Category Archives: imho is just a polite way to say I know you don’t give a hoot what I think but I’m going to say it anyway

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

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I was as naive as could be. And possibly stupid. I now realized.

When I first read the op-ed by Warren Buffett in New York Times, “Stop Coddling the Super Rich”, on 14 August, in which Buffett expounded on the concept of “shared sacrifices” and argued for tax increase for the super wealthy, himself included, I thought, BRAVO! Now this should be a plan that at least 98% of the population can get behind of.

I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

 

He ended his well-reasoned proposal with this plea:

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

 

Why was I surprised that Fox News immediately rose up in arms and accused Buffett of inciting CLASS WARFARE (ironically when they are themselves the ones that continue to use such figures of speech)? The rhetorics employed by these pundits left me gagging and in shock.

 

(For those who cannot watch the video, here is the partial list of Fox News clips included in this Daily Show segment. You can find the entire transcript on Daily Kos)

NEIL CAVUTO (8/15/2011): Warren Buffett, writing how the rich should pay more taxes, but saying not a word about the half of American households that pay no income taxes at all.

STUART VARNEY (8/18/2011): Is that fair, when half the population pays absolutely nothing?

SEN. JOHN CORNYN, R-TX (7/7/2011): 51%, that’s a majority of American households, paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada.

NEAL BOORTZ (6/1/2011): Many of them get so much money in tax credits … that it wipes out any Social Security taxes or Medicare taxes they’re paying. They are absolutely on a free ride.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER (7/11/2011): … broaden the tax base …

MICHELE BACHMANN (7/11/2011): Everyone needs to pay something.

NEIL CAVUTO (8/6/2011): Before you start demanding one group pay more, maybe get everyone to put skin in the game.

ROBERT RECTOR, HERITAGE FOUNDATION (7/19/2011): When you look at the actual living conditions of the 43 million people that the Census says are poor, you see that in fact they have all these modern conveniences.

STUART VARNEY (7/19/2011): Poor families in the United States are not what they used to be. 99% of them have a refrigerator. 81% have a microwave; 78% have air conditioning; 63% have cable TV; 54% have cell phones; 48% have a coffee maker; 25% have a dishwasher.

 

[The technical definition of being poor is a family of four with an income of $22,350 a year.]

 

NEAL BOORTZ (7/6/2011): It is all-out war on the productive class in our society for the benefit of the moocher class.

JOHN STOSSEL (10/12/2010): The makers, and the takers.

BILL O’REILLY (10/12/2010): They want to take it from somebody else.

LAURA INGRAHAM (6/29/2011): Everyone’s jumping in the wagon, no one wants to pull.

NEAL BOORTZ (6/22/2011): … parasites we have out there depending on government …

NEBRASKA ATTY. GEN. JON BRUNING (8/18/2011): The raccoons, they’re not stupid, they’re going to do the easy way if we make it easy for them, just like welfare recipients all across America.

ANN COULTER (8/15/2011): Welfare will create generations of utterly irresponsible animals.

 

[The bottom 50% of the people, the moochers, the takers? They control 2.5% of the wealth. ]

 

What happened to Compassionate Conservatism? Remember that? They don’t even bother to pretend to care any more?

As I laughed at Jon Stewart’s sardonic commentaries, at the same time, I felt my eyes burning. Out of frustration. Out of shame. Yes, I feel ashamed for these people. The Haves. The “class” that I belong to. All I could do to calm myself the fuck down was to recite these lines that Joseph Welch said to Joseph McCarthy during one of the infamous hearings:

 Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

 

Repost: My Problems with “The Help”

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Apparently many of my friends from my “real life” LOVE The Help. Love it. They are telling people on Facebook to “GO SEE THE HELP. RUN. NOT WALK!” including a dear dear friend who studied and wrote about Apartheid in South Africa. As I ponder how much I should share my perspectives with her at the risk of hurting her feelings and alienating her, I re-read my post from January 20. 2010, and nope, my view has not changed. Since the movie adaptation is receiving rave reviews all over and I have not seen my Anglo-Saxon lady friends so enthusiastic about a movie with an African American lead since The Blind Side (yes please argue why the African American characters are at most CO-lead, and you’ll be right in my book), I feel compelled to share this post from almost 2 years ago again.

