I expected, going in to the Republicans having a debate on MLK day in the first state to secede and fire shots in the Civil War, that there would probably be a few jaw-dropping dog whistles blown to race-bait a crowd that's got a lot of people still bitter about a federal holiday honoring the civil rights movement. Seems to me that the whole point of the scheduling by Fox News was to stoke racial hostilities and keep Republican enthusiasm for kicking the black President out of office high, especially since Romney's presence is hurting Republican enthusiasm in the polls. So I was a bit surprised that Juan Williams broke the rules that require race to be discussed through dog whistles and insinuations, and tried to get it all out on the table. I mean, his personal motivations for that are obvious---the whole scheduling thing plus the candidates' increasingly racist rhetoric is just plain offensive, and the urge to call bullshit must have been high---but considering how much Fox pays him, I was still mildly surprised that he decided to use the debate to actually provoke the candidates into being more blunt. Of course, the flip side of that is that he had to have known that if he did provoke one of them into saying something super racist, his picture would be on the front page of every newspaper today.
Turns out that worked out better than even the most ambitious debate moderator could have hoped, because the crowd's naked hatred of Williams for daring to bring up race, instead of letting conservative candidates talk about it in euphemism, guaranteed he'd be the talk of political media today. Most of the coverage I've seen is of Gingrich taking the opportunity to really pull the string and let the asshole out in full force.
Of course, Williams dropped the ball, because there's a number of ways to challenge Gingrich's lie about the President "putting" people on food stamps. You can ask, for instance, if he's saying that the better solution is for poor people to starve. You could ask how people are going to make it to that job training he's so up about if they're going hungry. You could ask him if he sincerely believes that we have 9% unemployment because people prefer to get $150 a month in food stamps rather than have a job, and if so, why did the number of people that he believes "choose" not to work has doubled in the past four years. You could ask him when he's getting a job, instead of living off direct mail donations. There's many fun ways to go about this.
That said, I honestly don't blame him for dropping the ball. It's got be unnerving being dressed down by a soulless monster while booed by a blood-hungry crowd of Southerners who are still pissed about the 60s and are looking for torches to light. And honestly, I don't care about why or how Williams went about this. I'm just glad he tried. The Republicans have really come to believe that they are entitled to race-bait without anyone calling them out on it, or even asking them an honest question about it, and they simply aren't. Someone needs to call bullshit on that.
In a report last week, NBC revealed that Romney’s great grandfather, Miles Park Romney, had fled to Mexico with other Mormons to escape persecution for polygamy. Romney’s father, George, was later born in the northern Mexico colony of Colonia Dublan.
When this was brought up, the audience booed simply at the mention of being born in Mexico. It was a naked moment of irrational hatred. What, do they think that the soil itself taints you? Would they refuse to travel there for fear of getting cooties? I'm rarely surprised at the ugliness that percolates below the surface in much of conservative politics, but even I was taken aback by how the mere mention of Mexico and being born there set them off. Interestingly, the Romney family and mine have this in common---my grandfather's parents were British citizens but my grandfather was born in Mexico and then moved to the U.S. as a child---and my grandfather is all about this Tea Party stuff. Wonder if they'd boo him, too.
Romney's stock answer---that he supports immigrants who can claw through the mountains of paperwork and obstacles put in their way to move here legally---tends to satisfy a lot of people, but his family's story should really show why it's not good enough. It's not just that, but for Native Americans, we're all descended from immigrants. It's that most of them got here in ways that would now get them labeled "illegal". Moving back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico was actually really common back when the Romney's were doing it, mainly because you could do it without getting tied up in mountains of red tape that is now there because our government has decided to make it nearly impossible to legally immigrate here. And that doesn't even touch the problem of people who, like the Romneys when they were living in Mexico, are probably not looking to lay down permanent roots. Looking at the past with clear eyes makes it obvious that the purported dangers of having more permeable borders are just so much nonsense, and that increasing restrictions on immigration is pretty much always tied to racist hostility, which is why we've had laws aimed, at different points in time, at keeping out Germans and Irish, Italians and Eastern Europeans, then Asians, and now Mexicans and South Americans.
It's mid-January, which means that we're in the midst of America's newest annual tradition: everyone in public life distributes one of three MLK quotes, and then we all reaffirm our collective national commitment to ensuring that race relations don't regress any further than 1965, or 1954 at the absolute earliest. It's like a Thanksgiving where everyone sits around and quotes from Dances with Wolves and then asks what the deal with Native Americans is.
Martin Luther King Day is problematic. It's problematic because it's the leading edge of a bifurcation of King's legacy into what can charitably be called the Disney King and the Real King. The Disney King is the one whose predominant message was a race-ignorant society where recognizing "the content of one's character" was a command to ignore the entirety of America's history with race. That King's message was that a class of people, discriminated against on the basis of race, simply wanted the country to stop thinking about their race. Once that happened, discrimination would end, and the vicious psychological scars of slavery and Jim Crow and racial inequality would be healed. ...And scene.
The Real King was a tremendously complex political figure despised by many, who fought for racial justice, and against Vietnam, and who accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. He wasn't a moderate pragmatist who just really wanted to be able to sit in the front of the bus - the man was, both by the standards of his day and of the present day, a leftist.
America has coalesced around celebrating the works and legacy of a leftist. And it's a good thing.
At this point, it's nearly cliche to point out that Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't die to help white people feel less guilty about America's history, and didn't wear a suit to shame young black men in jeans. I no longer have patience with today as a shared reiteration that Civil Rights Act was a good thing, or that racism consists of solely of whatever was in Eyes on the Prize.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was, in fact, a radical. He was a radical about war, about race, about class, about a whole host of issues. That part of his radicalism is now enshrined as unassailable convention doesn't reduce it - it simply provides a much-needed reminder that radicals are sometimes wiser than they ever get credit for.
