You should be redirected to the new address. If that doesn't happen in a second, visit http://short-sharp-shock.blogspot.com Oh, and update your bookmarks. Thanks.
After almost five and a half years, it's time for a change. Culchavox is now Short Sharp Shock (with all apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan, whom Pink Floyd owe an apology as well). Everything put together here in that time — from politics to pop culture, commentary on global affairs to analysis of America's wrestle with race and ethnicity — is in a new place.
The reason? Partly visceral -- I got tired of explaining what it meant and how to say it -- and partly strategic. I'm developing a new site, CULCHA, meant to be the seed of what could be something different for the Internets: crowd-powered entertainment news and reviews, social media and a few other wrinkles still in the works. It's in beta, but feel free to have a look anyway.
So ... it's not goodbye. We're just moving across the street. Come peek in the window if you're so inclined. Thanks for all you do.
What the hell is it about the twentieth of April anyway. For generations now the 110th day of the year has been a source of fascination bordering on … well, not bordering on anything so much as tipped over into obsession. For numerologists, the number 420 has meant deception, fraud and subterfuge. Fans of nursery rhymes point to the line in “Sing a Song of Sixpence” (four and twenty black birds baked in a pie”). Fans of rock point to Stephen Stills plaintive “4+20,” what you get when you multiply the numbers in the title of Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35.”
For the rest of us, the date April 20 usually, or at least often, comes to three things:
There’s Adolf’s birthday. Yes, even demons have birthdays. The enduring symbol of how the cult of personality can be twisted into monumental evil was born this day in 1889, in what was then Austria-Hungary. The rest is history more ably recounted elsewhere, and lived, to one degree or another, everywhere. It’s a comforting idea, the idea that by common consent any associations between Adolf Hitler and April 20 could be expunged from the record of our collective memory, the better to reinforce his expulsion from the garden of humanity.
But thanks to white supremacists a lot like those who descended on Los Angeles over the weekend for a thwarted demonstration at City Hall, or those who offer the Fuhrer hosannas on his natal day via Stormfront and other deep-extremist Web sites, the link between Hitler and April 20 is pretty much indelible and immovable, ready to inspire people to madness where you least expect it.
Like at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., 11 years ago today, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two seniors in black trenchcoated disguise, walked into the school cafeteria and shot and killed 13 people — 12 students and a teacher — with a stockpile of shotguns and pipe bombs, before turning the weapons on themselves.
It’s not clear if the Columbine killers had any specific affinity for Adolf Hitler. They clearly admired his work, and the fashion sense of the SS. And they had a grimly powerful read of how one brutal action can ring into the future for years, whether it’s one decade ago or 60 years in the past.
◊ ◊ ◊
Happily, we can thank stoner culture for another reason to remember 4/20. In 1971, a group of high school students in San Rafael, Calif., decided to gather one day after school at 4: 20 in the afternoon to smoke marijuana while searching for … a missing crop of marijuana thought to be growing near Point Reyes. Ryan Grim recounts their exploits in today’s Huffington Post.
Since then, herbal aficionados have gathered on 420 to celebrate cannabis culture and the increasingly confident movement toward decriminalization of marijuana. (My alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder, celebrates the day in high style; more than 10,000 students showed up at last year’s celebration. This year’s turnout? Depends on who you talk to.
From the Colorado Daily:
The university estimates that 8,000 people showed up for Tuesday's unofficial smoke-out, about the same number as last year, said Bronson Hilliard, spokesman for the Boulder campus. Police officers took the rough crowd measurement while standing on a top floor in Norlin Library so they could get a bird's-eye view of the quad, he said.
But Alex Douglas, executive director of the CU chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, estimates there were at least 15,000 people assembled on [Norlin Quad].
Whatever their actual number, we can thank this group of necessary yahoos for rescuing April 20 from being the downer that history says it should be.
“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Waste Land.”
But not necessarily.
Image credits: Hitler: Deutsches Bundesarchiv. Klebold and Harris at Columbine: In-school closed circuit image from 1999. Marijuana: Chemistry World blog. Boulder 4/20 celebration smoker: Daily Camera/Mark Leffingwell.
Until the deadline closes for the position, the unemployed online have a new friend in our corner, and one of us maybe even has a job waiting. Thank Alicia Keys for that.
Recently, subscribers to the monster.com job search service got a pleasant wake-up call in the early morning monster posting: an ad by an employer seeking an employee. What an ad. What an employer:
Some things work better than coffee for putting steam in the morning stride. This has been one of them.
Ms. Keys seeks a “head blogger” for her new IAAS.com Web site, which will focus on news and empowerment advice for women. If you’ve got mad soash skills, Ms. Keys would like to hear from you and maybe put you to work helping her in reinventing her persona for the Web, and in expanding access to news pertinent to women online.
The vetting window closes on May 3.
Besides knowing Web culture and having an active blog or social site to prove that with, here’s some of what’s required:
• A background in Public Relations, Marketing / Web Marketing, Media Relations, Communications, Journalism, Writing, Digital Media, Internet Canvassing, and/or Social Media.