Or, actually, skip this post entirely and go read My Brown Baby‘s post “I Was the Help —- and My Experience Taught to Dream Big“. If you have been reading my blog and liking what you have been reading, I have a feeling that you are going to appreciate very very much what Denene Millner, the autohor, has to say about the book, the movie and the reception of it. Peace out.

 

REPOSTED from January 20, 2010

I probably don’t need to publish this post on my blog. It is not appealing. It is not good writing. It will not make you laugh out loud. It is not even a proper rant. Besides, it is friggin’ long – I am amazed at how much I tapped out on my iPhod, and tedious. I am not even making any coherent argument, not to mention grammatical errors! Run-on sentences! totally exposing myself as a feeble-minded person. Even the title spells “MEH”.

That being said, I feel this pathological need to be on the record, I guess. Since I have been treating this blog as my diary, I want everything that comes out of my head to be on here. So, sorry about this… mental puke…

I brought the book, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett with me on my flight back home last December. I have had the whole flight between IAD and Narita to ponder on this book. I won’t even attempt at writing a review since I am really not qualified to do so. And at any rate, there are already more than 1,400 reviews on Amazon.com. Furthermore, all the book reviewers in the major news outlets have done so and waxed poetic on this book, with one of them comparing The Help to To Kill A Mocking Bird.* I will just make a list of things that I have been chewing on. By Tap Tap Tap on my iPhone (without a SIM) and therefore heavy editing involved thereafter.

Spoiler alert: If you are thinking of reading this book, you should skip this. I will also be 100% honest with myself, which means I will be contradictory, at times nonsensical, and possibly offending, especially if you love the book.

Confession first: I enjoyed reading this book tremendously. Cliché, yes. Truth is: it IS a page turner. For me. From the moment when I opened it in August when I first received it, I could not completely put Aibileen out of my head until the Christmas week, when I finally had time to sit down and read the book in long stretches.

The stories are riveting. The voices are, as much as I hate using this word because it is often confused with “stereotypical”, or at the very least “archetypal”, the voices sound to me “authentic”. That is, when I was reading it, when I was caught up in the drama of the story that was being expertly told, when I was kept in suspense as to the safety of the women, when I was hoping with clenched fists and a racing hear that they would triumph over evil and that justice would be done. Well, justice be done to a certain extent, in the strict confines of the story-telling.

Now I ask myself: How many Southerners do I know? None.

Do I know any African American domestic help? Nope.

What do I know about Southern dialects and accents? Not a thing.

So what do I know about whether the book is “authentic” or not? Hasn’t this always been the gripe I have against books like Memoirs of a Geisha? That a fiction novel, on account of its main characters being of a non-white race, is evaluated and praised for delivering an “authentic” portrayal. Do we even care whether Dan Brown’s characters are authentic or not?

Damn the identity politics theories I read, classes I took.

I cannot help, in the back of my mind, though I immensely enjoyed the stories of these women, that a white woman took possession of the black women’s stories twice, especially after I read Kathryn Stockett’s personal note at the end of the book: like Skeeter in the story, Stockett wrote the black women’s stories and gained wild success.

I understand the above statement reeks of identity politics, but I cannot help the gnawing feelings in the back of my head.

What bothers me even more is Skeeter’s cajoling, forcing almost, these women into telling her their stories because she was told that she needed to write something that nobody had ever written before in order to get into the publishing world. Throughout I was extremely uncomfortable with her motive: next to the all too real risk to the black women’s lives, her motif seems so trivial. Selfish even. What is the potential downside for her engagement in this feat? None too serious really. And indeed, there was a happy ending for Skeeter. But for Minnie and Aibileen the future remained uncertain.

Although I do wish something horrible would happen to the wrong-doers and was a bit let down when it didn’t, I do applaud the author for not cheapening the story by taking the easy way out. They are still in the mid 1960s in Mississippi and it is not like they are going to all of a sudden find true equality by the end of the book. I need to give the author props for not providing her White readers with an easy cathartic way to assuage the white guilt. “The villain that caused such misery is dead/appropriately punished, all is well in the universe. Now get on with your merry life.”

