There are things you notice when you watch a string of Michael Jackson videos back-to-back, things you probably didn’t notice when you were eight.
One of them is how obsessed with masculinity Michael Jackson’s Thriller- and Bad- era work seemed to be. In Thriller, he tells his girl he’s not like other guys, and he’s both a threat to her and her savior. Beat It is all about his alpha dog ability to stop a gang fight through dancing (”Don’t wanna be a boy/You wanna be a man). Bad, above, is full of macho-posturing, and this was when the crotch grabbing really started in earnest. (Lyrics: “Your talk is cheap/You’re not a man.”)
Sometimes, his masculinity is being challenged, and he overcomes the challenge. This is especially true in the video for “The Way You Make Me Feel,” which I remember as one of my favorite songs.*
In the beginning, a group of men are laughing at Jackson’s attempt to get the girl, saying, “You don’t know about women.”
Then he gets her. Through dancing and singing, obviously.
This continued through to “You Rock My World,” which would have been a better song and video if he wasn’t at that point so painful to look at.
He got more macho just as he began to look more feminine. One of the first things I remember learning about Michael Jackson is that, by the Bad cover — which is the last one I really remember seeing on a vinyl album in a rack at Wal-Mart — he had had surgery to make it look as though he always had eyeliner on. Even a nine-year-old knows that’s different from your run-of-the-mill Pop star.
In today’s New York Times, Alastair Macaulay wrote a really fantastic review of Jackson as a dancer, and notes that Jackson was projecting a sense of androgyny early in his career. That’s true, but I’m not really sure the conflicting tones were purposeful, or at all embraced, by the troubled soul Jackson proved to be.
*I’m trying to remember if this was in the Moonwalker movie, or if we just had the video recorded on the same VHS tape we had recorded Moonwalker on. Does anyone know? Also, as an aside, doesn’t Moonwalker become an extremely weird movie now that you’re older?
** Macaulay calls the socks Jackson wore during the Motown 25th anniversary special off-white. Those socks were sequined, sir.
Something, anything, with a little hint of the late King of Pop. It’s no surprise that Michael Jackson left his substantial musical imprint all over hip hop, too.
Here’s a list of my five favorite hip-hop joints that include samples from Jackson’s unparalleled catalogue:
1. It Ain’t Hard to Tell by Nas. Jackson sample: Human Nature. A couple of classics from a pair of artists who were, in a sense, pioneers of their genre. Obviously, Nas ain’t touching Mike on a number of levels. But nonetheless, Nas has built quite a legacy in hip hop. This was the song that pretty much launched his career and turned Illmatic into a classic.
2. It’s All About the Benjamins by Puffy, Biggie, The Lox and Lil’ Kim. Jackson sample: It’s Great to Be Here. If you’re wondering where the sample comes in, it’s the last verse of the song. Biggie’s verse. And he kills it. As usual.
3. OPP by Naughty by Nature. Jackson sample: ABC. “OPP” is a song that has held up well over the years. Nothing feels dated about it.
5. Breakadawn by De La Soul. Jackson sample: I Can’t Help It. One of my favorite hip-hop acts rhyming over my absolute favorite Michael Jackson song. Both songs put me totally at peace.
For the record, I’m having quite the time going through all these CDs and digital music files in the name of “research.” And when it’s all done, I plan to make bloggers beat it and scream just like Michael (headz ain’t read-ee).
We’ve just learned Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Los Angeles … and we’re told it was cardiac arrest and that paramedics administered CPR in the ambulance.
He was picked up at his home around 20 minutes ago — we’re told his mother is on the way to visit him.
UPDATE: The 911 call came in at 12:21PM at his Holmby Hills home in L.A.
UPDATE: A Jackson family member tells TMZ Michael is in “really bad shape” and the brothers are headed to UCLA.
UPDATE: We just got off the phone with Joe Jackson, Michael’s dad, who says “he is not doing well.”
