The Fugly Facts

[from 12/9/09]

In December 1998 one of our local Seattle daily newspapers told us that homeless man on the #359 bus started shooting, and the bus went off the Aurora bridge and landed hard in Fremont. It actually turned out the perpetrator wasn't homeless and the paper kindly corrected itself a couple days later in a tiny note on page 8, as I recall, but that's besides the point I'm about to make.

My point, which I am making now, unusually early in a column, is that the mainstream media does that sort of thing, that is, tell you in headlines when a perpetrator is homeless, but not tell you when they aren't homeless, or bury it 3 paragraphs down.

Pointing this out is not as picky or as whiny as it may seem, because I can make a case for the idea that it is precisely this kind of disparate treatment that results in serious discrimination and oppression.

Let's invent an imaginary two-class town. Call it Laidvue. Say Laidvue has 100,000 people, of which 99,000 are butt ugly, and 1,000 are face ugly. It's 99% Buglies, 1% Fuglies. Assume that in Laidvue, Buglies and Fuglies are equally lawful one by one, so that 99% of the crimes are committed by Buglies and 1% by Fuglies, according to their numbers. But suppose that the Laidvue Daily Ladle, the main media in town, only identifies Fugly suspects by class.

That would be natural, wouldn't it? If 99% of the people are Buglies, shouldn't that be the default assumption? If you're reading about a crime and the paper doesn't tell you a Fugly did it, well then, you'd just assume it was a regular person right? And in this scenario, a regular person is an Bugly, right?

Right. You should assume that, but you wouldn't, because that's not how human brains work. Instead, what happens is, over time, you'd become aware that whenever the class of a perpetrator is known, the perp is a Fugly. So you'll think all, or almost all, of the crime being reported is caused by Fuglies. Eventually you and your neighbors will organize block watches so when a Fugly person walks through your neighborhood someone can alert the police. As those calls come in and get logged, it will turn out that 10% of all calls concern Fugly suspects, a minority, but 10 times as much as should be for their numbers. Instead of being seen as evidence of profiling, the numbers will be taken as proof that Fuglies are indeed ten times as likely to commit crimes. After all, it isn't the police who will be making the calls, it's the concerned community doing it. The community can't be profiling! They're just reporting what they see.

It gets worse. Since the police are more likely called to investigate activities of Fuglies, they arrest more of them than expected by their numbers, which leads to more convictions per population for the Fuglies (while the corresponding Buglies aren't caught, because the police are busy elsewhere), and those statistics are used to justify genuine police profiling (as opposed to community discrimination described above), which leads to more disparate conviction results, which leads to more profiling, etc, and you got one grand screeching social feedback squawk.

Then, as if that isn't enough, you have to endure sanctimonious carping from liberals like me, braying about the death of reason and crap like that.

To avoid the screeching feedback squawk of perpetual injustice and tiresome braying, there are two ways to proceed. Either, the media can stop telling us the class of the perpetrators. Or, if they can't bring themselves to do that, they should always reveal the class whenever they know it, whatever it is.

Why didn't Monfort and Clemmons get that treatment? How many people just scanning the headlines have absorbed the fact that these people were housed? When are the headlines going to start telling us about the 99% of crimes committed by housed people?

A Bob Hope to End All Bob Hopes

Whenever the national media obsesses on one subject for days I call it a Bob Hope. That's because, at the end of May 2003, the media obsessed on Hope's 100th birthday for a week, and then just two months later obsessed another week as they poured out his eulogies. If only he had passed away a week BEFORE his 100th birthday, we could have got birthday and death all wrapped up in one week, BUT NO, he had to drag it out. We ended up with at least four "Bob Hopes" that year, two due to Bob Hope himself, one to the Iraq invasion, and one to Martha Stewart.

This week's Bob Hope is Obama's inauguration. Not only has he got himself being presidentially inaugurated, Obama has cleverly arranged this for the same week the country honors Martin Luther King, Jr., a fact which gives his inauguration the punditry-significance equivalent of a telephone book on a high chair. Without MLKJr Day during the same week: "Obama's inauguration is the most important event in African-American history since the invention of peanut butter." With MLKJr Day the same week: "Obama's inauguration is the most important event in African-American history since the invention of peanut butter, and wouldn't Martin Luther King, Jr., be just tickled pink?"

I'm writing this Monday. Israel couldn't simply announce they'd be pulling out of Gaza by tomorrow morning. They had to feed the ongoing Bob Hope-itude, the current Bob Hope-unami, by announcing a pullout "in time for Obama's swearing in."

Were it not for Obama's impending assumption of office, last Thursday's pretty river landing of an Airbus 320 by Captain Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III might have been mainly an opportunity for the press to inquire into the relative vulnerabilities of French-made planes versus properly made planes, with regards to large water fowl. Instead, we get "Isn't this a wonderful thing to have happen now, in time for Obama's inauguration, to show what kind of great country we live in, where we can all pull together in times of need?" over and over again on CNN and Fox. With multiple testimonies from average American Hudson River ferry boat workers.

There's nothing the media can't tie to Obama. Chris Rock recently put out a DVD of a tour in which he made very few references to Obama. So CNN had to interview Chris Rock this week, focusing on why he had so little to say about Obama. Tomorrow they can interview an actual rock and ask it the same question. The next day they can do a piece on why the B in BLT doesn't stand for Barack.

CNN also highlighted the remarkable similarities between the rush of travelers to DC and the Inauguration to the annual Hajj to Mecca. Hajj: lots of people. Inauguration: lots of people. Hajj: a demonstration of the solidarity of the Muslim people and their submission to Allah. Inauguration: a demonstration of the solidarity of the American people and their submission to their elected leader. Hajj: Includes the rite of Ramy al-Jamarat in which pilgrims throw stones to signify their defiance of the Devil. Inauguration: this year, for the first time in history, there will be much throwing of shoes to signify the pilgrims' contempt of the last president. I'm crossing my fingers hoping that the last will become a great new American tradition.

Clearly, this country hungers for opportunities to engage in mass behaviors. Following American Idol, Survivor, and the NFL isn't enough. A nation of extroverts, we need structured mass play on the level of Children of the Corn. This is America, the land of Hope. We can accomplish anything we try. We can create a Mother of All Bob Hopes.

I propose that whenever the country is down in the dumps, say with a recession, or say a depressing war occupies too much of our attention, we hold a week long Throwing of the Shoes at the Bush Ceremony.

You may work the details out amongst yourselves.