April 30, 2012

No Sign Yet of "Girls" Whiteness Crisis Abating

From Salon, a trifecta of 2012ness uniting HBO's largely unwatched new show Girls, whiteness, and neuroscience.
Your brain on white people 
Neuroscience shows the media's overwhelming whiteness really is changing our minds. But we can change them back  
BY JEREMY ADAM SMITH 
Hello, New York, indeed. This isn’t the first time TV pushed millions of immigrants and people of color to the margins of one of the most diverse cities in the world. Hello, Woody Allen! Hello, “Seinfeld”! Hello, “Friends” and “Sex and the City”! If “Girls” can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere. Of course, the rest of TV has been overwhelmingly white, too. Ever since “Father Knows Best” and “Wagon Train,” the medium has long presented a whitewashed version of the way we live. 
That might be why some “Girls” writers take exception to their show being singled out for criticism. Here’s what writer Leslie Arfin tweeted in response to criticisms: “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” (“Precious,” the 2009 film about a mentally and sexually abused teenager, featured a predominantly black cast.) 
Why shouldn’t Arfin and creator Lena Durham be able to re-create their own private girl-world on screen? What responsibility do show runners have to represent diversity? Does it even matter? How do our brains respond when people of color are invisible or stereotyped on TV? 
This is where science can help. I co-edited a book called “Are We Born Racist?,” ... 
The trick is, quite simply, to acknowledge race and racism, and to talk about it. Many white parents avoid the subject like the plague — in one notorious instance, parents pulled out children en masse from a study when they learned it would entail talking about race. But this strategy doesn’t produce colorblind citizens. It creates shows like “Girls,” “Seinfeld” and “Sex in the City.” It perpetuates a society that historically has pretended to be entirely Anglo-Saxon.

Uh ... Seinfeld pretended to be entirely Anglo-Saxon?

Meanwhile, although of apparently minimal interest to the press, for the second weekend in a row, the number one box office movie in America was Think Like a Man. This didactic comedy is based on the self-help bestseller book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by the socially conservative black comic Steve Harvey. 

The goal of Harvey's book is to help black women get married by teaching them what black men want and need:
Steve Harvey, the host of the nationally syndicated Steve Harvey Morning Show, can't count the number of impressive women he's met over the years, whether it's through the "Strawberry Letters" segment of his program or while on tour for his comedy shows. These are women who can run a small business, keep a household with three kids in tiptop shape, and chair a church group all at the same time. Yet when it comes to relationships, they can't figure out what makes men tick. Why? According to Steve it's because they're asking other women for advice when no one but another man can tell them how to find and keep a man.

Think Like a Man was made on a budget of $12 million dollars, and in its first ten days of release has grossed $61 million. Audiences have given it an "A" grade on Cinemascore's survey. It's directed by Tim Story, a black guy who directed 2002's well-remembered Barbershop, another socially conservative black comedy that was a surprise hit. (The part in Barbershop that got the biggest laughs from black audiences was when Cedric the Entertainer explained:
"I wouldn't be saying this if there were white folks around, but there are three things blacks got to admit: Rodney King deserved to get his ass beat. O.J. did it. And Rosa Parks wasn't that special, just tired.")

But, who cares about discussing in the media a movie like Think Like a Man that black people made for themselves and genuinely like when we can instead worry about the lack of blacks among the four main characters on a show that very few black people would watch?

Was I wrong about the Rodney King riots?

Last week in The Secret History of the 1990s, I suggested that the 1992 Los Angeles riots served as a shameful wake-up call to blacks at the nadir of the crack / gangsta rap era to check themselves before they wreck themselves, and that the relative improvement in black performance in the later 1990s may date from that turning point.

A number of commenters demurred, pointing out, among other objections, that I hadn't produced a lot of quotes suggesting that African-Americans had actually been ashamed of how significant numbers of their younger people had behaved during those three days two decades ago. 

So, I did a Google search on 

ashamed 1992 riots south central

and came up with ... not much. 

A Korean academic claims, "I was embarrassed and ashamed, because many Koreans had established a negative image among the media and the African Americans. " 


That kind of thing ... 

This isn't to say that black private individuals didn't feel ashamed by the riots, but it sure isn't part of The Narrative.

April 29, 2012

Memories, misty watercolor memories ...