You can’t really read the decision in NAMUDNO v. Holder, the closely watched voting rights case that the Supreme Court decided on Monday, and miss how ambivalent the language is in the Justice Roberts’s majority opinion, which leaves a key portion of the landmark Voting Rights Act (mostly) untouched. The majority opinion in the 8-1 decision (Justice Thomas dissenting) basically pointed out how constitutionally flimsy the VRA is, before ruling on the case on statutory grounds. Indeed, the opinion could be read as a either a punt on the constitutional issue — or a warning to Congress to fix the VRA before another strong case forces the court’s hand.
The case centered around Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One (NAMUDNO), a political jurisdiction of about 3,500 people in Texas. NAMUDNO wanted to change its polling locations for local elections from private homes, where they’d traditionally been held, to some other public spot. But Section 5 of the VRA, which was installed to make sure sure that certain jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory practices aimed at keeping black people from voting (literacy tests, etc.) requires that any changes to election procedures in those jurisdictions first need an OK from the Justice Department (or “preclearance.”) NAMUDNO doesn’t have a history of racial discrimination, but Texas is one of the jurisdictions required to get preclearance, and so NAMUDNO also needed to by default. NAMUDNO filed suit for relief under the ”bailout” provision (which allows jurisdictions to get out from under the preclearance rules if they meet certain conditions)*; the district also argued that if Section 5 would not allow it bailout, then it was unconstitutional. But the district court said bailout was only available to localities that register their own voters — NAMUDNO does not — and denied their request on both counts.
They finally appealed to SCOTUS. The high court granted NAMUDNO bailout, but decided not to touch the issue of Section 5’s consitutionality — but not before basically calling Section 5 everything but unconstitutional. Justice Thomas’s dissent isn’t even that far from the majority opinion; he really just wanted to force the constitutionality issue. (Which isn’t too surprising; Justice Scalia, the court’s conservative firebrand, once said that Thomas “doesn’t believe in stare decisis, period.”) Thomas goes on to deftly lay out the sordid history of white folks disenfranchising black folks with violence, intimidation or moving the chains, before saying that the conditions that fueled Section 5’s creation are not the conditions that currently exist.
This is not to say that voter discrimination is extinct. Indeed, the District Court singled out a handful of examples of allegedly discriminatory voting practices from the record made by Congress. … But the existence of discrete and isolated incidents of interference with the right to vote has never been sufficient justification for the imposition of §5’s extraordinary requirements. From its inception, the statute was promoted as a measure needed to neutralize a coordinated and unrelenting campaign to deny an entire race access to the ballot. … The burden remains with Congress to prove that the extreme circumstances warranting §5’s enactment persist today …. An acknowledgment of §5’s unconstitutionality represents a fulfillment of the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise of full enfranchisement and honors the success achieved by the VRA.
It’s pretty easy to call bullshit on that, obviously.** (The Michigan voter I.D. debacle springs to mind.) But you could read Thomas’s dissent as the true feelings of a cautious court. Either way, there’s no doubt here that Section 5 is in need of some serious tweaking. The optics in this case were bad — some tiny hamlet with no record of wrongdoing has to petition all the way to the Supreme Court just to get permission to move its voting machines to the local high school or whatever. And the court is clearly not enamored with the statute as currently constituted, so it’s not clear that it would survive another serious constitutional challenge. Stay tuned.
*It’s also worth noting that few jurisdictions opt for bailout, and even fewer bailout requests are granted. Write professorsStephen Ansolabehere and Nathaniel Persily: “The rarity of bailout is somewhat of a mystery. Perhaps the criteria for bailout are too difficult or politicians are loath to make their cause célèbre the escape from a civil-rights law. Or perhaps, as many of the covered jurisdictions have indicated, they prefer to be covered because it gives them a DOJ stamp of approval for their voting laws that they can wave in the face of those who otherwise might sue them.”
**Sherilyn Ifill on Thomas’s dissents in civil rights cases: “Thomas knows that as the lone black justice his views about race will garner particular attention. He painstakingly sketches the history of racial discrimination…It’s always a compelling read. But it’s a setup for his dissent. The punch line is always ‘that was then, this is now.’”