• Experience using web development tools and software such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft on Demand, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, WordPress, LiveJournal, and Digital Media Platforms.
Here’s what else is required:
• 2-3 years of related work experience.
• A Bachelors Degree or equivalent experience.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States. Unable to sponsor or transfer H1 visas at this time.
• Must be available for frequent domestic and international travel. Must have valid passport, and must complete any additional paperwork necessary for government travel clearances.
• Final candidates will be interviewed in New York City as part of a news segment on a national TV network morning show on or about May 17-20, 2010, and in London, UK at the Black Ball on or about May 27, 2010. Candidates must be able to travel to and participate in the interviews.
• Submit to a thorough background and reference check.
• Must be willing and able to report to work in New York City, NY.
And you pick up the tab for relocation. To New York City. Take it from one who knows: that can be a full-time job in itself.
But still, for the right person, this could be (as Ms. Keys advertises it) “an Opportunity of a Lifetime!”
For the rest of us in the hunt … it’s at least the best-looking jobs ad we’ve seen all year.
On Monday we discovered just how much of two minds, of at least two distinct American realities the American media can be on matters of who advances in the nation’s newsrooms and who doesn’t, and the curious calculus by which that’s decided.
Richard Prince’s excellent Journal-Isms column (a longtime fixture of the Maynard Institute Web site and most recently syndicated in The Root) broke it down in one place for readers on Monday — Pulitzer Day.
Among the winners of the most prestigious and recognized prize in American journalism were The Denver Post, which won for feature photography; and for the Philadelphia Daily News, which won for investigative reporting.
Greg Moore is the editor of The Denver Post; Michael Days is executive editor of the Daily News.
For the first time, mainstream American dailies helmed by not one but two African American editors won two of the more coveted Pulitzer Prizes, the recognition for the two elements of modern print journalism — powerful photography and the compelling shoe-leather public-interest news story — that still resonate with the American public (or the percentage of the public that still read newspapers).
It was a good day right after a bad one.
◊ ◊ ◊
See, on Sunday, we got the results of the 2010 newsroom census from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, its findings a perfect distilling reason why black Americans, and especially black journalists, often characterize progress as one step forward, one step back (or is it two steps back? We forget sometimes).
The ASNE newsroom report found that, overall, the percentage of minorities in newsrooms was 13.26 percent, a drop of .15 of a percentage point from a year ago.
But black journalists got hit the hardest of everyone. The ASNE survey found there were 929 fewer African American journalists than were recorded in 2001, a falloff of 31.5 percent. The ranks of Native American journalists fell by 52, or 20.9 percent in the same time. Hispanic representation declined by 145, or 7 percent. The number of white journalists fell by 10,400, or 20.9 percent.
Newsroom jobs held by black journalists were cut by 19.2 percent in 2009, nearly six percentage points higher than the previous year.
◊ ◊ ◊
In a statement released Tuesday, Kathy Y. Times, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), called it “a travesty that minority journalists would be targeted disproportionately in staff cuts. Despite the economy we must keep our newsrooms and voices at least on parity with the communities we serve.”
Communities are not of one color and neither should newsroom decision makers,” she said.
“It’s about accuracy,” NABJ Diversity Director Bobbi Bowman said of the census objective, in the same NABJ statement. “Can you accurately cover your community if you have a newsroom that doesn’t look like your community?”
“Readers are very smart and readers know whether or not their newspaper is covering news that is important and relevant to them,” she said Tuesday.
And we might have known this would follow. The NABJ said on Tuesday that its board "is scheduled to meet in the Washington, D.C.-area this weekend to discuss the recent ASNE findings and develop an action plan for improving newsroom hiring and retention of black journalists."
This latest broadside on the media’s institutional lethargy could well be the moment of the gauntlet throwdown. As media orgs rebound from the economy and begin rehiring, as many of the bigger players start to conceptualize how to cover the 2010 race (and begin to decide who gets to do it); as the country grapples again with race as the volatile, powderkeg subtext for everything political in the country ... watch for fireworks, or maybe just some overdue surprises.
It was another bright, warm day in April, the clocks were again sounding thirteen, and the workers dragged the chairs out of cubicles and grouped them in the middle of the hall in the Riverside Hilton in New Orleans, in preparation for the start of the Republican Southern Leadership Conference, the Three Days Hate.
◊ ◊ ◊
Like a similar event attended by Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell’s “1984” (shamelessly mangled in the previous graph), the Republicans convened a kind of Hate Week over the weekend as their kickoff to the 2012 election season. There was a refreshingly high-minded purpose to some of the proceedings.
“Over and over, Republican speakers said their party had gone astray when it held in power; it was time, they argued, to get the party back on track with a focus on fiscal restraint and a break with the party's recent past,” reported Brian Montopoli today at CBS News. But elsewhere there was evidence of the bashing and condemnation that’s been a ritual enacted by party leadership in Congress, and (with a lot less eloquence) by party partisans in the streets.
