Month: November 2010

A reader writes:

Here, two multimillionaire performers are able to overcome prejudice by sitting at a piano and educating us through the analogy of a keyboard’s colors.  They also give each other Old School low fives as silhouettes.  Perfect harmony.  So simple.  Oh Lord, why don’t we?

Another writes:

I prefer the version by Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy.

 

I was wondering if we would ever hear Sarah Palin publicly regret her young daughter's homophobic Facebook attack on a young critic of "Sarah Palin's Alaska." The young man in question, Tre, had the audacity to write:

Sarah Palin's Alaska is failing soo hard right now.

Bristol immediately admonished him for running his mouth "just to talk shit." He responded: "hahahahaha the show fails, i think, just opinion but so do other people." Check out the full dialogue after the jump. Willow quickly jumps in and calls Tre gay and a faggot. Here is how Palin responded to this on Hannity's show yesterday:

People probably think that my greatest frustration is the lies that are told in the tabloids and on hateful blogs full of anonymous sources about my family … and there are constant everyday lies that we have to read that are out there in the public. But my family and I…thick skin…we can take it, you know…we can take what the haters say despite the fact that there’s injustice in the situation. I mean, look at the other day …Willow, finally, my 16 year old … she had had it up to here with somebody saying very very hateful things about the family and saying mean things about her little brother Trig and Willow finally responded and she used a bad word when she responded in defense of her family. And her response became national news, even hard news copy it turned into, so that’s ridiculous and I had to explain to her … Willow, there is no justice here but you have to just zip your lip and let’s move forward.

"Very, very hateful things about the family." As in

hahahahaha the show fails, i think, just opinion but so do other people.

And where is the reference to Trig in this thread? Nowhere. Willow, moreover, did not "finally" do anything. She jumped into the thread almost immediately, calling someone a "dumb shit" and another person "effin fat as hell." (The recipient of that comment revealed later that he has Crohn's Disease and the steroids he has to take make him overweight.)

Of course, this is a trivial issue and what kids say on Facebook is neither here nor there. But it does reveal certain things: the Palin children are clearly used to using the term "faggot" very easily, with minimal provocation. More importantly, Palin's response is not to take responsibility for her children's behavior, and not to apologize for the use of the "bad word" "faggot." Her response is to blame the media and to reassure her daughter that she was the victim in all this.

Willow is the victim because it is unfair to put the children of public figures in the spotlight. Which is why, of course, Palin has turned Bristol into a reality star, has brandished an infant with Down Syndrome at her book signings, exposes her other daughter's dating habits on a reality show, and constantly refers to her being the mother of a combat vet. It's okay for her to splay every aspect of her family and private life across multi-media platforms; it is not okay for anyone to have a critical reaction or response to it.

The other thing we know is that, once again, Palin's first response to a difficult question is to lie. Unless I am missing some cryptic reference, no one was writing "mean things about [Willow's] little brother Trig". In fact, there was no reference to Trig in that thread at all. It is almost as if Trig is used reflexively by the Palins as a defense mechanism against criticism or scrutiny.

Full Facebook thread after the jump:

Dave Munger weighs in on proposed changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

One of the biggest changes in their proposed definition is the statement that a mental disorder “reflects an underlying psychobiological dysfunction.” They are, in essence, saying that there is nothing truly “mental” about these disorders—the disorders are a result of physical problems in the brain. This is a huge acknowledgment for a field that once thrived on such vacuous concepts as the “id” and the “superego.” …

Doctors don’t define a broken leg as “unable to walk,” so why should psychiatrists define a mental disorder solely based on the behavioral symptoms?

Skate culture makes its way to Kabul, a remarkable little film that captures something indelible about the capital of Afghanistan and the truly wretched subsistence of its people, and how some, including intrepid girls, have overcome it:

SKATEISTAN: TO LIVE AND SKATE KABUL from Diesel New Voices on Vimeo.

Radhika Marya reports that 59% of adults check their email during holidays, and of those, more than half check their work email at least once a day:

Forty-one percent of those who receive work-related e-mails during time off say that they’re typically annoyed or frustrated to see the messages in their inbox. It looks like younger adults — specifically, 56% in the 18 to 34 demographic — are most likely to express these sentiments. Meanwhile, only 39% of those between 35 and 44, and 30% of those in the 45-54 age range, admit to being annoyed by work-related e-mails during the holidays.

At least 12% of respondents admit to feeling dread.

That 12 percent? That's me. My personal in-tray currently has 474 unread emails. I'm going to try and catch up this weekend. In between blogging, a column, an essay due Monday, an afterword for our forthcoming "Cannabis Closet" book, and more work on my green card application. Livin' large.

John Cassidy takes stock of the bloated financial industry:

Think of all the profits produced by businesses operating in the U.S. as a cake. Twenty-five years ago, the slice taken by financial firms was about a seventh of the whole. Last year, it was more than a quarter. (In 2006, at the peak of the boom, it was about a third.) In other words, during a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot, and Lipitor, the best place to work has been in an industry that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing.

"It turns out that looking forward, not back, will never resolve the torture legacy. Until we own up to and provide a reckoning for the moral and criminal wrongs committed by officials at the very highest levels of the former administration, the fact that we tortured will continue to fester—and cause problems for its successor. The prevailing view in Washington seems to be that we should move on, but such wrongs cannot be forgotten. Try as we might to ignore it, the fact that we tortured and did nothing about it will periodically raise its head—in a failed prosecution, a foreign court judgment, or a terrorist incident inspired by images from Abu Ghraib. And even when it does not manifest itself so dramatically, the fact that the president of the United States was able to order torture, boast about it in a best-selling book, and walk way scot-free will fuel a deep vein of worldwide resentment. Torture and its after-effects will be with us until we are willing to confront them head-on," – David Cole, New York Review of Books.

I didn’t note Sarah Palin’s verbal screw-up when she called South Korea North Korea in an interview with Glenn Beck. Why? Because in context it seemed like a simple verbal slip-up, the kind everyone makes from time to time. Yes, when you listen to the whole thing, there’s a weird, nervous-laughter defensiveness about her recognition that she got something wrong, but she gets the benefit of the doubt in my book.

What’s really fascinating is her response. It’s a merciless, grammar-free, sneering compilation of Obama verbal gaffes. It’s like a blog-post from some Malkin clone:

My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that… 

This may be a smart-ass retort; it may be useful inoculation against a potentially damaging gaffe; it may even be a well-researched blog-post, but what it isn’t is anything approaching the kind of character we expect in a president. A simple respect for the office she seeks would not reflect itself in these increasingly callow, sarcastic, cheap jibes at a sitting president. But sadly, like so many now purporting to represent conservatism, there is, behind the faux awe before the constitution, a contempt for the restraint and dignity a polity’s institutions require from its leaders.

There is no maturity here; no self-reflection; no capacity even to think how to appeal to the half of Americans who are already so appalled by her trashy behavior and cheap publicity stunts. There is a meanness, a disrespect, a vicious partisanship that, if allowed to gain more power, would split this country more deeply and more rancorously than at any time in recent years. And that’s saying something.

Spotsylvania, Virginia, 11.45 am