These conditions arise as a result of faulty bonding and identification with the same-sex parent, starting in early life. They indicate deep-seated gender self-alienation (TG's cross-identify with an opposite-sex figure), and are preventable and treatable.
The writings of well-known figures like Chastity Bono, James Morris, and Richard Raskind confirm this pattern.
Psychiatrist Richard Fitzgibbons's articles "Gender Identity Disorder in Children" and "The Desire for a Sex Change" are instructive.
The Left has been lying to the public for decades, with false science and false argument. "Gays" are a manufactured "minority" used for political purposes.
The National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality has the real information (http://www.narth.com).
More and more Americans are learning the truth. GayScam, this fraud, will be ended. The laws will be adjusted accordingly.
--Sharon Kass Washington, D.C.
I responded:
Well, you weren't born an asshole, either, but I still think it's wrong to take your computer away.
And then, feeling like perhaps she doesn't have the mental acuity to get the joke, I followed up with:
I'll add that no one is born religious, either. That condition arises, often as in your case, because of a strong hatred in the heart that can't be rationalized by real world evidence. So fantasies of gods and demons arise, giving the religious person justifications for their ugliness and irrational hatred, in this case of queer people. These fantasies are preventable, and treatable.
Since you appear to have blanket refusal for giving anyone rights for conditions they weren't "born" with, to be consistent, you should work on banning the practice of religion. After all, the question of homosexuality or transgenderism being inherent at birth is still up in the air, but no one believes babies are born religious.
"Blame the mother" is an old, and thoroughly discredited theory. Quacks like to cling to it, often in all sorts of ways, for the same reason that anti-vaxxers talk vaguely about "toxins" in vaccines. The reason is that nearly anyone's experiences can be framed this way, if need be. If your mom showed you affection as a child---and mothers are known to do t hat---and you were clingy and needy---I have rarely seen a child that is not---then a manipulative bigot can use that as "evidence" that you overly identified with your parent. Perversely, if your mother was actually distant or unaffectionate, that also can be used, as you'll then be told that you were made clingier by lack of affection. Once you've determined that being queer is a "disease" with its roots in childhood, you're able to exploit anything from even the most idyllic childhood and claim that as the cause.
Ironically, Kass is not only wrong that "more and more" Americans are turning against gay people, but she has it completely backwards. As the real-world evidence piles in that being gay or transgendered is not inherently damaging, and certainly is not experienced as "choice" any more than being straight is, more and more Americans are coming around to support gay and transgender rights. This includes the American Psychological Association, which says:
There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.
They also take this position on transgendered people:
Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder. For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures, and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression, or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.
In other words, what psychological distress stems from being transgendered is not inherent to the state, but a result of bigotry. Anyone who claims to be concerned about the mental health of gay and transgendered people should respond, then, with acceptance. Like I said in the comments at the Girl Scouts post, I hear a lot of complaints from bigots about how they don't like accepting people, but so far, I have not heard one give a substantive example of genuine damage to themselves that could occur by just accepting people for who they are.
Sharp readers will notice that I didn't engage in the debate over whether or not people are "born this way". Empowering Lady Gaga lyrics aside, the reason is twofold. One, the evidence is sketchy for any claims about where queerness "comes" from, and in fact, many of us think that's because we're asking the wrong question. Asking where queerness "comes" from implies that cisgendered and straight is a baseline, and anything that differs from that is deviant and needs an explanation. I think of queerness like I do being left-handed: most people are right-handed, but some of us are left-handed. We don't think of left-handed people as deviant so much as we accept that in any population of people, there's going to be some diversity in orientation, as in personality.
The second reason is that it's beside the point. My sense is that sexual orientation and gender identity are probably a mish-mash of genetic, environmental, and experiential influences, but even if you could somehow prove that it's all experiential, so what? It doesn't change the needs of queer people to get proper medical care, social acceptance, and legal rights. I don't give a fuck about this "choice" argument. There is a small subset of the GLBT community that can legitimately be said to be making the "choice" to be at least perceived as gay: bisexual people who really could date either way but have chosen a same-sex partner. So what? I still don't think they should face employment discrimination, being kicked out of community organizations, or being forced not to marry the person they love. It's a completely moot argument, in the pragmatic sense. A lot of identities are partially social constructs, but we still recognize them as real and extend legal protections from discrimination. On the far end, you have religion, which is 100% a choice and completely a social construct, but religious people, in fact, enjoy many legal protections for their religion. On the other end of the spectrum, you have things like race and gender, which are socially constructed but often have easily recognizable physical markers that let people know "what" you are. Gayness is rightly perceived as closer to the race/gender side of the spectrum, since all available evidence shows that it's mostly experienced as not a choice. But it doesn't really matter to me; what matters is that it's on the spectrum, and therefore people who are gay or transgendered deserve to be protected.
I'm taking the rest of the day off---though I'll be on Twitter for the debates tonight---to honor MLK Day. Everyone should celebrate by getting some relaxing in. That said, I had to take the time to respond to someone who had the nerve to use this holiday to send off bigoted missives.