It's nostalgia time at the Daily Beast:
L.A. Riots Anniversary: Two Gang Members Remember 
... It wasn’t an unusual anecdote for Townsend and fellow former gang member Alfred Lomas, who shared their memories of participating in the riots with The Daily Beast. The riots were a sudden opportunity to vent frustrations with the police, with a judicial system that favored everyone but them, with limited employment. By taking to the streets and looting, they were only getting what was theirs. The two said that violence on the same scale could spring from those Los Angeles neighborhoods again, and that while fewer residents believe that a riot in the next five years is likely, many of the same problems remain. 
And although Rodney King’s beating mattered to the rioters, it wasn’t their sole or even always their primary motivation for rioting. Townsend was less upset by Rodney King than he was by the shooting of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was killed with a single bullet by a Korean convenience-store owner who suspected her of shoplifting. That was in March 1991, one day after the four policemen charged with assault in King’s beating pleaded not guilty. Townsend says he couldn’t understand why Harlins’s shooter was let off with a sentence of only five years’ probation. “The liquor-store owner said she had stolen a bottle of orange juice,” Townsend said. “That penetrated my heart.” 
On April 29, when the not-guilty verdicts were handed down in the case of the four LAPD officers who had beaten Rodney King, faith-based groups tried to keep demonstrations peaceful. Townsend, in fact, was on his way to church with his cousin as the first bottles flew. On their way, he said, he saw a Korean liquor store being looted, one of many Korean businesses targeted out of anger over the Harlins shooting. “I went to the church, and while we were in the church everybody’s pager and phone was going off saying it was a riot,” Townsend remembers. 
“None of us needed tires, but let’s fill the backyard up with tires. Now we have tires.”   
As the riots spread beyond Florence and Normandie, Townsend said, it seemed the natural order had gone unhinged. “There was no such thing as a red light,” Townsend said, and the Los Angeles Police Department was nowhere to be seen. When he did see police, “they weren’t making arrests”—not even the cops in two squad cars that pulled up when Townsend’s buddies were robbing a pawn shop. He says the cops shooed them away, got back in their cars, and drove off. 
The gangs were on their own, and they seized the opportunity. “Pretty much we started thinking in terms of what is of value,” Townsend recalled. “Where are the jewelry stores, the television store, the furniture store.” When they saw an automotive store, they “went in and started stealing tires. None of us needed tires, but let’s fill the backyard up with tires. Now we have tires.” ...
Former Florencia 13 heavy hitter Alfred Lomas says that gang members were far from the only participants in the riots. 
“It wasn’t entirely a gang issue as much as people assume,” Lomas told The Daily Beast. “The L.A. riots represented a population that involved all different kinds of ethnic groups, that involved more a population unrest than a gang unrest.” 
Lomas had gotten his start in gang life early, crewing up as a 12-year-old drug addict with the city’s largest Latino gang in 1976, a process that involved him being beaten by the other members of his new fraternity for 13 seconds. A few years later, at the age of 18, Lomas volunteered to serve his country because he “wanted to learn how to shoot and kill people.” 
“My specialty was using that skill set”—skills he acquired at the expense of the American taxpayer—“to further the gang and support my drug habit, and it took me into some pretty high-profile stuff,” Lomas said. “I was part of the introduction of crack cocaine in the area I was from in South Central,” said Lomas, who grew up in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood and helped coordinate his gang’s drug trade. “I’ve been involved in every major gang war in South Central until about 10 years ago.” 
To this day, despite having left gang life, Lomas says that he remembers the simmering tensions that bubbled and bubbled before boiling over in 1992.
“Being a young kid growing up in one of these areas, there’s always a sense of harassment from the police,” Lomas said. “We’re talking about a high-crime, a high-unemployment area, and you grow up and you know you’re disadvantaged.” 
“At the time I was watching the actual riots, the Reginald Denny thing, I was located one block east of South Central in Huntington Park,” Lomas said. He was with other Florencia 13 members; Lomas says the very fact that he was a career lawbreaker seemed to separate him from most rioters. For one thing, his gang was more organized than the neighborhood toughs of the 8 Tray Crips who flogged Denny. Lomas’s gang disapproved of that kind of display, he said. 
“The criminal element, we’re looking at this like, ‘We don’t agree with this beating, that’s obviously wrong, they’re assholes, but where is the LAPD? Where are the illustrious blue lights?’” Lomas said. “It was actually days, one or two days, before we saw any sort of action from law enforcement.” 
After the first day, Lomas said he and his friends had to expand their scope to find fresh shops to loot, driving into Koreatown as well as neighborhoods on the city’s west side, including Hollywood. “Our areas got burnt up pretty quick,” Lomas said. “We’re an equal-opportunity gang, so we drove around looking for other places. I remember seeing some, now we would call them hipsters, with a shopping cart taking TVs, taking clothes, taking furniture.” It’s this last observation that has most stuck with Lomas through the years—what one may call the egalitarian nature of the pillaging and pilfering. 
“Given what occurred then, in the state of mind I was in, it was like, F the police, F the government, F everyone,” Lomas said. “And I think the L.A. riots—I don’t care what anyone says—the L.A. riots represented that kind of catharsis on a mass level.”

Good times, good times ...

Thank God that Ron Paul has finally renounced that disrespectful joke that appeared in his newsletter in 1992 about how the riot ended on May 1, 1992 because the looters stayed home to await their welfare checks. What a scandal. Some things are too sacred to joke about.

April 28, 2012

What South-Central L.A. looks like

For the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King riot, newspapers are running stories on the Mean Streets where the rioters lived. (The above picture is from today's L.A. Times.) A decade ago, I wrote the same article for the 10th anniversary of the riot and ran into same conundrum: the residential streets around the notorious corner of Florence and Normandie in South-Central L.A. look fine. 

But the business streets look awful. 

This isn't a new phenomenon, either. On July 4, 1977, I drove around Watts, a dozen years after the Watts riot. The side streets of Watts looked nice. The main streets looked bad.

In theory, South-Central L.A., or as it's been officially rebranded "South L.A.," could represent the world's largest gentrification opportunity. The weather is phenomenally mild and this sprawling region is freeway close to lots of jobs. South-Central is one of the few neighborhoods in the world to host the Opening Ceremony of two Summer Olympics, and is home to most famous film school in the world.

But, white people in L.A. find flat land unnerving. They mostly want to gentrify hilly neighborhoods, which, deep down, they find psychologically reassuring. Hills look more tactically defensible for when the hammer finally comes down and the long-awaited L.A. Apocalypse is at hand. 