As I mentioned, the book received gleaming reviews. From White book reviewers. This could be racist on my part, and certainly identity politics at its worst as some might say, nevertheless, I feel I NEED TO know how an African American reader may feel about this book. NOT because a white woman from a privileged family in the South wrote this book, but because, again, despite my immense enjoyment of this book, and yes indeed I feel guilty for liking this book when I started wondering how my friends back in my graduate study classes would have said about this book, I cannot ignore the conflation of the tropes: 1. the White heroine being rescued, or finding self-realization, through Black folks around her that she does not socialize with, 2. Black people, unable to help or save themselves, being rescued by a White person.

I imagine this book already optioned by a movie studio. Or soon will be. Anyway you look at it, it IS going to be a great vehicle for some of the outstanding African American actresses, and god only knows how hard it is for a good script with a strong minority character lead to make it all the way to some head honcho’s desk. I do hope that the script and the actor that portrays Leroy would breathe some more life into him rather than the one-dimensional wife-beater. When in doubt, we reach for the things we share as women: abusive husbands, cheating boyfriends, sexist Chauvinistic patriarchs. In that process, our men are further demonized. Joy Luck Club immediately comes to mind. I can’t watch that movie without cringing. Not a single man in that movie is worthy of loving. Is it why it was accepted by the white mainstream audience? “Poor Asian women. They are so much better off over here. Away from their men.”

When The Blind Side came out, and the Internet was all abuzz about what a feel good movie it was, it immediately raised the mental red flag for me. “Feel good” means, to me, “Not for you. You are probably not the target audience/reader. Stay home. Otherwise you won’t feel good.”

I asked an African American columnist whether she planned to see the movie,

“No. We don’t consider that movie an attractive idea.” She said coyly.

* The surest way to incite heated debate against the worth of any book is to compare it to the beloved To Kill a Mocking Bird… So if you hate someone, yeah, go ahead and compare them to Harper Lee.

WTF Wednesday: I will stab anyone who says “Boys will always be boys”

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I wrote a post titled  I will stab anyone who says “Boys will always be boys”  in October 2010 at the height of teen (and preteen) suicides. With the nation coming together in the movement It Gets Better, I felt relieved.

“People get it now.” I thought. “They are reaching out to our young people. People are taking bullying at school seriously.” I told myself. “There is hope that things will change.”

What the fuck was I thinking?

 

Almost a year from when the movement It Gets Better was first started in September 2010, Mother Jones this week brought to our attention that NINE teenagers have committed suicide in ONE school district in the past two years. (Never mind your first reaction: Why weren’t these cases reported by the news outlet? Now that we have the celeb-endorsed It Gets Better, teen suicides are no longer news-worthy or something?!)  That district, Anoka-Hennepin school district, is the largest in the state of Minnesota with 40,000 students. The situation is so alarming that the area where the school district is located has been identified as a “suicide contagion”, according to the school district website, “because of higher than normal numbers of suicides and suicide attempts.”

Nobody can really pin point precisely why these young people decided to take their own lives. Most of them were either self-identified as gay or were thought and taunted as gay. Wouldn’t you know that the Anoka-Hennepin school district apparently has one of the most homophobic official school policies?

Anoka-Hennepin has a policy on the books known colloquially as “no homo promo,” which dates in back to the mid-1990s. Back then, after several emotional school board meetings, the district essentially wiped gay people out of the school health curriculum. There could be no discussion of homosexuality, even with regard to HIV and AIDS, and the school board adopted a formal policy that stated school employees could not teach that homosexuality was a “normal, valid lifestyle.”

Later the policy was changed to require school staff to remain neutral on issues of homosexuality if they should come up in class, a change that critics said fostered confusion among teachers and contributed to their inability to address bullying and harassment, or to even ask reasonable questions about some of the issues the kids were struggling with, like sexual orientation.  Source: Mother Jones

 

After so many young people have lost to us, people started paying attention and asking questions. The Anoka-Hennepin school district is currently under Federal investigation.  The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have also filed a law suit against the district. (SPLC explains why they are suing Anoka-Hennepin here)

The Anoka-Hennepin school district has been the subject of an investigation since the fall of 2010, after several students and community members came forward to report both verbal and physical bullying and harassment . During the ten month investigation, SPLC heard from students and teachers about concerns regarding the “neutrality” policy and implications of a gag policy in the classroom.