Liz Cheney, surrogate for the former vice president, set the table for the event on Thursday. “The Obama administration is putting us on the path to decline,” she said, explaining the three-pronged Obama doctrine: "apologize for America, abandon our allies and appease our enemies."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the Obama White House “a secular socialist machine” on Thursday. “This is the most radical administration in American history. … If you think about the group that meets together in the White House, their experience is the machine politics of Chicago, the corruption of Springfield and the radicalism of [Saul] Alinsky.” Gingrich then proposed that “when” the Republicans retake the Congress in January, the Obama administration should be handcuffed by a congressional refusal to fund any of its policies and agencies — a threat to shut down the United States government.
Nominal former Alaska governor and political personality Sarah Palin took aim on Friday at “the makings of the Obama doctrine, which is coddling enemies and alienating allies … Don’t retreat, reload — and that is not a call for violence. … Yes we can kowtow to enemies, criticize allies, vacillate, bow, dither ... but somebody needs to tell the president just because we can doesn’t mean that we should.”
And not to be outdone by those in New Orleans, the head of the Republican Governors Association, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, set a spell with CNN’s Candy Crowley on Sunday and continued the repeal of rational thinking announced (and amended) last week by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who’d previously decided that slavery in Virginia was no B.F. Deal, before he decided that it was after all.
Barbour (who’s actually been considered a possible presidential contender, bless his heart), told Crowley on “State of the Union” that McDonnell was right about slavery.
CROWLEY: The [Virginia] Governor didn’t even mention slavery in his proclamation. Was that a mistake?
BARBOUR: Well, I don’t think so ... I don’t know what you would say about slavery, but anyone who thinks that you have to explain to people that slavery is a bad thing — I think it goes without saying. ...
CROWLEY: You know what I’m trying to get at. There’s a sort of feeling that it’s insensitive, that you clearly don’t agree ...
BARBOUR: To me it’s a sort of feeling that it’s just a nit. That it is not significant. It’s trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t matter for diddly.
All props to Barbour, staying the course of his constituents, all praise for fidelity to the past on the part of the governor of the state of Mississippi, a holdout on ratification of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution (the one prohibiting slavery) until 1995.
◊ ◊ ◊
The desperation with which the elements of the moderate-to-extremist right have hurled themselves against any hint of deliberative compromise with the Obama White House has been sadly astonishing — like that of a sleeper thrashing in his slumber against an unseen enemy, fighting with all his might against a phantom of the mind.
It’s a case of mental illness as political metaphor. There’s mounting evidence that the conservative movement and the Republican Party are jointly and rapidly approaching the low point of an identity crisis, that some kind of psychic snap is coming shortly. The GOP is having a nervous breakdown.
A predisposition toward instability was first suspected during the 2008 presidential campaign, in which the party standard-bearer, Sen. John McCain, displayed the ethical duality and tendency to ruthlessness common to the political diagnosis.
Some would say the condition first fully presented in the Joint Session of Congress in January 2009, when South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson cemented himself in the history books for at least one memorable achievement during his time in the House (“You lie!”). In the fourteen months since then, and especially as the health-care debate wound its way torturously through Congress into law, the Republicans and their more emotional proxies in the Tea Party movement, engaged in cheap shots and a breathtaking range of character assassinations.
This disorder may be contagious. The conservative ranks might actually be spreading this condition around the country. It’s already got people confused. Americans don’t know who to vote for if they want an alternative to the Democrats. With conservatives staking out their territory separate from the Republicans staking out their territory as a thing apart from the Tea Party crew … right now the American people are faced with three flavors of conservative identity: Traditional, Deep-Fried Partisan and Extra Hysterical.
How do you choose between the three in November? Do you even bother to try? How can you be expected to make up your mind when the big-C and small-c conservatives can’t seem to make up their own minds about who and what they are?
◊ ◊ ◊
Last week Bob McDonnell forgot to mention slavery in a state proclamation honoring the Confederacy. Then the Republican Southern Leadership Conference convened in New Orleans and forgot to mention the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
That amnesia of convenience, the philosophical schizophrenia, the strategies of opposition ranging from Palin’s passive-aggressive snark to the Tea Party crowd’s more graphically corrosive racism … it’s all proof of the Republican Party experiencing an episode of unprecedented high anxiety.
As President Obama gets ready to nominate his second Supreme Court Justice, watch for the condition to get that much worse. Watch for Hate Week to be convened somewhere else in America. Image credits: Palin: Gerald Herbert/AP. Wilson: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP. Republican tea: CBS.
Six hundred twenty thousand Americans dead. Another 412,000 wounded. Cities and towns destroyed, an economic infrastructure agonizingly transformed. A president assassinated. That’s the grim snapshot hallmark of the Civil War, never so much the War Between the States as it was the War Between the Confederacy and the United States. Among that conflict’s legacies is its lingering presence in this nation; among the most painful ironies we recognize about the Civil War is the one we’d most like to forget: it’s a war that’s still being waged today.
