America

As has been widely noted, this past week marked the fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unethical, immoral, and unwinnable war in Iraq. As the war enters its sixth bloody year, no end appears in sight. The fragile, fractious political situation in Iraq is no better now than it ever was. The public infrastructure is still shattered, with such basic necessities as electricity and potable water still widely unavailable in many regions of the country for more than a few hours a day. The so-called surge is stalled and its tenuous successes are failing to take hold. Everyday violence is still omnipresent, and the 3,000-year-old civilization of Iraq is still in shattered ruins. By any measure, George Bush's ill-advised Iraq adventure is an unqualified disaster.

Numerous comparisons have been made between the untenable situation in Iraq today and the equally untenable situation in Vietnam back in the 1960's. Not all of those comparisons are apt or accurate, but many of them are. America in the spring of 1968 was a very different place than it is in the spring of 2008, even though it's fundamentally unchanged in many ways today. Racial and political tensions were far higher then than they are today, with riots in the streets still in the news and bombings of banks and other public institutions still far too common for comfort. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were raw wounds in the shared psyche of America in 1968. And overseas, an endless war against amorphous insurgents continued to drain the hearts and minds and blood and treasure of our nation's best and brightest for the sake of a cause that no one could satisfactorily explain at home.

Today we celebrate Christopher Columbus, the man who "discovered" America.

As your resident latina I feel the need to weigh in on the moniker "Hispanic" as in "Hispanic Heritage Month". Actually, people have been asking me off-blog about the 'hispanic vs. latino' and I just have to weigh in.

If the opening of this post is any indication, and if you are too lazy to peruse our archives, you will see that not once have I used the term hispanic to descibe myself nor my heritage. I detest the word. I loathe the word. I find the word hispanic repulsive and repugnant, to the point of inciting me to acts of violence. Why? Let me give you some reasons :

1. Hispanic assumes that all people in Latin America speak Spanish.
   What about the languages spoken by Haitians (French), Trinidadians(English) or Brazilians (Portuguese)? What about indigenous and creole languages like Aymara, Quechua or Papiamento?

2. Hispanic assumes all people in Latin America have a Spaniard and European ascendancy.
   Along with the fallacy of Spanish-only, even in a place like Puerto Rico (which was a Spanish colony until 1898), Spanish Castillian culture was not the source of most of the Spanish culture in the island.

   Most of the Spaniards that settled in Puerto Rico were not Castillian. These so-called Hispanics were actually non-Spanish speaking Catalanes (Catalunya), Gallegos (Galicia), Mallorquines (Las Mallorcas) and Canarinos (Islas Canarias) with, as per some demographics theories floating around now for more than 30 years, a huge influx of Crypto-Moors and Crypto-Jews from Andalucia and Granada.

   
   

[Editor's Note: While I am on vacation I am reposting some of my old stuff. This one didn't get a lot of attention, but it did get a fair number of reads and seemed well received.]

I tend to tune in Current TV in the morning. In between my wife's intense study of the Weather Channel and leaving for work, I switch on Current TV. Good mix of news and culture in a short attention span theater format. Often something particularly good will be on.

This morning I saw an interesting segment on the difficulty of an Asian/African-American interracial relationship. A Korean daughter runs into trouble with her parents when her mother discovers that she is dating a black man. Her mother freaks out, leading to an ongoing harangue trying to convince her daughter that she is betraying her race and doing something unnatural, while her daughter tries to convince her mother than 2006 in America is different than living in homogenous Korea.

Neither mother nor daughter dare tell the father what's going on. Presumably he doesn't watch Current TV, unless this is her way of telling him.

The segment ends with the statement that the daughter still hopes for understanding from her parents because she loves them.

Racism is universal. I can't say anywhere I have been seemed to be completely free of racism. How race is defined varies. The percentage of tolerant people in the culture varies. But there is always a core group of people who finds ways of defining "us" vs. "them" and who will be horrified every time one of "us" falls in love with one of "them."

SO MICHELLE MALKIN'S HINGE TWEAKS A BIT MORE STARBOARD as the police state she began dreaming of so long ago promises itself to her. A world where each person in the crowd is a terrorist or a terrorist-watcher, a world where we are all thinking in terms of enemies, a world where we all work hand in hand with the police, a world where "sensitivity" and "multiculturalism" are weak, weirdass, wimpy words; a world where Islamic law looms overhead like a heat-seeking cloud of evil, a world where only Jews are persecuted and must be protected, a world where we are consumed with fear and hatred of Other and believe wholly and with all our shrunken hearts in the eternal war between Islam and the rest of the world.

I tend to tune in Current TV in the morning. In between my wife's intense study of the Weather Channel and leaving for work, I switch on Current TV. Good mix of news and culture in a short attention span theater format. Often something particularly good will be on.