According to Sam Wolfe, lead attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, students have reported being called vicious anti-gay slurs and subjected to being physically assaulted pushed into school lockers and trash cans due to their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. One student even was reportedly attacked by a pencil and stabbed in the back of the neck. Source: WashingtonBlade

 

Maybe it is pure coincidence, but Anoka-Hennepin school district happens to be in Minnesota’s 6th congressional district whose representative is none other than Michele Bachmann.

Michele Bachmann who just recently signed a Christian right conservative family value yada yada group’s pledge which also stated that children born into slavery were somehow better off than children born into modern African American families.

Michele Bachmann who has from the beginning of her political career opposed any education and policy promoting tolerances towards the LGBT communities, who sees a “homosexual agenda” where gay youth would lure and indoctrinate the otherwise non-gay youth into a life of sin.

 

Yes, Michele Bachmann, there IS indeed a "Gay Agenda"...

 

Michele Bachmann who is the favorite of the Tea Party, and is leading the one woman (+ one ambiguously “pray the gay away” gay therapist husband) charge against gay marriages in defense of marriages, vowing to ban gay marriages (AND pornography, because you know, straight people do NOT watch porn. Ever). “Marriage is something worth fighting for!” she yelled. Cough cough. Michele, on this point, I think we all agree with you: Why do you think the gay community fights so hard for their right to marry?!

(I am waiting for her to say something in support of Hitler and deny Holocaust. Just you wait. It’s like she is playing a “Really? Really?! Are you fucking kidding me?!” Bingo game…)

 

According to a blog post on The Dump Michele Bachmann Blog from 2006 (way before she became a household name), “Most of the time Bachmann avoids committee hearings like the plague. However, she did deign to attend a hearing about a bill to address bullying in schools.” At this hearing in 2006 (which has been unearthed and discussed in these past few days), Bachmann questioned a proposed “zero tolerance” anti-bullying bill:

 “For all us, our experience in public schools is there have always been bullies, always have been, always will be. I just don’t know how we’re ever going to get to point of zero tolerance and what does it mean? … What will be our definition of bullying? Will it get to the point where we are completely stifling free speech and expression? Will it mean that what form of behavior will there be – will we be expecting boys to be girls?” – Michele Bachmann, 2006

 

She went on and on to say that there are differences between boys and girls, that children are like barbarians and we as parents are trying to civilize them, yada yada yada. Why? So we as parents simply expect boys to be barbarians? To bully each other? To pick on the weak who cannot defend themselves? Lord of the Flies? 

I have been seeing red ever since I read this line of hers this afternoon. I am so upset that I cannot really talk about it intelligently. I have said all that I wanted to say wrt. this subject in October 2010  I will stab anyone who says “Boys will always be boys”. I did not expect the day when I need to repeat myself, and it seems more urgent than ever because Bachmann is running for President and I honestly do not want to live in a country ruled by her and her narrow-minded friend. Heck, I don’t even want to live in a country where such an outcome is POSSIBLE.

I need to go stab a pillow or something.

Oh, one more thing.

Can we bring Sarah Palin back please?

The Curious Case of Ruby, the Anti-Barbie

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I suspect that you have been seeing this picture popping up on your Facebook and/or Twitter stream this week. I did. Like you, I had a visceral response to it.

FUCK YEAH!

Was exactly what I said to the monitor as I responded to the plea on Facebook “This was an ad made by bodyshop. But Barbie INC. found out about it and now it’s banned. Repost if you think this ad deserves to be seen,” and hit the SHARE button before I could say “Happy National Donut Day!”

Then my inner Cyber Sleuth / Internet Meme Historian took over. “I wonder whether this is yet another hoax?” Ok. Fine. It was also my inner cynic’s doing. I googled it.