Bob McDonnell, the newly-minted Republican governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, reminded us of that.
Reviving a tradition discontinued in two previous (Democratic) administrations, McDonnell issued a proclamation on Friday declaring April to be Confederate History Month in Virginia, doing so at the request of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization of descendants of rebel soldiers with members from Trent Lott to MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan, from Charlie Daniels to Clint Eastwood.
McDonnell was the first Virginia governor to so recognize the Confederacy since Republican Jim Gilmore did it in 2001. But McDonnell made his Friday proclamation with no mention of slavery, the peculiar institution that gave the Confederacy its very oxygen. Slavery in the state of Virginia, erased by decree.
That’s when everything went, well, deep south. Condemnation exploded in various corners, including high-ranking political figures, and progressive lawmakers and organizations.
Tim Kaine, who preceded McDonnell as governor and is now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said McDonnell’s tribute to the Confederacy "without condemning, or even acknowledging, the pernicious stain of slavery or its role in the war disregards history, is insensitive to the extraordinary efforts of Americans to eliminate slavery and bind the nation's wounds."
The outrage from the cable TV department of the punditburo, and an equal amount of discontent from the online commentariat was just as loud. It all prompted McDonnell (or someone on his staff with a better grasp of historical cause and effect than the governor) to amend the proclamation.
On Wednesday the governor finally came more or less correct — not politically correct but humanistically correct — with an edited version of the proclamation, and a mea culpa:
“The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow Virginian who has been offended or disappointed.”
“It is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war, and was an evil and inhuman practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights.”
McDonnell’s backing and filling was punctuated by a news conference on Wednesday that reportedly showed the governor well off his game, fumbling and stumbling to explain what he was thinking. He performed damage control the best he could, but less than three months into the job, McDonnell has shown he’s tone-deaf on stagecraft, and apparently even clueless about the breadth of his constituency, which includes not just the people who voted for him but everyone in the state of Virginia. Even 1.54 million people who don’t look a thing like him. People who know what slavery had to do with the state they live in.
◊ ◊ ◊
McDonnell’s epic fail was wrong on so many levels. It reflected a shallow reading of history as a collection of figures in a diorama, the stuff of a reenactment, tweakable and cherry-picked at will. This was the dumbest, most politically expedient kind of revisionist history. It was revisionist history that celebrated a tradition while overlooking the antecedents that made that tradition possible. Without slavery, there’d have been no anti-slavery position for Abraham Lincoln to run on and win an election with; without Lincoln’s election, the rationale for secession and the Confederacy vanishes.
In his freshman governor’s bid to shore up bona fides with his political base, McDonnell made a reflexive rush to the Stars & Bars without thinking things through. Just months into his brilliant career, he may have just had his macaca moment.
Tiger Woods officially begins his quest for a fifth green Masters jacket on Thursday afternoon, when he tees off, with K.J. Choi and Matt Kuchar, in his first round of golf of the year. The gallery — the one at Augusta National and the other, bigger one watching the proceedings on television — will be packed.
And as of today, three more people figure in the sexual farrago of the former life of the world’s greatest golfer and richest athlete, the public consequences of that not-quite-private life, and the potential for redemption, a way out of the deep rough.
◊ ◊ ◊
As the saga of infidelities has unfolded since November, it looked for awhile that those within the friendly confines of Augusta National had largely looked the other way, forgiving Tiger for his ethical meltdown, welcoming him back into the fold no questions asked. Then, today, Billy Payne busted a cap.
As part of his annual state of the Masters news conference, Payne, the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club said what’s been said elsewhere during the last four months, but formally putting the Masters organization on the record.
"As he now says himself, he forgot in the process to remember that with fame and fortune comes responsibility, not invisibility," Payne said. "It is not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here. It is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids."
"Our hero did not live up to the expectations of the role model we saw for our children," Payne said. "I hope he now realizes that every kid he passes on the course wants his swing, but would settle for his smile."
"We at Augusta hope and pray that our great champion will begin his new life here tomorrow in a positive, hopeful and constructive manner, but this time, with a significant difference from the past. This year, it will not be just for him, but for all of us who believe in second chances.
"Is there a way forward? I hope yes. I think yes. But certainly his future will never again be measured only by his performance against par, but measured by the sincerity of his efforts to change."
◊ ◊ ◊
You could be of two minds in reacting to Payne’s news conference drive-by. Payne did end a relative silence from the Masters leadership, coming with a sermon from golf's mount that we might have expected, sooner or later. Tiger Woods is returning to competitive golf for the first time since the sturdy gated, exclusive insulation around the hot copper wire of his personal life cracked open in a driveway in Florida. And he’s returning at the Masters. As the head of a golfing franchise as much a national institution as it is a sporting organization — what other golf event has a “state-of-the” news conference before it begins? — Payne was obligated to make some kind of Official Statement consistent with the 74-year-old history of the event. It's only right.