Sure, there are great natural teachers who do amazing things despite mediocre salaries, piles of administrative trivia driven by legislatures and/or fears of litigation, and the broad popular belief that teaching is easy and that therefore everyone and their dog is entitled to second-guess what happens in the classroom. And sure, there are also brilliant, driven students who can get into Harvard despite a lifetime of homelessness. …
But, exceptions aside, good teaching is something that people can be trained to do-–or at least trained to be better at. It *is* a profession, after all, much like medicine. And good students, too, can be trained: that’s the entire fucking point of education, after all.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you can treat teachers like widgets and just “train” them in lieu of providing professional salaries. Or that any old teacher in front of any old student can do the kind of excellent job that we want every student to have access to. If you want people to adhere to professional standards, you need to pay them like professionals. And one important reason for that is that maintaining professional standards actually *does* cost money. Not just at the level of “the system,” either.
If the job is easy enough that people who are half burned out and/or not really paying attention can “go through the motions” and do it “well enough,” then fine; pay $40k/year. Your employees will be average, won’t be able to pay for ongoing training, won’t be able to take vacations very often to recharge, and won’t be willing or able to take their work home to a reasonably-appointed office space, since they won’t be able to afford the childcare, rent, equipment, or mortgages that make working at home possible. They won’t be able to afford the “networking” opportunities that keep them in touch with other professionals, who can alert them to new and interesting developments in various fields that can be brought into the classroom as examples, opportunities, or curricula (including field trips). They won’t be able to afford to provide students with the things that rich parents can afford to provide their children: educational games, toys and software; the ability to “try out” new, unfamiliar hobbies; the ability to experiment (which sometimes involves breaking or wasting materials) without being punished. They won’t be able to afford the “down time” that lets them come back every day and juggle not only the day’s curriculum, but all the emotional and psychological events that come up in any group of 20-40 (or more) young people every single day.
And yes, if they are bright, ambitious, and creative enough to be able to command six-figure salaries in other professions, they are unlikely to stick around teaching for more than a couple years because (1) teaching well actually is really hard work; and (2) we do, as a society, measure status in large part by income and lifestyle, and few bright, ambitious people really are going to feel happy for long living and being treated “lower” than their intellectual peers.
Why was Mark Sanford in Argentina? Apparently, he was having an affair (via Politico):
South Carolina GOP Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday to an affair, and resigned his position as chair of the Republican Governor’s Association following a strange week in which the governor dropped off the grid and could not be located.
“I have been unfaithful to my wife. I developed a relationship with what started out as a dear, dear friend from Argentina,” Sanford said.
“I’m a bottom line kind of guy I’m just gonna lay it out. It’s gonna hurt and I’m going to let the chips fall where they may,” Sanford said.
Sanford apologized to his wife, Jenny, and his children. “To Jenny, anybody who has observed her over the last 40 year of my life knows how closely she has stood by my side in campaign, after campaign, after campaign,” he said.
“I’ve let down a lot of people, and that’s the bottom line,” he said.
And that’s it for your daily dose of meaningless political gossip.
Burnishing his credentials as a Hall of Fame asshole, newly released tapes reveal President Richard Nixon would have preferred Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and Halle Berry – to name a few – never existed.
Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.” But he also saw a need for abortion in some cases —like interracial pregnancies, he said.
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”
Although politics in the Palmetto State are usually pretty odd, the past week has been especially strange for the residents of South Carolina. Last week, observers noticed that the state’s conservative governor, Republican Mark Sanford, had vanished from the halls of the state capital in Columbia. After several days of confused speculation, the governor’s aides announced that Sanford had taken one of his regular hikes of the Appalachian Trail. Of course, this wasn’t at all helpful; the trail begins in Maine and extends 2000 miles down the east coast. Saying that Sanford was on the Appalachian Trail was about as specific as saying that Sanford was in the country somewhere. As it turns out though, Sanford’s aides didn’t even have their information straight. He wasn’t hiking the trail, indeed, Sanford wasn’t even in the country; the governor had gone for a brief, unannounced faction to South America (via The Fix):
The news — first reported by the State newspaper — that Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) had spent the last six days in Argentina not, as his staff had previously said, hiking the Appalachian Trail turns what was a bad story for the governor’s future political prospects into an out-and-out public relations disaster.