Good news (or is it in fact bad news?) : This is for realz. The Body Shop did wage such a brilliant war against The Barbie.

Bad news (or does it really matter?) : It was from 1998.

The late Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, wrote in 2001:

In 1998, The Body Shop debuted its self-esteem campaign, featuring the generously proportioned doll we dubbed “Ruby.” … …

Ruby was a fun idea, but she carried a serious message. She was intended to challenge stereotypes of beauty and counter the pervasive influence of the cosmetics industry, of which we understood we were a part. Perhaps more than we had even hoped, Ruby kick-started a worldwide debate about body image and self-esteem.

But Ruby was not universally loved. In the United States, the toy company Mattel sent us a cease-and-desist order, demanding we pull the images of Ruby from American shop windows. Their reason: Ruby was making Barbie look bad, presumably by mocking the plastic twig-like bestseller (Barbie dolls sell at a rate of two per second; it’s hard to see how our Ruby could have done any meaningful damage.) I was ecstatic that Mattel thought Ruby was insulting to Barbie — the idea of one inanimate piece of molded plastic hurting another’s feelings was absolutely mind-blowing.

In 2002, Ms. Roddick again wrote about Ruby when the Danish pop band Aqua was sued by Mattel for their song “Barbie Girl”. In the same post, she also mentioned how an American artist, Tom Forsythe, had been engaged in lengthy legal battle against Mattel when Mattel sued him for his photographic project “Food Chain Barbie“. (You’d be happy to know that in 2004, after five years and millions of dollars in legal expenses, Mattel was ordered by court to pay $1.8 million in legal fees for Mr. Forsythe.)

Googling also led me to believe that every year or so, this poster of daring and clever protest by The Body Shop would resurface to the Internet’s attention but then the buzz would die down as fast as it started. For example, this article in Mother Jones from 2007.

It seems that more and more people are being outraged on Twitter and Facebook asking people, “It is banned by Mattel. OMG! RETWEET IF YOU WANT THIS POSTER TO BE SEEN!” It has caught on like a bad rumor. (It has now appeared on BuzzFeed with no historical context).

At first I wanted to “set the record straight” by shouting from the mountain top: This was from 1998, people. Case closed!

Then I thought about what Ms. Roddick wrote:

It makes me angry, not only because it is a male-dominated industry built on creating needs that don’t exist, but because it seems to have decided that it needs to make women unhappy about their appearances. It plays on self-doubt and insecurity about image and ageing by projecting impossible ideals of youth and beauty.

Things have not changed much since 1998 when the world first met Ruby. And yes, the world needs to be reminded of Ruby once in a while. We are a forgetful people with short attention spans which seem to get shorter with each new generation.

Ruby, who still watches us from posters throughout The Body Shop’s offices, won’t let us forget.                                     — Dame Anita Roddick

“I have a spare tire in my car.”

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I don’t know what else to say. I will just quote extensively from this news report from KSN News 3 on May 25, 2011.

Sometime in May Representatives in Topeka, Kansas “were debating a bill that would ban insurance companies from offering abortion coverage in regular health plans. The bill, that was signed into law Wednesday, means women will have to buy a separate health policy to cover abortions.”

During the debate, Barbara Bollier, a Kansas lawmaker “pointed out that abortions would not be covered, under the new Kansas law, for cases of rape and incest.”

Kansas Pete DeGraaf responded by saying, “We need to plan ahead, don’t we, in life?”

Bollier then asked, “And so, women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with pregnancy?”

Are you ready for DeGraaf’s response to this question?

“I have a spare tire in my car,” said DeGraaf. “I also have life insurance. I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for.”

 

“I have a spare tire in my car.”

 

Things You Should Read

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Instead of reading my blog, here are two things I came across today that you should read over the weekend:

From the New York Times, A Gay Former N.B.A. Player Responds to Kobe Bryant, by John Amaechi, who in 2007 was the first NBA player to come out. We have all heard that Kobe called a referee in the heat of an argument the F-word. Many came to his support, claiming that it’s just the way the Sports World, the good ol’ boys club works. Mr. Amaechi begged to differ, in a rational, respectful and persuasive voice.

