Reading this NPR piece on the Occupy Wall Street protests, I came upon a true “let them eat cake” moment:
One man, who declined to give his name, but said he has worked on Wall Street for nine years, just shook his head. He was wearing a grey wool coat and his hair was neat and combed back. He stood at that corner for a while.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I just don’t understand why they’re not out trying to find jobs.”
He said he works 75 to 80 hours a week, so he deserves to be part of the one percent. He says he chose a degree in finance so he could make a lot of money.
I told him what Nathan Storey had told me. He was laid off in 2008 and still couldn’t find a job.
The man shook his head.
“He could get jobs at McDonald’s,” he said. He conceded however that minimum wage isn’t much money and he said he was willing to pay more taxes.
But he said he truly believes if you want to make money in this country, you can work hard and do that.
“This is the land of opportunity,” he said.
There appears to be a disconnect in the anonymous gentleman’s statement that he entered finance so he “could make a lot of money” and his assertion that if you “want to make money in this country, you can work hard and do that.” Yes, “the land of opportunity” is the U.S.’s advertising slogan but that is as relevant in practice as “The King of Beers” is for Budweiser.
His McDonald’s comment is both unoriginal and condescending, as if working in the fast-food industry is a viable option for people who have trouble finding jobs. Sure, many companies are calluously choosing not to interview job applicants who are unemployed — their way of capitalizing further on the poor job market — but having McDonald’s on the resume won’t improve the situation.
He should also know that a bad economy usually doesn’t trickle down. It’s the jobs near the bottom of the 99 percent that are the first to fall. Why does he suppose there are all these job opportunities at McDonald’s? Or does he think any reasonably educated person is preferable to the usual applicants at the fast-food chain? If so, then what are they supposed to do if what used to be the middle class takes their jobs — find work as medical school cadavers?
But let’s propose that there are McDonald’s positions for anyone who wants one. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Even if you had the opportunity to work 75 to 80 hours a week (you won’t, as you’d be eligible for benefits and overtime), that’s about $30K a year. You’ll be exhaisted and won’t see your family but you’ll be content with the knowledge that you can provide them with so little.
Meanwhile, after nine years, our guy on Wall Street is possibly making around $300 to $500K. That breaks down to around $100 an hour at a 75/80-hour work week, which is slightly more rewarding. He can also get sick once in a while and send his kids to college.
Obviously, our economy can’t work if everyone is either in the finance or fry-making industry. It’s also telling that there’s no other default job that people like this guy can mention. The underlying message is “go away, stop bothering me with your problems, and serve me.”
There is a difference between having a middle-class work ethic and being an all-day, licked down to the center of the Tootsie Roll pop sucker. It’s like being the doting boyfriend while your girlfriend is fooling around with your best friend, brother, uncle, father, and family priest. It can get to the point that even the noblest person would rather die annoying the 1 percent than quietly serve them for the off chance of a pat on the head.
Even before the Penn State scandal, I’ve never fully trusted coaches. If you’re like me — and for your sake, I sincerely hope not, you always had a slightly antagonistic relationship with your gym coaches. Gym was that special hour of the day when jocks got to feel better about themselves, cute girls got to vex boys who watched them gradually fill out their gym clothes each day, and the unathletically inclined got to humiliate themselves in pointless fitness tests that probably inspired our current interrogation techniques.
When I was in seventh grade, Mr. Clue, fit the stereotype of the sort of odd gym teacher to every inch of his painted-on, Richard Simmons shorts. You might ask, “What kind of guy teaches gym to 12 year olds in short shorts?” Well, the kind of guy who announces to the male students that he’s going to start keeping the gym towels in his office. Apparently, there had been a rash of towel thefts. It didn’t make sense to us either. Keep in mind that showering around other boys was traumatic enough. “The Exorcist” wasn’t as frightening as the first time you did this. None of us wanted to add the prospect of racing into Coach Clue’s office dripping wet for a towel.
After a brief huddle and discussion, our representive told Coach Clue that we didn’t want to do this. He insisted. Kids were apparently selling gym towels in Chinatown or something like that. Our response was to stop showering after gym. Problem solved. Not really, as the next week, Coach Clue gave a stirring lecture on the value of hygiene. At this point, I had no choice but to tell my mother. She was horrified and wondered why I didn’t tell her sooner. I recall saying that I didn’t fully trust my own judgment about what was appropriate or not — after all, I’d though breaking that vase was a good idea.
I’m not sure what my mother did but we didn’t have to go into Coach Clue’s office for towels anymore.