“I don’t know how this thing got blown out of proportion,” said Sanford upon his return stateside, explaining that he had mentioned to his staff that he might be going hiking along the Appalachian Trail last Thursday before changing his mind at the last minute. Asked why his staff released a statement Monday night saying that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, Sanford told the State: “I don’t know.”
If Sanford decides to run for president (and he has been floated as a potential candidate), my guess is that most Americans won’t be too thrilled about the possibility of a disappearing chief executive.
Whatever It Takes is the story of Geoffrey Canada, the president and mastermind of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) an audacious social experiment that hopes to reduce poverty and raise education achievement in a 97-block area in Harlem. (Coincidentally, the program was mentioned today in a post here.) Paul Tough, the book’s author, reported on one of HCZ’s most discussed programs, called Baby College, in a recent episode of This American Life. The program is typical of HCZ’s ambition: it aims to teach poorer parents child-rearing techniques that are more conducive to learning, and is the first step on a “conveyor belt” of comprehensive programs meant to carry those children all the way into college.
You can find information on Paul Tough and check out reviews of the book here and here. We’ll be discussing the book on the 15th of July.
The people running [other education reform organizations] share a set of beliefs with Geoff: that the achievement gap between poor minority kids and middle-class white kids is the most important civil rights issue of our time; that despite the disadvantages they face, every poor child can succeed; that in order to overcome those disadvantages, those kids often need an extraordinary amount of support; and that finding a way to get them that support is a shared national responsibility.
But there are some important differences too. Those education reformers tend to focus on schools alone. And they have produced many excellent schools and teachers. But Geoff’s project is based on the idea that schools alone can’t solve all the problems facing poor children. Which is why he runs not just a charter school but also a parenting program and an all-day prekindergarten and an after-school tutoring program and family-support centers. He thinks that in order to succeed with big numbers of kids, you need to do it all.
If you were going to nominate/vote for us for a 2009 Black Weblog Award — and you will, if you know what’s good for you — which category/categories do you think would best suit us?
French President Nicolas Sarkozy would like to ban the burqa in public places, stating that it’s “a problem of liberty and women’s dignity.” He also called the burqa “a sign of subservience and debasement.” There are two specific moments in Obama’s speech in Cairo, where he addresses women’s rights:
“it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.”
And also this:
“I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality.”
France has a particular history amongst Black Americans (Baldwin, Shay Youngblood, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright) as being a place of racial harmony and equality, a bastion of safety, beauty and expression. The country can certainly be all of these things. It is also a place I would like to visit again.
The FLN were in no way innocent victims of peaceful protest. Women unveiled themselves to appear European, to pass checkpoints and place bombs in public places. Others carried weapons underneath their burqas and shot at police officers. The louder the call for (Arab) independence grew, the more violent native, and non-native born Algerians became. The assertion of Arab identity was an affront to French superiority. Muslim born Algerians were denied French citizenship, even those who had served in the French military–sound familiar? Full citizenship was granted upon complete abnegation of Muslim identity.
Documented in both the film, The Battle of Algiers, and Frantz Fanon’s essay titled ”Algeria Unveiled” in the book A Dying Colonialism, Sarkozy’s demand encourages an abandonment of female Muslim identity. For those who choose to be covered, he is continuing France’s history of colonialism and persecution under the guise of feminism. As history indicates this only plants the seed for forceful opposition.
The school’s founder, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, 32, a Yale graduate who founded a test prep company, has been grappling with just these issues. Over the past 15 months he conducted a nationwide search that was almost the American Idol of education — minus the popular vote, but complete with hometown visits (Mr. Vanderhoek crisscrossed the country to observe the top 35 applicants in their natural habitats) and misty-eyed fans (like the principal who got so emotional recommending Casey Ash that, Mr. Vanderhoek recalled, she was “basically crying on the phone with me, saying what a treasure he was.”)
Mr. Ash, 33, who teaches at an elementary school on the outskirts of Raleigh, N.C., will take the social studies slot.
