photo credit: -basti-

By The Public Sphere | The post Issue № 3 <small> | March 2009</small> appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Imagine my surprise when the movie turned out to be brilliant. Brilliant, note—not enjoyable. The cinematography was fantastic and every one of us was retrospectively amazed that the whole thing was accomplished using a mere five actors. So yes, an incredible piece of work. The technical coups, however, were only icing on the cake. Its true distinction lay in its patent ability to discomfort the viewer in ways that I no longer thought possible, in a show-all, tell-all world.

Disclaimer: I can’t proceed without plunking down a massive spoiler. You’ve been duly warned; if you haven’t already seen the film, and you want to be surprised, stop reading, go out and watch it, and join us again later.

Now, then: as I mentioned above, the basic summary that I had received only covered a minute fraction of the overall narrative. Mainly, the film consists of a fourteen-year-old girl drugging and torturing a man who—and we don’t know this for sure until well near the end of the movie—enjoys picking up woefully underage females and, to use an outmoded euphemism, corrupting them, sometimes worse. The height of tension comes as we (and the depraved villain) realize that a safe, hygienic, and considerately anesthetic castration will soon take place, courtesy of the enterprising heroine’s prescient purchase of a medical reference and a book bag packed with all of the requisite tools to perform the operation in the comfort of one’s own home. The only thing we see while this procedure is ostensibly underway are shots of the respective players’ faces; the lack of visual confirmation of bloodletting and corporal restructuring still set off tangible winces, cringes, and waves of general disgust and terror through the audience. The males in my group were especially uneasy with each new development, screwing themselves up into contortions that would seem to indicate the receipt of a good, hard kick to the groin. Even after we learned that our bright young gal has only faked the procedure—she’s merely made him believe that she’s removed the visible representations of his manhood and sent them through the disposal—the sense of moral indignation, of shock and outrage, was still palpable among our little assembly. Why did we need to see that? What possible reason could anyone have for creating such a thing? That’s revolting.

The collective sense of having been abused was, I think, undeniably justified. But then—simultaneously, disturbingly—it also wasn’t. A curious sort of appreciation began to make its ugly appearance inside of me, accompanied by the hopefulness that my feelings about the film were “right,” that the writer and director and whoever else was in charge also had hoped to convey the message that was gradually taking shape inside my head. Stay with me.

Throughout most of my adult involvement in cinema and literature, I’ve regularly had to endure portrayals of rape, whether in print or on celluloid, while trying to remind myself that it’s not real, that it’s all a condemnation of human brutality. In discussions about these scenes, in class or informally, I’ve had to sit there and pretend to be objective, try to get through the ordeal and successfully hide the fact that those artistic encounters with rape have left indelible bruises on my psyche, punched empty spaces into my stomach that will never really fill themselves in again. I try to dismiss the foolishness of feeling personally small and hurt and beaten down by the action. And resignedly, I realize that there’s not much protest to make after others (usually men) have ended the conversation by walking away congratulating themselves that they’ve been able to float past all of this pain to an appreciation of the greater significance of the piece—having  defended the sacrality of Art and brought me to a higher plane of awareness in the bargain.

I’m tired of having a man condescend to explain to me that art can’t ignore the violence in society, that these scenes portray reality and thereby refuse to talk down to us by hiding the evil of the world from us. I’ve had enough of hearing such episodes justified by an assertion that, in showing the cruel truth of life, the purgative powers of horror will bring us to some sort of realization and change us into better people because of it. That, according to the guys down the hall, for example, the mental scars that remain fifteen years after viewing A Clockwork Orange constitute a small and worthwhile sacrifice compared to the new, profound considerations of ethics to which the film supposedly exposed me.

Every time I hear such schlock, I’m reminded, in spite of all of our contemporary rhetoric of equality and worth, of the still-present, senseless ways that (mostly) men can demonstrate what they perceive to be superiority over (mostly) women. It’s not merely the act of rape itself, then—or the vicarious humiliation of a viewer faced with its reenactment—but the noble-sounding defense of its inclusion in art that seems so insulting. The justification believed, so smugly, to be representative of advanced rationality. The authority so convinced of his instruction on the proper way to feel about (portrayals of) something so unforgivable.

Admittedly, these proponents of Truth in Art might not change their tune, where Hard Candy is concerned; if so, I’ll at least congratulate them on their consistency. Based, though, on the reactions I saw in the guys around me, I would expect a different sort of argument to ensue, at least a pause or a momentary lapse of certainty. Because I’ve witnessed these same men sit through more “traditional” rape scenes, visions of slaughter, war crimes, and so forth, and even while acknowledging, on some level, the dread of it all, not displaying any sort of physical discomfort, or expressing a post-viewing condemnation of the project’s creators as sick.

I’m guessing, in other words, that with this film, art has brought us as close as possible to allowing males to appreciate the emotional reaction that I (and many other women) have when watching a rape scene. Not nearer, note, to understanding the actual crime, or to acknowledging that humans are capable of heinous cruelty, or that life is intricately unjust. Rather, the movie might just give guys a taste of the chilling sensation that what you’re witnessing is somehow directed at you, almost a warning that you, too, could have your soul and dignity hatefully, mercilessly, and often casually shattered in front of your face. A reminder to watch out: don’t become too secure in your foolish conviction that you are a unique and valuable individual.

Why does this movie get those messages across so successfully? Among a multitude of other reasons, it openly addresses, without shying away from any of the “truths” that proponents of truthful art so admire, the fact that so much of being able to prove that one is a respectable man seems tied up in the presence or absence of a functioning organ. That someone might care so little for you that that person wants to go beyond hurting you physically, taking, too, that thing that, at bottom, you believe is yours alone. I saw those men in my little group begin to understand what it feels like to see someone so successfully go after another’s soul with a self-congratulatory smile. And then to get the impression that those around you would dismiss you as weak and hysterical were you to admit your painful feelings of empathy and fear, were you to do anything other than walk away from the screen and grab a beer and move on to the next activity. Well, I thought, they might finally know what it feels like.

But hold on, now; I’m not trying to “get back” at anyone; I’m not gloating over a victory in the ridiculous battle of the sexes. The scene I’ve described, and most of the movie, in fact, was almost too excruciating to watch. There was nothing enjoyable about seeing someone tortured, despicable person though he was; I experienced no triumphant feeling of “justice” (if we must call it that) having been served. There was no glee in wondering what this act of vengeance was doing to the person perpetrating it, or what sorts of hurt and sense of futility had led her to undertake such an extreme course of action. It was more than unnerving to think that a whole team of creative professionals came together with the intention of turning a disturbing idea into a visible reality. This film is not, in other words, what I would call “entertainment” in any sense of the term.

I feel that I should note, too, that this picture was not the product of angry, vindictive females; writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade are, as their names suggest, men. And watching the DVD commentary, it’s quite obvious that their purposes in making this movie weren’t aligned with the ones the ones that I’m taking out of my experience with it.

All of its motivations aside, though, Hard Candy is an obviously powerful film. And, sadly enough, in spite of all of my disparagement of “truth in art for truth’s sake,” I think it had to be as gruesome as it was in order to wake “us,” male or female, out of the desensitized ways in which it seems that we accept violence in this culture—at least violence against women, or any sorts of brutality committed between members of the same sex. (Think of the especially prurient pleasure taken in “chick fights.”) I don’t know of any more fruitful course of action in terms, for example, of getting men to see just what the idea of rape does to at least this woman. Other than this incident, the closest I’ve come to that outcome has been a sort of paternalistic sheepishness on the part of nice, guilty-feeling men who can’t imagine (and why should they be able to?) how it affects me.

What am I really trying to say, then? My plea is not for a balancing of the scales, so that brutality is acceptable as long we achieve parity in the number of victims of each gender, each side keeping up in a continual raising of graphic stakes. Neither am I demanding a wide-ranging ban on the depiction of violence, in film or elsewhere. But might we consider—just for a second—whether letting us in on the intricacies of a sexual assault is really worth it? Whether the continuing portrayals of such an act—and the justifications made about them—might be (maybe unconscious) attempts to hold onto a place on some remaining hierarchy? Or whether they only present us with “inevitabilities”—for whose elimination, in our newfound artistic maturity, we might as well not struggle?   Why resist truth, after all?

How about we get a little more creative than merely reporting on “reality?” Why not, in other words, ditch the rape scenes and scrap the shoot-em-ups? Idealistic? Sure. Willfully naïve? Maybe so. Likely? Not in this universe, I’ll admit. I’m not asking for a revoltingly aseptic cinematic universe worthy of Patty Duke and the Beave. But I will ask that writers or directors consider, next time they feel like using rape to make a point, that they think not only about what kind of world they’re reporting on—but what sort of reality—emotional, spiritual, even physical—they’re helping to create.