So, L.A. is once again looking at the question of whether or not to require condom use in porn filmed in the city. This was a question I was initially agnostic on, figuring that it was probably a complex argument and I should give both sides a listen before deciding. In taking that approach, I have discovered that the anti-condom arguments are some of the most piss-poor, illogical arguments I've ever seen. I was forced by the badness of these arguments to agree that mandating condom use is clearly the path, since it's the only side that actually bothered to make an argument that wasn't smoke and mirrors. Let's take a look at each argument from the anti-condom side and see why they're just so terrible:
1) It'll cut into porn profits. This is really the only argument that the porn industry---like any industry fighting against labor protections---cares about. Everything else is hand-waving (though I will address it, because the hand-waving has sucked in many liberals, mostly men, for reasons that should be as obvious as they are embarrassing). This is a value judgment argument. The question is whether you value the health and safety of the porn actors more than the ability to move units of the producers. I tend to side with people over profits, and have yet to hear a conservative make a compelling argument for why they value profits over people.
2) The customers want this. This is the male entitlement argument. (Yes, I know women watch porn, but the porn industry that we're talking about has a male customer in mind.) I know this will get me lambasted as some sort of man-hater, but I do think that men really aren't entitled to any form of gratification they want, regardless of who they hurt. No one is. The law already recognizes this when it comes to porn. There's a lot of customer demand for stuff that's illegal or at least should be: high school girls, little kids, actual rapes instead of fake ones, serious injuries or even death inflicted on women, pictures where the subject explicitly did not give consent. There probably are some customers who will be sorely disappointed to see visible evidence of safety precautions on screen, but I'm honestly skeptical that they're going to be so angry they just decide to boycott jerking off to porn. I remain strongly unconvinced that seeing a little latex in a porn is a greater tragedy than contracting HIV on a porn set.
3) They're just going to take porn shoots elsewhere. Really, liberals? This is the best you can do? This is actually a standard argument business always makes against labor protections. This threat has various degrees of seriousness to it, but even in serious cases, it's an empty argument. It basically deprives the government of the right to protect people within their jurisdiction because they don't have the right to do so in other jurisdictions. Governments should have a right to say, "This behavior is so wrong that while we can't ban it everywhere, we can ban it here." Often, once one jurisdiction does it, others soon folllow, especially with regards to safety regulations. Plus, I'm a little skeptical of the notion that the entire porn industry in L.A. will decamp to another location. They aren't in L.A. just by accident, you know. The one thing the porn industry needs---more than latex-free dicks, even---is a steady supply of young people who don't have a lot of money but put a lot of effort into their looks. The steady stream of people who come to L.A. to make it and then don't is a gold mine for the porn industry. You're not going to find that in Minneapolis. It helps if they can be convinced that doing porn could be the entryway into a career they want. The porn industry grasps this, which is why they take any porn actress who has a bit part in any Hollywood movie and trumpets the hell out of it, to keep the crossover dream alive. You're just not going to have that in any other city. Look, the porn industry isn't fighting this tooth and nail because they have a lot of options. They know that L.A. has them over a barrel on this, which is why they're fighting so hard.
4) Freedom of speech. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't really think that freedom of speech covers the right to avoid safety precautions for workers. Regular Hollywood has to follow labor laws with regards to their actors, and they have to deal with unions, to boot. The porn industry is exploiting the fact that the world doesn't care very much about the people that work for them, and I'm glad that L.A. is stepping in and saying porn actors deserve the same kind of labor protections that we extend to other professions.
"We're selling a fantasy," says Lisa Ann, 39, who enjoyed her own mainstream moment when she was cast as a Sarah Palin-type in Hustler's spoof of the 2008 elections. "It would be great to teach young people to put a condom on during sex," she says, but she's not sure how much the porn industry should be responsible for educating teenagers.
This is a bad argument for two reasons. The most important is that it's a strawman. The regulations aren't being written in order to "teach" condom use to teenagers. They're protection for the actors on-set, to keep them from contracting STDs and especially HIV. But it's also bullshit by its own measure. Porn producers are trying to have it both ways. Their main marketing strategy is that they aren't fantasy, but are real. The sex is real, and they have frequent close-ups and particular emphasis on ejaculation being caught onscreen in order to make it clear that this is real and not a fantasy. Comparing this to explosions and car chases in real Hollywood movies is missing the point; everyone knows that the car chases and explosions are special effects. The whole point of porn is to say, "This is not a special effect, but actual people having actual sex." The reason people choose porn videos over drawings or fictional sex scenes is the realness of it.
The sense that porn is real means that it does have an impact on the viewers. Anal sex, Brazilian waxing, and facials have all become more common in real sex because of porn. I'm not judging that---to the extent that porn encourages people to experiment and have more fun in bed, I'm all for it, though some of the practices that have taken off have questionable value as pleasurable---but it is inarguable that porn has a normative effect in a way that stuff that doesn't present itself as real doesn't. Whether that should be used for good is up for grabs, but again, while this is all an interesting conversation, it's also completely moot. The regulations aren't about directing the message, but about protecting the workers.
6) Condoms are uncomfortable. The argument is that since the actors are having a lot of sex, condoms "chafe" in a way that they miraculously don't for us ordinary people. I think this is grasping at straws, personally, because a lot of ordinary people do in fact have bouts of condom-use sex that are intense and long-lasting and don't seem to have this problem, at least if they use lube. But I also have to point out that the porn industry standardly asks women to cram multiple cocks into them, to have anal sex whether they're up for it or not (and to make sure they're up for it with fasting and heavy duty enemas---the kind of stuff that you don't have to do when having ordinary people anal sex), or to have sex with machines. If keeping the actresses physically comfortable was important to them, porn would look completely different and probably be far less profitable. Which is why #1 is really the only argument in play here, and one that liberals who think you're killing a puppy if you venture even the slightest criticism of the stuff they jerk off to should stop being so defensive and really think this through. No one is telling you that you're a bad person for looking at porn. We're just saying that the industry should be forced to take more precautions when it comes to the health of its workers. The utter indifference to the health of porn workers suggests that a lot of people think of them as second class citizens who can be used for sexual gratification and then disposed of. And if you do believe that, then yeah, I think you're a bad person.