Roots of "Girls" Whiteness Crisis: "Tiny Furniture"

So, I watched Lena Dunham's 2010 indie film Tiny Furniture, which served as a trial run for her HBO series Girls

For a $50,000 budget film written, directed, and starring a 23-year-old, it's quite competently done. It gets lumped in with the "mumblecore" movement, but the dialogue is crisply written and well-recorded. The word that kept coming to my mind is "watchable." (Here's the trailer.)

Tiny Furniture is not laugh out loud funny, but it gets funnier a second time through as you pick up that you aren't supposed to feel terribly sorry for Dunham's dumpy character as she endures repeated humiliations trying to launch a career as a hipster media sensation. She isn't supposed to be likable, as she does selfish things to people trying to be nice to her. She's a young, female George Costanza, but an ambitious egomaniac to boot, lacking George's contentment with his own mediocrity. 

You sympathize a little with her for having a mother / role model who has, somehow, clawed her way to making a lot of money in the New York art scene by taking photos of tiny furniture (played in the movie by Dunham's real life mother, who, indeed, makes money selling in galleries her photos of tiny furniture). But, it's an inherently absurd situation.

So, who exactly are all the aggrieved People of Color who want to be Georgette Costanza's friend? And why?

And, would People of Color actually be watching this show in vast numbers if one of the four girls was nonwhite? Blacks famously wouldn't watch Seinfeld, and I doubt if adding Martin Lawrence to the cast would have done much for Seinfeld's black ratings.

We can actually test this hypothesis about "Girls" quantitatively right now by looking at how many blacks have bought tickets to see Whit Stillman's current movie Damsels in Distress, in which one of the four damsels is black. My guess is that Troy Patterson would go see any Whit Stillman movie no matter who was in the cast, and the vast majority of other blacks wouldn't go see a Whit Stillman movie even if the four damsels were played by Beyonce, Mo'Nique, Lil Kim, and Tyler Perry.

Speaking of George Costanza, that also raises the question of earlier New York sitcoms about People of Pallor, such as Seinfeld, where the only memorable black character was Kramer's Johnny Cochran-inspired lawyer. (I vaguely also recall a black executive who played straight man to George's fecklessness).

After Seinfeld and, especially, after Curb Your Enthusiasm (by which point Larry David had a half billion dollars, so even if he got Michael Richardized if a race joke went over wrong, he'd still have a half billion dollars), isn't it pretty obvious that Larry David's views on race are closer to mine than to those of all the folks who are in a huff over Lena Dunham's three titular friends being white? At least on the central issue -- Race Is No Joking Matter! -- me and Larry are on the same side of the barricades.

Note to Colbert Report writers: Cousin Marriage is back in news!

When reading Stephen Colbert's very funny book I Am America (And So Can You!), I kept getting the impression that at least one of Colbert's writers was a reader of mine. Nothing at all was ripped off, but a lot seemed riffed off, which I very much like. Then I came to an entire page of the bestseller on the less-than-burning topic of cousin marriage, confirming my surmise.

So, for the benefit of Colbert writers, let me point out that the scientist, Alan Bittles, whose research I used most for my pre-Iraq war article on cousin marriage has a new pro-cousin marriage book out, Consanguinity in Context:
A Perth-based researcher has called for an end to the stigma surrounding marriage between cousins, after uncovering evidence that the health risks have been greatly exaggerated. 
Murdoch University adjunct professor Alan Bittles has shed new light on the consequences of intra-familial marriages, which he says are on the rise in Australia due to increased migration. 
Bittles has sought to address common misconceptions of same-blood marriage, from a social, medical and religious perspective, in a new book based on 35 years of research. 
Bittles claims more than 1.1 billion people are either married to a close relative or are the offspring of such a marriage, which are common in many Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Jewish communities. 
In his book, Consanguinity in Context, Bittles called for greater understanding and acceptance of the practice, which is largely taboo in Western countries. 
He said there was a general belief that first cousin marriages lead to negative genetic outcomes, yet a large majority of children born to first cousins are healthy. 
And in many cases of those born with defects, non-genetic factors were often to blame.

It's kind of like how society is always getting upset at people who drive with their infants on their laps while texting. A large majority of the time, however, the baby doesn't fly out the window of the moving car. And even if the infant does land on its head, it probably didn't inherit good brains to start with, so no biggie. Likewise, why is society worried about Muslim immigrants forcing their daughters to marry a first cousin from the Old Country as part of an immigration fraud scheme and then having the taxpayers pay for a lifetime of care for the offspring with birth defects?

White Male Privilege

From the Daily Dot:
Justin Anthony Knapp. 
The bearded and bespectacled former pizza delivery guy from Indianapolis, Indiana is a pretty extraordinary wikipedian. Last week, Knapp, 30, became the first person on the site to reach 1 million edits. He’s done it by spending “several hours” every day on the site. Knapp’s never received a cent of pay from Wikipedia and is currently unemployed.

The Mightiest Mestizo

It's universally assumed that as the Mexican-American population increases, integration and assimilation will ensue. Yet, I keep recalling great Mexican-American athletes of the past, such as Pancho Gonzales, Lee Trevino, and Nancy Lopez, who lack contemporary counterparts. 

Recently, an ESPN article "NFL Draft Lacks Latinos" predicted that few Hispanics would be drafted. Indeed, through the first three rounds or 96 picks, there was only one Spanish surname called, and Kendall Reyes is definitely not Mexican.

