So I’ve recently accepted a position as the political editor for a new publication. Mano is the brainchild of my friend Hector Luis Alamo, and I’m thrilled to join him on the quest to amplify strong voices from the Latino counterculture.
You can catch my first article here. Thanks.
We are approaching 100 years of cool.
Yes, for the vast majority of human existence, nobody was cool or hip or happenin or tight or flexing or phat or badass or whatever the kids are saying today.
Those concepts didn’t exist.
So everyone — from kings to peasants, from farmers to pirates — just went about their business, devoid of coolness, until the day they died.
And then the 1920s arrived.
All of a sudden, we had jazz and nightclubs and drinking and carousing. We had crazy parties, hipster lingo (e.g., “the bee’s knees”) and America’s first wild women, the flappers.
Seriously, how cool were the flappers?
But the development of this new human state of mind provoked an equally strong backlash. So we had the first scolds, the first self-righteous hypocrites, and the first moral panics.
Why did this happen?
Well, as usual in America, you can blame it on Black people… or more accurately, you can blame it on White people who blamed it on Black people.
You see, the 1920s saw the rise of jazz, often proclaimed as the only music genre created in the United States. Of course, I would argue that the blues is an original music form that was born in America, and the same can be said of rock and roll as well as rap/hip-hop (and yes, Black people invented all of them).
In any case, jazz musicians were primarily Black, and the White audience that danced to those crazy beats had upended a cultural norm that no one ever thought would be upended.
For the first time in American history, Black people were influencing White people. Never before had White Americans admired or respected Black people the way they did with jazz musicians. This was simply unprecedented, and to many White people, it was unimaginable and abominable as well.
And this inversion of societal mores promptly caused much of White America to freak the fuck out.
The criminalization of drug use, the demonization of the younger generation, the hysteria about loud music, the terror over premarital sex — all of it had its roots in the 1920s. And all of these cultural fears were based upon the jagged foundation of racism, the true root fear for so much of our country’s hatred and paranoia.
This particular set of horrors is closing in on a century of cultivation. And as we all know, these fears are stronger than ever with a very large and very loud portion of America.
But to be fair, without apocalyptic sermonizing and uptight judgement and close-minded intolerance, we would not have their antithesis: the concept of being cool.
So here’s a salute to those wild, bawdy, and edgy 1920s jazz lovers, partying until sunrise and drinking bathtub gin and dancing bizarre jitterbugs like the chicken flip, the kangaroo dip, and the monkey glide (all real dances, by the way).
We can all only hope to be half as cool as they were.
So I recently finished watching Kingdom, a Korean television show set in the Middle Ages that features my favorite scenario in any medium:
A full-scale zombie apocalypse.
Really, is there anything cooler than a massive swarm of zombies attacking?
No, there isn’t. I answered for you.
In any case, even though Kingdom rocked, I’m dismayed to realize that, when it comes to Hollywood, you’re more likely to see medieval Korean zombies than contemporary Latinos.
You see, Netflix recently admitted that while it “has made progress adding diverse content created by and starring women, Black and Asian people on its platform in recent years, the streaming service and film studio hasn’t had the same success yet with increasing Latinx representation.”
Just how poorly do Latinos fare on Netflix? Well, the studio would have to quadruple the number of Latino actors in its movies and shows just to match our percentage of the US population. So double it and double it again, and then we’re getting warm.
Netflix’s self-incriminating report came out around the same time that Oscar nominations were announced. The 20 acting nominees represent the most diverse field in Academy Awards history. That’s undeniably great news.
But the odd thing is that this most diverse field ever does not contain a single Latino. As in not one.
In fact, Panamanian-American director Shaka King appears to be the only Latino to have nabbed a major nomination (The Judas and The Black Messiah director was nominated for best picture and best original screenplay).
Unfortunately, this is an old story. For its entire history, Hollywood has had “a major problem greenlighting films and shows made by and starring Latinos,” despite the fact that Hispanics purchase more movie tickets per capita than any other US racial demographic group.
Damn, there are more movies about the Hasidim than there are about Hispanics.
Of course, every now and then, Hollywood will roll out some initiative to discover Latino storytellers (as if we’re hiding and trying to evade capture). But these programs seem to last only a year or two before studio execs mumble, “Well, we tried,” and get back to creating shows about white people in Brooklyn. A sustained effort is necessary, but most likely not coming.