Two years later, I learned the value of procrastination from Coach Stroller. Mr. Stroller looked like one of the officers from “C.H.I.P.S” — blonde hair, sunglasses, stoic gaze. My freshman year of high school, I was dealt the cruel hand of having first period gym. That’s a nightmare. No 14 year old should wear sweat pants publically until about 5 pm each day when his body is almost behaving normally.
Coach Stroller tried to add a bit of academia to gym class so you had to take notes while he gave a lecture on some sport or other. One Friday, Coach Stroller asked the class if we wanted to take notes on football today or on Monday. The class went with Monday. Why not put it off until after the weekend? However, I had steeled myself for note-taking on Friday. My thought was to get it over with and enjoy “Golden Girls” on Saturday. But I was outvoted.
The next day, Coach Stroller was arrested for having an affair with a student. We never had to take those notes. This was a tragedy, of course, and I felt for the student, but I was very glad not to have to take those notes.
Back in the late 1980s, when the world almost trusted Germany again, record producer Frank Farian discovered model/dancers Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan in a Munich nightclub and decided to have them front his band Milli Vanilli.
Farian believed the actual singers on what became the “Girl You Know It’s True” album (a title that would prove to have certain dramatic irony) were not marketable. However, it’s hard to imagine them proving more of a laughingstock than Rob and Fab, who were ridiculed frequently for their curious dance moves and Whoopi Goldberg fright wigs.
Milli Vanilli won the 1990 Best New Artist Grammy, which was later revoked when it was revealed that the duo was a fraud. That always seemed curious to me because the actual music was legitimate. Why not give the Grammy to the poor schmuck singing for them?
Later that year, George Michael embraced the Milli Vanilli concept in his “Freedom ’90” video but this was the polar extreme of vanity. Michael was so attractive he felt burdened by it and refused to appear in the videos for his “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1” album so that his music could stand on its own. The debut single, “Praying for Time,” was just white lyrics against a black background. I guess they decided to jazz things up for the follow-up.
Eddie Murphy in “Delirious” commented that all you had to do was “sing” but the MTV Generation had ensured that vocal talent alone was not sufficient if you had a face for radio rather than video. Live performances were now just extensions of the music video.
One of my favorite singers is Martha Wash, who had a memorable hit in the early 1980s — “It’s Raining Men” — as one half of The Weather Girls. The song has been covered multiple times but never equaled.
By the 1990s, the marketing geniuses also declared her appearance unacceptable. They were idiots for several reasons: One, Wash is a beautiful woman, but I concede that all that is subjective. However, the “marketable image” position implies that only heterosexual men are buying the records or watching the videos. Maybe people who look like Wash would appreciate seeing someone similar to themselves in a video rather than a model mindlessly voguing while mouthing the words. Unfortunately, C+C Music Factory went with the latter option when it released its video for 1990’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).”
Wash sued to receive proper credit in the video. She later sued Black Box for pulling the same racket on the three songs for which she provided lead vocals — “Everybody Everybody” (I’ve left instructions for the song to be played at my funeral),”Strike It Up,” and “I Don’t Know Anybody Else.” Wash’s actions had a permanent impact on the industry, making it mandatory to properly identify the vocalists in a CD and video.
Burned so badly by all of this, I at first thought Sheryl Crow was a fraud when I saw her “All I Wanna Do” video in 1994. She seemed too cover girl attractive than the girl next door I envisioned in my head when listening to the song on the radio.
In some ways, the Milli Vanilli/Martha Wash controversies were a more innocent time when a record company wouldn’t dare simply present attractive but untalented performers and expect a gullible audience to willingly pay money for their awful music. The industry would soon get over that as evidenced by the careers of The Spice Girls and Britney Spears.
The Grammys had no problem giving Spears an award in 2005. Incidentally, I think the reason the audience is applauding in the above clip is because that’s the only way Spears would release their families.
There is much complaint of late that the Christmas season seems to start the day after Halloween, effectively preempting Thanksgiving. The National Retail Federation (yes, that’s real) officially declares November 1 the beginning of all the “Santa Claus, ho-ho-ho and mistletoe, and presents to pretty girls” that Sally told Schroeder about in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
However, the Nordstrom store in Portland, Oregon is resisting the early call of the holidays and has declared Christmas music off-limits until the day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday because that was the day African-Americans got to celebrate after spending the actual holiday serving the guests at the Thanksgiving dinner scenes in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.”
That’s somewhat unfortunate because there are no real Thanksgiving tunes — not even a “Monster Mash.” I can understand not wanting to hear the more overtly Christmas songs such as “Silent Night,” “Joy to the World,” or “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” until a half hour before midnight on December 25 (my preference), but we could all use more exposure to “Last Christmas” or “Do They Know It’s Christmas” or “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” — it’s been a Christmas ritual of mine since 1986 to watch Darlene Love perform the latter on David Letterman’s show each year.
