Harping What Needs To Be Harped

[from 7/29/09]

I've been frustrated by the coverage of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Cambridge two weeks ago. I don't mind that the media took up the story and wouldn't put it back down while all the world's ills were forgotten. I don't mind that it took needed attention away from a deceased Walter Cronkite, a 40-year anniversary of a moon landing, a move to construct a national health plan, Sotomayor, or Harry Potter. I just wish the media would harp on the whole Gates story, and not just bits of it.

I mean, think about it. The man had just come back from a trip to China. Do you know how long a flight from China to Boston is? I don't. But I'll bet it feels like a gazillion hours. We've been told over and over again that the white neighbor called the police because it looked like two non-white men were breaking into Gates' house, which was true, only it happened to be Gates and his driver looking like they were doing so. But almost no air time or print has been spent on the question: "How many hours cooped up in a modern passenger airline does it take to drive a normally well-behaved Harvard professor berserk?"

James Crowley, the police officer who ended up arresting Gates, has previously taught fellow officers on racial sensitivity. But who in the Boston police department has proven sensitivity to tired, sore, miserable, globe travelers? Do they have a class for that?

You know that Gates hates to fly, because he came home with a backpack. There's only two kinds of people who fly internationally with backpacks. There's the ones that already had all their checked luggage lost one too many times. And there's the ones who'd rather walk, but the ocean was in the way. Since Gates walks with a cane, and since he's a big-shot professor, and since he's almost as old as I am, I'm guessing he's lost more luggage than you've ever owned, and you could get arise out of him just saying the words "airlines" and "luggage" in the same sentence.

Now, you've got a guy who's been on a plane for more hours than there are people in China, he hates flying to begin with, he finally gets home, and the f$*#ing door is jammed. S$* of a f$*#ing b$&%h. But he gets inside, and has just enough additional time to crack open a lager, land hard on the sofa, take one swig, and call the landlord about the broken door, when Officer J. "Racially Sensitive" Crowley pops his head in and says, "Pardon me, but we have reason to suspect that you are intruding in this house." What would you expect Gates to say next? Can you say "You've GOT to be sh*%&&ing me?"

The other aspect of the story that has not been discussed enough is the correct assignment of stupidity. We have heard that Obama shouldn't have called the police involved stupid. But there hasn't been enough attention to the question of who or what he ought to have called stupid.

Here's stupid for you. Boston police arrested an angry, surly, tired man for being angry at intruders (the police!) in his own home. OK, bad enough. But THEN, it took more than 4 days for the charges to be dropped by the prosecutor. How do you justify a charge of disorderly conduct in public, when the conduct that instigated the charges were only in public because the officer drew the man out to his front porch, in order to make them public? You justify it by being stupid.

More stupid: Please, everybody, stop telling me that this one incident proves that America is still racist. We know it is, and we didn't need this as proof. What happened to Gates could have happened to anyone. The point is, it happens more often to minorities, and we also knew that, and this only reminded us.

Our Sorry-ness

 [from 6/24/09]

It's three hours to deadline and all I have is a note to myself that says, "write about how sorry we are." OK, um, we're very very sorry we didn't start thinking about this column a whole lot earlier.

The note concerned two or three oppressed minorities that I don't belong to. The "we" in the note refers to me and the other nonmembers of the minorities in question, AKA "the Sorry."

Of course, one of the things we all aren't good at talking about is that you can be an oppressed minority for the purpose of one discussion and one of We the Sorry or We the Should-be Sorry for the next. Complicating matters, there are oppressed majorities. For example, Christians are severely oppressed, as passages from the Bible may be engraved in stone and propped up almost anywhere EXCEPT public property. Demand reparations!

But I digress. I was talking about oppressed minorities, having in mind African-Americans, specifically those descendent of slaves, and the LGBTQ crowd, and maybe one other.

One of the points I always want to get across is that we oppressors and/or former oppressors are the real experts on oppressions, and the "go to" people for information about them. I mean, if you just want to know what it's like to be an oppressed person, go ahead and ask one of them, they have that down. But if you want to know how someone can be oppressive asked an oppressor. It's just common sense.

For example, the recently passed Senate version of an apology for slavery contains a clause that would disallow its use as a basis for claims of financial reparations. If you ask an African-American descendant of slaves about this you can expect to find out how they feel about it, but don't expect any useful information as to why that clause is in there. For that you have to ask racist white Senators.

While not a Senator, I HAVE been white and racist, so I can guess for a fact what it's about. White people are doing this calculation: "There's so many of us, and so many of them. If we give all that money to them, that takes away so much of our money. Damn, that's no good. OK, let's just say we're sorry and hope they're satisfied with that."

It's really all about the money. Frankly, guys, it was all about the money when our ancestors enslaved you. It was all about the money when they set up segregation. The idea was to use you to make money, and then when that didn't work, to keep you from getting a share of what money was left over. It was all about the money then, and it still is.

It's all about the money. It's not about hate. Racial hate was just something that was invented by rich whites to bring poor whites on board with the money thing, to get them to go along with whatever it took to hang onto the money.

With the Japanese it was the same. Make reparations just for that generation, drag your heels until most of them are dead, make the amount as paltry as possible, and you can shelve the hatred.

Sunday will be the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, as good a time as any to ask why it happened. More to the point of this column, we need an oppressor to step up and explain how that oppression comes about. I'm at a total loss when it comes to the general issue of oppression of LBGTQ people, but I have a guess about the opposition to same-sex marriage.

It's all about the money! The whole idea that it's about preserving the sanctity of marriage is a load of crap used to string the poor people along. The real issue is, marriage benefits cost money, and the majority is calculating "more for them means less for us."

It's all about greed, never about justice. That's how sorry we are.