Here is a quote from the very powerful, and may I say, surprisingly well-written (yes, I have my bias against people in sports. SORRY!) article:

Many people balk when L.G.B.T. people, even black ones, suggest that the power and vitriol behind another awful slur — the N-word — is no different from the word used by Kobe. I make no attempt at an analogy between the historical civil rights struggle for blacks in the United States with the current human rights struggle for L.G.B.T. people, but I can say that I am frequently called both, and the indignation, anger and at times resignation that course through my body are no greater or less for either. I know with both words the intent is to let me know that no matter how big, how accomplished, philanthropic or wise I may become, to them I am not even human.

 

 

With a title 9 Things The Rich Don’t Want You To Know About Taxes, how can you not be intrigued? Unless of course you are this guy:

The "NEW" GE way indeed...

These are the 9 secrets:

1. Poor Americans do pay taxes.
2. The wealthiest Americans don’t carry the burden.
3. In fact, the wealthy are paying less taxes.
4. Many of the very richest pay no current income taxes at all.
5. And (surprise!) since Reagan, only the wealthy have gained significant income.
6. When it comes to corporations, the story is much the same—less taxes.
7. Some corporate tax breaks destroy jobs.
8. Republicans like taxes too.
9. Other countries do it better.

Charts and numbers galore!

Sucker Punched

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Warning: This post is a RANT with a heavily identity politics bend. So if you have no time nor patience to listen to People of Color whining “Oh no not that wah-wah we want to be represented crap again!”, please just ignore me when I come back down from my high horse.

I AM BACK! PEOPLE! Remember what I said? That a good case of justifiable (or not who gives a shit? Not me certainly!) indignation is the best way to get me all fired up and ready to go?!

Go like AKIRA!

 

Kicking and screaming like Sucker Punch!

 

I read an article on Racialicious today that made me pause everything I was doing to write a long comment. It surfaces up all the internal debates I have had about identity politics, about ownerships, about representations, about who gets to represent whom, about the gaze.

“An Uncomfortable Silence: Why Is Geek Media Keeping Quiet About The akira Remake?”

Long story short: the manga series and anime films AKIRA have long been revered by fans all over the world, including the self-professed Otakus in the U.S. (I should really write about “Otaku” and the adoption of this self-identity by the youth / geek culture in the U.S. … Focus. Focus!) There has been a rumor for many years that a major adaptation by Hollywood is in the works while fans all over hold their breath waiting for the announcement of WHO will be playing their beloved biker gang in a post-apocalyptic world. Lists of actors have been floating around and it becomes more and more alarming to the Asian American community as EVERYONE attached to play to lead characters so far has been… Lily white.

The GEEK community, usually considered to be progressive and presumably to be more aware of the reality of “racial diversity” in major urban cities in the U.S., has been quiet about this. NO protest. NO griping in the chat rooms.

Seriously? If even the self-professed self-identified Otakus have deserted our cause, why does Hollywood have to give a rat’s ass about under-representation by Asian American actors, especially MALE actors?

 

Anyway, here is my long comment. I am sharing it here in case the editors over at Racialicious deems my comment unworthy of being published over on their site…

Thank you so much for this article! I was just lamenting this fact of Hollywood coopting the fringe Geek Culture (manga, anime) and “Whitewashing” it to try to mainstream it all in the pursuit of something NEW to revitalize the at-risk film industry (Hello YouTube!)

I saw the trailer for Sucker Punch and it looked like a balled-up conglomeration of every Otaku’s fantasy from anime and mange rolled into one. As far as I could tell, all of the lead girls (yes, they are MEANT to be objectified as girls, so no disrespect on my part) are blonde and so pale they glow in the dark. “So this is it? We can’t f*** get a break? They are taking away manga and anime from us too?”