But still. Tiger Woods has become a part of modern Masters lore, and by extension helped grace Augusta National and the Masters with millions in revenue and burnishing the Masters’ already solid reputation with the added luster of being the site of some of the greatest contests in the game. Payne’s statement — something from a perspective part preacher, part moralist, part disappointed dad — could have been made about any random phenom coming to the Masters for the first time after a potentially crippling scandal. You wonder if Payne might have told this to Tiger privately, if for no other reason than to spare Tiger the embarrassment, and to spare himself any appearance of punitively piling on ("As he now says himself”). Where was the love?
◊ ◊ ◊
If Payne might have been in a privately forgiving mood, Tiger wasn’t helped with today’s news that Raychel Coudriet, Tiger Woods' neighbor, claimed through a friend that she slept with him last year, according to the National Enquirer.
From the Enquirer:
”Raychel Coudriet, now a 22-year-old grad student at a state university in the south, had a torrid one-night stand with the cheating champion that left her ‘shaken and humiliated,’ says one of her close friends.
“Shockingly, Tiger's sexual advances started in his car, only yards from where the golfer's devoted wife Elin was home, ending with a two-hour sex session on the couch in Tiger's private office.
The perverse timing of this, frankly, seems inescapable: an obvious attempt, almost psychologically malicious, to interfere with Tiger’s mental faculties — to get inside his head the way Tiger gets inside the heads of his competition on the course.
◊ ◊ ◊
But nothing gets in your head and stays there like what your parents tell you. Whether you take their advice or not, the lessons of the family are the first we ever learn, in voices we hear long after they’re gone. Nike understands this.
In the latest of its series of sometimes baffling, often intriguing television ads — spots that sell mindset as much as merchandise, striving to make connections between sports and life with either the starkness of a documentary or the splash of a musical — Tiger is summoned by the ghost of Earl Woods, his father, who passed in 2006.
Tiger, in living black & white, stands stock-still before the camera as his father speaks:
“Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive, to promote discussion. I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are. And did you learn anything.”
Cut to the swoosh. And the chase: In its own enigmatic, visually striking way, Nike formally announces that, while a parade of other sponsors bailed out since November, Nike still has Tiger’s back. And in an undeniably personal way, Tiger's father reaches out from beyond the grave and speaks as only a father can to a son. The words were spoken in reference to one of Tiger's early tournaments, but in the context of the current crisis, they're another way of saying, I've got your back too.
◊ ◊ ◊
It’s a good sign. While Payne was of a mind to weigh in and Coudriet may be of a mind to cash in, Nike’s willingness to stand in the fire with Tiger Woods may be some indicator of all this turning a corner. Finally. On Thursday a little before 2 o’clock Eastern time, it gets back to where it matters, on the golf course.
It was the smartest, most astute, least ideologically-driven thing that Michael Steele’s said in a long time, and he caught hell for it almost immediately.
The “it” was his response to a question from a commentator on one of the morning TV gabfests — a response that laid his heart vis-Ã -vis the matter of racial equality in the United States, tolerance, patience and whether it’s possible for the storied playing field to ever be level.
Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has been under fire from many analysts and observers (including this one) for his role in contributing to the fiscally licentious management culture that led to the RNC’s West Hollywood spending scandal, and the resulting fallout. He was interviewed Monday by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: We've got a lot of questions on my blog for you this morning.
STEELE: Sure.
STEPHANOPOULOS: One came in from Myron. And he asked, "Do you feel that, as an African-American, you have a slimmer margin for error than another chairman would?"
STEELE: The honest answer is yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Why is that?
STEELE: It just is. Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. We — A lot of folks do. It's a different role for, you know, for me to play and others to play. And that's just the reality of it.
The pushback was immediate, aggressive and (a departure for modern Washington) totally bipartisan. Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state and the vice RNC chairman, jumped on Steele with all fours. “To interject race here is nonsense. There is a pattern of missteps, miscues and misstatements. And as a consequence, we now can’t fall back on the issue of race.”
And White House press secretary and Quipmaster General Robert Gibbs displayed an enviable rhetorical economy on the matter, dismissing Steele’s comments in a single sentence. “Michael Steele’s problem isn’t the race card. It’s the credit card.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Blackwell’s response probably obscured some of the deeper issues on race that the Republicans have. What no doubt truly raised the ire of the Republicans over Steele’s comments had much to do with equating himself with Obama on this issue. That’s what got the GOP in an uproar.
“Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. … A lot of folks do.” With two brief sentences, Steele brought down part of the GOP’s carefully constructed barrier of political distinctions. By existentially aligning himself with Obama, Steele undercut his party’s effort to maintain the philosophical firewall, the us vs. them, that’s central to contemporary Republican identity. Finding common cause with “the enemy” on the nation’s enduring third-rail issue blurs the battle lines, creates the rationale for carving out a commonality the Republicans want nothing to do with. That’s one of the reasons why Blackwell hit back so hard.
And for the Obama White House, and for Democrats generally, Steele’s reply to 'Myron' was problematic because it reawakened debate over a crucial aspect of the racial divide, reanimated an intrinsically corrosive but utterly necessary narrative that the Democrats have invested much time and political capital in trying to put to rest (witness the quixotic "postracial" meme that no one who's serious about this country takes seriously).