I have a friend from out of town staying, so I can't be online today, but that's no reason for the rest of you to deprive yourselves of a Panda Party! After a few months of doing this, choosing themes and booting trolls has become quite the democratic institution, so I think it can fly without my presence this week. But that doesn't mean I won't be sharing a video with you that's fitting for the WAM Prom that will take place mere hours after Panda Party usually peters out.
And, as an added bonus, here are the two mash-ups Marc Faletti has created and pre-released:
This story is definitely flying around feminist circles. Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two investigative reporters for the Boston Globe, have published an excerpt from their new book about Mitt Romney in Vanity Fair. In it, they tell the story of a woman who was in Romney's church and when she was pregnant with her second child---while single---Romney, acting as a bishop, paid her a visit. He then pressured her to give up her baby for adoption, which she most adamantly didn't want to do.
Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn't exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. "And then he says, 'Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don't, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,'" Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. "This is not playing around," she said. "This is not like 'You don't get to take Communion.' This is like 'You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.'" Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: "Give up your son or give up your God."
It's a believable story, even though the church denies that they prescribe excommunication for the "sin" of single motherhood. After all, it sounds like he didn't phrase it to her that way, more more as a matter of disobedience. More to the point, I can see Romney, who is an imperious fuckhead, getting rapidly frustrated that this woman didn't immediately give in to his demands, so he could wrap up his church duties and return to his beloved business of cannibalizing other businesses and putting people out of work. Or whatever it was he had to do that day. Either way, I don't imagine he thought much of some woman low on the totem pole talking back to him instead of just doing what she was told. In frustration, bringing up the possibility of excommunication to get his way? Totally plausible.
(It's worth noting at this point that Jezebel is right that his behavior, if true, is beyond the pale. But from what I understand, Mormons don't believe in hell, per se, so perhaps this threat isn't quite as dire as when it's made by Catholics using the threat of god's punishment to control women's reproductive choices. It's like only 99.9% evil instead of 100% evil. But any Mormons or former Mormons are free to 'splain in comments.)
What's interesting to me is that the Romney campaign is denying the story. This is interesting to me, because it suggests that even out-of-touch Mitt Romney realizes that pressuring a woman to put a baby up for adoption has become politically toxic. This is an interesting and positive development, if that is in fact his concern.
For as long as I remember, the anti-choice movement has heralded adoption as the "perfect" alternative to abortion, usually accompanies with platitudes like, "Abortion is never the answer." They implied that growing a baby for 9 months, giving birth, and then simply giving the baby to a "deserving" couple and walking away like it never happened was really not much harder than getting an abortion, and anyone who disputed that was just being selfish. The argument demonstrates the fundamental refusal of anti-choicers to see women---all women, even sexually active ones (aka, most women)---as full human beings. The value of women's labor, and the suffering that women reported was a common side effect of giving a baby away? Waved off, because they quite literally don't see it as mattering. Women are basically breeding animals in their view, and just like you don't ask your breeding dog if she wants pups when it's time to bring the stud around, you certainly do't worry if the women you see as stupid sluts get their hearts broken producing babies for "deserving" couples. You even take umbrage at the idea that women should be compensated for their labor with money.*
For whatever reason, however, the coldness of this point of view has suddenly become apparent, and anti-choicers are scrambling to seem a little less heartless. I mean, they aren't becoming less heartless---their view is still that women who have sex outside of marriage deserve no better than to be forced to bear children and then to have those children taken away from them---but they are beginning to realize that they should probably at least pretend to support other options besides shotgun marriages and giving the baby up for adoption, if they want to present the false image of caring about women. That's why they occasionally make a big fuss over a single mother like Bristol Palin (while of course mindlessly condemning most single mothers who aren't white, wealthy, and Christian-identified). It's about creating the image that they will take single motherhood as a lesser of two evils, because they know their absolutist view of "get married or give it away" isn't flying with the public as much anymore. This feigned support for women who choose single motherhood over abortion is all smoke and mirrors, of course, since the Christian right by and large still doesn't support any social programs that would make raising a child by yourself easier, but that they feel the need to pretend to support single mothers is an interesting development.
Romney's denial suggests that he gets that. The aggressive attacks on single mothers makes it incredibly clear that the opposition to abortion is not about "life", but about patriarchal power and controlling women's reproductive capacities.That anti-choicers have to tone down the sexist aggression, at least for P.R. reasons, is a victory for feminists. While it's frustrating that they pretend to uphold our belief that women are valuable while pushing legislation to relegate women to second class status, it's interesting that our values are so ascendent that they have no other choice. Which, of course, is all the more reason to keep these older stories of women being coerced and threatened into giving babies up for adoption in the public eye. Antis shouldn't be allowed to hide their point of view on this so very easily.
*Yes, yes, I get that there are women who give babies up and walk away and it's not a big deal for them. But that's surprisingly rare. The evidence for this contention is that after maternity homes, which were basically places where pregnant women and girls were made to believe they had no choice but to give up their babies, were shut down, the number of healthy, adoptable babies on the market plummeted. Meanwhile, there was a concurrent rise in the rate of single motherhood, which indicates that it's not legal abortion that really did the adoption market in, but women keeping their babies. In fact, the difficulties white Christian couples have in finding white, healthy babies to adopt is one of the reasons the anti-choice movement is so extreme: They want to restore the supply side, by force, if necessary. Which it appears to be.
This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.