Thanksgiving has also produced a paucity of seasonally themed movies or TV show episodes. Old men don’t suddenly see the error of their ways and start down a path of redemption on Thanksgiving. They just watch football and occasionally tell a racist joke before falling asleep on the couch.
The exceptions are few — I plan to download the 1986 Thanksgiving episode of “Cheers” — a classic half hour of comedy, and I preferred spending Thanksgiving with the cast of “Friends” than with anyone else from 1994 to 2003.
Otherwise, much like the Charlie Brown specials, Thanksgiving on a cultural basis ranks behind Halloween and Christmas, and given the economy, there might be a lot of cold cereal and toast instead of turkey and stuffing on the menu.
The challenge for Thanksgiving is that there’s nothing really special about it — no crass commercialism of Christmas, which is what the U.S. does best, and no excuse to dress up and over-indulge on candy like Halloween. It’s basically a dinner party. You can do that any day of the year — especially if Woody Allen loaned you the black maids from “Hannah and Her Sisters” to help with the cooking and clean-up.
I think the problem is not that Christmas starts too early, it’s that it ends too soon. Is there anything more depressing than January with the decomposing tree in the corner, the discarded toys on the floor, and the stack of bills on the coffee table? It’s cold outside but not in the sexy way of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” but in the “I can’t believe it’s snowing again. How am I going to get to work?” way.
So, I say push Christmas back to January 25th. This will allow Thanksgiving to embrace its fate in the natural order as the opening act to Christmas while still maintaining some of its dignity. It will add some much-needed juice to January. You can even do one better and make New Year’s Eve February 13. If you go the right party, your loved one will have such a hangover the next morning, you won’t have to worry about Valentine’s Day.
It might surprise people who know me to find me promoting Christmas in any way, but frankly, the religious aspect of it has long been abandoned. Santa Claus is Alec Baldwin’s character in “Glengarry Glen Ross” deriding Jesus’s Dave Moss: “Last year, I had a million guys dressed as me and twice as many TV specials. What did you have? See, that’s who I am. And you’re nothing.”
Well, of all the crazy things Ann Coulter has said, this probably ranks around the middle:
“They harangue blacks and tell them ‘you can’t be a Republican, you can’t be a Republican,’ it is so hard for a black to be a Republican,” and then complain when conservative events are mostly white-attended, Coulter argued. “Maybe you shouldn’t harangue them so much!” Coulter also told Hannity the source of why liberals “detest conservative blacks” is that “it is ironic in a cruel, vicious, horrible way… that civil rights laws were designed to protect blacks from Democrats,” and now there are “liberal wimen using laws to protest blacks in order to attack conservative blacks with these vicious, outrageous charges.”
Coulter is responding to recent sexual harassment charges against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain.
The heretofore surging Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was lifted by news Saturday that he was tied with Mitt Romney at the top of the Des Moines Register’s poll of likely Iowa caucus attendees. Then he was hit by heavy turbulence when Politico reported that, as head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, he was at least twice accused of sexually harassing behavior by women who left after receiving payments from the trade group.
Promoters of racial tolerance Coulter and Rush Limbaugh immediately argued that the release of this story was racially motivated.
“This is not a news story, this is gutter partisan politics, and it’s the politics of minority conservative personal destruction is what you’ve got here,” the conservative radio host said, also mentioning The Post’s story on Florida senator Marco Rubio (R). “We cannot have a black Republican running for the office of President. We can’t have one elected.”
Limbaugh said that Cain was targeted because of his conservative views and skin color.
“Anything good that happens to any black or Hispanic in American politics can only happen via the Democrat Party. If it happens elsewhere, we’re going to destroy those people a la Clarence Thomas.”
“It really is about blacks and Hispanics getting too uppity. That’s what this is,” he said. “You don’t achieve in American politics as a Republican…..you try it and we’re going to destroy you.”
Coulter and Limbaugh seem to be confused on motive. If anyone wants to take out Cain at this point in the race, prior to the first official GOP primary, it would be another Republican candidate. Based on the last debate I watched, there are a few dozen of them but the ones who have the least laughable chances are Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. Both of whom are seeing Cain lapping at their heels or potentially surpassing them. The Obama campaign is focused on Romney as a viable threat because he’s almost rational. Anyway, it would seem logical for the Democrats to wait and pull the pin on any grenade it had until much later in the primary race or even after a candidate had secured the nomination. The denials stemming from the other GOP candidates just reinforce this.