◊ ◊ ◊
Steele’s honest answer, of course, is the right one. There’s always been a different threshold, a different mathematics of performance that black Americans have been subject to. The saying about “working twice as hard to get about as much” has long standing in black and minority America. It distills many of the interracial and inter-ethnic disparities in the national life, from educational achievement scores to advancement in the workplace, from unemployment statistics to life expectancies.
In a perfect world, or a less partisan one, the fact that Steele understands this would be cause for celebration. As it is, it’s another indicator of the current reflexive ruthlessness of our politics. Steele’s comments reflect a grasp of that division; ironically, the reactions to what he said don’t conceal that division so much as they reveal it for what it is.
The fact that Steele drew fire from both sides of the aisle for his honest answer to an important question indicates the common ground the Democrats and Republicans already share:
Whether it occurs within a Republican Party allergic to broadening its appeal to black and minority voters, or from inside a Democratic administration determined to take the high road on race matters by avoiding the road altogether whenever possible ... denial is an equal opportunity experience. Image credit: Steele top: Good Morning America/ABC News. President Obama: Still from White House video, August 2009.
The anglers’ saying for making a decision — “fish or cut bait” — has rarely attracted so much attention as it has since Sunday, when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens used the phrase to set the terms for deciding on a time for retiring from the court. “There are still pros and cons to be considered,’ Justice John Paul Stevens told The New York Times. “[But] I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process. The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.”
Stevens’ judicial early warning means that President Obama will nominate the 112th Justice of the Supreme Court — a choice he’ll make amid a political atmosphere more charged and partisan now than it was last year, when Sonia Sotomayor was appointed after reactions from the Senate, the public and right-wing radio that went from the mildly controversial to the downright derogatory (remember Rush Limbaugh’s allusions to Sotomayor as a cleaning woman?). ...
It’s a fact that whoever President Obama nominates to the court will be required to pass a test as fraught with politics as with a command of the law. Olive branches from ranking Senate Republicans notwithstanding, GOP senators can be expected, as a matter of reflex, to oppose whoever he chooses.
And Obama’s progressive-left base isn’t a slam-dunk for support, either; liberals and progressives will call on Obama to make a selection that reflects attention to that constituency — important now, vital in 2012. The one and possibly two appointments Obama may make before long is his chance to make his philosophical imprint on the court whose laws impact Americans like no other.
Ten names that come to mind — most of them previously floated on any number of hypothetical short lists — would offer the president an embarrassment of riches: a range of intellectual and judicial heavyweights reflecting a range of personal perspectives very much like America itself. ...
The iPad revolution is held to have officially begun on Saturday at 9 a.m., when Apple began sales of the multimedia tablets nationwide. According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster's estimates for iPad's first day of sales, somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 iPads were sold on that frabjous opening day.
While the jury is very much out about who those 600K to 700K customers were, Ken Gibbs Jr. of BlackWeb 2.0 weighed in on March 30 with a lament (also published Saturday, in TheGrio) over who’s apparently opted out of the first wave of media organizations and publications to embrace redesigned Web presences built around the device.
“[W]hat about the African-American market?” Gibbs asks. “Has anyone seen or heard of an iPad demo of Ebony or Jet? Or how about Black Enterprise, Essence, Uptown or Vibe? African-American brands are the ones who could benefit most from the new revenue streams offered by the iPad.”
BW2.0 has a valid point. We’ve known the generalities of what Apple was planning for some time; The New York Times published a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office drawing of an Apple prototype months ago. We’ve known the specifics of what was coming since January, when Apple chieftain Steve Jobs showed it to the world in a dog-and-gigabyte show in San Francisco.
So it is curious that Johnson Publishing Company, publishers of Ebony and Jet, apparently didn’t come up with an early promotable working prototype of their Web sites in the iPad environment, in light of Johnson’s recent (and stunningly attractive) makeovers of both print magazines — and their Web counterparts.
Same would seem to be true for Essence — and for Black Enterprise! Given BE’s high-profile place in minority business journalism, some from-the-jump tie-in with a device likely to be a new and powerful form of personal technology would seem to be a no-brainer.
◊ ◊ ◊
It’s entirely possible, though, that all those print pubs BlackWeb mentioned may have such iPad-configured prototypes in the works right now. It’s not necessarily an advantage to be the first one out of the chute on tweaking a major technological advancement.
With the way technology changes in general, and the way Apple technology can be relied on to change in particular, there’s a lot to be said for laying in the cut for a minute and surveying the terrain before you jump in. Maybe they’re all taking a page or two from Sun Tzu.
We can assume (and sure as hell hope) that when the dust settles, the Webmasters at those black pubs will have iPad-ready versions of their sites, and soon. Like all the early adopters who waited in lines outside Apple Stores for days, the top-shelf, deep-pocketed publishers got in first, which means they’re hostage to any glitches or malfunctions that might arise in the first-generation devices themselves. First-to-market isn’t always the one that people remember.