The illustration is based on the photo by Made Underground. Credit: Made Underground

By Katy Scrogin | The post Artistic Truth Bites Back: The Bitter Taste of Hard Candy appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Whichever side they come from – and whichever variation of the arguments they choose – it all boils down to this: they are decrying the fact that relationships have moved from the private to the public sphere.  The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only and should remain between them; love should remain an unmediated experience between the two persons in that relationship.

Which of course completely misses the point. 

If we consider the fact that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, then there must be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is that one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding.  This would be understanding at its most banal – and perverse – form; that of bringing the other person under one’s stance.  If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationship; all negotiation is gone and the other person is effectively effaced.  Hence whenever one hears the phrase “I understand my partner,” one should be wary; clearly that person’s version of a relationship is a masturbatory one.

In this sense, any relationship between two (or more) persons always already carries with it the unknown, and always unknowable.  The other person is an enigma, remains enigmatic, to you.  This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person – and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is.  For if the other person comes under your own schema, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love, one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; the other person becomes nothing more than a check-list.  To compound matters, if it is the qualities that you love, by extension, if those qualities go away, so does the love.  Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event.

If it is an event, then strictly speaking it cannot be known before it happens; in fact, at best it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realized retrospectively.  Hence at the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere; this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, ‘I was struck by love’ or even more so by ‘I was blinded by love.’  This is a blinding in the very precise sense of, ‘I have no idea why or when it happened; before I knew it, I was in love.’ Cupid is blind for this reason: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time) but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. 

Since there is an unknowable relationship with the other person, the only way you can approach it is via a ritual.  This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the god(s), one has no choice but to approach them through rituals.  These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless – the actual content is interchangeable – but it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets, and secrets are never about content. Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret.  This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work; since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret.  Occasionally the actual secret content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance.  For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings.  In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognize the significance of the knowledge of my birthday.  This of course means that you have to know that you know something.  Since the god(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the god(s).

The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritual role.  It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them.  The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange.  Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received.  This of course means that the worst thing that one can do is not to give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person.  This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the return gift would be nothing more than a calculated return, where the relationship is nothing more than an accounting figure, where the other would be once again reduced to a statistic, a mere return of investment.

The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind.  In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and the reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). 

Of course this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. The stupidity involved actually saves the relationship from being merely banal.  And more importantly, prevents it from entering the mere profane.

It is the stupidity of Valentine’s Day – complete with it kitsch-ness – that protects the sacredness of relationships, precisely by being completely and utterly meaningless …

By Jeremy Fernando | The post In Defence of Stupidity; on Love and Valentine’s Day appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Indeed, Dylan went on record making several claims that would typically fit with a classic sex-positive, feminist model of sexuality: she wanted to associate the personal with the political, in that selling her virginity would enhance her thesis research on the value of virginity. She believed that selling her body would lead to self-determination in the face of a culture that strips women of their bodily power, and she learned to “think differently” in her women’s studies education about the master narratives of purity, chastity, and virginity. She said, “College taught me that this [idealization of virginity] is just a tool to keep the status quo intact. Deflowering is historically oppressive—early European marriages began with a dowry, in which a father would sell his virginal daughter to the man whose family could offer the most agricultural wealth. Dads were basically their daughters’ pimps. When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefitting from that? It is mine, after all.”

These complexities raise two questions for me, questions with which this essay wrestles: First, what does it mean that the news media refused to take seriously Dylan’s reading of this event as a feminist act? Second, what else is at stake here? Focusing on this first question, my inquiry grates against obvious limitations about the relationship between women and the media. When looking at this relationship, a more obvious set of limitations about the interplay between gender politics and media coverage become apparent. Mainstream news media typically has nothing but contempt for feminism as a concept, ideology, practice, or identity; those who espouse feminist views—particularly if they actually use the “f-word”—typically end up ghettoized by the media as outdated (e.g., “those silly peace protesters from the 60s”), hypocritical (e.g., the frenzy about Gloria Steinem getting married after claiming that marriage oppressed women), a celebrity fad (e.g., Ashley Judd and Susan Sarandon as spokeswomen for a cause waning in its trendiness), or downright scary (e.g., the vilification of sex-negative thinkers like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin within academic and media circles).

Further, the media’s reluctance to accept Dylan’s reading of this event as a feminist act reveals that our media rarely considers the social context of sexual acts, preferring instead to argue for biological essentialism and the “naturalness” of heterosexuality. It seems impossible for the news media to take seriously any claims about the social context in which vanilla sex occurs, let alone the social context that enables prostitution or sex work. I raise this issue because, embedded within these frenzied discussions about Natalie Dylan are the deep-seated cultural anxieties we have about imagining sex as a social act, including the social aspects of virginity, what “counts” as sex, or what is at stake (emotionally, physically, etc.) in (first) sexual exchanges. Case in point: we still believe that erectile dysfunction is primarily related to physiological problems; the popularity of Viagra attests to our blocks about seeing erections within their social context as related to, say, partner communication, relationship issues, crises of masculinity, fatigue, abuse, fear, stress, etc.

So, in addition to the vilification of feminism and the reluctance to see sex in its social context, we also have the problem of the news media believing, particularly for young women, that sexual scripts are fixed, determined by men, and non-negotiable in their social meaning. In other words, we believe that Dylan should value her virginity because it has inherent value, rather than seeing virginity as something constructed in light of our obsession with women as the “purer” sex. We are outraged that Dylan is selling her virginity because it evokes our fear that men will lose control of the sexual economy (e.g., men trade women amongst each other—via marriage and legal arrangements—and not the other way around). In short, the primary objections to Dylan’s actions include the following two things: first, virginity matters; second, men should rule the sexual economy. In this light, the media must belittle, make fun of, ridicule, and shoot down Dylan’s own narrative of selling her virginity as a feminist act. For example, one recent blogger responded to Dylan’s statements by snarkily saying, “Sounds like someone took a couple of philosophy classes, too, and paid really close attention when moral relativism was described (but not critiqued).” If we could move past such belittling statements, we might enable a discussion about that most frightening of realities: the fact that the social world is a flexible, ever-changing universe, wedded not to the inevitability of stagnancy, but to the certainty of change.

This brings me to the second, and arguably more interesting, question I posed: What else is at stake here for social justice, particularly from a feminist lens? I ask this question not in spite of, but in light of, the problems set forth above (namely, that mainstream American news media have a vested interest in reducing the complexity of this situation, dismissing Dylan’s own claims about selling her virginity, and insisting upon a worldview that denies social context and cultural ambiguity). If selling one’s virginity now represents, for Dylan anyway, a feminist act, what do we as feminists do with this assertion? What do we stand to gain from agreeing with her, and what do we stand to lose by disagreeing with her?

Here’s what I like about Dylan’s labeling of selling her virginity as a feminist act: it takes our culture’s normal to its logical extreme. Much feminist research has sought to show how that which is on the fringe actually informs, comments upon, and alters that which is in the middle. For example, Susan Bordo has long argued that the anorexic body, rather than being an aberration, mental illness, or a symbol of the non-normative, actually most fully represents the normal. ((Susan Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the crystallization of culture,” Philosophical Forum 17 (Winter 1986): 73-103.)) In other words, the anorexic body shows us what we value in women: passivity, weakness, thinness, conformity to patriarchal norms, lack of nourishment, pre-pubescent and therefore non-threatening bodies, and so on. In showing us these facts, the anorexic body simultaneously takes on a kind of empowerment, saying to the world, “You want thin? Well, this is thin. Now what?” Similarly, Dylan’s approach takes on a similar logic: “You want to overvalue virginity and give it all kinds of powerful social meanings that it probably doesn’t deserve? Well, how about just making it an explicit bidding war!” In doing so, she reveals to us our cultural pathologies about virginity in the very extremity of this act. We do overvalue virginity. We do sell and trade women’s bodies in a discursive sense. We do teach women to be the gatekeepers of sex and to ward off men’s sexual advances. We do have serious cultural hang-ups about keeping women pure and fetishizing processes that deflower them. Remember: in the world of plastic surgery, hymen reconstruction surgeries are on the rise, primarily in response to the demand for women to prove their virginity (or worth) to new prospective mates. The selling of virginity makes fun of, benefits from, and plays around with these realities. Dylan takes these hang-ups to the logical extreme, and this course of action might actually be useful, ideologically and otherwise, to a feminist politics.