If Netflix is listening, however, I have a great idea for a show about a Latino detective. Call me.
As I mentioned in my last article, I have recently had computer problems that prevented me from posting updates to this site, or commenting on the myriad issues that are afflicting America — issues like, apparently, the gender of a toy potato.
Wait, what the fuck?
OK, maybe I’ve been offline for a little bit, but surely, nobody is falling for the GOP’s obvious attempt to reignite idiotic culture wars in a pathetic ploy to distract from their massive failures of leadership, criminal neglect, boorish incompetence, and treasonous behavior.
Right?
Oh damn, there’s a U.S. congressman reading Green Eggs and Ham.
Look, maybe we should reassess what constitutes a crisis.
For example, despite definite progress, the coronavirus has not been vanquished. In fact, Republican-led states now have higher Covid-19 case rates and death rates than Democrat-led states, which may have something to do with right-wing zealotry that encourages conservatives to punch anybody wearing a mask.
Or perhaps Americans should be alarmed at the fact that “Republicans are taking a sledgehammer to voting rights” and that assaulting democracy has become “the central tenet of their party.”
No?
Well, maybe we should note that the FBI has reconfirmed that White supremacist extremists are the nation’s deadliest terror threat, andthat a recent Defense Department report highlighted disturbing examples of white supremacy inside the military.
For that matter, perhaps we should at least acknowledge how freaky it is that 40% of Republicans might become violent if they don’t get their way.
And speaking of the GOP, am I the only one who is just a little annoyed that not a single Republican voted for pandemic relief legislation? I mean, the effort was immensely popular and had the backing of most economists. It was a golden opportunity for Republicans to refute the idea that they “only care about the people who can make donations to their campaigns.”
After all, these are the same people who threw a party when they passed tax cuts for billionaires. So isn’t everyone pissed off that Republicans clearly don’t care if average Americans swan dive into bankruptcy or get sick and die? Isn’t every citizen incensed at the hypocrisy, indifference, and corruption?
Hmm, I guess none of this is bothering people.
So never mind. Maybe I’ll just go and disconnect my computer again.
My old computer is dying. With luck, I can post this quick missive before it succumbs completely.
I’m going to punt on a longer post until I get a new computer (hopefully, this weekend), and I don’t have to fight with crashing programs and timed-out connections and gibberish error messages.
So I’ll see you next week.
They either stopped right away or they kept going to the end.
Most of them ignored the screaming, and the pleas to stop, and the obvious indications that they were causing enormous pain and needless suffering.
They just kept cranking it up.
I’m talking, of course, about the participants in one of the most infamous psychological studies of all time: The Milgram shock experiment.
In 1961, Dr. Stanley Milgram set up a test in which participants administered electrical shocks to people. The participants were put in front of control panel that had increments of voltage marked — from 15 volts (“slight shock”) to 450 volts (“danger, severe shock”). The test subjects were told to increase the voltage gradually, delivering stronger and stronger jolts to a person hooked up to the machine in another room.
Now, it was an elaborate ruse, in that nobody actually got shocked, but the participants didn’t know that. They couldn’t see the person in the other room, but they heard him yelling and telling them to stop (again, the yelling was fake).
What Milgram found was that despite the screaming, most participants obeyed the researcher’s insistence to keep administering the shocks, and to keep increasing the voltage. Most people just kept inflicting pain, going all the way to the top level (450 volts) simply because they were told to.
Milgram’s experiment is regarded as a milestone in the study of human obedience. His findings — replicated many times in numerous other studies — proved that “people tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based.” The disturbing conclusion is that it’s pretty easy to talk individuals into doing horrible things, and “ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.
These findings apply to such well-known atrocities such as Nazi Germany, the Rwandan genocide, and the killing fields of Cambodia.
But they also apply to, for example, a wannabe despot who exhorts his followers to attack the US capitol in a deranged bid to overthrow the government. As many of those rioters later admitted, they rampaged through the capitol because Trump told them to. They were “just following orders.”
And where have we heard that excuse before?
In any case, in the aftermath of the riot, 43 Republican Senators continued to just follow orders — continued to display abject obedience — by acquitting a man whom the vast majority of Americans want punished.