And this reminded me of a Mexican-American guy of my age from Ontario, California (Inland Empire) who ranks right at the top of offensive linemen in the history of the NFL, Hall of Famer Anthony Muñoz. I'm not a football expert, but I typed into Google "greatest offensive linemen" and one article from 2010 concluded its top ten list with:
#1 Greatest NFL Offensive Lineman of All Time: Anthony Muñoz 
Anthony Muñoz is the greatest offensive lineman of all time. At left tackle, Muñoz was the total package of size, strength, athleticism, and technique. In the passing game, Muñoz routinely shut down the game's best defensive ends and outside linebackers. In the running game, Muñoz could wall off his man for two counts, throw him onto the ground, and rumble downfield to wreak havoc on pesky linebackers and defensive backs. As a receiver, Muñoz also hauled in four touchdowns on tackle-eligible plays during his 13-year career as a Cincinnati Bengal. Anthony Muñoz mastered, perfected, and dominated his position as well as any man that has ever played any sport. Anthony Muñoz—the Gold Standard franchise left tackle.

A lot of top ten lists on the Internet are content farm produce. There aren't many statistics on offensive linemen, so there's no way to conclude the argument over who was the greatest ever. But Muñoz is definitely in the argument, and might well be the favorite.

This is kind of weird when you stop and think about it. Because of the huge increase in population, there ought to be more famous Mexican-Americans today in more different fields than there were in the past, but it doesn't really look like that, does it?

April 27, 2012

The "Girls" Whiteness Crisis Mounts

From today's New York Times:
Whiteness is too often invisible on television, so much the norm that it no longer begs evaluation, and for whatever advances “Girls” makes in expanding the range of women on television, and the sorts of conversations they’re permitted to have, it certainly lacks for other forms of diversity. All the central figures — four young women scavenging New York for bits of love — are white.

Wait ... wait ... Don't tell me!

From the New York Times:
Police Chiefs Focus on Disparities in Gun Violence, With an Eye Toward Solutions 
by Erica Goode 
In a single week last April, 3 people were killed with guns in Philadelphia, 14 more were shot and wounded, 68 robberies were carried out at gunpoint and a total of 144 crimes involving firearms were reported.During that same week in San Diego, a city of roughly the same size with far fewer police officers, there were no gun-related homicides, 2 people wounded by gunshots, 4 robberies committed at gunpoint and a total of only 20 gun-related crimes. 
What made the difference? About 250 police chiefs from around the country debated this question and gun violence more generally at a meeting here this week, taking as their focus a survey of crimes occurring in six cities — Philadelphia, San Diego, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Austin, Tex., and Toronto — over a seven-day period in April 2011. The survey was carried out by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research group that sponsored the session as part of its two-day annual meeting.

I hear Carmel, CA has even less gun violence. The Police Executive Research Forum should go investigate Carmel.


The Secret History of the 1990s

With the 20th anniversary of the South-Central L.A. riot of 1992 coming up, I was glancing at a thumbsucker in the Books section of the L.A. Times by a diligent literary critic who concludes that, unlike the 1965 Watts riot, literary types have avoided the subject of the latter riot:
But 20 years later, the shelf of books addressing the disaster is threadbare, conditional even, as if we've never figured out how to write about these events.

My explanation for this is that the most true and interesting things anybody can say about the Rodney King riot are A) that it was a shameful tantrum by African-Americans (which of course few aesthetic writers dependent upon grants would dare say), and B) that blacks actually were embarrassed enough by it to slowly start behaving better. 

By a variety of measures, the early 1990s represented a crisis among black. The most obvious is the peak in the black homicide offending rate, especially among very young blacks. But lots of other things went wrong: test scores went down and teen fertility was up.

The invention of crack in the mid-1980s was obviously one big problem, but another was rap, especially as it evolved toward celebrating criminality in the late 1980s. Put crack and rap together and what do you get? In the intellectual sphere, the early 1990s were the peak of multiculturalist postmodern whoop-tee-doos in the academy.

On a more conscious level, blacks were even more embarrassed three years later by their celebration of O.J. Simpson getting away with murdering those two white people. That led quickly to Minister Farrakhan's Million Man March, which had a remarkably penitential aspect to it by the standards of anything black-related. But, I think the aftermath of the Rodney King riot was the moment when blacks collectively stared into the abyss of where they were headed and started to take a few halting steps back toward collective sanity.

J. Alfred Prufrock never had it so good

An average looking young nobody and a few confederates who explain to onlookers that he is "Thomas Elliott" and was either in The Hunger Games or will be in a Spider-Man movie make the day of various young women at a mall. The video isn't really that amazing -- the title cards rather overplay it. But, yeah ...

Much of the job of being a celebrity is mustering up the energy to make your fans' day. Taylor Swift is famous for this. It looks easy to do on your own schedule, but could you do it all the time on the public's incessant schedules? John F. Kennedy Jr. apparently figured out at some point that his main talent and thus his calling in life was Making People's Day (or, considering the dynastic psycho-energies random people invested in him, Making People's Week). He became a gracious figure to all the people he rode in elevators with as he went about his business in NYC, which helps explain some of the bizarre media outpouring when he died in a plane crash in 1999. In New York media circles, everybody had at least one friend who had once met JFK Jr. and he'd been like a prince to them.

One interesting converse of this is that talented actors can use their acting skills to go about their daily business unnoticed and live like normal people when they feel like it. For example, my wife and I were at the crowded L.A. Auto Show in 2001, looking at some zillion dollar car, and she asked me a technical question about it to which I had no idea what the answer was. The lady standing next to her chimed in and explained to us the engine was a V16 and so forth and so on. When she walked away after a couple of minutes of technical conversation, my wife said, "That was Tom Hanks' wife." 