That said, Dylan’s approach skirts one of the most severe problems within the feminist movement: we as feminists do not feel enabled—in part because of the heavy social penalties within the movement, and because our politics rely so intensely upon social constructionism, postmodernism, and relativity—to draw lines in the sand about what we will and will not tolerate in a political sense. Let us ask ourselves: Are we really okay with feminist prostitution? Do we really find it compelling to imagine that sexual liberation emerges from playing around with extreme cooptation, exploitation, and the treatment of sex as a form of labor? Might it be deeply problematic that we still construct men as the “buyers” of virginity/sex while women remain objects to be sold, bartered, and traded in a literal sense? Doesn’t it matter that, even in this discussion, we focus only on Dylan rather than on the men who want to buy her virginity? Must we learn to accept and tolerate extremity in the name of sex positivity?

What irks me most about the selling of virginity in general—whether labeled as feminist or not—is that it further entrenches us into a politics that despises pleasure, values commodification of bodies and sexualities, links capitalism with sexual power, and undermines the relational power of the erotic. As such, despite the rather insightful reading that Dylan has about the feminist implications of selling her virginity—and despite the way that it plays with the relationship between women (especially feminists) and the media—calling the selling of virginity a feminist act seems false. I say this with a full awareness of the hazards of drawing such a line in the sand. Yes, women’s desires are constructed by patriarchy and are therefore suspect. Yes, women have limited options with regard to how they enact resistance to social norms; we all, in a sense, struggle to find ways to reconcile the demands of patriarchy, racism, classism, heterosexism (etc.) with our political and social idealism. Yes, it is dangerous to assert that sex in the context of love and emotional relatedness is an ideal form of eroticism, for it sets up hierarchies between “good” and “bad” sex, “normal” and “abnormal” sex. Yes, the potential for resistance to patriarchy and power appears in all sorts of unexpected ways, and as such, we must take care not to obscure our own hypocrisies or exclude others from joining the cause. Still, mustn’t we at least attempt to articulate a worldview that moves in the direction of these most basic principles of social justice—equality, respect, love, solidarity, kindness, freedom from exploitation, creativity, shared power? Can’t we at least imagine a road to sexual empowerment for women that is not paved with the gritty, grungy, raunchy, hypercommodified realities of stripper poles, bunny ranches, online bidding wars, and girls going wild?

By Breanne Fahs | The post Is the Selling of Virginity a Feminist Act? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Beck’s criticisms suggest that, at least for him, post-racial means that he should never have to be accused of being racist again, and perhaps he should never have to hear the word “race” again without the “post” in front of it. While 52% of the voting populace of the U.S. can congratulate itself on the election of Obama and the transformation of racial discourse such an election may portend, said election is not license to end conversations about race. Obama, in his own candidacy (in Philadelphia in March of 2008), actually demanded we push conversations about race further and deeper. In his recent book, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, Tim Wise, as he has done in previous works, critiques the machinations of white privilege and the need for this nation to wrestle with “racism 2.0,” the subtler forms of racialization that perpetuate white dominance. Current practitioners of racism 1.0 will admit they did not vote for Obama because they do not trust a black man. Practitioners of racism 2.0 may have even voted for Obama, but they still found him difficult to pin down and untrustworthy, a perception, which, though they may not admit it to themselves, had everything to do with Obama not being white. Statistics show that on average, people in the U.S. tend to maintain negative stereotypes of minoritized communities, ((“Minoritized communities” refer roughly to those who fall into the following “racial” categories: African American, Asian American, Latin@, Middle-Eastern American, and Native American.)) even while willingly casting a vote for Obama. Such negative stereotypes participate in a system of continued white racial dominance, whose effects can clearly be seen, for instance, in the disproportionate numbers of Latin@s and African Americans in prison. ((Tim Wise’s book provides further details that lay bare the inequalities resulting from such dominance, such as white Americans’ disproportionately lower rates of imprisonment for drug use than other parts of the population, in spite of this group’s being able to boast a higher percentage of drug users among them than is the case for other races. The work also points to systemic inequalities that target racialized minority groups besides Latin@s and African Americans.)) Such stereotypes also appear in subtler ways, like the recent New York Post cartoon and fiasco in which people debate whether the image, because it is no longer an overtly racist moniker, can still be deemed racist. ((The reluctance to deem the cartoon racist also circles around the way that the label “racist” tends to be a conversation stopper instead of the conversation-starter it was meant to be. In a recent speech, Attorney General Eric Holder called the people of the United States “cowards” for their unwillingness to confront race. New York Times’ editorialist Charles M. Blow criticizes Holder’s comments on the basis that calling people cowards does not make them willing to talk to you; it just makes them defensive. Numerous people of color have made similar statements about the “r” word; don’t call people racist because then they just get defensive and refuse to change. Confronting aspects of what John L. Jackson, Jr. has called de cardio racism in his recent book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, Holder challenges all the people of the U.S.A., not just white Americans, to confront the issue of race straight on and have the guts to talk about these aspects of de cardio (internal matters of the heart that hide beneath the surface) racism, those parts of racial discourse and practice that can only be read between lines and beneath the surface because political correctness has eliminated most surface racism and made many Euro-Americans terrified of being called prejudiced, as Blow elucidates in his own essay. Jackson suggests, as my own experience does, that in fact the only way forward in confronting de cardio racism is through close personal relationships that require courage. We must be willing to confront racism in our friends, who must get over their fear of being called racist. We must be willing to confront racism in our own minoritized communities and ourselves, and not just internalized racism against ourselves. Latin@s, for instance, need to confront racism toward African Americans. Why, for instance, is the only significant African American character in Ugly Betty, played by Vanessa Williams, also a major villain (even if she has a better rounded character in the most recent season)? Too often comments like Holder’s focus on the relationship between white and black America without consideration of other communities, like Native Americans who are so painfully absent in Holder’s comments, even if his comments address black history month. All communities need to respect and listen to the racial quagmire confronting all groups. These groups should also confront additional questions of privilege like class and heteronormativity. We must have the courage to remain committed to friendships with people who do not always make things easier for us, but who challenge us most of all when we lie to ourselves.

)) Recent research on the subconscious connection of “apes,” African Americans, and police violence propose that racialized programming, with deep roots in U.S. history, continues at a deep level among people of all racial-ethnic backgrounds and political inclinations.

I write this editorial not solely out of concern that Beck and other Euro-Americans think that Obama’s election means we can stop talking about race. I also fear that those of us who hail from minoritized backgrounds have internalized racism 2.0. Many of us need to query the privileges we have had in life, but we also need to examine the ways we have internalized negative stereotypes about ourselves from dominant culture. I, for one, continue to perceive myself through the Dubois’ double-consciousness, ever concerned about my measurements according to others’ tape, feeling my plural identities ((I have at least two warring and at times complementary identities, maybe more since I am a woman, a gender category that carries its own double-consciousness, and my racial and ethnic identities are not neatly circumscribed by U.S. racial terminology.)) ever unreconciled. This internalized racism also means that I never learned to feel, truly, that such double-consciousness is my strength and not my shame. Following some arguments in John L. Jackson’s recent book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, I have been unwilling to own my paranoia around matters of race in personal and public life as justified. While confronting new and complex racial realities, realities that cannot be adequately addressed through pre-civil-rights-era terminology, I, too often, fear that I misread and over-react. At the same time, in these trying economic times, I wonder if I can actually get a job given my “strangeness,” my ethnic and other non-ethnically specific behavioral deviations from established cultural norms. And the big question, if I do get a job, is it because of my skill set and unique abilities, or is it simply because my last name helped an institution fill a quota?

That those of us from historically dominated groups still must wrestle with racism 2.0, especially around the question of affirmative action, was made apparent to me in the weeks following Obama’s election. On November 20, 2008, I watched an episode of the television show Ugly Betty, “When Betty Met YETI.” Ugly Betty, a U.S. interpretation of a Latin American telenovela, centers around Betty Suarez, a young assistant to the editor-in-chief of the fictional fashion magazine, Mode. While the show has been known to confront challenging issues artfully, in “When Betty Met YETI,” the heroine decries the inhumanity of affirmative action.