The Equity Project will open with 120 fifth graders chosen this spring in a lottery that gave preference to children from the neighborhood and to low academic performers; most students are from low-income Hispanic families. It will grow to 480 children in Grades 5 to 8, with 28 teachers.
The school received 600 applications. Mr. Vanderhoek interviewed 100 in person.
Along the way, Mr. Vanderhoek, who taught at a middle school in Washington Heights before founding Manhattan GMAT, learned a few lessons.
One was that a golden résumé and a well-run classroom are two different things. “There are people who it’s like, wow, they look great on paper, but the kids don’t respect them,” Mr. Vanderhoek said.
The eight winning candidates, he said, have some common traits, like a high “engagement factor,” as measured by the portion of a given time frame during which students seem so focused that they almost forget they are in class. They were expert at redirecting potential troublemakers, a crucial skill for middle school teachers. And they possessed a contagious enthusiasm — which Rhena Jasey, 30, Harvard Class of 2001, who has been teaching at a school in Maplewood, N.J., conveyed by introducing a math lesson with, “Oh, this is the fun part because I looooooove math!” Says Mr. Vanderhoek: “You couldn’t help but get excited.” Hired.
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Which presents us with another pretty compelling reason to pay these kind of salaries: how many people who are natural teachers don’t go into education because of the relatively meager pay? At the same time, the pay model at Equity would be difficult to replicate on a larger scale (especially since Equity teachers can be fired, unlike public school teachers). Still, it bears watching how well they do.
Aside: some of the commenters on the original Times story seemed annoyed that these kind of educational resources were going to “neighborhoods and schools where people don’t value education.” Coded language aside, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how education resources are allocated in big city school systems. Typically, the best resources are allocated to the best schools, which means that kids at a top-notch public high school like Stuyvesant — who are already more likely to come from middle and upper-middle class homes with highly educated parents — also get sterling facilities and the strongest teachers in the system. There’s an argument to be made that those are the kids who need those things the least.
The League’s Mark Thompson has a great post up on affirmative action that has had me thinking about the topic all evening. I’m pretty familiar with most of the common objections to affirmative action, and I’m particularly good at convincing folks that affirmative action isn’t a form of “reverse racism” or bigotry against white people. Though, to be fair, I’m good at it (and presumably, so is Mark) because the facts are on my side: institutionalized discrimination has had a tremendously negative (and quantifiable) impact on educational attainment with minority communities. Affirmative action programs (in college admissions at least) do target academically successful minorities who lack the wealth or support networks of their white peers. And affirmative action programs have successfully integrated minorities and women into the elite spheres of American life. Indeed, as sociologist Orlando Patterson repeatedly notes in his book The Ordeal of Integration, affirmative action easily ranks as one of this country’s most successful policy undertakings.
Despite all of this, affirmative action programs – and especially those in college admissions – are deeply controversial, and I’ve spent the better part of my afternoon and evening trying to figure out why that is. Clearly, some of the opposition to AA comes from perfectly obvious sources: Pat Buchanan-esque white ethnic parochialism, a libertarian/conservative commitment to a “color-blind” state, a sincere belief that racism and sexism don’t significantly impact the lives of women and minorities, and of course, plain old racism/misogyny. But I think that for a significant number of people opposed to affirmative action, the debate is only superficially about preferential treatment (they may or may not realize this), and instead, is really a debate over the purpose of the university and of a university education.
I don’t have any data to back this up (and please excuse me as I think out loud), of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if AA opponents are inclined to describe university as some combination of education and credentialing – if you’re smart (as defined by some objective metric) you attend a “good” school so that you can get a “good” job on the strength of your credentials. By contrast, supporters of affirmative action are probably more inclined to think of higher education as some combination of education and socializing. In this vision, the goal isn’t really to find the highest academic achievers as much as it is to find and place the individuals who will “enrich” the institution in some (usually) ill-defined way. Although these certainly aren’t mutually exclusive visions of higher education, you can imagine how they could find themselves in conflict. If your goal is to enrich the institution then you will occasionally elevate those students who don’t quite meet the ‘objective’ criteria for admission. The same is true of the opposite; if you elevate the academically successful without considering backgrounds or demographics, you run the risk of leaving yourself with a painfully homogeneous institution.