As for Clarence Thomas and his so-called “high-tech lynching.” Boo. Hoo. The guy was confirmed to the Supreme Court. It’s hard for me to find a narrative that comes close to tragedy here. OK, he had a tough job interview. I repeat: Boo. Hoo. It still grates that he pulled the racial victim card when the accusation was not about race but about gender. You’d have to be incredibly naive to believe that race was not a factor in President Bush’s selection of Thomas in the first place, and ultimately Thomas got the job. He still has it, demonstrating that he has better job security than any other black person in the United States. Is this the best Democrats can do to “destroy” people?
But let’s go back to the crazy lady.
With that as a framework, Coulter once again praised the conservative black people she had known, arguing that “our blacks are so much better than their blacks” because “you have fought against probably your family, probably your neighbors… that’s why we have very impressive blacks.” She went on to compare conservative black Americans to the family of the President, arguing that “Obama… is not a descendant of the blacks that suffered these Jim Crow laws,” that he was “not the son of American blacks that went through the American experience,” but the “son of a Kenyan” (a point she made with the caveat that she fully believed the President was an American citizen).
“Our blacks are better than their blacks”? That sounds like a discussion of college football in the South during the ’80s.
It’s probably not wise to bother asking but what’s the point of Coulter’s statement? Is the implication that the left prefers Obama because he’s “not the son of American blacks that went through the American experience”? Is the implication that Cain is better at connecting to American blacks because he did? But since when was “connecting to American blacks” a priority of the GOP? If it’s just about policies, then OK, Cain is preferable to Obama if you’re a Republican but why bring race into it?
As with the Thomas allegations, there is nothing really racially motivated about them other than that those accused claim they are. We don’t know the women involved in the Cain allegations — they could be white but that in itself wouldn’t prove anything either.
Cain might want to take some time to reflect on who his supporters are. Let’s recall what Limbaugh said about Thurgood Marshall, who Thomas replaced on the Supreme Court.
Noting that Kagan idolized Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — she was a law clerk for Marshall — Limbaugh pointed out that, in a 1976 speech, Marshall “declared, according to a law review article she wrote, that ‘the Constitution as originally drafted and conceived was defective. Only over the course of 200 years had the nation attained the system of constitutional government and its respect for individual freedoms and human rights that we hold as fundamental today.’
“ ‘The Constitution today,’ the justice continued, ‘has a great deal to be proud of. But the credit does not belong to the framers, it belongs to those who refused to acquiesce to outdated notions of liberty, justice and equality and who strived to better them.’ ”
Rush continued: “The credit, in other words, belongs to people like Justice Marshall. So this is who Elena Kagan idolizes.”
Coulter writes in her book “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America,” that “Martin Luther King Jr. …used images in order to win publicity and goodwill for his cause, deploying children in the streets for a pointless, violent confrontation with a lame-duck lunatic: Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor,” the Birmingham sheriff who was known to be easily provoked to brutality and violence to enforce racial segregation.
So, per Coulter and Limbaugh, “their” blacks are Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain and, if you’re on the left, “our” blacks are Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King (and possibly Obama if we can ever figure out whether he’s black or not. I think we’re still waiting on the FOX News pronouncement). I don’t think “their” guys are going to win the political version of the Heisman trophy any time soon.
Herman Cain is now talking like a candidate who thinks he has a serious chance of claiming the GOP presidential nomination.
During an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Cain said he’s “pro-life from conception, period.” Far be it for me to give Cain political advice but at the very least, he should consider what he’s actually saying and whether he wants to include the word “period.” He might be better off with “end of story” or “that’s all, folks.”
This is a turn from Cain’s previous statement made way back sometime last week that confused a lot of people because they had either read it or heard it, which is really not the best way to encounter Cain’s stance on the issues.
CAIN:… Abortion should not be legal; that is clear. But if that family made a decision to break the law, that’s that family’s decision. That’s all I’m trying to say.
Far be it for me to give Cain political advice again but at the very least, he should consider what he’s actually saying and whether, as the former CEO of a pizza chain called “Godfather’s Pizza,” he wants to say it’s “the family’s” decision to break the law.
As wonky as that comment was, it was nothing compared to his attempt to link Planned Parenthood to racial genocide.
Cain said Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to eradicate minorities by putting birth control clinics in their neighborhoods, a charge that the group denies.
“In Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word genocide, but she did talk about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born,” Cain said.
The indisputable logic here is that Planned Parenthood today is a racist institution because it was founded by a racist. Presumably, Cain also thinks that the United States is a racist country because it was founded by slave owners.
