This is from the year of my Boomer birth (note how I capitalize here -- try it sometime), 1961. This exemplifies what some might call a "high-functioning culture."
When y'all look up from your TikTok videos long enough to consider how to write a piece of music in 7/4 time -- much less how to dance to a piece of music in 7/4 time -- come get me so I can see what you've come up with. I'll be having a cocktail . . . legally.
Showing posts with label stereotypes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stereotypes. Show all posts
Friday, November 08, 2019
ok gen z
Monday, April 10, 2017
Dude tried to make Jesus a fool. Just made hip-hop uncool.
There are worse things than the Dinner Theater for Jesus ditties of Marty Haugen. You have to go to THIS extreme to get there, but get there you can.
The only thing I can say for this is "Rayvon" didn't call himself a "Jesus Wigga." But with this level of stereotypical idiocy, I'm not sure it would have been any more offensive if he had.
Not heard in the video: God, Jesus, Resurrection, Crucifixion, Sacrifice, Grace, Passover, Redemption, Christ, Christian, Sin, Forgiveness, Heaven, Hell, Life, Death or Love.
He can't even bring himself to utter the word "church." That's just as well.
This could be the only church (or at least the only one in Bel Air, Maryland) where you walk in as Homer Simpson and walk out as Beavis or Butthead (maybe both) -- followers, no doubt, of a feckless deity seemingly more ridiculous than yourself.
THE GREAT Southern (and Catholic) writer Flannery O'Connor once said that a God you understand is less than oneself. I fear that any God -- or, more accurately, god -- that "Rayvon" proclaims as his Primo Playa logically would be forced to damn himself to hell.
What a thing to achieve in the name of relevance but not necessarily righteousness -- a "gathering" of goddamn fools in the "swagtacula" name of a damn-fool god.
I think the term for insipidness such as this is "abomination of desolation." That's in the Bible . . . another thing, come of think of it, carefully avoided in da Gozpulshizzle uh Rayvon.
Which has managed to turn Jesus Christ -- He of "seeker-friendly" implicizzle but not revelizzle -- into something seemingly even tackier than Donald Trump.
Let the congregation say "Oy veh!" Or "Anathema sit." Whichever.
Friday, July 24, 2015
Ads that will embarrass y'all in 60 years
For the hell of it, I've been going through some mid-1950s editions of Television magazine, immersing myself into an archival wayback machine.
Trade advertising was fascinating then -- at least to me -- sometimes dry, sometimes cute, occasionally sophisticated . . . and too often, through the clarifying lens of 2015, horrifying.
Let's just say my little "wayback" exercise is a quick and effective manner of coming to grips with how a culture you were reared in -- and, frankly, didn't think much about at the time because people never see the forest for the trees -- actually was pretty horrifying in many ways.
IN THIS CASE, looking back at 1955 and 1956 through the lens of a television camera, we see a culture that was both deeply racist, quick to stereotype and completely hung up on the glories and nobility of "the Lost Cause." We see a culture dedicated to whitewashing (both literally and figuratively) its defining narrative and embracing an identity that you could sum up as They Who Give the Finger to the Yankees.
The South's past: Not forgotten because it's not really past.
Of course, to be fair. one Minnesota TV station had a trade ad touting itself via the ugg-a-mug stereotypical language of the American Indian, but you have to admit that the South set the standard for casual bigotry in the United States. We Southerners leave our subtlety at the door.
NOW, this has me thinking about matters not of the past but of the future.
My wondering goes something like this: When future generations of Americans -- or whomever -- look through the cultural output of post-millennial America, what things will horrify them that we hardly think about at all? Which of our cultural assumptions will testify against us and our age?
You know, sort of like watermelon-eating black children, branding yourself with the Confederate battle flag or the "gallantry" of Nathan Bedford Forrest?
Thursday, March 19, 2015
It's always 1939 in Ponchatoula
Because the South, because Louisiana, because rural Tangipahoa Parish, because the fraught racial history of the South, and of Louisiana, and of rural Tangipahoa Parish, I am pretty much speechless that this is the poster for the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival.