As regular readers know, I firmly reject the popular history of disco, which claims that it was a value-free trend that the nation was best rid of, in favor of the increasingly popular and often better-researched history that demonstrates that it was an interesting and vital musical form that helped give birth to New Wave, post-punk, techno, and of course, hip-hop. Stating this claim publicly, I've learned, especially if you note some of the racist and homophobic underpinnings the straight white male-dominated "disco sucks" movement, gets you a lot of angry pushback. Usually people engaging in it cherrypick their evidence, citing the soulless crap side of disco, such as "The Hustle" or the Village People, as evidence for their contention that disco was simply worthless and there's no deeper story to why it got so violently rejected. The problem with that argument is that yes, 90% of disco sucked, but as Sturgeon's Law states, 90% of everything is crap. Since the vibrancy of everything from science fiction to rock music is usually judged by the 10%, I demand that disco be held to the same standard.
With that in mind, let's talk about Chic. Chic is one of the most famous disco bands of all time, but even if you know them, you probably don't know how broad or deep their catalog really is. The band was the brainchild of Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. They formed in 1976 and disbanded in the early 80s. And it's really hard to imagine what popular music would sound like today without their influence.
Let's start with the songs they're most famous for, "Good Times" and "Le Freak". As noted on Wikipedia, their seamless blending of rock and disco on these tracks was inspirational to people from all corners of the pop music world. Blondie, Queen, and Daft Punk have all borrowed from "Good Times", but its biggest impact was felt on hip-hop.
It's been sampled in roughly one billion rap songs, but the most famous is probably still "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang.
But while their work under the banner of Chic would have been enough to secure their place in music history forever, Chic did so much more than that. Edwards and Rogers were in it to win it when it came to writing and playing disco. They're the engine behind Sister Sledge, for instance.
And for Diana Ross in her disco phase. Yep, you have Chic to thank for "Upside Down"
For which MC Lyte was no doubt grateful:
And also behind Diana's massive hit that has become a gay anthem "I'm Coming Out":
Which in turn worked out pretty well for Biggie Smalls:
If it were just Chic, that would be reason enough to laugh off the notion that disco sucks and offered the world nothing but soul-destroying mediocrity. But there's a lot of stories like this, if you do a little digging. For instance, there's the strange and forward-thinking "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer, which was produced by Giorgio Moroder , and so impressed Brian Eno that he said to David Bowie, "I have heard the sound of the future." Bowie went on to work with Moroder on "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", a song that was famously featured in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds". Or take the case of Sylvester, a gay icon and one of the singers who helped push disco closer towards the house sound with a mutation called Hi-NRG. And, of course, pure disco sound has a few artists who are still holding the torch, to great effect, like New York's Escort or Jhameel.
All the blather about "fiscal conservatism" that comes off conservatives is, I generally believe, just that: blather. The notion that they want to slash social spending because it's the "responsible" thing to do has always and forever been belied by Republican willingness to spend like madmen when it came to private contractors feeding off the military, corporate giveaways, and of course, tax breaks for the rich. No, the entire conservative view of social spending is rooted in a authoritarian, hierarchical view of the world that believes that it's somehow for the best if the lower classes suffer privation. After all, how will you know how comfortable you are if you don't have people going hungry to compare yourself to?
If you doubt this, spend five minutes listening to any wingnut rant about the economy. Their imagination is captured by the fear that some poor person somewhere might have occasional moments of not suffering. Any suggestion that a poor person might have a moment of joy, a bit of relief, a pillow to lay their head on at night? All this is considered offensive to the wingnut, evidence that the poor are simply not suffering enough. Which is why you continually see "outrages" on the right, such as learning that most poor people have a refrigerator in their homes, a factoid that reasonable people should find unremarkable because refrigerators usually come standard with apartments. (Seriously, I find this outrage completely baffling. Are they suggesting that a smart move for a person living in poverty would be to pawn a refrigerator that is almost surely owned by their landlord? Talk about fiscal irresponsibility!) And needless to say, images of poor people owning phones are sure to set off any wingnut worth his salt. How dare they have a way for potential employers to reach them?! They're poor! They have to bootstrap it by communicating with others through smoke signals. Anything less than that is being coddled by the system.
Once you piece together the various outrages against poor people for having refrigerators and phones, it becomes clear that for all the talk of bootstraps, conservatives really don't want poor people to find a way out of poverty. That's why they really get angry if someone has any tool to help them save money or earn money. The refrigerator is offensive, because it allows a person to buy food at the grocery store and cook, which stretches the food dollar. Apparently, you're supposed to be living on Doritos. The phone connects you to the world, which is the bare minimum for job seekers, and we can't have people looking for work actually, god forbid, find it. And so on.
And so it goes with the latest assault on people living on the edge of the knife. Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania is cutting people off of food stamps if they have more than $2,000 in savings. This will help expediate the process of getting people in unemployed or under-employed situations out of their homes and into the streets. If you have to burn through the money you were counting on to pay rent on food instead, that will subtract months of you sitting around in an apartment, acting like you deserve shelter like some uppity shelter-haver. You can eat or you can have a daily shower, but Corbett and his supporters think you're just asking too much if you want both.
Of course, having savings to lean on while unemployed is critical if you, lower income person, are trying to get a job in order to not be dependent on food stamps anymore. Under the new Corbett system, where you have to choose between shelter or food, you can kiss that job goodbye. Employers aren't generally known for looking fondly on people who show up to interviews in unwashed clothes without having had a good night's rest or a shower. If the goal is to make sure people living in poverty have all avenues of escape cut off, good job, Pennsylvania! If your goal is anything else, well....I reject that it could be. No one could be that stone cold stupid. Occam's Razor: the intention here is to make escaping poverty impossible.
This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.
