over the past week.

Like so many others, I made no secret of my disgust for Obama’s repeated punk-outs and disappointing overtures to idiots that never had any intention of working with him. But, for at least one magical week, I’m getting to enjoy some good old-fashioned, sweet ethnic beatdown:

What started with a surprisingly in-your-face State of the Union address, has poured over into a daily–semi-abusive–barrage of calling-out, political flourish, and general ridicule. Seemingly overnight, Obama has gone from a bad case of no-balls accommodationism to a life-threatening case of testicular answer.

Now, that’s my kind of change.

Every year around this time, the TV lights up with lame programs about “where we are” in respect to Martin Luther King’s “Dream.” Even though I recognize the value of the occasional check-in, I’ve always felt that the annual MLK news special was one of those hollow, easy gestures from the CNNs of the world—put mostly in place so the second-string newscasters can log hours while Wolf Blitzer gets “the night off.”  Needless to say, this year’s special got all fucked up because of the whole Obama thing. For the first time in a long-ass time, they actually have some movement on the Dream front.

I don’t actually plan on watching any of these shows that I’ve been seeing commercials for, but I can pretty much guess what they’ll sound (and look) like: a TV-Reporter Asian American Girl walking toward the camera while saying something like, “While Obama’s election marks a big step in the right direction toward fully realizing King’s dream, there’s still a lot of work to blah-blah-blah.” Cue footage of an especially dramatic Obama speech, inter-spliced with some black-and-white MLK footage. I guarantee it.

So, knowing how the news is going to handle that situation, where are we with the Dream, really–especially with a black president and all?

It’s complicated. But I’ll start with the stuff we won’t get into (at least not right now):

• How a whole new breed of dumb-as-shit, redneck racists is coming out of the woodwork since the election
• How Obama may have only gotten the job because the guy before him fucked up so monumentally
• All of the miscellaneous evidence that the world is going to shit (spike in overall stupidity, the economy, obesity epidemic, etc.)

What I will discuss is the condition of MLK Boulevards, Drives, and Streets everywhere. I’ll explain.

For most of my life, I’ve subscribed to the Chris Rock School of Thought on MLK Streets:

The way I see it, MLK Street is a good barometer on how far we’ve come to achieving King’s dream of equality. As long as MLK Street remains a ghetto-ass, dangerous place in most cities, things haven’t changed all that much. Just because a minority or two land a good job, that doesn’t mean the condition of that whole race has improved. It’s just a stroke of good luck or an exceptional hustle by that one person.

So if non-violent MLK Streets is a sign that the Dream has become reality, imagine my dismay when I found this—in Jerusalem, Israel of all places:

It’s a good thing Dr. King kept his Dream domestic.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that the only way to get your point across to some people is to throw a hard object at them.

Oh, now I see what you mean.

Recently, a Massimo Tartaglia appears to have put this principle into practice, when he, appropriately and accurately, nailed Silvio Berlusconi—everybody’s favorite billionaire media mogul and corrupt asshole politician—in his right-wing mouth with a plaster replica of the Duomo di Milano.

A lousy, overpriced souvenir finally comes in handy.

Frankly, I don’t like violence. But I recognize its important role throughout the history of human communication. I’ve always called violence “the ancient language of last resort.” In the overwhelming majority of cases you can make your point with other, more modern forms of speech (in ascending order: silence; calm, reasonable statements; firm, direct talking-to; screaming and cussing; etc). But occasionally, you have to resort to the oldest language. There are even times when someone may use it with you.

But like any experienced urban dweller will tell you, there are some people who only understand that language. One of those people, it seems, is Mr. Bloody Mouth.

For the longest time, people have been complaining about what it’s like to be heard in Berlusconi’s Italy. The guy almost exclusively owns and controls the media, an advantage he fully exploits to his political benefit. So, if you have an opposing view, you’re pretty much shit-out-of-luck; you’re not showing up on any of his television stations. Add to that his hard-right politics and (habitual) corruption, and you have a recipe for pissed off Italians. Even Berlusconi himself was quoted as having said, “[he] expected this to happen.”

The last time someone took aim at a monumental dick was a few months ago, when that guy threw his shoe at George W. Bush. For his efforts, people all over the world celebrated him as a hero. Women were offering him their daughters in marriage. People were offering him jobs, houses, and other extravagant gifts.

And, that asshole missed.