(Let’s not go into the whole obvious issue of the problematic of perpetually objectifying women in the name of empowering them through hyper-sexualization…)

On a bright note, actually, now I think about it, I am not sure whether this counts as a plus or minus but the ONLY U.S. movie I know with an Asian American male lead who is NOT a kung fu master and who actually gets to kiss and gets the girl aka Debbie Gibson (sorry about the spoiler; and IF you don’t know who Debbi Gibson is then you are too young and I shouldn’t be talking to you…) is Vic Chao in… “Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus”…

In this post-Obama juncture, I have many people telling me that we are a “color blind” society and I should NOT be so hung up on race/ethnicity/blah blah blah, implying that by not letting go I am being the “racist” myself because I seem to be the only one seeing race. Now I get it. “Color blind” means “Universal” which in turn applies to “WHITES ONLY” as in “White actors/actresses can represent any culture especially in the post-apocalyptic universe previously residing in manga/anime aka Japanese culture”. Sorry. I’d better stop since I am merely repeating myself: I have written about this in my graduate school more than a decade ago.

Why I have nothing to write about on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day?

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Because Hallmark does not make a card for this.

When I opened the newspaper this Sunday, ads with BIG SALES for International Women’s Day did not tumble out of the newspaper bundle. Well, because there was none.

It was not even an after thought here in the U.S. if it were not for the Interwebz, the Blogosphere and the Twitterverse. And for online magazines to come up with LISTS of Most Influential Women, Most Powerful Women, Women Who Inspired Us, yada yada yada, you know, just so all the frantic google searches by people who are trying to find something that they can blog, tweet and Facebook about today will lead to their websites. Traffic-generating content.

I guess the Google Doodle for the day also helped bring attention to the existence of an International Women’s Day to a lot of people.

But, seriously, if it were not for Daniel Craig, who as you would notice is a man, dressed up in a drag, the Interwebz would not have been buzzing about the 100th Anniversary of IWD as much. So men in drag sell. Got it.*

Women have a half day off in China every year on March 8. Just sayin’

I am still reeling from my vehement agreement with Stephanie Coontz who said in her interview on NPR that though women have undoubtedly made great progress since when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963), there seems to be, instead of “the Feminine Mystique” (or, as a cynic would argue, in addition to), “the HOT Mystique” nowadays:

Women are told, “Yes, indeed you can be anything you want, but, you also have to be hot while you are doing it!” And there is this tremendous pressure on young women… This can be very destructive to young girls when they are channeled into this sense. That, the way to empowerment is to display your sexuality.

 

What else? … Oh, of course, Texas. Can’t forget Texas. In honor of Internati0nal Women’s Day… Ok. I jest. Texas probably does not know nor care. Texas… sigh. I’ll let CNN tell you:

The state house approved the anti-abortion measure [that requires mothers seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound examination and listen to a description of what it shows] in a 107-42 vote Monday. And state senators backed a similar proposal last month. After a conference committee hashes out the details, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will have the final say.

 

To put everything else in perspective, here are some latest breaking news around the world:

Ivory Coast marches on International Women’s Day end in bloodshed

International Women’s Day Egyptian march met by men

Not a good day to google news with the keywords “International Women’s Day” really.

 

Sorry I have turned on my cynical pump full cylinder today. Turbo-Cynicism FTW! And really it is all my own fault. Nobody else to blame. I kept on seeing since this morning tweets that asked women to share their greatest accomplishments.

I thought long and hard. <– Elly, this one is for you. Who loves ya baby?!

I could only come up with “Gave births twice but only suffered acute birth pain for 15 minutes so probably did not count after all if you want to be all picky about it”. It’s that or “Managed to keep children alive longer than any pets i.e. fish I have had”…

Ok. Enough about me.

So… how’s everybody’s Fat Tuesday coming along?

 

 

* Don’t get me wrong. I love the promotional video for www.weareequals.org with Daniel Craig and Judy Dench narrating the facts and statistics. Here, I’ll prove it by putting the video right here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkp4t5NYzVM

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

39 Replies

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As an agnostic, I do acknowledge a higher unknown force. But I also know that the earth revolves around the sun and that the tides are created by the moon's gravitational pull. Incidentally, my second-grader knows that too.

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Just so we are clear on this: Mars has TWO moons, discovered in 1877...

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But, Wait, There is more!

Inspired by Vapid Blonde’s brilliant idea in her comment, that Papa Bear’s words when read out loud could sound almost like a children’s book, I present you with these…

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