Those of us who lived through the early 90s can attest that it was a time when there was a sudden surge of pop culture interest in HIV and getting out the message about safe sex. MTV started talking about condoms, and having special addressing condom use. Fox, believe it or not, started airing condom ads in 1991. The first major movie about AIDS, the treacly “Philadelphia”, came out in 1993, the same year that a cast member of “The Real World” came out as both gay and infected with HIV. And, the two biggest female hip-hop acts in the country made raising awareness about condoms part of their act.
First you had TLC, who tried to normalize condoms in a sly way, by having Left-Eye Lopez wear one as an eye patch.
And Salt’n’Pepa took on discussions about safe sex on in a big way, both in their hit song “Let’s Talk About Sex” and revised versions that put even more emphasis on the issue of preventing HIV transmission.
Why was there a sudden interest in having even more frank discussion about HIV and AIDS in the early 90s? I think it was a couple of things. Part of it was that it was an era of shaking off the Reagan years, and all the prudery and conservative nonsense that came with the so-called Reagan revolution. But another part of it was that AIDS really stopped being the “gay disease” in the early 90s.
HIV incidence among women increased gradually until the late 1980s, declined during the early 1990s, and has remained relatively stable since, at approximately a quarter of new infections (23% in 2009).
The realization that women were getting HIV in the late 80s really, I think, made it clear that straight people needed to be educated on protecting themselves. It’s a shame that it took HIV growing into the straight community to get this much attention paid to it, of course, but to be expected considering how much more acceptable homophobia was back then. That women were getting it, too, is why I think it was female rappers specifically felt pressure to address the situation. I’m just speculating here, but I suspect that these women, being, you know, straight women, knew very well how hard it can be for a woman to bring up the topic of safe sex with a man she’s having sex with, and they did a really great thing in trying to make condoms and the discussion of them seem less scary.
What I want to point out is that TLC and Salt’n’Pepa framed portrayals and discussion of safe sex within a larger context of talking about pleasure. Their songs are fun and light-hearted and put a particular emphasis on women as sexual subjects, who have sex for their own reasons and not just because men expect them to. This is in contrast with far too many safe sex messages, which are medicalized and don’t talk about power or pleasure. Many safe sex messages assume that the biggest barrier to condom use is knowledge, but actually, a lot of people who don’t use condoms really know that they should, and so repeating messages about the efficacy of condoms doesn’t do much to improve usage. But if you can associate condoms with having fun, and if you can portray women taking charge of their sex lives in a positive light, you’re going to do a whole lot better.
What’s disappointing is that this trend of women putting out songs portraying women as fun-loving, empowered, sexy women who take care of their own health seems to have been just a blip on the radar. Good luck finding that many women doing anything like TLC or Salt’n’Pepa were doing in the early 90s in hip-hop, dance, or rock music, at least anything that’s topping the charts like these groups were easy to do. Why it went away so fast is something of a mystery to me, even still.
By the way, Marc has released another mash-up from the set he'll be playing on Friday night at WAM Prom. It's two female acts from completely different eras from the one described above, but both with their own strengths.
Before we leave the weekend's debates behind, and in keeping with the blog's first rule of economics — Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money. — I would be remiss not to mention the performance on Sunday of Dancin' Dave Gregory, chronic Vineyard vacationer and Beltway King of Pain. He reached an entirely new level of smarm when he asked Jon Huntsman the following question:
Let's talk substance. So Governor Huntsman, name three areas where Americans will feel real pain in order to balance the budget?
See, you stupid proles. The only "substance" worth talking about is exactly how miserable your lives will have to be made in order to keep The Deficit from eating our children in their beds, and how wretched your existence will have to become so that David Gregory and the people with whom he goes to dinner can think themselves people of serious purpose. And then, even after Huntsman had once again pledged fealty to the economic sadism that is the plan offered by zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan, which is why Huntsman's position as The Only Sane One is not entirely accurate, Gregory still wasn't satisfied.
Three programs that will make Americans feel pain, sir?
Not that Atrios and Charles are wrong to blanch at Gregory's slobbering desire to see throngs of people begging in the streets, of course, but I also hesitate to draw too much attention to our disgust, for fear that these kinds of questions are going to get toned down. As I was noting gleefully on Twitter when a couple of anti-choicers started bleating at me, I want them to explain, in lavish detail, how sex is only for procreation and that women who have sex for pleasure deserve to be punished as the dirty whores they are. They know, as I know, that it's probably not best for them to show their hand like this, which is why they're constantly on about "babies", but if you push hard enough, the "sex is evil and should be punished" belief always comes out. That's where we need them: showing their true face. The more honest they are, the better.
Ideally, we'd have a situation where the Republican candidates started competing with each other to see who could come up with the most lavish trials they wish the 99% to endure. If we could get Mitt Romney trying to outdo Newt Gingrich by explaining how he won't be satisfied until good Christian women are selling blow jobs in the church parking lot to make rent, I think that would probably work out pretty well. Sure, the Republicans will eat it up, but it won't do much to help the Republicans pick up votes from those oh--so-important swing voters and independents.
This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.
One of the myths about disco, one that I think that contributes to a lot of misunderstandings about it, is that it was a brief trend that collapsed as quickly as it rose up in the 70s. In reality, disco was just another step in a long 20th century evolution of dance music, and it ended for the same reason a lot of musical trends do: it morphed into other forms. If anything, disco had a larger impact than most music trends do, as elements of it came out in techno and all other electronic dance music, post-punk, New Wave, and most importantly, hip-hop (which is why we're doing a dual theme for this year's WAM Prom.) But one reason I think there's a sense that disco was its own thing in a way that other trends aren't is that the kind of dancing people think of when they think of disco is this elaborate, ballroom-style dancing that has no relationship to the bouncing and writhing that is most dancing people do in America, whether at a rock show, hip-hop club, or rave. You know what I mean. People think "disco" and they think of John Travolta playing Tony Manero.