But here it is, going to a place Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima have never gone before. That place is Pickaninnyville.
According to a story in the Advocate, the south Louisiana daily newspaper, the creator of the poster drew upon the work of a late Ponchatoula artist known for his stylistic portrayals of rural blacks in the Deep South.
The festival board’s publicist Shelley Matherne told WBRZ that the painting for the poster was selected in an open contest in which two entries were submitted.WELL, THAT'S fair enough, and it would be pure knee-jerk speculation to say there was any malevolent intent on the part of the artist, Kalle Siekkinen, but I think it does show an abject cluelessness on the part of Siekkinen and festival organizers about the minefield that is race in the South.
“Art is subjective; there was no intent other than to pay tribute to the festival and the strawberry industry,” she said in a statement. “This is Kalle’s interpretation of a similar world-renowned local Ponchatoula artist, now deceased, who he drew his inspiration from.”
From what I can see of the late artist Bill Hemmerling's original work, the style of the poster is pitch-perfect in representing Hemmerling's style, but managed to hit all the wrong chords with the execution. It's rather like when Yosemite Sam tries to blow up Bugs Bunny with a booby-trapped piano.
Bugs hits the wrong note and lives. A frustrated Yosemite Sam, angrily showing Bugs how to correctly play the melody, hits the right note . . . and blows himself to bits.
WHO KNEW Yosemite Sam was from Ponchatoula?
I don't think it's the poster's use of African-American children is necessarily problematic, per se. It's just the little things in the artwork that turned it into something close to the perfect stereotype, and it's troubling that no one involved could see that. And that may well speak to deep-seated problems of culture and race that would merit a post unto itself . . . if not a very, very thick book.
If only the poster had depicted the kids in a different pose. If only the kids' skin wasn't absolutely, positively coal black -- which wasn't necessary to mimic a significant portion of Hemmerling's work. If only the little girl had a different hairstyle -- even just a little different, which might have been truer to Hemmerling's originals. If only the kids had been wearing hats, which would have been even truer to much of Hemmerling's paintings.
If only, if only, if only.
Even so, some folks still might have been offended. But it wouldn't have been so condescendingly, head-shakingly, "Holy crap!" stereotypical.
As it stands, the poster for the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival only could have been worse if it were for the Ponchatoula Watermelon Festival.
It says nothing good for Louisiana, or for the state of racial understanding in the South, that one is rather relieved that Ponchatoula doesn't have a watermelon festival.
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
A helicopter's-eye view of Nebraska
Just because people say something -- a lot -- that doesn't make it so.
Recently, cinematographers took to the skies over our piece of Flyover Country to show folks exactly how flat and boring is Nebraska -- not. So, if you're someone who always thought the state tree was a telephone pole, prepare for your world to be rocked in three . . . two . . . one. . . .
Action!
Monday, July 16, 2012
The South that raised me
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When I was a child, all of the South was like the Mississippi of this 1966 NBC News documentary, Mississippi: A Self-Portrait.
The only thing was that Mississippi was just a little bit more.
If we all waived Confederate battle flags -- we called them "Rebel flags" -- Mississippians waived them a little bit more. Especially during football season, for the University of Mississippi was (and is) home of the Ole Miss Rebels. Today, the name remains, though the flag and "Colonel Rebel" do not, and that transition was not an easy one for Mississippians.
If we all celebrated "moonlight and magnolias" and venerated "the Lost Cause," Mississippi celebrated and venerated a little bit more.
And if there was ugliness toward blacks -- we called them "Negroes" or "nigras" or "colored," and that's when we were trying to be nice -- or racial strife to be unleashed, Mississippians did what Southerners did back then. Just a little bit more fervently.
I was born in 1961. Mississippi: A Self-Portrait aired on NBC in 1966, when I was in kindergarten in Baton Rouge. Until 1970, I attended legally segregated elementary schools.
Welcome to my world.
WELCOME to my upbringing as the child of racist parents in a racist, racially segregated society, which represented the only way they knew how to live. Which represented, for a long time, the only world I ever knew.