The GOP’s compliance is, of course, sadly predictable.
But there is another angle to Milgram’s experiment that is not often discussed, and it has direct relevance to the Republican Party.
You see, not everyone in Milgram’s experiment kept shocking the hell out of people just because they were told to.
About 18% of participants stopped when the indicator reached 150 volts, and the first yelps of pain came from the other room. Of those who went past 150 volts, the vast majority kept going to the end (450 volts).
Basically, people either stop at the first sign of trouble, or they never stop at all.
Similarly, many Republicans who begrudgingly voted for Trump in 2016 bailed on him circa Charlottesville (i.e., when he said there were “very fine people on both sides”), which was arguably the point when his racism could no longer be denied.
But if they stuck with Trump after he insisted that Nazis weren’t so bad? Well, at that point, they were in it to win it (if by “win it” you mean “excuse storming the capitol”).
There is a psychological condition in which we refuse to alter our behavior — even if it is harmful or irrational — if we have emotionally invested in a course of action. In such cases, we go deeper and deeper, because to stop would be admitting that we have wasted our time and been wrong all along. And that’s just too psychologically distressing.
So those conservatives who stuck by Trump past Charlottesville, past the caging of babies, past the botched response to coronavirus, and past the myriad outrages and failures are now at the point that they will justify any abhorrent behavior to rationalize supporting Trump to this point. To disavow him now would be to admit that they have spent the last four years cheering for a corrupt lunatic. And they just can’t have that.
So instead of conservatives coming to their senses, we have the Oregon Republican Party suggesting that the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation by Democrats to discredit Trump. We have the Texas Republican Party openly supporting the QAnonconspiracy theory. We have GOP lawmakers in Ohio proposing an annual state holiday in Trump’s honor. We have Republicans giving a standing ovation to “a woman who trafficked in anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories, and questioned whether 9/11 and mass shootings were real events.”
To be sure, many right-wingers feel no distress at supporting Trump and his minions. They adore the man and crave more of his special brand of chaos and madness and hatred.
But for those conservatives who know, on some level, that all this hero worship of an obvious sociopathic incompetent was a severe mistake, but who didn’t get out while they could, well, they can’t stop now. They have to keep twisting the dial to deliver more shocks to the system.
And they will continue to just follow orders.
Just over one year ago, the United States suffered its first known Covid-19 death. At the time, many scientific experts were concerned that a pandemic would erupt, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Those experts were pretty much ignored, in favor of just wishing that the virus would magically go away.
And now here we are, 12 months later, with no pandemic problems whatsoever (as long as we don’t count the 450,000 dead Americans).
Hey, what do those egghead “experts” know, right?
In any case, it’s worth noting that while the coronavirus doesn’t care who it infects, we Americans most certainly do. And our top priority is ensuring that affluent White people do not get sick.
But Covid-19 can devastate entire Latino communities without Americans getting upset about it. We know this is true because that’s exactly what has happened.
Coronavirus hospitalization rates for Latinos are more than quadruple the rate among Whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and “in almost every state in the nation, the number of Latinos affected by the disease is higher” than their percentage of the population.
Furthermore, Hispanics get infected at a higher rate than other groups and often suffer worse effects. This is because, for starters, we are more likely to have underlying health issues, and less likely to have health insurance.
But it is also because Latinos often work in jobs that potentially put us at risk. And yes, many of those jobs are on the fabled frontline.
This is especially true among the undocumented. In fact, “more than two-thirds of undocumented immigrant workers have frontline jobs considered ‘essential’ to the U.S. fight against Covid-19.” And nearly one million essential workers are Dreamers protected by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
So if you’re keeping track, Latino immigrants are keeping the country afloat, and putting themselves at enormous risk to do so, in exchange for being demonized, threatened, and blamed for all of the nation’s problems.
Sweet deal, huh?
It would be nice, of course, if the country acknowledged the huge debt that it owes to Latinos. But many Americans are too busy shouting slurs at us, or calling 911 over minor slights, or just cheering on ICE raids. So they haven’t gotten around to writing out the thank-you notes yet.
Maybe they’ll be more grateful during the next pandemic, when no doubt, Latinos will once again be tasked with rescuing a nation that hates them.
And speaking of the next viral outbreak, remember in the early days of coronavirus, when many people said that diseases like SARS and bird flu seemed like a test run?