In his new campaign manifesto, “This is Herman Cain: My Journey to the White House,” the candidate states repeatedly and without qualification that “Our Founding Fathers did their job … a great job.” He makes no mention of the blacks who fled George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson during the Revolutionary War in search of their freedom, or the Constitution’s protection of slavery, or that the initial Constitution forbade Congress from prohibiting American participation in the international slave trade for 20 years and indeed made that provision unamendable.
Oh, I guess he doesn’t. Well, let’s not keep Cain’s apparent hand-waving over historical wrongs get in the way of his focus on Planned Parenthood’s racist actions in the present.
Cain said Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to eradicate minorities by putting birth control clinics in their neighborhoods, a charge that the group denies.
Cain said 75 percent of the organization’s abortion facilities were built in black communities.
“In Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word genocide, but she did talk about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born,” Cain said.
I’m not sure if Cain actually believes this nonsense or whether he’s having fun making racially inflammatory statements that would have resulted in a full-day FOX News marathon of condemnation if Obama had said them or been in the presence of someone who said them. It’s actually possible that Cain supporters, offended by his racial genocide comments, will still blame Obama somehow for it.
During the “Face the Nation” interview, Cain was asked if his anti-abortion stance also extended to cases of rape, incest, or life of the mother. Cain went for the hat trick of reproductive regulation and responded, “Correct, that’s my position.”
Far be it for me to give Cain political advice yet again but at the very least, he should consider what he’s actually saying and whether he wants to utter the phrase “that’s my position” when discussing rape or incest. It’s just odd.
Perhaps instead of pizza, Cain’s next business venture will be “No Exceptions” jeans for women.
Shortly after 5 on Thursday, I enter Les Petit Cafe on Rue Descartes. It’s hard to resist a cafe on a street named after the author of “Discourse on the Method.” Descartes famously stated that thought cannot be separated from a human being. However, he lived centuries prior to the invention of cable television.
The cafe is at the top of the hill that’s Rue De La Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, a few blocks up from the apartment I’m renting. As the day weakens into night, the smell of cheese from the fondue restaurant across the street grows stronger.
The chill in the late October air that sends me inside reminds me of previous Octobers spent in a similar coffeehouses in New York in the days before Starbucks where there were independently owned coffeehouses in New York. There are Starbucks in Paris, as well as in Barcelona and pretty much every major European city I’ve visited. They all look the same as if they are exported in a model kit with easy to follow instructions. The android barista probably has a switch to activate the appropriate language.
When I first moved to New York, in my early 20s when I had all the time in the world and was as overwhelmed by that as anyone else is at that age, I would often leave the office and go to a coffeehouse in Morningside Heights on 107 and Broadway. It was then called the Coffee Lounge — “the uptown coffeehouse with the downtown vibe.” In those days, it was very important for hip things to be downtown or have a downtown feel. It still is, I guess.
Cafes are different here — you can enter one and order an espresso, a good beer on tap, or an excellent French wine. That’s at least three different places in the states with a distinct decor. Somehow a dive bar, coffeehouse, and wine bar all exist simultaneously and harmoniously.
You can also peacefully read, jot in a notebook, or have a quiet conversation, as well. That is difficult to achieve during happy hour at a NY bar. Coffee Lounge expanded shortly before 2000 and became a bar — The Underground Lounge, which still reached to the downtown vibe but the increased volume made reading the paper impossible.
The 20something Parisian next to me reads his paper while sipping an espresso. A different young woman, each of increasing pulchritude, walks in every few minutes and greets him with a kiss. Later, a blonde lingers past the initial kiss, resting a moment in his lap, then moving to an adjacent chair when her Cotes du Rhone (the 3 Euro house red) arrives. She stretches her leg, which is long enough to reach Burgundy, over his as she chats with the waitress. He leans his head into her chest and she strokes his hair. He seems happy. This never happened to me at Coffee Lounge, presumably because I never ordered the espresso.
The young woman working behind the bar sings along to Portishead’s “Wandering Star,” which plays on the iPod speaker dock behind her — the only words I hear her speak in English the entire time I’m there are “please won’t you stay awhile to share my grief. It’s such a lovely day to have to always feel this way. And the time that I will suffer less is when I never have to wake.”
She was probably four or five at the oldest when Portishead’s “Dummy” was released in 1994. I wonder how many iterations of women her age have sung along to these words over the years? One of them was the woman I dated in 2001 — definitely a woman to me then; now, in retrospect, it’s hard to consider her more than a girl right out of college who wanted to avoid law school (she ultimately failed) and who liked to listen to “Dummy” and Bjork’s “Vespertine” in the dark – as did I.
It’s now past six, so I abandon coffee for liquor and the cafe feels just like a wine bar once the whisky is placed in front of me. If I stay until 8, I would find myself in a french bistro — the menu is similar to one of my favorite places in the East Village — but I leave to walk down the hill as the odor of fondue follows me.