If you know anything about the South today, watching this film will show you how far it's come in 46 years. If you know anything about the South today, you know how far it still has to go. You also know this: It gets complicated.
I was raised by white folk just like the white folk in this documentary.
You want to know the dirty little secret of that? The part that makes one both a victim and a perpetrator, brings one to the line where the difference between conscious and unconscious -- willfulness and reflexiveness -- gets . . . complicated?
It's this: Ivan Pavlov, of "Pavlov's dog" fame, was right.
Pavlov started ringing a bell whenever he fed his dogs. Soon enough, the dogs began to slobber at the ringing of a bell. We white Southerners of a certain age -- a great many of us -- were conditioned to slobber at the ringing of any number of bells, most of them cracked.
AND THAT'S what the Yankees can't take away -- what maybe even Jesus can't completely take away. We can learn morality. We can accept "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" in our minds and, indeed, even in our hearts.
We can do this. God Almighty compels us to do so; I know this. The force of our will enables us to at least attempt this.
But none of this takes away that goddamned -- God-damned, to be precise -- and devilishly cracked bell that a sick society started to ring in our ears the minute we popped out of our mamas' wombs. If we white Southerners of a certain age are honest, those of us who were neither born saints nor raised by them, we recognize that God-damned, subconscious half a second between some stimulus right out of 1966 (or 1956, for that matter) and the moral conscience that imperfectly informs our conscious mind in 2012.
Most white Southerners won't tell you that; I just did. Because that damning 1966 documentary about Mississippi -- about how old times there were not forgotten -- is pretty much how I was reared in south Louisiana back then. Hell, I remember when my eldest uncle died when I was a junior in high school (and I'm talking 1977 here), it was real important for my old man to find out whether the funeral home in Ponchatoula was "all-white."
The mortician eagerly assured him that, yes, it was. Another place in town was the "colored funeral home."
Because race mixing was (is?) an issue, even when you're dead as a doornail, sealed in a coffin and 6 feet deep in the good Southern soil.
WELCOME to my world, the one I cannot escape no matter how far afield of the South I might wander. The world that made my mind and haunts my heart. The world that gave so many of us that God-damned subconscious half second.
Meantime, make sure you go here (and that you watch the segments in order) to see how we're trying -- black and white alike -- to make sense of what made no damn sense at all, God help us.
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Monday, March 19, 2012
HBO and the 'New York n*ggers'
Pardon my French, but this happened, and I just need to tell it the way it was.
When my father died in May 2001, my most desperate wish was that Flannery O'Connor had been alive -- and there -- to help me (and, most especially, my Yankee bride) process the Southern Gothic fun house that once again surrounded us after many years in the Midwest.
There were many scenes Miss O'Connor could have offered her commentary on, but I'll just tell you about this particular one. It was a late spring evening in Baton Rouge, and we had gathered at Rabenhorst Funeral Home East -- my wife, my elderly mother and me -- for my dad's wake. Once again, for the first time in many years, the missus and I were engulfed in the barely controlled chaos that is my very large, very south Louisiana, very blue collar and very loud family.
We were standing in the front of the chapel, Daddy behind us in the casket. It was a wake, but it also was a family reunion, a potluck and a competition. If you're from where I'm from, you understand.
Anyway, we were there, and some cousins were there, and my Uncle (Deleted) had arrived a little while before. He is (Deleted) for a reason -- to protect the guilty. I owe family at least that much.
Uncle (Deleted) has a hang-up, you understand -- a not-uncommon one, which you'll see in a second. It's one my old uncle has held onto rather fiercely through the years.
After a short while, in came Uncle D., my mother's baby brother. And, no, I'm not naming him either. Always the, uh . . . eccentric, Uncle D. walked into the chapel -- down the middle aisle of the chapel -- looking like a white man's take on Huggy Bear, the black "street character" from the '70s cop show, Starsky and Hutch.
Uncle (Deleted), Mama's older brother, took one look at this spectacle -- and, remember, we were standing in the funeral-home chapel with my dead father six feet behind us -- and bellowed, "Boy, you look like a New York nigger!"