At the beginning of the episode, Betty learns of the existence of the “Young Editors’ Training Initiative” (YETI). This course of seminars is a key career stepping stone. Betty decides to pursue admission to YETI, though she only learns of it two days before the deadline. As it turns out, the heroine must compete for a spot in YETI against fellow Mode assistant, and gay Euro-American, Mark (because heaven forbid she should compete against an unambiguously privileged white heterosexual male). While Betty gives a strong presentation in her interview for YETI admission, everything about Mark’s application strikes the viewer as significantly better than Betty’s. Where she only supplies a cover and a letter from the editor, Mark creates an entire magazine, featuring articles contributed by famous columnists. When YETI admits Betty over Mark, she goes to comfort him, but he informs Betty that she was only admitted because she is Latina and fills a quota. Later in the show, Mark hopes she doesn’t think he is a racist for having said this, and the viewer is made to feel that what he said was completely reasonable and obvious. Then, YETI confirms for Betty that they only admitted her because she was Latina. ((YETI”s acknowledgment surprised me because, unless I have applied to a program that specified a desire strictly for under-represented applicants, I have never had anyone admit so plainly that I received anything for filling a quota. I have, however, had plenty of colleagues hint at such an agenda, claiming that I have had advantages they were denied because of their blinding whiteness. I have had white male colleagues tell me I have a better shot at getting a job than they do because I have affirmative action 2.0 working in my favor, but they never doubt that they deserve a job more than I do, or question whether all Euro-Americans who receive good jobs necessarily earned them.))

Tortured by this revelation of her quota-filling prowess, Betty decides to withdraw from YETI so that Mark can have her spot. ((This is another leap from my reality; I have never been admitted to a program and then been enabled to name my replacement if I withdrew.)) Betty’s father, Ignacio, provides a short litany of the discrimination he experienced for being Mexican, and ultimately he concludes that if they want to give Betty something because she is Mexican, she should take it. ((I, unlike the producers, happen to agree with Ignacio that this is the least YETI can do to compensate for all the times people at Mode have insulted her father’s cuisine.)) Betty, however, prefers YETI to want her for who she is, not because of some arbitrary system that picks her just because she is Latina. Fair enough, the experience of what I dub affirmative action 2.0, the system of racial quotas that education and employers have wielded in response to the 1960s civil rights movements, can be incredibly painful. We would all prefer to be admitted and hired because we really are the best people around. Alas, we live in an unjust world that is not a meritocracy, and without affirmative action 2.0, Betty’s application would have been disregarded because it bore the name Suarez. For instance, a 2003 University of Chicago-MIT study found that people whose resumes bore equal qualifications but white-sounding names were 50% more likely to be called for an interview than people with black-sounding names. ((Project Implicit also studies our unexamined racial biases. It is worth everyone taking a trip to this site and taking these psychological tests. We may be surprised to discover the racial biases we hold inside.))

So Betty withdraws from YETI. In the end, however, her boss, the wealthy and well-connected Euro-American heterosexual man, Daniel Meade, pulls some strings. He speaks with the YETI board and manages to get Betty re-admitted alongside Mark. Betty has now become a recipient of what I term affirmative action 1.0 (or “old-school affirmative action”), the old boys’ network. Affirmative action 1.0 has no-doubt existed for countless generations; thus Plutarch partially admires ancient Sparta for its supposed elimination of nepotism, thereby criticizing Roman-style affirmative action 1.0. Affirmative action 1.0 is not a system that explicitly prevents members of minoritized communities from acquiring jobs and educational degrees. Instead affirmative action 1.0 assists the already well-connected in acquiring jobs and spots in schools because of whom they know and who their family is rather than through any merit-based analysis of their actual skill-set. ((Actually, another recent book suggests that post-civil-rights affirmative action is actually the era of affirmative action 3.0, and that the New Deal ushered in an era of affirmative action 2.0 that specifically helped Euro-Americans while denying assistance to minoritized communities. See Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.)) In the case of Ugly Betty and YETI,her wealthy and powerful (and not coincidentally Euro-American) boss likes her and pulled strings for her. Betty, who refused affirmative action 2.0, should be equally incensed that YETI would admit her just because of affirmative action 1.0. Here again, YETI admitted her not for the merit of her ideas but because of systemic practices whereby an admissions committee would be reluctant to deny wealthy and powerful Daniel Meade’s pushy request. Oddly, our heroine is no longer upset that YETI has no interest in her as Betty Suarez; rather, she is thrilled that Daniel supports her, and she happily takes a position received thanks to affirmative action 1.0.

What lesson should a Latina draw from watching such a television episode, especially cast in the light of an historic election, which supposedly, finally, signifies that those from non-dominant communities in the U.S. can do anything? Affirmative action 2.0 is, and always has been, an imperfect solution to an imperfect system. Yet affirmative action 2.0 always leaves recipients open to scapegoating. We have become accustomed to the label “affirmative-action case,” and naturally, someone at Ugly Betty wished there were some other way to navigate our uncomfortable reality. For most of my life, I have been riddled with self-doubt about whether I deserve what I have achieved. At the same time, I have watched a fairly talentless upper-middle-class “WASPy” heterosexual male slide easily into well-paying jobs and artistic gigs, without once questioning whether he really deserved them or if he was just an affirmative action 1.0 case, receiving appointments merely because of his privileged upper-middle-class white racial identity and family connections. Perhaps one of the main problems with affirmative action 2.0 is its failure to challenge the injustices of affirmative action 1.0, injustices which affect people from the lower middle classes, regardless of their racial background, just because they lack connections to the elite and powerful. ((Marc Lombardo in reviewing this piece also suggested that an advantage of affirmative action 2.0 for the dominant culture could be that affirmative action 2.0’s recipients constantly question whether they are good enough. Such self-doubt often pushes these recipients from minoritized communities to work harder than their non-affirmative-action colleagues.))

I understand that talented people genuinely believe they have earned better in life and are frustrated to see others receive accolades they think that they deserved. Affirmative action 2.0 allows many Euro-Americans to think that some minority kid unfairly took their spot, instead of pushing these Euro-Americans to question not only their own qualifications (did they really deserve that job; or has their privileged background led them to assume they deserved it?) but also the broader injustices of the world in which we live. In a discussion of the Gratz v. University of Michigan case, ((Jennifer Gratz sued the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor for a system of what she deemed unfair racial preference, which granted students from minority backgrounds extra points in their admission applications. This system, she contends, denied her a spot at her first choice university because it went to some non-white student with lower SAT scores. How she actually proved this is beyond me. Ultimately, the Supreme Court decided in her favor, 6-3. Naturally, I am in complete disagreement with Gratz and the then-Rehnquist court.)) however, Wise points out that while some students of color at the University of Michigan had lower test scores than Gratz did, over 1000 white students did as well. Her spot, if in fact she deserved one, was more likely taken by a white student whom the University of Michigan favored because of athletic ability or because s/he grew up in the wealthy Upper Peninsula (both categories also received extra points in the Michigan admissions process). ((The one worthwhile anti-affirmative action 2.0 question to pursue here might be, are there people of color in the wealthy Upper Peninsula who applied, and did they get double bonus admissions points? Affirmative action 2.0 undoubtedly needs to take up issues of class, still with a preferential option for minoritized communities who are still underserved even in comparison to their underserved lower middle class white families. Yet issues of class should factor into these considerations more as underprivileged poor Euro-Americans likewise lack access to affirmative action 1.0 and need systemic help. Jennifer Gratz, however, being from a middle-class family who could afford to sue the University of Michigan was not underprivileged in any way; thus my objections to the Supreme Court’s decision in her favor stand.)) Yet her anger was not directed at athletic or class preference, a class preference largely favoring those of Euro-American background. Her anger did not criticize affirmative action 1.0 as it was encoded into the University of Michigan admissions policies; her anger was directed at affirmative action 2.0 and the recipients from minoritized communities.

The assumption that we are more entitled to a spot at USC than an African American with slightly lower SAT scores has everything in the world to do with “privilege,” being privileged enough to nurture a sense of entitlement. Privilege allows one to challenge affirmative action 2.0 because its recipients are the underprivileged. I can only assume one refuses to challenge affirmative action 1.0 because its recipients are privileged, and one hopes to someday avail oneself of precisely affirmative action 1.0’s privileges. ((Privilege is also too complex to examine in this essay. Again, I direct readers to Peggy McIntosh or Tim Wise for further information on white privilege in particular.)) I certainly recognize that I had privileges over other Latin@s that enabled me to be where I am, and among these privileges are my fair skin and perfect standard English, privileges that allowed me to widen a door cracked open for me by the privilege of affirmative action 2.0. Yet my life is not everything I wanted. I have not received everything I have applied for. Why? Because that is life; we’re not all Susan Sontag or Albert Einstein. The Jennifer Gratz of the world need to make peace with the injustice of life just as much as I do, while fighting for a system that is fairer for everyone, and not just for our privileged selves. I would have respected Betty’s character more if she had turned down YETI’s position the second time because she did not want to receive affirmative action 1.0 either. I would have admired her for taking the position at YETI but saying I am going to use this affirmative action 1.0 now to make sure that no one is ever admitted for something other than their qualifications again.