These are issues that don’t receive much attention in mainstream conversation, except when viewed through the lens of affirmative action and other forms of preferential treatment. And while there isn’t really much of a “point” to this post, I do think that you can shed some light as to why opposition to AA programs is long-lasting and calcified if you begin to think of affirmative action in these terms (and if you assume that there really is a split of public opinion on this sort of thing, which might not actually be the case).
After reading the second paragraph of this weekend story in the Washington Post about Michelle Obama, I had to manually prevent my eyeballs from rolling into the back of my head:
So far, the first lady has chosen to be a food bank volunteer with an outsize entourage and an education activist with the largest soapbox imaginable. But Michelle Obama also fills a role that is not of her choosing but that may, in fact, be the most influential: She serves as a symbol of middle-class progress, feminist achievement, affirmative action success and individual style.
And she has done all this on the world stage . . . while being black.
Thank goodness for Bill Cosby and Co. Otherwise, I doubt any of us Negroes would have ever known how to act in public.
But really, the audience for this piece is clearly people who don’t know black people or know anything about them other than what they see on TV. Because if they did, they would know that Michelle Obama is no alien, no anomaly, no actor.
Indeed, Michelle Obama could be your mom, your next-door neighbor, your elementary-school teacher, your attorney. She’s an actual human being, and most of all, she didn’t grow up feral on some remote island. I think it’s safe to say Michelle Obama didn’t “become a symbol of middle-class progress” all on her lonesome – her older brother was also an Ivy League grad, after all.
Maybe this is a foreign concept to some people but I’ve known Michelle Obamas and Claire Huxtables all my life. Hundreds of them. And I didn’t have to watch TV to figure that out.
Did you know that some Republicans, like Sen. John McCain for instance, are unhappy with President Obama and his leftist agenda? News at 11!
Your PostBourgie-approved reading material from the weekend:
1. In her exhausting and depressing essay in this month’s edition of The Atlantic, author Sandra Tsing Loh makes a compelling case that the American ideal of a lifelong, monogamous marriage is obsolete. She closes with a mighty thunder clap: “In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.” It is here that I should mention that Loh is divorcing her husband of the past 20 years.
2. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that convicts do not have a constitutional right to evidence to test it for DNA testing to prove their innocence. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog writes that “while the decision appeared to be focused on whether such a right of access exists after a criminal conviction has become final… the language used by the Court majority made it appear that the sweep of the decision may turn out to be considerably broader.” Glenn Greenwald points out that the decision has raised the ire of manyliberalbloggers, and notes that it’s another example in which Obama’s Justice department adopted the position of the previous administration.
3. The Obama administration, which has (rightly) taken a lot of shit for the way it’s handled a bunch of Defense of Marriage Act cases, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and other LGBTQ issues, has organized a meeting with several prominent gay rights groups to help repair some of the damage and figure out a way forward.
4. Against all odds – really, almost all of them – a homeless girl from Los Angeles has earned her way into Harvard. “I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, ‘You got the easy way out because you’re homeless,’ ” she said. “I never saw it as an excuse.” No doubt, Pat Buchanan feels she has denied some white guy of his rightful place in the freshman class.
5. President Obama has issued a cautious statement on the protests in Iran. “Martin Luther King once said – ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.”
6. Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy (via ObWi) has some ideas on how raising kids is a lot like international relations: “Most of us love our children deeply, which puts real limits on the amount of punishment we are willing to inflict. Total war just isn’t an option, and the ability to use force is limited, so we’re stuck with coercive diplomacy. And kids quickly figure out which threats are credible and which are not, and they are geniuses at probing the limits of our resolve.”
9. “I’m not a sideshow. I’m not a freak show,” (Jonathan) Krohn exclaims, pointing his finger, nearly shouting. “I am an intellectual force! Newt Gingrich said that.” Ladies and gentleman, meet the 14-year-old future of the GOP.