As it was with the vote, major league baseball and the presidency of the United States, African Americans may not get to something early in the game, but the impact made when we finally arrive is inescapable.
Stay tuned. Better still, stay wired. Image credit: Steve Jobs, January 2010: Apple tablet patent illustration: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, via The New York Times. Apple Inc. Brother iPad: Via The Huffington Post.
West Virginia's valiant, quixotic run for the NCAA men's basketball title ended on Saturday night in heartbreaking fashion. The team, at the hands of a relentless attack by the Duke Blue Devils, lost their semifinal bid by 20 points. But the pluck and heart of the Mountaineers was pretty well distilled at one point during the game — not by one of the players, but by coach Bob Huggins.
In the fourth quarter, West Virginia's DaSean Butler took a bad cut driving to the basket; after colliding with Duke center Brian Zoubek, his left knee buckles and Butler falls to the floor, writhing in agony. Trainers and players did their best to console Butler, even as the team's medical people prepared to carry him off the court (later to find out Butler had a torn anterior cruciate ligament, one of the more serious injuries).
But before that happened, Huggins went on to the court at Lucas Oil Stadium to minister personally to his fallen player. In so doing, the irascible, colorful Mountaineers head coach created one of the most quietly electrifying, human moments in sports history.
Crouching over Butler, Huggins held him, caressed him, his face inches from Butler's own, cradled the stricken man in his arms and talked him through the world of his pain. We may never know exactly what soothing, anodyne words passed from coach to player. Huggins will paraphrase it for us forever — and maybe it's best that we don't know. Somehow, the transcript is beside the point
What the world will long remember ten years or a hundred years from now is the image, and the moment that made the image possible, of two human beings in communion. A player fallen in battle; a coach with a deep and inestimable reservoir of soul.
This was beyond authority or age or race. This was even beyond sports. This was a celebration, purchased with pain, of our base metal, the best of what human beings can be.
With its two recent hot choices for upcoming hosting duties, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” is proving you don’t have to be a spring chicken — or be built like one — to get a gig on the show that may be the best reason to stay in on Saturday night.
On Thursday the Marquee Blog at CNN.com confirmed, through a NBC spokeshuman, that Gabourey Sidibe, the Oscar-nominated sensation of Lee Daniels’ highly and justly acclaimed “Precious,” is set to host the comedy sketch show on April 24. It will be Gabby’s first-time hosting gig on SNL, now in its 35th year. (Look at its longevity another way: the show was eight years along when Sidibe was born.)
That news drops a few weeks after it was announced that Betty White, the octagenarian hottie star of TV, movies (“The Proposal”) and Snickers Super Bowl ads, will host ‘SNL’ on May 8 (that’s the day before Mother’s Day. Don’t forget.).
“SNL” jefe Lorne Michaels told USA Today the Mom’s Day appearance by White, 88 years young, was just the right thing to do. "She's the mother of us all in comedy," he said. The massive outpouring of popular support — more than 135,000 people approved of the idea in a recent Facebook poll — might have had a little bit to do with it too.
The casting picks show “SNL” continuing to break new ground. When Gabby stars on the show, she’ll be one of the few African American celebrities to host a program that’s come in for criticism of its often all-white cast, and its monochromatic hosting history. But hold up: TNT basketball analyst Charles Barkley did the hosting honors on Jan. 9 and former cast member Tracy Morgan (a mainstay of NBC’s “30 Rock”) did it on March 14. We got a trend thing working here.
And White will take the stage at Studio 8H as the oldest “Saturday Night Live” host ever — a refreshing departure from pop culture’s tendency to focus on the Bright Young Thing of the Moment.
All props, then, to “Saturday Night Live” for continuing to step outside the box —like it did in the past.
Next up: Mickey Rourke? Image credits: Gabby: Via The Huffington Post. Betty: Lifeline Program/Mike Ruiz Photography, via The New York Times.
With Pampers worn in their proper place, the early adopters are already in line at an Apple Store near you, caffeine IV drips positioned next to the lawn chairs that will be their homes for the next forty-three hours or so. Saturday begins the season of the itch to be scratched by techies and fanboys/girls, artifact-collecting dilettantes with disposable income, and by the loyalists who’ve over 30 years made Apple Inc. as much a religion as a corporation.
The iPad arrives at 9 a.m. on Saturday and, to go by the early reactions of those who’ve played with it and tested it, the latest tablet-shaped device thrown down from Mount Cupertino by Steven the Lawgiver will then start the process of revolutionizing online access, publishing, music retrieval and things we haven’t thought of yet.
Walt Mossberg, dean of the tech journalists who also navigate the mainstream media, weighed in yesterday in The Wall Street Journal: “After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.”
At the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko also made with the hosannas: “[A]fter a
week with the iPad, I’m suddenly wondering if any other company is as committed to invention as Apple. Has any other company ever demonstrated a restlessness to stray from the safe and proven, and actually invent things?”