Sorry, Will Smith, just because Barack Obama is president does not mean that other people in this country have no excuse for failing to achieve their dreams. How many people, black, white, or what have you, have had either the educational opportunities of Punahoe (Obama’s elite Hawaiian preparatory high school) or the sheer genetic good fortune to be as handsome and intelligent as Obama (or Smith for that matter)? Yes, the U.S.A. has made immense progress on what Jackson terms de jure and de facto racism. ((According to John L. Jackson, Jr. in Racial Paranoia, de jure racism is racism “of law”; that which is rooted in and can be rectified by law. De facto racism is racism “of fact”; that which is obvious and easy to name, which differentiates it from de cardio racism. De cardio racism is racism “of the heart,” that which transpires beneath the surface, between the lines, and that which we hide even from ourselves. Racial paranoia exists in our new post-political-correctness racial age where much racism is a matter of de cardio racism, a racism that irks and evokes suspicion but cannot be named. Its elusiveness gets treated as license to pretend it no longer exists, and the post-racial epithet responds precisely to the perpetuation of de cardio racism, that which lies at the heart of continuing racialization. We must all own our racial paranoia and work on de cardio racism if we are ever to be truly “post-racial.”)) Still, real systemic inequalities persist, and all of us still wrestle with de cardio racism, the racism that transpires in our hearts and that we hide from the world and often from ourselves. Affirmative action 2.0 sought to redress some of the inequalities that pervade our racially contorted system, but yes, it is an imperfect solution. The imperfections of this approach do not mean, though, that we have the luxury of throwing it out the window. Ugly Betty over-simplifies the complexities of affirmative action 2.0 while favoring the even more unfair unwritten policy of affirmative action 1.0. If a show supported by prominent Latin@s can propagate such a simplistic narrative, then those of us who can speak complexly about race have much work before us. Sorry, Glenn Beck, but just because affirmative action 2.0 made it possible for enough people of color, including President Obama, to take advantage of affirmative action 1.0 does not mean the work of affirmative action 2.0 is complete or that we can stop talking about race and racism.

By Jacqueline Hidalgo | The post We Don’t Live in Postracial America Yet appeared first on The Public Sphere.

A group of well-meaning Christian students asked their mostly non-religious friends: “What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word ‘Christian’?” The answer: “Fear and hatred.” The non-religious friends did not hate Christians, but many of them did assume that Christians demand a litmus test of political, moral, and social beliefs and practices to reveal who deserves God’s love. These Christians’ non-religious friends view such a test as a gateway to bigotry. For their part, the Christians found that they, too, shared some of the same concerns about Christian litmus tests and bigotry. Their friends’ beliefs also raised another question for the Christian college students: what is the church doing that paints Christians as fearful and hateful? Perhaps, if they discovered the answer to this question, then they should apologize for 2,000 years of wrongs done by the church.

So, this group of mostly Protestant students decided to spend a year asking this question about millennia of church failures, a program that they jokingly called the “Mea Culpa campaign.” Their operation included a film series, focusing on “current church failures.” Fundamentalism topped their list of church failings, followed by anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia.

The campaign featured films for each topic, followed by an open-ended discussion, not contrived or controlled. The Christian college students were not interested in changing their friends’ minds. Rather, they wanted to give their non-religious friends a forum in which to express why they view Christians in such a negative light. And I, their college chaplain, watched as the conversation unfolded.

The students chose several films including Jesus Camp. One film they chose was Amen, which focused on a German SS officer and a Catholic priest, both of whom attempted to expose secret concentration camps to the Vatican. The Vatican, however, refused to speak out. The Protestant Christian students reacted with shock, horror, and grief to a part of church history of which most of them had never heard before that night. Also present at the film screening of Amen was a member of the newly formed Hillel chapter and members of the Catholic Newman club. These students nodded sadly at the Protestant students’ reaction, for they were aware of this particular church failure. “We had always blamed the Nazis,” said one Protestant, “but we did not understand the role the church played, or refused to play.”

The Jewish student talked a lot about how the Holocaust affected her family. At first, the others listened, and then the discussion went off on several tangents. The meeting ended on a positive note of shared horror and new friendships. At the end of the evening, I thought the viewing of Amen and the discussion was a success. But then, I realized that this film’s focus on genocide made it too easy to agree with the church’s failure. Clearly, the murder of six million people is wrong, whether the players were passive observers or active participants.

Overt evil is easy to discuss. It’s banal evil that is hard to acknowledge. And you can’t confess to a sin until that sin has been acknowledged. Churches spent the rest of the twentieth century acknowledging the sins of genocide. However, in her writings, Hannah Arendt, who witnessed the trials against the Nazis, wrote about how the Nazi war criminals resisted acknowledging that their boring, nine-to-five office jobs of record keeping or laboratory work on the use of chemicals in the gas chambers had actually been evil. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt chronicles the wartime activities and trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he was only doing his bureaucratic job as a transportation logician. But his “job” led to the death of millions in the Shoah. Likewise, in a scene from the movie, Amen, the German SS officer explained the ratio between the amounts of chemicals needed and how the right combination of chemicals would quickly kill a certain number of people. In making this explanation, the SS officer was doing his job. However, the precision and efficiency required by his task masked the reality of how the ratio of chemicals he calculated meant the physical death of millions and the moral death of twentieth-century Christianity. While we know that gassing millions is wrong, the horrors of the genocide and the road to hell are often masked by dull organizational details like chemical ratios, and by the seemingly good intentions of clergy who look the other way to avoid the cargo trains and the stench from the gas chambers.

When I reflect on the sins of the church in events like the Shoah, sometimes I think we should apologize, not for being evil, but for being pathetically inert. The church leaders (not all, of course, but many) acted as if all were well while evil lurked beneath the surface of banal actions, like those of Nazi Christians. The church claims to represent love, but sometimes it does something in the name of love that seems evil (like baptizing slaves before they are sold). Even in the church’s exercise of evil, though, its greatest sin often occurs when it is simply being pathetic, being passive and complacent, unwilling to take action beyond a quiet moan.

The pathetic villains of the church are often not cast as passionate people with a cause. As in the case of Amen, Christian villains folded their hands, bowed gracefully, and looked in the other direction. Who would love the pathetic church member? Give us the passion-filled, albeit evil, witches of old! The recent success of the Broadway musical, Wicked, shows that society still loves the epic villains, like the wicked witch of the west, Drusilla, or Boris and Natasha. The obviously evil character is not pathetic—only passionate and misguided. The evil villain puts his or her entire heart and being into a cause, even if people get hurt in the process.

The pathetic villain, by contrast, follows orders, keeps the accounting straight, and does so with very little thought or passion. The evil villain accomplishes something intentionally. The pathetic villain accomplishes nothing on purpose. Perhaps by accident, the pathetic villain does some damage, like blowing the seeds off a dandelion, only to find, like in Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, that a civilization could be destroyed by a simple puff. Except for his or her cause, the evil villain almost looks like a brave soul. The pathetic villain is ultimately a coward.

This cowardice of the church was explored in the third installment of the “Mea Culpa campaign,” an independent documentary, Traces of the Trade. It looked at how one family received its wealth and privilege from the nineteenth-century North-American slave trade. The lucrative slave trade strategy of rum traded for slaves who were used to harvest sugar to make molasses used to make rum to be traded for slaves was skilled and successful commerce in its era. The banal, but carefully executed trade of rum, slaves, and molasses, however, also led to the torture of millions of human beings, and undermined the long-term economic advancement of generations of African American families.

In the documentary, family members of the slave trader were horrified and heartbroken over the revelation of the sources of their family’s wealth. Many attempted to rectify the wrong of slavery through social action or consciousness-raising activities. While I admire them for this, I still have to get up every morning and sort through how much of this legacy of slavery still affects my family and me. I think of how many of my family members are still in poverty, even though they may have attended college. The dandelion seeds have been blow away, and generations of slavery cannot be undone, especially if present action is still undertaken with pathetic cowardice. At best, I have always viewed civil-rights advances, not so much as overcoming one of history’s greatest evils, but more as stripping away the illusion of white superiority from the emperor’s back and declaring him to be a naked, pathetic fool.

Although the family profiled in Traces of the Trade tried to discuss reparations, or compensation for slavery to the descendants of African American slaves, the old conversation faltered in the face of a staggeringly long legacy. In the film, the family members asked the lone African American who was in their midst, about her feelings. She was actually one of the filmmakers, and had not planned on appearing in the film. When the white family members asked her what she thought about racism, she said that she saw that many of her friends, including members of this privileged family, were good people. But many whites, she said, were cowards for not wanting to address the issue of racism.