Well, it’s quite possible that SARS and H1N1 were not warnings about Covid-19. It may be that Covid-19 is itself a warning of something much worse to come in the future.
Next time, I wonder if we’ll listen to the experts.
There is no graceful reaction to seeing lunatics get their hearts broken.
When we hear about adherents of QAnon weeping and wailing because their infamously psychotic theory didn’t quite come to pass, well, it’s a question of how we should respond.
Should we laugh?
Should we gloat?
Should we feel pity?
All are understandable reactions when we’re talking about individuals who sincerely believed that Trump was going to round up satanic cannibals with the help of JFK Jr., then wipe out the lizard people that run the world economy.
Really.
Yes, true Q devotees honestly thought that at Biden’s inauguration, Trump would stride to the stage, proclaim himself president, and have every Democrat and Hollywood celebrity promptly thrown into jail. They believed this right up to the moment Biden had his hand on the bible to receive the presidential oath — literally to that second.
And afterward? Well, many Q believers are now saying, “My bad” and trying to slink back into American life. So we’ve had ex-Q fanatics go on television to tell journalists they are sorry for accusing them of eating babies. And we’ve had multiple news stories expressing sympathy for these poor misguided souls who shrieked for suspending the constitution and publically executing anyone who displeased them.
Hey, minor mistake, right? We’ve all been there. Could have happened to anyone.
Ahem.
What we are seeing is, yet again, the media’s benevolence toward violent White people, and the airing of full-throated rationalizations for delusion, hubris, and horrific behavior among “respectable” citizens.
You see, the link between QAnon and white supremacy is well-established. To no one’s surprise, many disgruntled ex-Q followers are now embracing straight-up Nazism. Furthermore, the anti-Semitism and Islamophobia at the core of the conspiracy theory naturally lend itself to all forms of bigotry.
Of course, it’s not just that you are unlikely to see Black people waving WWG1WGA signs (although that is indeed unlikely). It’s that the very act of becoming a QAnon supporter is a twisted form of White privilege.
Again, look at any article rationalizing the growth of this insanity. You will inevitably read — perhaps to the point of faint praise — how new followers spent 14 hours a day online researching their conspiracy theories.
This is one reason why there are few Latino QAnon freaks. Hispanics are working too fucking hard to spend 14 hours a day researching idiocy. It is only comfortable White people who can indulge in clicking on link after link about Pizzagate and the Storm and similar nonsense.
In addition, Latinos and Blacks don’t need to conjure up imaginary enemies. We had a real-life, 100% verified adversary in the White House for four years, and we see bigots marching in the street, or calling the cops on us for no reason, or even shooting us in our bedrooms. What ethnic minority needs to make up a threatening force? We don’t, because we live in America.
Furthermore, the rise of QAnon is another example of the belief that if things are not working out for white people, it must be a conspiracy. It is also an illustration of how racists will hide their motives by insisting there is some greater good — like rescuing children from blood-drinking sex traffickers — rather than broadcast their hatred.
Finally, it is perhaps the ultimate example of bigots using their power and privilege to lash out at ethnic minorities, which should not be a shocker because “throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds.”
And yet numerous media outlets have expressed compassion for this White-centric movement. We hear that QAnon supporters are “regular people” who got “seduced” by a nefarious force beyond their control.
But these are not people who were conned by a compelling theory. These are people who leaned in for a sloppy tongue kiss with craziness.
They possess a strong need for chaos and an insatiable desire for control. QAnon disciples cheered when Trump’s reign “reached its natural culmination, the activation of an army of White thugs who could be motivated by the oldest trick in the nationalist playbook: the promise that they operated in service of some grand idea — to be explained at a later date — and that it was going to take some head-cracking and bloodletting.”
There is a “substantial correlation between those who support or sympathize with QAnon and ‘dark’ personality traits,” such as “extreme, antisocial psychological orientations and behavioral patterns.”
QAnon followers were not seeking explanations for a complex world or trying to rescue America or striving for anything remotely noble.
No, these are people who are sincerely disappointed that a military dictatorship did not institute capital punishment without trial.
So naturally, we should feel sorry for them.
In any case, many QAnon supporters have kept the faith, and simply repurposed their labyrinthine belief system to fit a new set of inconvenient circumstances.