So, I started looking around for Hanks, who was at that point still about the biggest movie star in the world. And sure enough, there was Tom Hanks nearby, wandering around like everybody else, looking at exotic cars that, out of the thousands of people all around him, only he could afford. No bodyguard or personal assistant. He had a baseball cap pulled down low, but he's tall enough to stand out in a crowd, except that he'd set his body language and facial expression so that he'd look completely uninteresting. It was like that Jedi mind control scene in Star Wars: "This is not the Forrest Gump / astronaut Jim Lovell / Capt. John H. Miller / Woody the Talking Cowboy Toy you're looking for." I watched dozens of people walk by him, with only a few doing doubletakes after they'd passed him by and realized, "Hey, that nobody looked just like Tom Hanks, if only Tom Hanks weren't Tom Hanks!"

There's a famous story about Marilyn Monroe and a friend walking down the street in New York City unnoticed, when the star stops and announces she's now going to switch from Normal Jean mode to Marilyn mode. With minutes, traffic is gridlocked.

April 26, 2012

Democrats and white men

From USA Today:
House Democrats will make history in the 2012 election, sending to Congress next January the first women and minority-majority party faction in U.S. history. 
A new analysis by the Cook Political Report reveals a further progression of white flight from the Democratic Party, which is increasingly represented by women and minorities, while the GOP remains a party dominated by white men. 
The projections were calculated by David Wasserman, an election analyst for the non-partisan Cook Political Report, who details the rise of women and minority influence in the Democratic ranks in the latest issue of National Journal magazine out today. 
In 1950, white men constituted 98% of House Democrats -- a percentage that fell precipitously to just 53% following the 2010 elections. Based on the makeup of candidates in the current congressional races, Wasserman projects that the 2012 elections will result in a House Democratic Caucus that will be 46%-48% white males when the next Congress starts in January -- whether or not Democrats win a majority. 
In contrast, white men continue to make up the vast majority of the Republican Party. In 1950, House Republicans were 97% white men, which fell to just 86% in 2012 -- a figure that Wasserman says will remain largely unchanged in the next Congress.

The change in sex ratios doesn't necessarily mean much: the sterling career of Nancy Pelosi is a continuation of the D'Alesandro family's political dynasty: her father and brother were both mayors of Baltimore, back when that was a fun job, and her father was in the House before her.

Still, if you look at America's most globally competitive industries, especially ones that are apparently considered too cool to have to worry much about discrimination lawsuits, such as Silicon Valley and Hollywood, you'll notice that white men pretty much run everything. 

April 25, 2012

Latest on "Girls" diversity crisis

The New York Times solicits eight opinions on the burning issue of the day "Whitewashing on the Small Screen." You see, HBO's new non-hit sit-com "Girls" has four white actresses playing the four titular girls. 

But, where is the diversity among the debating diversitoids? I see five blacks, two Jewish women, and, mirabile dictu, one Asian dude. But why is the vibrant 50,000,000+ Hispanic Latino/Latina community flagrantly excluded from the debate? It's almost as if nobody particularly cares about them. The New York Times should have a debate over the lack of diversity in this debate. I see the opportunity for an infinite regress coming on.


How to attend the Olympics

I went to the second week of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. My main advice is: only attend the events at which gold medals are handed out. Stay away from preliminary rounds. 

The excitement of a once every four years prize makes minor sports fun for a day. For example, a weightlifting final I attended turned out to be a blast, almost as much fun as professional wrestling (the weightlifters try to psych each other out, which is fun to watch). This was their moment in the spotlight and they took full advantage of it. In contrast, watching the American basketball team starring Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing win a fairly close basketball quarterfinal match over West Germany 78-67 sounds pretty good in theory, but was actually rather dull.

Why the most hated man in America looks a little like Obama

The New York Post runs a long Reuters article on George Zimmerman full of valuable information. Here's a minor bit that answers one question that struck me: Whereas he looked quite mestizo in the notorious orange shirt photo, why, lately, does a skinnier, shaven-headed, suited Zimmerman look a bit like the President?
The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather - the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

So, he's not just a mestizo, he's a "pardo," like Hugo Chavez calls himself.

More good stuff:
A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men. 
Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account. 
"Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I'm black, OK?" the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. "There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood," she said. "That's why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin." 
"MIXED" HOUSEHOLD 
George Michael Zimmerman was born in 1983 to Robert and Gladys Zimmerman, the third of four children. Robert Zimmerman Sr. was a U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1970, and was stationed at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, in 1975 with Gladys Mesa's brother George. Zimmerman Sr. also served two tours in Korea, and spent the final 10 years of his 22-year military career in the Pentagon, working for the Department of Defense, a family member said. 
In his final years in Virginia before retiring to Florida, Robert Zimmerman served as a magistrate in Fairfax County's 19th Judicial District. 
Robert and Gladys met in January 1975, when George Mesa brought along his army buddy to his sister's birthday party. She was visiting from Peru, on vacation from her job there as a physical education teacher. Robert was a Baptist, Gladys was Catholic. They soon married, in a Catholic ceremony in Alexandria, and moved to nearby Manassas.