The latest polls show Herman Cain beating Barack Obama in the 2012 general election. This is based on a complex, scientific process of predicting how people will vote a year from now (i.e. “guessing”).
This is exciting: Two blacks fighting for the title for the amusement of a mostly white audience and it’s not Ali vs. Frazier. Let’s hope the build-up to the big bout is at least as entertaining.
Unfortunately, if Cain does win, he doesn’t get to be the first black president. Sure, the second black president is sort of impressive — he probably still gets to make a speech, kind of like the salutatorian at high school graduation, but few people listen. This is probably why Cain supporter Laura Ingraham claims that he would in fact be the first black president.
INGRAHAM: And what happened with Obama is that he gets this job that he’s not qualified for… OK, so [Obama is] Constitutionally qualified for but he’s not really qualified for. And guess who pays the price? All of us. Because we had such a yearning for history.
Well I have a question. Herman Cain, if he became president, he would be the first black president, when you measure it by — because he doesn’t — does he have a white mother, white father, grandparents, no, right? So Herman Cain, he could say that he’s — he’s — he’s the first, uh — he could make the claim to be the first — yeah, the first Main Street black Republican to be the president of the United States. Right? He’s historic too.
See, Obama, who was a U.S. Senator, was not qualified to be president and only won because we wanted to have a black president (it was on everyone’s wish list in 2008, along with the iPhone) but Obama has white relatives so isn’t really black in which case, if we act quickly before our warranty expires, we should be able to exchange him for Cain, CEO of a profitable pizza company and thus perfectly qualified to be president, who does not have any white relatives because obviously Ingraham would have researched something like that and not just talk out of her ass.
I’m not sure how far back in the family tree Ingraham is willing to go, but Cain is from Georgia and it was pretty hard for blacks to get through the antebellum South sexually unscathed. Slave masters weren’t that picky. They couldn’t have been because — putting it bluntly — having sex with a slave was probably like having sex with a homeless person. I’m sorry. Hate me all you want but you’ve been watching too many movies with Halle Berry or Jasmine Guy if you think otherwise. Slaves didn’t get access to the quality deodorant, moisturizers, and bath soaps. You think they got to shave their legs? Take all that away from even Beyonce and you’ve got something nasty in a weave. Now take away the weave: Scary, isn’t it?
Even the house slaves were probably legally required to be sufficiently less attractive than the mistress of the house. And the mistresses weren’t Vivien Leigh, either. Look at some paintings from the period. We’re talking about 4s or 5s to be kind, so Mammy is probably a 2 at best and the slave master is still putting on some Rolling Stones and violating her because the guy owns human beings, you expect rationality?
I know this implies that it was predominately Southern men going after slave women. I’m sure some bored antebellum housewives fooled around with male slaves but in a more sexist period, it was certainly risky. If she gives birth to a kid who looks like Obama, maybe she can pass him off as the master’s kid with a suntan and curly hair. If she gives birth to a kid who looks like Cain, it’s her ass unless she then claims that she was assaulted because she wouldn’t willingly have sex with a slave, she’s a good Christian woman, after all. So, her husband rounds up all the male slaves and orders her to identify the guilty one. She goes down the line, winking surreptitiously at the Shemar Moore-looking slave and then points at one of my ancestors, Jebediah Robinson.
Mistress: Yes, darling, that’s the one! I’ll never forget. It was horrible.
Jebediah: Really? Oh come on! (turns to Shemar Moore-looking slave). Dude, I thought we were friends. Look, when I said I’d be your wingman, I didn’t think I’d wind up in actual wings.
However, let’s say Ingraham’s correct and Cain is 100% black — much like the lady who flipped out on Jeffrey Dahmer in court. This would mean that the United States had gone “all in” on a black president. It’s like the guy who is bisexual in college but when you meet him a few years later, he’s dating men exclusively. If we elect Cain, we’re not pussy-footing around. We’ve gone all the way.
And it’s not even about skintone: As Cain says, Obama’s never been part of the “black experience.” Obama, after all, cowardly chose to not even be born when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, whereas Cain bravely followed his father’s advice to “not start trouble” and sit in the back of the bus.
“…If I had been a college student I probably would have been participating.” (Cain) said that, as a high school student, “it was not prudent” for him to be involved.
“Not prudent”? Well, if Cain’s elected, Dana Carvey can stage a comeback by impersonating him. Apparently, Cain’s father advised him to keep his focus on education and presumably the promising career in janitorial services he would have had without the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement.
“Did you expect every black student and every black college in America to be out there?” Cain said. “…You didn’t know, Lawrence, what I was doing…maybe, just maybe, I had a sick relative!”