While the film is less than two years old, the filmmaker’s thoughts about cowardice bear a striking similarity to US attorney general Eric Holder’s recent comments. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder said. “We, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.” His accusation seemed to have cleverly and thankfully stopped the old conversation on race, a conversation that has decayed from a struggle for gains in civil rights to the pathetic, self-congratulatory exercise it has been for the past twenty years. The old conversation on race has become an exercise in back-slapping, high-fiving, cheers against the racist white man and applause at liberal whites helping poor little brown children. We are in a new era; where majority culture advocates realize that justice must be more than just humanitarian aid. Perhaps Holder’s comment will move us away from the conversation on programs that put bandages on racism to a new dialogue about making real gains against racism in this twenty-first-century multicultural milieu.

I have spent years in discussions among Christians about the failures of the church to speak out against racism. Often, the participants in these conversations are well meaning. OK, now we all agree, racism is wrong, the emperor is naked. After that admission, however, nothing seems to change. I suspect this inertia is due to the fact that it’s more comfortable to call racism an overt evil; then, overt actions and overt villains can be blamed, but most of us never have to face the relationship between the minutiae of our daily lives and racism. Perhaps we will actually start rectifying the damage of racism if we address it as a banal or pathetic evil.

We all know evil when we see it, but pathetic-ness masquerades so well as quality, excellence, piety and holiness. Too often, some well-meaning person approaches us with a plan or a cause, and we even though we smell the scent of banality, we are convinced that the intent of the project is what makes it good. This allows us to ignore the damage that these pathetic actions cause to others. If racism is really going to be conquered, it will take more than a mantra of “we will overcome.” Perhaps we need a new mantra, something like “I will be transformed.”

To this end, the church will need a new confession. The church needs not to confess our sins as if we were as evil as Hitler, but to admit that our sins are as banal and cowardly as Eichmann’s. We should admit that, in our cowardice, we pass laws so that we can avoid the real change that should come to our hearts. We need to confess that all we do when we change laws in order to legislate being nice to everyone. Our conversations must pass beyond a mere gaping at racism’s damage. But before this happens, our nation’s collective heart needs to ache for the damage done by racism. Otherwise, we are doomed to do more damage while hiding behind the good liberal shield of acknowledging racism only when it is overt.

For the solution to racism, anti-Semitism, and all of the church’s failures is rooted in embracing the part of the Christian message that claims that love transforms the heart and makes it able to love one’s neighbor, family member, and enemy with the same passion. For if the church had been doing this, it would have avoided committing most of its sins over the past two millennia. And until the hearts of Christians are transformed through the process of confessing to racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, or whatever “ism” that is fueled by the passive sins of omission, all the church will ever be is a bunch of cowards. Until people’s hearts are transformed through the process of confessing and acknowledging racism, nothing will change.

By Valerie Bailey | The post The Church Needs a New Confession: Pathetic-ness as Moral Failing appeared first on The Public Sphere.

I eat mud 
when sun doesn’t shine
and
eyes, mine like seas, busk
heavy with the sadness of every season at winter.

To cheer me up
they use illumination therapy and melatonin, carefully ionized air,
but I tell them nothing

of what I cannot speak: that I eat mud
because I can’t swallow this thick rain peacefully,

that I understand leafless branches’
sorrow
having managed to exist
past frost.
And though you may see me snow-balled and laughing
I am not

unafraid of the tragedy and change
so terrifically embodied by this moribund
post-autumnal haze!

But would be loved
and even if am

am not.

For I speak not of mothers, neither of fathers nor siblings
other
do I speak.

The sweet ambiance of well grown seasons means everything to me.

I would go where weather still exists
and cease 
to
cease.

2.

I thrive through the ebullient seasons 
made of light
and redolence, and the hypnotizing dusts
of flight

through brilliance and dander, 
and wet green smells
of water 
circulating through healthy bark
of trees 
in blossom     and
even the rain then

fall down onto me
with the light!
into entirely everything 
at the same time
as i scoop
from the torrent 
so many changing, wonderful beings;
cupping my hands, my whole body, into a biblical ark
and am not alone then, in those moments never without you 
Helios, Apollo, Utu, Ra,
Mithras, Phoebus, Horus,
Sol

in our sun-spangled atmosphere 
of meaning 
flowing for what feels
this time to surely

be the long awaited eternity 
of peace

By Geoshino Ollscia | The post Elsewhere appeared first on The Public Sphere.

What exactly is this relationship between big hair and handicapped animals in American society? The bigger your hair, the more likely you are to share your life with a domesticated animal missing a limb. Case in point: the tripod canine hobbling around the pool at our motel in El Rio, Oklahoma and his owner, the motel”s proprietress, a big-haired, faux blonde with acrylic nails.

This dog reminds me of Jesus. We”re swimming on a summer night. All the heat trapped in the air enhances the dark blue of the night sky in such a way that lighter objects seem to glow in contrast. This dog is such an object. His sandy and grey flecked body shines against the swelling blue Oklahoma night. He seems heavenly.

And he whimpers. Whimpering does not preclude heavenliness. Jesus wasn”t all shimmer and gilt. He cried out on the cross. He wanted out. This dog wants out. He hobbles around the pool, translucent and crying. His owner, the motel”s proprietress, leans against a stucco wall and releases cigarette smoke into the blue night. She wants out.

We left Atlanta at 7 o”clock that morning. Fourteen hours later we”re a few miles west of Oklahoma city, at this motel, in this swimming pool. Our destination, San Francisco, is twenty-five hours away. Tomorrow night at about 9:30, after having just crossed into California at Bakersfield, we will make the decision to drive through the night. But tonight, we stop. It”s hot, we”re dirty, we swim, the dog whimpers, the big-haired, faux-blonde smokes. I get out of the pool.

☙

I”m laying in the street, bleeding. I”m at the intersection of 2^nd and Market at a red light. People with power–power ties, power suits, and power pumps–step over me as they traverse the crosswalk, moving north-to-south and south-to-north on their way to and from power lunches. A group of homeless men on the corner in a drumming circle begin chanting, “ouch, that hurt, ouch that hurt” over and over as they beat on their plastic buckets. I pick up my bike and my body, pretending that I am not in pain. Two minutes earlier I had no idea that my bike would capsize if I rode on top of the streetcar tracks. The light turns green, I mount my bike and ride down Market Street with the fervor of someone who knows exactly what she is doing.

I hit the next light green and cut over to Sansome, beginning my climb into Pac Heights. I think this is the best way into Pac Heights. Today is only my second day as a bike messenger; next week I will learn how to loop around the Embarcadero and enter Pac Heights from the north. At this moment, the most power I have in my life resides in my legs. My right leg is slightly numb and bleeding. I hate having a job. This is the sixth job I”ve had in eighteen months. I will have one more before I move to Utah. My parents think there”s something wrong with me. “Honey,” they say, “you have been beautifully educated, why can”t you get a real job?”  Because I enjoy sitting on a bench along the Embarcadero at 8:30 in the morning, watching the pigeons twitter and pick, watching the homeless unfurl from their blankets and cardboard boxes, watching the standing traffic on the Bay Bridge, waiting for my dispatcher to call me with a pick-up. I prefer my life this way.

I arrive at the graphic design office where the drawings are to be delivered. The receptionist is old and fat. Her glasses are thick and large, covering her cheeks. A knotted chain dangles from the sides of her glasses. She has smeared makeup all over her face, perhaps to conceal her deeply etched wrinkles, and she smells like the Clinique counter at a suburban mall. I hand her the tube of drawings from my bag and ask to use the restroom. “I”m sorry,” she whines, “our restroom is for employees only.”  I turn and leave, still bleeding.

☙

The Canon to the Ordinary just fired me. He called me into his office, an office blanketed in plush green carpet, an office with two wingback chairs in one corner and an expansive mahogany desk in the other, an office much larger than the Bishop”s office. He sits behind the desk, instructing me to take a seat in one of the wingbacks, a good ten feet away from him. “This just isn”t working,” he tells me. “It”s just not working out,” he clarifies. I don”t tell him that ordering the Bishop”s coffee and tea supplies is not a good use of my “beautiful education.”  I don”t tell him that the only thing I like about my job is riding the cable car to and from work. I don”t tell him that I think he treats his secretary like crap. And I don”t tell him that two weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago, I gave my two weeks notice, meaning today, the day he is firing me, is, technically, my last day. I sit and listen to him yell. I turn in my keys and leave.