11. From KateHarding.net, a blog on the “fatosphere” called Shapely Prose that dispels fat stereotypes and catalogs the effects of pop-culture on women from a very funny, blunt and feminist perspective. Check out this article on the lack of fat heroines in romance novels. Also, check on the BMI slide show here.
12. Arturo Garcia at Racialicious is not a fan of the nation’s No. 1 movie. “What I cannot abide is brainless humor. And so, when I tell you that The Hangover is celluloid excrement, I don’t say it lightly.” For what it’s worth, I saw the movie Saturday night and thought it was pretty funny. But very overrated. Also, Racialicious has come up with a list of acceptable white guys for black female performers seeking love or lust or both. In a bit of an upset, Bill Maher doesn’t make the list. But I might quibble with the inclusion of aspiring mayor Brad Pitt because, hey, who hasn’t dated Robin Givens?
14. Deconstructing Kobe. Money quote here: “By any measure Kobe just put up a grade A finals for the ages — even if it’s compared to the Basketball Prototype.” That would be Jordan.
17. There’s so much wrong with this story: a Corpus Christi, Texas, strip club is suing a 14-year-old girl that it hired as an exotic dancer.
18. And to make up for all that divorce unpleasantness earlier, let’s talk about love:
And for the first time since we made the round-up a regular feature, I actually had trouble narrowing down the list of submissions. Thanks to everyone that made a contribution.
In my search this morning for some songs to honor all the fathers out there on Father’s Day, particularly mine, I quickly came to realize the offerings were very limited. One online list of father-centered songs turned up Will Smith’s remake of “Just the Two of Us.”
I mean, really?
It reminded me of Chris Rock’s classic riff during his “Bigger & Blacker” comedy set in 1999 about the diminished importance — relative to mothers, of course — of the traditional father.
[The real daddies] Make your world a better, safer place, and what does daddy get? The big piece of chicken. That’s all daddy gets is the big piece of chicken.
From my perspective, it’s hard to argue with him.
Even though plenty of fathers — like my own — worked hard to provide for their families, they’re often ignored and taken for granted because outward displays of appreciation and affection are supposedly unimportant to dads. Real men don’t need praise; they need quiet time in front of the TV with a beer and the sports section of the Sunday newspaper … right?
Or not.
In my case, I could not possibly come up with enough ways to express gratitude for my father. I mean, where would I start?
Thanks for spending all those nights teaching me arithmetic on flash cards; thanks for teaching me how to execute a proper layup; thanks for motivating me for little-league football by promising a video game for each touchdown; thanks for boosting my confidence enough so that I summoned enough courage to ask out a girl for the first time in my life; thanks for understanding when I bawled like a baby on the drive to college; thanks for encouraging me to keep running up The Hill even when my lungs were burning and my legs were wobbling; thanks for keeping all of my college newspaper stories in a clipbook; thanks for convincing me that Oklahoma City wouldn’t be such a bad place to live after all; thanks for hugging me so tight when I found out I lost my job; thanks for being the first to suggest that I ask the First Lady to come join me in Tampa; thanks for being there everday, even when I was less than appreciative. Like, maybe, Tuesday or something.
A big piece of chicken isn’t nearly enough. And neither is a song.
There’s a website called helpiranelection.com, and with a single click, you can put a lovely green patina over your Twitter avatar, to show your support the election dissenters in Iran.
After seeing a bunch of newly green avatars today, I tweeted this:
Um, why weren’t people changing the color of their avatars after the Zimbabwe election? Tsvangirai really coulda used it. /hateration
Which sounded really salty, I know. What can I say? I get salty sometimes.
I know there are many, many reasons why the mess in Iran has gotten more attention than the bigger mess in Zimbabwe. For one, Iranians surely have more access to social media, and citizens can tell their own stories. Second, our relationship with Iran is a bit more complex than our relationship with Zimbabwe, presently.
But, perhaps, some of it has to do with expectations. I was talking to Jamelle about it, and he suggested that no one expected the level of dissent we’re seeing in Iran, but that we always expect terrible things to happen in Africa (yes, the continent).
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