If the Civil Rights Movement was the black Vietnam — although blacks fought in Vietnam, as well, but just try to follow me on this — then Cain marched not in Martin Luther King’s path but Dick Cheney‘s and avoided service with, maybe, just maybe, a lame excuse.
But that’s all in the past. Let’s see who winds up king of the U.S. empire when Cain and Obama step in the ring! If my analogy holds, this means that we’ll probably wind up with a brain-damaged president regardless of who wins but we’ve been there before.
The Huffington Post thought it necessary to publish the following:
After widespread allegations that Ashton Kutcher strayed from his six-year marriage to Demi Moore, his alleged temptress, Sara Leal, is speaking out to Us Weekly, saying that she and Kutcher did have unprotected sex. Leal claims that she slept with Kutcher on September 24th after a night of partying — including a naked hot tub jaunt — in the actor’s Hard Rock hotel suite in San Diego.
Is there any public interest in this? OK, I should rephrase that: Is whatever public interest in the tawdry lives of celebrities necessarily something that the media should enable?
“Widespread allegations” that Kutcher cheated on his wife? Is this Iran Contra? Is Kutcher going to have to suspend taping of “Two and a Half Men” to testify before a Senate subcommittee? Why does anyone need to know about this?
Although Kutcher has not outright denied a relationship with Leal, he has taken to twitter to urge the public and his fans to not put any weight into the things that they read as well as to continue to support his wife via the 140 characters or less venue.
The latest? Kutcher tweeted a link to a pair of cufflinks with the abbreviated words “Cntrl” and “Esc” on them writing, “if we are not looking for one we are looking for the other Ctrl Esc.” Could this be Kutcher’s way of saying he lost control and now cannot escape or might it be his wishful thinking that he can control or escape the media?
Really? So-called journalists are now deciphering a TV star’s tweets as if they are complex passages from James Joyce?
I noticed that HuffPost offers readers the chance to “contribute to the story” — send in corrections and tips. I know unemployment is high but should people really spend their free time serving as unpaid and mostly unreliable Deep Throats? Do I at least get college credit? Sure, it would probably be community college credit, as it’s meaningless celebrity gossip, but what if I write an especially compelling essay explicating Kutcher’s tweets from his gothic period?
The House just passed the Protect Life Act, which true to its name ensures that all U.S. citizens have access to affordable health care, nutritious meals, and safe housing. It also eliminates capital punishment and reduces our military presence abroad. No, wait, I confused the U.S. with a first world country; the bill actually does the following:
Limitation on Abortion Funding-
‘(1) IN GENERAL- No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act (or an amendment made by this Act), including credits applied toward qualified health plans under section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 or cost-sharing reductions under section 1402 of this Act, may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion…
So, what’s the point of this? House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says it’s to “ensure that no taxpayer dollars flow to health care plans that cover abortion and no health care worker has to participate in abortions against their will.”
Cantor must think we live in some sci-fi movie in which everyone, after their birth from a futuristic gestation matrix, is assigned a career with no option to choose something else — such as the vegan who got randomly assigned to the slaughterhouse that specializes in cute animals. If you are distinctly anti-abortion, it might behoove you to consider a career in which it will never come up. It’s not that hard. I have friends who are real estate agents and accountants. To my knowledge, they’ve never had to participate in an abortion — even when the market was at its worst.
The bill does make the usual exceptions for “rape or incest,” so apparently the life is less worthy of protection if the father is a bastard and the mother did not actually enjoy the sex that led to conception. There’s also an allowance if the woman might die. However, that only gets her through Level 1 of the government-approved misogyny video game. Level 2 is still the potential refusal of the service if it offends the sensibility of medical provider.
OPTION TO PURCHASE SEPARATE COVERAGE OR PLAN- Nothing in this subsection shall be construed as prohibiting any non-Federal entity (including an individual or a State or local government) from purchasing separate coverage for abortions for which funding is prohibited under this subsection, or a qualified health plan that includes such abortions, so long as–
‘(A) such coverage or plan is paid for entirely using only funds not authorized or appropriated by this Act; and
‘(B) such coverage or plan is not purchased using–
‘(i) individual premium payments required for a qualified health plan offered through an Exchange towards which a credit is applied under section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986; or
‘(ii) other non-Federal funds required to receive a Federal payment, including a State’s or locality’s contribution of Medicaid matching funds.
I’m not a lawyer but basically, if you’re rich, you can still have an abortion — just have your butler hand over some gold bars to the doctor. This seems to put abortion on the same medical footing as a nose job and breast enlargement.