Okay, so, yeah, we all know Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman, but there really are a whole bunch of people in America with Germanic names who aren't Jewish at all or are only marginally Jewish. They just tend to be less famous per capita than Jewish people with Germanic names. A Baptist American named Robert Zimmerman, George's father, is more likely to never become famous than a Jewish American named Robert Zimmerman
Gladys came to lead a small but growing Catholic Hispanic enclave within the All Saints Catholic Church parish in the late 1970s, where she was involved in the church's outreach programs. Gladys would bring young George along with her on "home visits" to poor families, said a family friend, Teresa Post. 
"It was part of their upbringing to know that there are people in need, people more in need than themselves," said Post, a Peruvian immigrant who lived with the Zimmermans for a time. 
Post recalls evening prayers before dinner in the ethnically diverse Zimmerman household, which included siblings Robert Jr., Grace, and Dawn. "It wasn't only white or only Hispanic or only black - it was mixed," she said. ....
Zimmerman's maternal grandmother, Cristina, who had lived with the Zimmermans since 1978, worked as a babysitter for years during Zimmerman's childhood. For several years she cared for two African-American girls who ate their meals at the Zimmerman house and went back and forth to school each day with the Zimmerman children. 
"They were part of the household for years, until they were old enough to be on their own," Post said. 
Zimmerman served as an altar boy at All Saints from age 7 to 17, church members said. 
"He wasn't the type where, you know, 'I'm being forced to do this,' and a dragging-his-feet Catholic," said Sandra Vega, who went to high school with George and his siblings. "He was an altar boy for years, and then worked in the rectory too. He has a really good heart." 
George grew up bilingual, and by age 10 he was often called to the Haydon Elementary School principal's office to act as a translator between administrators and immigrant parents. At 14 he became obsessed with becoming a Marine, a relative said, joining the after-school ROTC program at Grace E. Metz Middle School and polishing his boots by night. At 15, he worked three part-time jobs - in a Mexican restaurant, for the rectory, and washing cars - on nights and weekends, to save up for a car. ...
In 2004, Zimmerman partnered with an African-American friend and opened up an Allstate insurance satellite office, Donnelly said. 
Then came 2005, and a series of troubles. Zimmerman's business failed, he was arrested, and he broke off an engagement with a woman who filed a restraining order against him. ...
Zimmerman enrolled in Seminole State College in 2009, and in December 2011 he was permitted to participate in a school graduation ceremony, despite being a course credit shy of his associate's degree in criminal justice. Zimmerman was completing that course credit when the shooting occurred. ...
 By the summer of 2011, Twin Lakes was experiencing a rash of burglaries and break-ins. Previously a family-friendly, first-time homeowner community, it was devastated by the recession that hit the Florida housing market, and transient renters began to occupy some of the 263 town houses in the complex. Vandalism and occasional drug activity were reported, and home values plunged. One resident who bought his home in 2006 for $250,000 said it was worth $80,000 today. 
At least eight burglaries were reported within Twin Lakes in the 14 months prior to the Trayvon Martin shooting, according to the Sanford Police Department. Yet in a series of interviews, Twin Lakes residents said dozens of reports of attempted break-ins and would-be burglars casing homes had created an atmosphere of growing fear in the neighborhood. 
In several of the incidents, witnesses identified the suspects to police as young black men. Twin Lakes is about 50 percent white, with an African-American and Hispanic population of about 20 percent each, roughly similar to the surrounding city of Sanford, according to U.S. Census data. 
One morning in July 2011, a black teenager walked up to Zimmerman's front porch and stole a bicycle, neighbors told Reuters. A police report was taken, though the bicycle was not recovered. ...
But it was the August incursion into the home of Olivia Bertalan that really troubled the neighborhood, particularly Zimmerman. Shellie was home most days, taking online courses towards certification as a registered nurse. 
On August 3, Bertalan was at home with her infant son while her husband, Michael, was at work. She watched from a downstairs window, she said, as two black men repeatedly rang her doorbell and then entered through a sliding door at the back of the house. She ran upstairs, locked herself inside the boy's bedroom, and called a police dispatcher, whispering frantically.
"I said, 'What am I supposed to do? I hear them coming up the stairs!'" she told Reuters. Bertalan tried to coo her crying child into silence and armed herself with a pair of rusty scissors. 
Police arrived just as the burglars - who had been trying to disconnect the couple's television - fled out a back door. Shellie Zimmerman saw a black male teen running through her backyard and reported it to police. 
After police left Bertalan, George Zimmerman arrived at the front door in a shirt and tie, she said. He gave her his contact numbers on an index card and invited her to visit his wife if she ever felt unsafe. He returned later and gave her a stronger lock to bolster the sliding door that had been forced open. 
"He was so mellow and calm, very helpful and very, very sweet," she said last week. "We didn't really know George at first, but after the break-in we talked to him on a daily basis. People were freaked out. It wasn't just George calling police ... we were calling police at least once a week." 
In September, a group of neighbors including Zimmerman approached the homeowners association with their concerns, she said. Zimmerman was asked to head up a new neighborhood watch. He agreed. ...
Less than two weeks later, another Twin Lakes home was burglarized, police reports show. Two weeks after that, a home under construction was vandalized. 
The Retreat at Twin Lakes e-newsletter for February 2012 noted: "The Sanford PD has announced an increased patrol within our neighborhood ... during peak crime hours. 
"If you've been a victim of a crime in the community, after calling police, please contact our captain, George Zimmerman." 
EMMANUEL BURGESS - SETTING THE STAGE 
On February 2, 2012, Zimmerman placed a call to Sanford police after spotting a young black man he recognized peering into the windows of a neighbor's empty home, according to several friends and neighbors. 
"I don't know what he's doing. I don't want to approach him, personally," Zimmerman said in the call, which was recorded. The dispatcher advised him that a patrol car was on the way. By the time police arrived, according to the dispatch report, the suspect had fled. 
On February 6, the home of another Twin Lakes resident, Tatiana Demeacis, was burglarized. Two roofers working directly across the street said they saw two African-American men lingering in the yard at the time of the break-in. A new laptop and some gold jewelry were stolen. One of the roofers called police the next day after spotting one of the suspects among a group of male teenagers, three black and one white, on bicycles. 
Police found Demeacis's laptop in the backpack of 18-year-old Emmanuel Burgess, police reports show, and charged him with dealing in stolen property. Burgess was the same man Zimmerman had spotted on February 2. 