It was not a compliment.
Again, pardon my French. More importantly, pardon Uncle (Deleted)'s.
THE ABOVE video -- from "filmmaker" Alexandra Pelosi's journey to a Manhattan welfare line, as screened Friday on Real Time with Bill Maher -- is what Uncle (Deleted) was talking about. And just as Pelosi and Maher pointed out the previous week about "typical" Mississippi Republican voters, Pelosi made clear she "didn't have to go too far" in New York to find a critical mass of idiot, reprobate welfare mooches foursquare for President Obama in the coming election.
All but one were African-American.
Once again, I am not sure what Maher's or Pelosi's point is -- apart from "look at the freaks." Racists, idiots and welfare mooches exist. I'll alert the media.
And once again, I am not sure what they hoped to accomplish, apart from confirming coastal liberals' condescension toward white Southerners (Maher: "You didn't pick out these people, and they're not a microcosm of what was there.This is what everyone said to you") and, now -- despite the "context" -- white bigots' stereotypical convictions about the average black American.
I think the real message is from America's cultural elite -- via its compensated spokespeople, Bill Maher and Alexandra Pelosi -- to the country's obviously unenlightened hoi polloi. What they want us to know, I think, is that we should be grateful they allow the likes of us to intrude upon their country, and that they allow us to do so is a sign of their intellectual and moral superiority.
Or, to quote Ferris Bueller, “It's understanding that makes it possible for people like us to tolerate a person like yourself.”
YOU KNOW what, though? People like Maher and Pelosi are intolerable. What they're doing -- branding people as The Other and holding them up to ridicule -- is intolerable. Furthermore, it's dangerous. We've seen that throughout history.
It's intolerable that, after the dirty deed was done, Maher made vague excuses for the dysfunction of the black Other ("The black guy, his legacy is real, and the white guy in the South, his legacy is a chip on his shoulder") while offering none for the Mississippi Other. Fair is fair -- everybody has a story. Everybody has his reasons for doing what he does and believing what he believes, no matter how wrongheaded the behavior or belief.
What's most intolerable, however, is what people like Maher and Pelosi have done to television . . . and us. Again. I'll give you an example.
What seems a lifetime ago, as a kid in the Deep South, the only culture I knew was a profoundly racist, segregated one. There was no "N-word" euphemism in the working-class universe of Baton Rouge -- there was the universal "nigger." If my people were being polite, "colored" or "nigra."
In the world of journalism or in the polite, for-public-consumption conversation of the cultured classes, it was "Negro."
What made "nigger" possible was the widespread (white) acceptance that the kind of thing we saw on the Maher show Friday was the normal state of blackness in America. What made it possible was the cultural conviction that any evidence to the contrary was the exception, not the rule.
What also made it possible was the belief, constantly reinforced, that maybe you couldn't be completely sure about the exceptions.
That many black folks might, in most ways, be just like you was unthinkable. Just unthinkable.
But. . . .
In the 1960s and '70s, television began to challenge the segregated party line, expanding the narrow horizons of kids like me. It's no exaggeration, I think, to say that the network TV broadcasts of that era were to the South what Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America were to people behind the Iron Curtain.
We got to see Diahann Carroll in Julia, a black professional in an integrated world up North. We got to see Bill Cosby in I Spy. And Sidney Poitier on the movie of the week.
White kids like me were hooked on Room 222, this California vision of an integrated high school where coexistence was possible and a black man was a universally admired "cool" teacher -- a role model. It was no small thing that Room 222 prepared young minds for encounters with the real thing as integration slowly eroded the once-impermeable monolith of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
AND WHAT television can help bring together, it also can begin to tear asunder.
That's the business Maher and Pelosi are in. In it, they join much of the rest of our culture, for which "the Other" is the next big thing.
There is a Them, we all seem to agree, and they are out to take away your money, rights, security, culture . . . whatever, and everybody is somebody's Them. Maher's and Pelosi's particular Them -- as I said earlier -- seems to be anyone not as smart, well off or "enlightened" as people like themselves.
Next stop for America 2012 is Bosnia 1993.