I walk across the Close to the Cathedral. Grace Cathedral sits atop Nob Hill, right along the California cable car line. Grace draws crowds; tourist and locals come to see the stones, the stained glass, the doors, the Bishop himself, but mostly they come to walk The Labyrinth, a maze to spiritual enlightenment, first designed by the Catholics in Chartres. Grace has two Labyrinths:  one carved onto the stone of the Close, and the other, a velvety carpet model, sits in the Cathedral”s nave. I have never walked The Labyrinth, and I do not do so today. Today, I cry.

I sit in a pew and cry.

The B.V. M. stares at me. I am sitting beneath her. The Window of the Annunciation shines down on me: Gabriel bestows God”s message on an overjoyed virgin. I have nothing. This is what I think. I quit my job and was fired from my job. Unemployment does not scare me; losing my health insurance scares me. Zoloft, my antidepressant of choice, costs $93 a month for a subclinical dose. I am on a subclinical dose. The Rev. Gwyneth Murphy breezes past my perch beneath The Annunciation. I recognize her from a staff cocktail party. She wears a 2″ clerical collar. Most female priests in the Episcopal Church wear the 1″ collar. Three years from now, she will work at St. Mark”s, the Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City, and I will live 2 blocks away. I get up and leave.

☙

After our swim, Jonathan and I decide to get some food. Not being familiar with the local cuisine in El Rio, we end up at Denny”s. We think it”s better to know in advance that our food will be bad rather than hope for something fantastic and regional, only to be disappointed and disgusted. I have no idea that San Francisco will disgust and disappoint me and that, after two years, I will leave it for Utah.

I want an omelet. It arrives and the waitress, attuned to our travel fatigue and noticing, perhaps from my short hair and Jonathan”s tongue ring, that we are not local, asks where we”re headed. San Francisco. “On I-40?” she asks. Yes, on I-40, straight through Texas. “Be careful in Groom-there”s a speed trap there. Also, right outside Groom is the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. It”s beautiful.”  She smacks her gum, slaps the bill on the table, and turns on her heels.

☙

It is the summer of clergy deaths. In addition to ordering the Bishop”s coffee and tea supplies, one of my duties in the Diocesan Office is to make and send out clergy death announcements. Clergy death announcements are postcards, a somewhat questionable generic decision given the postcard”s message. But I do not dispute the use of postcards; I simply make them. At first, I try to have fun with the assignment, crafting in large, obnoxious text: “Dear Clergy, Hey!  What”s up?  Weather”s great, wish you were here…all of you except the Rev. Bill Riley “cuz that motherfucker bit the dust!  Have a good summer. Love, The Diocese of California.“

Marilyn Belove is an exacting person. She has been the Bishop”s secretary for five years; before that she worked as the Canon”s secretary, but she fell in love with him. The Canon to the Ordinary dealt with the situation by firing her. The Bishop hired her. Her new desk sits right outside the Bishop”s office door and right outside the Canon”s office door. Her new desk is one foot to the right of her old desk. As the Bishop”s secretary, she has the same paper weights, paper clip dispenser, sticky notes, mousepad and file tabs as she had as the Canon”s secretary. And she swoons every time the Canon walks by in his dark cleric suit, tortoise shell glasses, and wavy blond hair.

Marilyn studies the language on my postcard. “Beautiful,” she says. I have used my father”s favorite words in the Book of Common Prayer for my third batch of clergy death announcement postcards: “a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming.”  Marilyn asks me if these words need to be italicized. It”s a nice touch, I tell her. I”ve made 400 of them, I tell her. “Yes, but they”re all different sizes,” she replies, holding up a clump of oddly-sized postcards. I”m not good with the paper cutter, I tell her. “They need to be fixed,” she says, “they all need to be exactly the same size.”  They”re fine, I say. Marilyn spends the next two hours trimming the edges of 400 clergy death announcement postcards. I hop on a cable car and go home. Tomorrow I will give my two weeks notice.

☙

Lynnie is skeptical. Lynnie, a forty-something lesbian with hairy legs, blue spiky hair, and an unlit cigarette somehow suctioned to her lower lip, is reading my resume. My over-education concerns her. “You could do anything you wanted. Why exactly do you want to be a bike messenger?” she asks me. I”m not sure what to tell her. I like to ride my bike and wish for the chance to be caught by the Bay, to take a peek on my way up a hill and see the vast grey waters spread out before me. Seeing water on my way up a hill surprises me. I tell Lynnie that I just want to try something different.

She hires me with the warning that I had better not “fucking flake out” after six months. I quit after two because the surprise of the water is no longer enough. A swinging taxi cab door throws me over my handlebars in Portrero casino Hill. A Marin Country widow drives right over me on Van Ness. Another messenger slams into me on Battery. I take down a pedestrian on Montgomery. January and February, the months that I worked, are San Francisco”s wettest. Eight hours a day I skim along the surface of downtown streets, blinded by fog and unrelenting rain. Gortex begins to retain water after two hours of uninterrupted exposure. My forearms get the wettest in the rain. And it”s hard to see the Bay through the burdened clouds.

☙

On one side of the Texas stretch of I-40 are signs which read, “Caution: Hitchhikers May Be Escaped Convicts,” and on the other is, as our waitress at Denny”s promised, the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere. But what our waitress at Denny”s in El Rio, Oklahoma didn”t tell us is the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere is surrounded by about twelve respectably sized statues of Jesus, each one depicting the Son of God in various poses of distress. There”s “Standing-Up-Tall-Jesus” who, despite his erect posture, sports a look of mournful foreboding. This statue is followed by “The Back-Bent Paschal Lamb” in which our Lord and Savior appears somewhat stooped. Next is “The-Word-Made-Flesh-at-90…Degrees,” a concrete masterpiece, immortalizing Jesus”s flexibility. This forward-falling motif progresses through the rest of the statues and culminates in the final statue, “The Collapsed Christ,” in which the Messiah lays prostrate at the foot of the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere. I think about the whimpering, heavenly dog at the motel.

☙

We live in a bad neighborhood. Women have broken beer bottles over one another”s heads in the street. DEA snipers have staked-out on our roof. There”s a woman with wiry hair shooting from her head who wanders around half-dressed, screaming. She screams things like “bitch, get your black ass back to Oakland” or “I ain”t yo” niggah, niggah.”  Sometimes, she carries a one-armed doll and swings it to accent her screaming.

I am under the kitchen table, screaming at Jonathan. Get down, I tell him. Turn off the lights and get down. He tries to tell me it was a firecracker. I know it”s gunfire because I saw the man running down the street firing the gun. Was his shirt yellow or grey?  Forty-five minutes later, when the police officer asks, I can”t remember. He asks me at approximately what time did I see this man?  I tell him 8:40.

Jonathan and I crawl on our bellies into the living room. The lights are out. We climb on the couch, peek over the back of the couch and out the window. DeMarco Jenkins lays face-first on Buchanan Street. A woman in pink flips him over. Jenkins is twenty-one years old and does not live in my neighborhood. He has a beautiful Afro-it is voluminous and thick and flecked with fresh blood.

☙

The espresso machine is temperamental. I explain this to Jean-Jean, a fashion design student on exchange from Belgium, because he is laughing at my apron. It looks like a Jackson Pollack original, done in java. I just made a double cap dry for the testy gay man who lives down the street and, as usual, the machine exploded, pelting me with ground espresso. Jean-Jean thinks this is funny. He orders a Magritte.

The Magritte is my favorite, to eat and to make. I have a weakness for Nutella. The batter sizzles on the crepe wheel as I quickly chop a banana. I flip the crepe over and wrestle with the Nutella; it is thick and solid and resists being spread over the warm crepe. But soon it melts, giving in to the demands of my wrist and forearm. I add the banana, fold everything up, dress it with powered sugar and whipped cream, and hand it to Jean-Jean. I am drunk and I am stoned and I have made another beautiful crepe.

When my shift ends, I drive to Oakland to see my girlfriend. We spent a great deal of our time having sex-in the bed, in the bath, on the kitchen floor, in organic supermarket parking lots. My girlfriend takes fourteen pills a day because she is a bi-polar, borderline, OCD, dyslexic, anorexic self mutilator. In three months, she will light herself on fire and I walk out of her life forever.

☙

It”s three a.m. and we are, for the second time in as many days, at Denny”s. Jonathan hands me the car keys. It”s my turn. In the past ten minutes, I”ve had three cups of coffee and five cajun chicken fingers. We are sitting at the counter. Denny”s is doing good business in the middle of the night; many of the booths are full, even if only with one person. Our waitress, with a ponytail and bangs, smiles at me every time she tops off my coffee. We leave her a good tip.