And there's much else, such as why Zimmerman bought a gun.

Here's a question: Whom would you rather have as a neighbor: George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin?

The overall picture that has finally emerged is the opposite of the Prestige Press's narrative: while an occasional screw-up, Zimmerman was way above average in altruism and pro-social activity, while Martin was increasingly seduced toward the dark side by hip-hop culture: apparently involved in burglary of jewelry.

On the other hand, let me point out that Trayvon's trajectory through age 17 didn't inevitably doom him to a life in and out of prison: three school suspensions of increasing severity and an unproven but probable suspicion of burglary or fencing burgled goods is pretty bad.  But if he'd had the same track record at 15, his chance of pulling out and getting back on the straight and narrow would seem far worse. As of 17, he didn't appear to belong to an organized street gang, which strikes me as key. My impression is that the appeal of joining a criminal gang starts to diminish pretty rapidly in the late teen years, so the key for his life would likely have been staying out of trouble enough to graduate from high school. His parents had some resources to move him around to get him away from the bad influences he was hanging out with in Miami. In general, he comes across as a classic victim of hip-hop, the kind of kid who would have been okay if pop culture wasn't constantly telling him to act like a thug.

My vague impression is that younger people in America are trending in the direction of Zimmerman rather than Martin: away from outlawry, toward pro-social behavior, conformism, authoritarianism, and so forth. You'll notice that the prestige press's response to this case was to play up Martin not as a would-be thug, but as an angelic innocent, while Zimmerman was portrayed as a Loose Cannon.

Lesley Arfin: The witch hunt for the young female John Derbyshire

When Rich Lowry fired John Derbyshire, that of course excited the witchburner sort of pundits to hunt down more crimethinkers suspected of not taking the reigning racial pieties with full somberness. Attention has thus shifted to an obscure young comedy writer named Lesley Arfin, a staff writer for "Girls."

That's the new HBO show that everybody is tweeting about but (virtually) nobody is actually watching. It's a half-hour downbeat comedy about four not-quite-affluent enough young ladies trying to make it in New York City. It was created by 25-year-old Lena Dunham, writer of the 2010 indie film Tiny Furniture.

I don't have cable TV, so I haven't seen Girls. (Here is a rave about the show by Slate's quite reliable TV critic Troy Patterson, who is just about the best black writer in America whom nobody notices is black.)

Unsurprisingly, there were the usual complaints that all four of the girls on "Girls" are white. 

Arfin, one of Dunham's staff writers, cheekily tweeted in response: 
"What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME." 

This is in the same vein as Sara Silverman worked: the Evil Ingenue ("I don’t care if you think I’m racist; I just want you to think I’m thin"), the young woman too narcissistic to notice the rules about what you are allowed to say about race. 

Silverman's best joke went:
I got in trouble for saying the word “Ch*nk” on a talk show, a network talk show. It was in the context of a joke. Obviously. That’d be weird. That’d be a really bad career choice if it wasn’t. But, nevertheless, the president of an Asian-American watchdog group out here in Los Angeles, his name is Guy Aoki, and he was up in arms about it and he put my name in the papers calling me a racist, and it hurt. As a Jew—as a member of the Jewish community—I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media.

But Arfin's tweet is still still pretty good for 140 characters. 

This enraged various moral watchdogs. It's fascinating how in this Age of Point 'n' Sputter, this Era of Not Getting the Joke, how much pride some of these people take in being humorless buffoons. 

On CNN, Soledad O'Brien, the networks go-to gal for all things African-American, and Sharon Waxman were confused and outraged by Arfin's joke:
“Wow!” Waxman responded. “Wow.” 
The CNN panel momentarily tried to figure out if Arfin’s racially-inflammatory tweet was a joke. 
“Do you think so?” O’Brien asked. “I guess it seems like she’s not necessarily taking the question of representation seriously to me.”

The New Yorker called Arfin's joke "breathtakingly dismissive and intellectually dishonest."

ThinkProgress whined:
Lesley Arfin, John Derbyshire, Vice, Taki Magazine, and the Lingering Cultural Capital of Racism

Elspeth Reeve of the Atlantic, who had piled on Derbyshire, entitled her angry piece:
'Girls' Writer Responds to Critique of 'Girls' with Horrible Joke

and followed up with:
'Girls' Writer Is Learning There's No Such Thing as Ironic Racism

Another notoriously butt-hurt site, Gawker, complained:
A Girls Writer’s Ironic Racism And Other ‘White People Problems’

You might think that the best way to complain about a comedy writer's joke is by making a joke back, especially if your complaints are really intended to get you an affirmative action job writing an HBO show. I mean, there are a lot of complainers in this world, so if HBO is going to have to hire some to write a People of Color sit-com, they might as well hire funny ones. But that kind of thinking is so pre-Trayvon.