Or Travolta's solo style dancing in the same movie:
Nothing against Travolta's unbelievable dancing skills, but this wasn't actually how people (at least prior to this movie) danced to disco, which was, from what I understand, much like they've danced to everything since, which is mostly formless bouncing and writhing. Now, all sorts of music trends have movies that exploited them to make semi-musicals with elaborate dancing, but Saturday Night Fever became synonymous in the public imagination with disco in a way that hasn't happened before or since to a musical form. Why?
There's a lot of reasons: the dancing is really that good, the music is that much better, a zeitgeists was hit. But I think one reason is that Saturday Night Fever purported to be based on a true story, giving the audience the feeling that they really were taking a peek into the Brooklyn disco scene by watching this fictional film, in much the same way that 8 Mile got a little extra boost because it's so well-known that Eminem did in fact scrape his way up through rap battles like the one portrayed in the movie. But while I think Eminem's life is pretty well-documented, the "true story" of Saturday Night Fever is actually, well, a hoax.
The whole thing started with a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn in 1976 called "Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a story about the elaborate disco lifestyle of the Italian-American regulars at a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco. The story was a hit; it seems it must have gone into development as a movie in record time. The only problem wiht it is that Cohn made the whole thing up.
For an article in the December 8 issue celebrating the 20th anniversary of the movie, Cohn tells of a disco deception born of frustration. The British writer describes how he went to Brooklyn's now legendary 2001 Odyssey searching in vain for a flamboyantly dressed fellow he had spotted in the club's entrance a week earlier. "I didn't learn much...I made a lousy interviewer: I knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn't speak the language.
"So I faked it. I conjured up the story of the figure in the doorway, and named him Vincent...I wrote it all up. And presented it as fact," Cohn confesses. "There was no excuse for it...I knew the rules of magazine reporting, and I knew that I was breaking them. Bluntly put, I cheated."
The culture and specifically the emphasis on dancing skills was a mish-mash of Cohn's own imagination and what he observed in the Northern soul clubs in Great Britain in the 60s. It's one of those stories that has drifted under the waves, because most people don't really think it's that important (though why not in our James Frey-bashing era, I don't know). But while it's far from the most important story of journalistic misinformation, I still think it's not something that should be waved off. After all, Cohn's imaginings supplanted the more reality-based portrayals of disco, most of which I think are far more interesting than the image that Cohn painted. To make it all worse, if people had a better idea of how disco actually was in the 70s, I think it would be easier to see it as part of the larger quilt of American pop music, which is always mutating as different genres swap and steal and morph into something new, yet still familiar.
Irin Carmon has a great rundown of Mitt Romney's botchtastic answer on the constitutional right to contraception at Saturday's GOP debate, which can be fairly summarized as such:
"It is silly that you would ask me about whether something is constitutionally protected. After all, nobody is threatening it. It's constitutionally protected!"
Ignoring that personhood amendments by and large do exactly that (as do the initiatives of any number of other conservative religious groups focused on the alleged sexifying effects of latex tubes and daily prescriptions), the question was important for another reason.
Romney (Harvard Law, when he admits it) replied with an ethic of constitutional interpretation that boils down to not thinking about it unless you have to, even when your main legal advisor is a guy who was denied a seat on the Supreme Court in part because of his stance on Griswold. Ron Paul chimed in by saying that the Commerce Clause would prevent the banning of birth control sales by states or localities, which would make a lot of sense if that was in any way what the Commerce Clause did. Earlier in the week, Rick Santorum declared that marriage was a privilege rather than a right, meaning that he's against the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, legalizing interracial marriage.
Add in Santorum and Gingrich's desire to abolish part or all of the Ninth Circuit (which would almost certainly lead to a massive due process and equal protection suit after a third of the nation loses access to federal courts), and the GOP has a widespread problem: their concern now is not stopping "activist judges". It's reliving a glorified costume party from the late 1780s, where we presume that the Founders sat down, calmly discussed every issue that could ever possibly pop up, wrote a document to cover it - except for the part about slavery, which would work itself out after a bit - and then got back to discussing what a pompous dick Ben Franklin was.
Conservatives increasingly aren't having problems withjudges. Conservatives are having a problem with courts.
Courts get in the way of the executive and the legislature. They're supposed to. They constitute a deliberative branch whose purpose is to analyze the actions of the other two branches and determine whether those actions comport with the law. Are they always right? No. But neither are the other two branches.
The GOP field's hostility to courts comes, largely, from the fact that courts are able to say and do things the other two branches can't, without the sort of rapid political changes that have led to Congress' position as a well-respected institution and the foundation of public life. Courts interpret and, yes, enshrine rules that the other two branches missed entirely. No matter how strong an executive is, after he has appointed a judge, his ability to constrain a federal court's discretion is limited mainly to the laws he or she signs.
By threatening the dissolution of courts and even entire circuits, or by deciding that entire swaths of Supreme Court precedents are wrongly decided because of stuff and things despite having almost zero familiarity with the underlying law or facts, the message is not that rogue judges can be constrained. It's that courts are no longer as untouchable as they thought they were, and if they don't step in line and rule along a particular ideological zeitgeist, they'll find themselves subject to the same punishment as a rogue legislator or insufficiently lockstep presidential candidate.
The Founders, of course, put in safeguards for just that purpose. Not that it matters, of course; should those Founders fight too hard for their beloved "Third Article", they're gonna find themselves the Founders of Finland, and we'll replace them with proper historical heroes, like Von Mises and Margaret Thatcher. Check yourself before you wreck yourself, oldheads.
Video chosen, because like Ron Paul, I hope we can all day be Austrians.