The New York Times’ David Pogue: “The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget.”
USA Today’s Jefferson Graham gave his endorsement — ringing but with a little less tintinnabulation than the others — in a video:
The choruses of early praise come amid a galaxy of new applications already designed for the iPad, with more following every day. And the ebook market is has been set for a major liftoff for awhile. The International Digital Publishing Forum reported on March 26 that U.S. wholesale ebook sales for the month of January increased more than 260 percent from the same period a year ago.
January, of course, was the month that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO and Zen visionary in chief, formally debuted the iPad to the world from the stage of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Just a coincidence, for sure.
◊ ◊ ◊
If history is any judge, what’s coming on Saturday will certainly be the first act of the iPad’s existence. All computer technology goes through upgrades and improvements, but it’s Apple’s peculiar genius to have reinforced the organic aspect of that evolution. More than with any other computing devices alive, Apple devices have mastered the mirroring of the plasticity of our lives. The semiotics of Apple technology fully dovetail with our idea of what computers, phones and music players should look like. Feel like. They’re becoming more and more extensions of ourselves.
The iPad will be subject to the same evolutionary process that took us from being quadrapeds to creatures that get around on two legs. And in the future like the past, that evolution will test our adaptability as much as that of the device itself. Starting with its features and its price.
We already know the iPad doesn't support Adobe's Flash technology, one of the thing’s biggest drawbacks. The Flash embargo locks iPad users out of some of the best visually-driven features of major Web sites like Disney, Hulu and ESPN. No onboard camera.
And, as the ‘Vox noted in January:
[I]ronically (very ironically for Apple), the iPad doesn’t allow for running multiple applications at once — a truly concerning omission given the insanely great multitasking capability of the other, most successful Apple products available today. In real-world terms, the iPad’s portability is almost neutralized by its lack of multitasking power. In marketing terms, it’s a challenging, counter-intuitive reach to expect consumers to step back from expectations based on what Apple’s already proven it’s capable of doing.
There’s issues with accurate translation of Microsoft formats to the iPad environment; Mossberg discovered this the hard way: “In one case, [an] exported Word file had misaligned text. When I then tried exporting the document as a PDF file, it was unreadable.”
Some other matters, minor on their own, take on greater importance in the aggregate. GPS won’t be available on all versions. The iPad’s lack of widescreen capability means getting a letterbox effect without the corresponding increase in image size (like you get when you watching a movie in letterbox format on TV). And, Mossberg also notes, familiar iPhone apps including Clocks, Stocks and Weather aren’t included.
◊ ◊ ◊
But no worries: Some of the features not in the inaugural iPads purchased by the truest believers — the people mainlining French roast outside the Apple stores right now — will show up in iPad 2.0. The long-term early adopters know this little drill, know it well. The X dollars you paid for an iMac with a 17-inch display in January will get you a 20-inch display and other goodies — in September of the same year.
It’s the price you pay for being in the church: accepting the fact that the pews will be bigger, the hymnals will be thicker, and the stained glass will reveal another 2 million colors the next time you come to worship. Count this writer (working at this moment on a second-generation iMac) as one of the longtime parishioners.
This just in: The iPad is about to change everything.
Including, eventually, itself. Image credits: iPad images: Apple Inc.
On March 1, Bill Bunten, mayor of Topeka, Kansas, signed a proclamation Monday calling for Topeka to be identified for the entire month as "Google, Kansas — the capital city of fiber optics." It was Bunten's bid to persuade the Big G to make Topeka a test site for the company's Internet connection.
A month later, Google returns the favor, in the company's inimitable style:
America from 2004 to 2009 –its new ironies and old habits, its capacity for change and transition – is topic A in this collection of essays and blog posts on pop culture, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, a transformative presidential election and the first 100 days of the Obama administration. | Now available at Authorhouse
One nation subject to change: A collection of topical essays exploring television, hip-hop, patriotism, the use of language under Bush II, and the author's own reckoning with mortality. | Available at Authorhouse
A veteran journalist, producer and blogger, Michael Eric Ross contributes to Medium, and the content channels of Creatd Media. He writes from Los Angeles on the arts, politics, race and ethnicity, and pop culture. A graduate of the University of Colorado, he's worked as a reporter, editor and critic at several newspapers and websites, including The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, MSN, Current, msnbc.com, and TheWrap, a major online source of entertainment trade news. He was formerly an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, PopMatters, Salon, The Root, seattlepi.com, NPR.com, theGrio, BuzzFeed, Daily Kos, and other publications. Author of the novel Flagpole Days (2003); and essay collections Interesting Times (2004) and American Bandwidth (2009), he contributed to the anthologies MultiAmerica (edited by Ishmael Reed, 1997) and Soul Food (2000).
After almost five and a half years, it's time for a change. Culchavox is now Short Sharp Shock (with all apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan, whom Pink Floyd owe an apology as well). Everything put together here in that time — from politics to pop culture, commentary on global affairs to analysis of America's wrestle with race and ethnicity — is in a new place.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