April 24, 2012

Tiger Woods and George Zimmerman

In my new Taki's Magazine column, I explain the bizarre story behind a weird phenomenon I had pointed out in May 2009: In 2006-07, golfer Tiger Woods suddenly bulked up to look like a GI Joe action figure. You don't really need to look like that to win at golf, and, it turns out, Woods may have had a very different goal in mind.

To find out what Woods was thinking about quitting golf to do, read the whole thing there.

How to invent a sport women would like

In the name of gender equity, the Summer Olympics are debuting women's boxing at the London games. Women's wrestling was added at the 2004 Athens games. 

The problem, of course, is that very few women are interested these highly masculine sports. Yet, as part of Chris Rock's Keep Your Daughter Off the Pole movement, it would be good to invent some sports that would appeal to normal girls and young women. The idea would be to come up with something less crudely sexualized than pole dancing but less unfeminine than wrestling.

One problem is that the kind of sports-minded nerds who would be good at inventing the rules for sports generally don't understand women well, and conventional female minds aren't tuned to inventing universal rules for sports. There have been a lot of studies of little boys and little girls making up games with balls. The boys argue a lot, but from their arguments actually do evolve better rules that deal fairly with an ever-larger percentage of future situations. The girls, in contrast, tend to devolve the rules to make participants feel better in the present by making ad hoc exceptions when feelings get hurt.

What do women want? Well, one approach is to look at the sports that most excite women viewers in the Winter and Summer Olympics: figureskating and gymnastics.

Another approach that converges on a similar idea is to look at women's fashion magazines. Why, for generations, have women been buying magazines to look at pictures of 5'10" 112 pound fashion models? Yeah, yeah, I know, it's all a Big Gay Conspiracy. But, 2Blowhards had a little essay once on why Mrs. Blowhard loved looking at pictures in fashion magazines. 
There's an additional fantasy element too, which is autonomy. Part of what women fashion-magazine fans seem to enjoy imagining is the fantasy of being found glamorous purely for its own sake. They seem to want to forget about the pleasing-guys element. There's a little defiance in the fantasy -- and you can see the defiance in many of the kicky poses and attitudes the models strike. 
Perhaps something that helps explain the appeal of these images is that not only do many women enjoy imagining looking like these models, they enjoy imagining feeling like them too. I think guys often forget what a weighty and earthbound thing it can be, being a gal. There's so much dreariness to contend with: fatbags, hormones, moods, emotional agonies, etc. Women are weighed down by a lot of burdens, or at least they feel that they are, which is good enough for the purposes of my attempt at an explanation here. 
The gals in the pages of fashion magazines and catalogs aren't weighed down by anything, not even flesh. They burst out of cabs, they leap onto sidewalks, they let loose with irrepressible guffaws, they're caught by insistent cameras looking their klutzy-but-charming best; they're tall and slim, and they're feelin' good and they're lookin' ready to dazzle. The girls in the pix get to enjoy the champagne-and-cocaine fun parts of being a grownup woman. They aren't saddled with fat asses and wobbly upper arms, with PMS, with no-good boyfriends and lecherous bosses, with imperfect features, with senseless mood swings, etc. 
What the fashion mags are selling is, to some extent, a fantasy of play and freedom. Which, come to think of it, is (in a general sense) pretty much what men's magazines sell too. Many guys enjoy indulging in fantasies about utopia -- a male utopia full of gadgets and sex-without-consequences. Many gals love indulging in fantasies about utopia too -- a female utopia, where the fantasizer is carefree and irresistably desirable 24/7. 
My hunch: perhaps superslim-and-supertall are a visual representation of carefree-and-desirable.

What we want in feminine sports is to emphasize, in the interests of keeping-your-daughter-off-the-pole, is to downplay the Desirable aspect and emphasize the nonsexual aspects.

A reductionist approach would be that what might attract feminine interest in a sport is freedom from gravity. Figure skaters glide endlessly and then leap and twirl. Gymnasts fly through the air. The final night of women's figure skating in the Winter Olympics is to crown the World's Greatest Princess and the all-around night of women's gymnastics in the Summer Olympics is to crown the World's Greatest Pixie. 

The problem with this is that nobody really is free from gravity. Competitive cheerleading, for example, is a feminine sport that has evolved toward ever more high-flying death-defying stunts, which is great, except for the cheerleaders who end up in wheelchairs for life.

Trampolining was recently added to the Olympics and it's very exciting because it's amazingly high-flying. But it's also terrifying to watch. I don't think the dads and moms of America are going to get too excited about their daughters taking up trampolining. When I was a little kid in the 1960s, trampolines were a popular backyard amenity. But then they stopped being common because so many kids got hurt on them. 

So, here's my idea for the perfect 21st Century sport for middle class American families with daughters: invent a sport where the girls fly, do quadruple somersaults and quintuple axels or whatever, but are actually in movie special effect wire work harnesses, like in The Matrix.

So, that takes the fear of paralytic injury out of the equation. You still have the puberty problem (the laws of physics decree that girls who haven't developed T&A yet can spin faster than those that have). Figure skating and gymnastics had to put minimum age requirements into the Olympics to keep their sports from being dominated by girls taking drugs to hold back puberty.

So, there's no perfect solution, but some kind of acrobatic event suspended from a bungee cord might go over big with today's parents and their daughters. Another possibility is that "indoor skydiving," flying on fan-blasted air that you can now do at amusement parks. For the very rich, zero gravity acrobatics flying on the Vomit Comet could be the next big thing.