This morning I saw an interesting segment on the difficulty of an Asian/African-American interracial relationship. A Korean daughter runs into trouble with her parents when her mother discovers that she is dating a black man. Her mother freaks out, leading to an ongoing harangue trying to convince her daughter that she is betraying her race and doing something unnatural, while her daughter tries to convince her mother than 2006 in America is different than living in homogenous Korea.

Neither mother nor daughter dare tell the father what's going on. Presumably he doesn't watch Current TV, unless this is her way of telling him.

The segment ends with the statement that the daughter still hopes for understanding from her parents because she loves them.

Racism is universal. I can't say anywhere I have been seemed to be completely free of racism. How race is defined varies. The percentage of tolerant people in the culture varies. But there is always a core group of people who finds ways of defining "us" vs. "them" and who will be horrified every time one of "us" falls in love with one of "them."

Don't you love it when American right wing nutjobs start crawling even further right and bump right into their avowed enemies?

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country's universities, urging students to return to 1980s-style radicalism.

"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.

David Horowitz, publisher of FrontPage magazine, and whose archive of articles is available online, has long advocated for something he calls "an academic bill of rights." Essentially, the academic bill of rights argues in language that would make the sophists blush with pleasure, that universities are not teaching, they are indoctrinating, and therefore, "intellectual balance" should be brought to bear. It's carefully worded to indicate that no professor should be hired or fired based on political views. It all sounds so reasonable. And then, when you click on Professor Horowitz's blurbs for his most recent book, The Professors, you find this:

It really is happening here.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State and The Interfaith Alliance Foundation have combined forces to encourage all Americans to put "First Freedom First" -- www.firstfreedomfirst.org

As James Madison circulated his Memorial and Remonstrance with petitions to gather support for Thomas Jefferson's Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, the First Freedom First organization is circulating a petition to get signatures from citizens who are interested in safeguarding separation of church and state and preserving religious liberty for all Americans.

I encourage all freedom-loving Americans to sign the petition, tell your friends, encourage them to sign it, and host a house party to discuss this issue.

BAC

A friend and internets-colleague of mine has been live-blogging from the Campaign for America's Future panel on the future of progressive politics this afternoon. She posted this comment on another blog and asked that I weigh in -- so I did, and what follows her quoted remark is my response. Make of that what you will.


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"Otter -- I am hoping you will weigh in on what I am sharing here -- this is a challenging talk to listen to -- Sperling is talking about being comfortable in a think tank, and Washington's self interests and tendency to operate as if the rest of the country is also trying to get their kids into private schools..."

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I wouldn't know anything about "being comfortable in a think tank," and I can't really think of anyone I know that does either. It is a topic that is 99.9 percent irrelevant to virtually everyone else in the country except those who either participate in or interact with people in think tanks. Frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn whether they're comfortable in there or not.

More of us give a damn about the private-versus-public schools issue, of course. But most of us don't have the financial wherewithal for that even to be a question, much less a choice. And for every year that goes by under the current affirmative-action-for-the-top-one-percent government mentality, less and less of us can even consider private school -- or any other kind of beyond-basics education -- as an option.

Do the common people out here in flyover country recognize, disparage, and deeply distrust both the conservatives and the non-conservatives who are so steeped in inside-the-beltway thinking that they can no more comprehend what it feels like to be Joe and Jane Voter than they can comprehend what it feels like to live on Mars?

Yeah. We do. You can bet our tiny little last remaining untaxed unspent unbankrupted dollars we do. I mean, *we* can bet our tiny litle last remaining dollars on it. We have to. And we have to bet them every day. We don't have any other choice. They're all we have left.

The Shrubyites' patently-fake non-populist "populism" is only a tiny degree removed from the professional-Democrats' bogus noblesse-oblige popularism. It's all smoke and mirrors either way, and everybody out here already knows that.

As far as Joe and Jane are concerned, it's crap. It's all crap. And our crap is only marginally better than their crap -- if that. People out here in the real world don't trust professional Democrats any more than they trust professional Republicans, which is a mighty low standard to live down to in the first place.

I'm lucky in some ways, in that I'm a relatively well-connected and well-educated, well-informed guy. But I'm also a guy who's spent the last couple of years living in what most people would consider a blue-collar industrial backwater. Well, guess what? A surprisingly high percentage of the locals here *do* read above a third-grade level, they *do* pay attention to what's happening beyond the end of their own noses, and they *do* know a lot more than I once would have assumed about what's going on in Washington and New York and Seattle and San Francisco.

But you know what? They also believe that far and away the largest part of any and all information and opinion they receive from all those think tanks and those pundits and those high-paid op-ed writers out there is basically worthless bullcrap. They figure that all the blahblahblah has nothing to do with what they know and think and feel out here on the ground, and that the people spouting it couldn't possibly care less about them.

That's what they think, that's what they feel, and that's what they believe. That's what they tell me, every day. And you know what? I've pretty much run out of ways to keep trying to convince them that they're provincial and shortsighted and unaware and wrong about those things. Why?

Because, by now, I don't think that they are anymore.