The Mojave Desert is dark at 3 a.m. There are no streetlights along the highway, nor are there any reflectors along the lane lines. I”m guessing. Jonathan is curled asleep against the window, clutching a pillow. The pillowcase, a yellow and orange array of floral patterns, is the brightest thing I can see. I sing Madonna to stay awake. I yell Madonna to stay awake: “Borderline. You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.”  Three and a half hours later, I tell Jonathan it”s his turn. The sun starts to come up over the hills of San Mateo County, and my pupils are so dilated from caffeine that I can”t squint enough to keep out the light.

By Hope Miller | The post Magritte: The True Story of a Road Trip’s Aftermath appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Consider that classic movie genre, the romantic comedy. It is the adult version of a fairy tale. But how many do we have to watch before we start to believe that some part of them must be based in truth? My guess is, really, not that many. When you consider how many different romantic comedies are out there telling the same basic story with minor variations, well, some of it must be true sometimes, right?

Yeah, right.

The fact is that it’s not as easy to stay grounded as we might think. Psychologists in Great Britain have been studying the effect of romantic comedies (rom-coms) on people’s interpersonal relationships. They’ve found that fans of romantic comedies tend to have unrealistic expectations when it comes to their own romantic lives. Sex should always be perfect, and if you were meant to be together, your partner should know what you want without having to be told. After all, that’s how it works in the movies. And when people have been watching these things since early childhood, they start to accept some elements as real, however unconsciously. That is what makes these movies so perilous.

There is a well-known and accepted formula at work in romantic comedies. The main characters must be relatable and appealing, there must be obstacles to their union, and those obstacles must be overcome so that they can get together at the end. The stories are predictable, light, and funny. It’s a formula that predates Shakespeare, and it’s been executed in dozens of variations since the invention of motion pictures. It works, but with occasional exceptions, the rom-com pretty well peaked as a film genre years before I was born.

Of course, there will never be another Philadelphia Story or Roman Holiday. Hollywood’s recent attempts at remaking classics (1995’s Sabrina and last year’s The Women come to mind), only prove its ability to water down even the strongest source material. And with so many changes in gender dynamics in the past few decades, not to mention shifting taboos and advancing communications technologies, this genre should evolve. The problem is that it hasn’t. If anything, it’s regressed. The basic formula is still there, but the characters have become stereotypes and caricatures. If I know exactly how a movie will end based on a thirty- second commercial, it’s safe to say that the storylines are beyond merely predictable. The fun, then, should come from watching it play out, the witty dialogue, the sparkling chemistry, the will-they-won’t-they, and how far will he or she go to attain the inevitable happy end. But very rarely does anyone evolve beyond the designated type. The dialogue is generally flat and predictable. At most, the audience gets a few standard pratfalls or moments of painful awkwardness.

Take, for example, Renée Zellweger’s most recent offering, New in Town. Chances are good that I will never see this movie. Not just because it got terrible reviews, since bad reviews won’t keep me away from any film that I really want to see. Rather, my opinion was sealed on my first viewing of the trailer. New in Town is a standard fish-out-of-water-falls-for- local-yokel format. Fine. But are we supposed to believe that a high-powered ambitious female executive takes on an assignment in the boonies without doing any sort of research, least of all checking the weather before getting on the airplane? She’s sophisticated and a bumbling idiot. She’s a mix of caricatures that real women are supposed to be able to relate to. Is it any wonder this film bombed?

After all these years and all of these cultural and economic shifts, Hollywood still does not give women credit for being thinking, independent consumers. Judging from the rom-coms that have come out recently, Hollywood actually believes women to be completely mindless conspicuous consumers who will pay to look at anything pretty and shiny. When we don’t, they turn around and say we don’t spend enough to justify their continued investment in female-targeted fare. Fortunately, the success of Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! have finally made the studios think twice about the power of the female wallet. Unfortunately, the results of those second thoughts are movies like Bride Wars and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which feature female characters who are brainless conspicuous consumers. I understand the challenge of fathoming the eternal question of what it is that women want. I don’t understand what’s so hard about doing a little quality control when you’re dealing with a proven working formula.

The romantic comedy’s primary purpose is, of course, to be profitable for whichever Hollywood studio produces it. Which means that, in practice, they are cinematic cotton candy–inoffensive, insubstantial, overly sugary treats that are enjoyable in the moment and then make you feel a little sick. We go to see them because we like the sweet fluffiness. It’s pure escapist fantasy. But I’m tired of feeling sick afterward. All I’m asking is that Hollywood not persist in insulting our intelligence. Plenty of clever writers and talented directors and charismatic actors float around in L.A. Let them be clever and show their talent and charisma. Over half a century ago, Charles Lederer and Howard Hawks, along with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, proved that you can have a completely implausible plot and still tell a great story in a fun, smart way. Fantasy doesn’t have to be stupid, and characters don’t have to be two-dimensional or stale.

In a world of Facebook, Twitter and iPhones, it should be so easy to explore the promises and pitfalls of modern technology that studios have no need to fall back on played-out conventions. I went to see He’s Just Not That Into You, thinking it might offer some comedic insights on the role of social networking and technology in the dating world. Beyond a line Drew Barrymore delivers that was featured in the trailer, though, the movie could have taken place at any point in the past thirty years. The central character is a slightly younger Bridget Jones on speed, desperately flinging herself at every potentially available guy. This is not a person with whom I am able to or wish to identify. The overall depiction of relationships is somewhat more realistic in this movie than most others that have come out in the last couple of years, but that’s not saying much. It’s a film based on a self-help book, for pity’s sake. The women are pathetically naive and completely neurotic, and the men are given license to exploit them. The fact that the movie has been so successful just speaks to the vacuum in the marketplace.

The only evolutionary trend I’ve noticed in the genre is a marked leaning toward men. Judd Apatow clearly deserves the credit for the recent introduction of the bromantic comedy to theaters everywhere. His take on the genre has nearly eliminated the need for female presence onscreen at all, while at the same time expanding the male audience. No coincidence there. For years, men have been complaining about their wives and girlfriends forcing them to sit through romantic comedies. Apparently, if you throw in a couple of fart jokes and make the leading man a stoner, guys will lap it up. Team Apatow has raised the status of the lovable loser in ways that John Hughes’s Farmer Ted and Duckie could never have imagined. The trend would seem to be culminating in the upcoming I Love You, Man, which is about a straight guy, in need of a best man at his wedding, who goes out looking for bromance. All I have to say about this is that there’s a reason the Duckies of the world didn’t get the girl. Relatable they may be, but sexy they are not. And, yes, I do resent men co-opting this traditionally female-targeted movie genre. Sure, Spicoli was hilarious, and while he might be the ideal bromantic partner, he is not the man of any girl’s dreams. Don’t men have enough movies targeted at them? We deserve our bit of market share. We also deserve a higher quality product for our money and time. If this genre is supposed to be about fantasy, loveable losers don’t cut it. Ostensible romantic comedies like Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall set up clueless, spineless slackers as the leading men. Is that supposed to be the romantic ideal for the twenty-first century? Call me old-fashioned, but I would much rather stay home and watch Cary Grant banter than pay to see Jason Segel’s bits.

My parents took me to see Lady and the Tramp when I was five years old. It was the perfect starting point for a lifetime of movie watching, especially for a little girl. All the elements are there: the beautiful, vulnerable heroine, the charming but flawed hero, an undeniable attraction, uncontrollable obstacles driving them apart, a handful of sidekicks for comic relief, some witty dialogue, a grand gesture, and a happy ending. I have no doubt that it and many similar films had something to do with my ideas about what life should be like. I still sometimes wish I could have a date half as romantic as Lady’s spaghetti dinner in that alley. Silly as the theory may seem, those British psychologists have a strong case. What we see on the big screen, especially when it’s set in familiar surroundings, probably does have an impact on our perceptions and expectations. So, when all that we see is superficial, generic and puerile, it can’t be good for anyone. The thing about Lady and the Tramp is that it’s smart and fun, and the characters all learn lessons and grow. It’s more than fifty years old and it’s a cartoon, but it has more realistic three-dimensional characters than anything Kate Hudson has starred in lately. It’s bad enough for people to hold up romantic comedies in general as models for their own lives, whether they do it consciously or not. But if they’re basing their romantic expectations on current rom-coms, I fear for the future of our society.

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I am Indignant! Why Can’t Romantic Comedies Be Good Movies? appeared first on The Public Sphere.