Even though he took back his endorsement of Ron Paul, I think it's safe to say that Andrew Sullivan is still deeply in love with George Wallance-cum-Dale Gribble. After all, the general tone of his retraction was, "Wah, I'm right that the man is like Mr. Totally Not A Racist, just like my 'Bell Curve'-loving self, but pouty pout the readers are making me." Seriously, he said things like, "It seems to me that even though I don't believe these old screeds reflect Paul's own beliefs....", despite the heavy of the first person in those screeds. It's clear Sullivan would be denying that Paul wrote them himself if someone dug up a picture of Paul writing them. But he continues to blog about the awesomeness that is the resident black helicopter crank in the race, and so I thought it would be a fun time to grab one of the more fun "NUH-UH RON PAUL IS TOTALLY NOT A RACIST" quotes, by way of this link from LGM.
Chuck Todd notes that Ron Paul voted for the MLK national holiday. Gingrich voted against. I find the notion that Ron Paul is a racist to be preposterous.
Ta-Nehisi Coates pushes back, pointing out that Paul explained his reasons for disliking the King holiday in his newsletter, and guess what! It's not because he's Mr. Peace, Love and Understanding. Here is Paul, in his own words, on the MLK holiday:
Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.
Cue the chorus of people claiming that we can't actually believe that someone using the first person and signing his name to a document could have possibly written it. Next you'll be saying Duncan Black is Atrios. Can we be sure that it's Andrew Sullivan writing the preposterous claim that it's preposterous to believe Ron Paul wrote some stuff that he said he wrote? Why not suggest no one ever be treated like the author of that which they authored, since fundamentally, we can never know for sure.
It's worth pointing out at this point that supporting Ron Paul, even just a little, appears to infect the supporter with Crank's Disease, where they're making conspiratorial claims that we can't assume that someone writing, "I, _____, am totally writing this," actually wrote it. The longer you chew on that belief, the more likely you are to find yourself, a year from now, wearing camo and shooting up beer cans while complaining about a one world currency, which is of course, a totally different thing than your desire that the entire world trade in gold.
I digress, however. (See, it's infecting me!) My point in writing this blog post is to point out that Sullivan, in his desperation, appears to have used Newt Gingrich as his standard-bearer for not-racism. He did this two days ago, in fact, which puts this comment after the blogosphere erupted with this comment made by Newt Gingrich:
And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.
Rick Santorum has been having fun implying both that all black people are on food stamps, and that all food stamp recipients are black, as well. In fact, the single largest racial group in the SNAP program is.....wait for it......white people.
According to 2010 census numbers, about 26 percent of food stamp recipients are African-American, while 49 percent are white and 20 percent are Hispanic.
I also want to digress a moment and denounce the very notion that there's something shameful about using SNAP. There's something shameful in the fact that our society has so many people living in poverty that we need to offer so much food assistance, but there's no shame in taking it. In fact, food stamps are the best form of economic stimulus our government is currently engaging in, generating $1.73 worth of stimulus for every dollar spent. The worst problem with food stamps is that the shame and hassle of applying discourages many eligible people---imagine the boost the economy would get if everyone eligible was using food stamps. Just sayin'.
Digression over. The point is that I think it's perfectly sensible and evidence-based to say that Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich both rejected the MLK holiday out of racial prejudice, which both men have routinely displayed and which has helped both men in gathering large numbers of supporters. Any other conclusion is basically throwing red herrings and trying to confuse the situation. The racial resentment boat is a big one, and there's lots of room on board, especially for those catering favor with the Republican base.
It is possible that Sullivan was merely complaining that Gingrich isn't getting the same attention for his no vote on the MLK holiday. To which I say, well, he probably should, but the "he's guilty, too!" thing is no defense, especially if your man is polling much better than the equally guilty.
Sebastian at Obsidian Wings wrote a post that probably got lost in the holiday shuffle, but it's something incredibly serious, which is the use of drug dogs as nothing more but an excuse to turn illegal searches into legal ones. Turns out the dogs are probably not sniffing drugs so much as they're reacting to their master's subconscious signals that they want to search Person X. This is an important issue for everyone, but skeptics especially need to be on this, because it's really ovious what's going on here, which is that drug dogs are a modern update of the Clever Hans problem.
Clever Hans (in German, der Kluge Hans) was an Orlov Trotter horse that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks.
After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reaction of his human observers. Pfungst discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.[1] In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition.
Sebastian recounts research showing that dogs' tendency to signal has more to do with what the cop is thinking than what the dog is smelling. Anyone who knows dogs should have guessed this one; dogs are basically human-obsessed machines who watch their humans super carefully and try very hard to please them. Of course drug dogs are more worried about pleasing master than producing good results. The real world results are predictable, but no less upsetting for it:
A tracking study was done of drug sniffing dogs in Illinois which found that the searches their 'alerts' triggered found no evidence of drugs 56% of the time. For Hispanic people searched as a result of the 'alerts' there was no evidence of drugs 63% of the time.
You can read about it at the Chicago Tribune. The cops are pulling the "well, they're guilty of something" bullshit, saying the dogs are smelling drugs that used to be there. Maybe. But again, I point to the well-documented Clever Hans effect and suggest that it's something else entirely, which is that the dogs are picking up on the officers' prejudices and acting accordingly.
Obviously, the ultimate goal here is to call off the War on (Some People Who Use) Drugs, which is run on magic and bigotry, and does more to destroy communities than to prevent drug addiction. But in the more immediate future, we must demand an immediate end to all use of drug dogs, certainly until it can be demonstrated in double blind studies run by experts that the dogs are detecting drugs and not reacting to subconscious signals sent by police. Since I highly doubt that can be demonstrated, basically I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices.