There is a section the prevents “nondiscrimination on abortion,” but that actually is intended to protect medical providers who are anti-abortion and don’t wish to perform them (sort of like the dentists who don’t like root canals):
‘(1) NONDISCRIMINATION- A Federal agency or program, and any State or local government that receives Federal financial assistance under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act), may not subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, or require any health plan created or regulated under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) to subject any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination, on the basis that the health care entity refuses to–
‘(A) undergo training in the performance of induced abortions;
‘(B) require or provide such training;
‘(C) perform, participate in, provide coverage of, or pay for induced abortions; or
‘(D) provide referrals for such training or such abortions
I think this is how you ban abortion while people are too busy watching primetime TV to notice. Who needs to bother with Roe v. Wade? Reading this bill, it seems a woman has a better chance blowing up the Death Star than getting an abortion.
Laura Bassett from the Huffington Post reports further:
H.R. 358, introduced by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), goes beyond the issue of taxpayer dollars to place actual limits on the way a woman spends her own money. The bill would prevent a woman from buying a private insurance plan that includes abortion coverage through a state health care exchange, even though most insurance plans currently cover abortion.
An even more controversial aspect of the bill would allow hospitals that are morally opposed to abortion, such as Catholic institutions, to do nothing for a woman who requires an emergency abortion procedure to save her life. Current law requires that hospitals give patients in life-threatening situations whatever care they need, regardless of the patient’s financial situation, but the Protect Life Act would make a hospital’s obligation to provide care in medical emergencies secondary to its refusal to provide abortions.
I suppose the bill is appropriately named after all: Its stated desire to “protect life” certainly is an act.
serhasacomplaint 
Let them work at McDonald’s…
Reading this NPR piece on the Occupy Wall Street protests, I came upon a true “let them eat cake” moment:
One man, who declined to give his name, but said he has worked on Wall Street for nine years, just shook his head. He was wearing a grey wool coat and his hair was neat and combed back. He stood at that corner for a while.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I just don’t understand why they’re not out trying to find jobs.”
He said he works 75 to 80 hours a week, so he deserves to be part of the one percent. He says he chose a degree in finance so he could make a lot of money.
I told him what Nathan Storey had told me. He was laid off in 2008 and still couldn’t find a job.
The man shook his head.
“He could get jobs at McDonald’s,” he said. He conceded however that minimum wage isn’t much money and he said he was willing to pay more taxes.
But he said he truly believes if you want to make money in this country, you can work hard and do that.
“This is the land of opportunity,” he said.
There appears to be a disconnect in the anonymous gentleman’s statement that he entered finance so he “could make a lot of money” and his assertion that if you “want to make money in this country, you can work hard and do that.” Yes, “the land of opportunity” is the U.S.’s advertising slogan but that is as relevant in practice as “The King of Beers” is for Budweiser.
His McDonald’s comment is both unoriginal and condescending, as if working in the fast-food industry is a viable option for people who have trouble finding jobs. Sure, many companies are calluously choosing not to interview job applicants who are unemployed — their way of capitalizing further on the poor job market — but having McDonald’s on the resume won’t improve the situation.
He should also know that a bad economy usually doesn’t trickle down. It’s the jobs near the bottom of the 99 percent that are the first to fall. Why does he suppose there are all these job opportunities at McDonald’s? Or does he think any reasonably educated person is preferable to the usual applicants at the fast-food chain? If so, then what are they supposed to do if what used to be the middle class takes their jobs — find work as medical school cadavers?
But let’s propose that there are McDonald’s positions for anyone who wants one. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Even if you had the opportunity to work 75 to 80 hours a week (you won’t, as you’d be eligible for benefits and overtime), that’s about $30K a year. You’ll be exhaisted and won’t see your family but you’ll be content with the knowledge that you can provide them with so little.
Meanwhile, after nine years, our guy on Wall Street is possibly making around $300 to $500K. That breaks down to around $100 an hour at a 75/80-hour work week, which is slightly more rewarding. He can also get sick once in a while and send his kids to college.
Obviously, our economy can’t work if everyone is either in the finance or fry-making industry. It’s also telling that there’s no other default job that people like this guy can mention. The underlying message is “go away, stop bothering me with your problems, and serve me.”
There is a difference between having a middle-class work ethic and being an all-day, licked down to the center of the Tootsie Roll pop sucker. It’s like being the doting boyfriend while your girlfriend is fooling around with your best friend, brother, uncle, father, and family priest. It can get to the point that even the noblest person would rather die annoying the 1 percent than quietly serve them for the off chance of a pat on the head.
Posted by Stephen Robinson on November 19, 2011 in Capitalism, Social Commentary
Tags: McDonald's, Occupy Wall Street