No doubt Alexandra Pelosi will be there with her camera.
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Thursday, March 15, 2012
The world according to our cultural betters
When I was growing up in Louisiana, we had this saying -- "Thank God for Mississippi."
It wasn't because we were so in love with the Magnolia State next door. It's just that Mississippi saved us from being at the bottom of a lot of rankings.
Besides, cultivating dark humor is a hell of a lot easier than improving your state's sorry state of affairs.
Like I said, I grew up in the Deep South. I am of a certain age. And I know a lot of those folks in the snotty Alexandra Pelosi video above, aired last week on Bill Maher's HBO program.
No, I don't actually know those particular Mississippians, but I know 'em. You know?
WHAT I want to know, however, is how the well-known misogynist Maher and the lesser-known daughter of Nancy Pelosi think that video much differs from finding the biggest pieces of ignorant, obnoxious trash the ghetto has to offer and presenting them as a portrait of black America? Maybe we'll get to see -- that is, if Maher keeps his word, such as it is -- whether the 'hood does indeed get the Mississippi treatment.
What I'd also like to know is why anyone would want to pay for HBO when they can get Maury Povich, the Jerry Springer Show and The Steve Wilkos Show for free? Because the only purpose Pelosi and Maher had in mind was a jolly game of "Look at the freaks!"
Pelosi's ode to Mississippi was no more than that, except for the pretension and the fact that her "film" ridiculed an entire state by design, as opposed to just the individual "freaks" on display for their betters' amusement. Pelosi and Maher weren't exposing social ills with the aim of reform; theirs was holding Mississippi's social ills up to ridicule for the amusement of America's elites.
Right, Andrew Sullivan?
Listen, I have no illusions about the lingering ills of the South. Neither do I have any illusions about the culture in which these folk were raised -- I was raised in the same one. By quite racist parents.
Still, that culture -- and, by extension, the entire state of Mississippi -- cannot be reduced to the singular, ridiculous stereotype that so amuses our cultural "betters" . . . like Maher and Pelosi. Even though a couple of staggeringly ridiculous people gave it their best shot.
And I'd rather live a lifetime in deepest, darkest Yoknapatawpha County than spend a minute in Hollywood with Maher and the "cultural elite."
HAT TIP: Rod Dreher.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
If you're not lame, don't act it
The tragedy of Nebraska is that people in some of the lamest places on earth think the Cornhusker state is lamer.
"Flyover country," they call us.
Our usual response is to act all insecure. Act like it's reasonable they'd think that. Like they're not stereotype-addled morons for being surprised that everything's up to date in . . . Omaha. And Lincoln.
Even Grand Island.
The guys at Archrival marketing in Lincoln have had about enough of that crap. In this video, they suggest a makeover.
ONE CAVEAT, though. The Archrival folks bring up the state's 2011 license plate as a marketing disaster, saying professional designers could have done better and saved the state the humiliation of a completely botched contest to pick the "winning" design.
What folks need to realize is that "professionals" can suck just as badly as anyone -- and cost a lot more. Also remember that, in designers, we're dealing with "creatives." You get what you get. Sometimes, it's Charlie Sheen.
Here, I present Exhibit A, part of the "design community's" protest over the suckage of the plate. I bring this up, because Clint! Runge and Charles Hull make it sound like the "design community" single-handedly saved us from bumper Armageddon. (I also bring this up because Runge puts an exclamation point behind his first name. Really?)
The "creatives" saved us from nothing. The "dull" old newspaper journalists at the Omaha World-Herald saved us from the abomination of stamped-tin desolation by reporting on the vote-rigging and demanding to see the state's data. The pols quickly got with the program.
Remember, it's all about excellence, not necessarily professionalism for professionalism's sake.
BUT ALL THAT is kind of beside the point, because the larger point of the presentation is dead on. In this world (and our postmodern economy), intellectual capital is destiny, perception is reality . . . and outsiders' perceptions of Nebraska fundamentally conflict with most Nebraskans' day-to-day reality.
If you want the world to beat a path to your door, don't be lame at marketing.
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