And those who have renounced it are not sorry for unleashing madness. No, they are angry that Trump didn’t come through, or that democracy prevailed, or that firing squads aren’t lining up Jews right now.
Others are embarrassed to be so thoroughly humiliated in public, or pissed that they wasted so much time on cryptic prophecies that never came true.
But they are not apologetic for embracing a ludicrous theory that led to actual death, and may yet lead to more destruction. They are bewildered that most Americans would object to their violent uprising, or that anyone would have an issue with their desire to just get on with their lives.
And getting on with their lives is exactly what many of them will do, because their privilege will come through intact.
Hell, some of them might even get elected to Congress.
Wait, check that. Some things are just too crazy to believe.
It may surprise you, but I have friends who are Trump supporters.
OK, they’re primarily Facebook friends, but still…
In any case, a guy I will call Jorge (not his real name) has been clogging up my social media feed for years now with rants about how Trump is unspeakably brilliant, and liberals are hypersensitive haters, and China is plotting with AOC to force everyone to be bisexual — or something like that (I lost track of all the craziness).
Until a few weeks ago, Jorge was adamant that Trump was the most super-patriotic president ever and would one day be regarded as the savior of the nation.
And then a bunch of racist, wild-eyed goons in face paint attacked the capitol.
Soon after, Jorge offered a meek defense of the president’s behavior, but mostly stayed very, very quiet. Then a week or so later, Jorge posted what he said was his last Facebook post. He insisted that the platform had gotten “too negative,” so he was quitting it. He looked forward to everything “getting back to normal.”
And just like that, it was as if his years of cheering for Trump had never happened.
Jorge made it all go away.
A similar phenomenon is happening with conservatives across America.
You see, for “the majority of GOP officials, apparatchiks, and commentators who sacrificed their dignity at the altar of Trump, a collective case of amnesia seems destined to set in the moment he leaves office.”
It’s important to note that conservatives are not disavowing Trump. They are not denouncing anything he or the GOP did, and they have shown no signs of regret.
Indeed, the Republican Party is once again proving that it would rather implode and die before it condemns the worst president in history.
Rather, conservatives are simply dismissing the chaos of the Trump years, and the massive failure of yet another GOP president, and the hollowness of their whole movement, by pretending that the last four years were not really that bad.
His supporters, including Republicans implicated in the capitol riot, “are downplaying the attack on our government and suggesting that impeaching the president or holding accountable the lawmakers who helped the attack is ‘cancel culture.’”
They are insisting that we all need to move on, and that unity consists of letting homicidal treachery slide. They demand, in essence, that we “give the man a break.”
The hope, of course, is that four years from now, voters will not remember the widespread death and economic collapse that occurred on the GOP’s watch, and that Americans will forget about Trump’s narcissistic depravity and grotesque incompetence. Right-wingers hope that people will focus on the good stuff — like god and fluttering flags and owning the libs. Oh, and remember those rallies where MAGA types cheered while the president insulted his enemies? Yeah, those were the motherfucking good old days, all right.
When looked at in this way, “Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies — not to mention his attempts to overturn an election — are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features.”
And that’s why my friend (or more accurately, my former Facebook friend) Jorge can just put all this messiness behind him. He no longer needs to defend Trump. He no longer feels like debating the horrific consequences of his support. Yes, America has gone to hell, but that’s not Jorge’s problem — or Trump’s problem, or the GOP’s problem, or Fox News’ problem.
There will be no introspection or the basic acknowledgement of bad decisions. And there certainly will never be apologies or admissions of guilt. There will be none of that.
Because it’s like all of it never happened.
Hey, remember when America got all wacky and thought it would be funny — just fucking hilarious — to elect as our president a racist, misogynistic, ignorant, hate-filled, narcissistic, delusional, incompetent, unqualified, corrupt, greedy, xenophobic, sociopathic, doddering, dimwitted, impulsive, unpatriotic, fascistic, blowhard megalomaniacal liar who had a history of sexual assault, bigoted attacks, shady business dealings, backstabbing, adultery, bankruptcy, and malicious behavior and who would — as anyone could have foreseen — lead the country into widespread chaos, economic ruin, international ridicule, open sedition, and mass death that would rupture society, destroy families, shatter our culture, damage our institutions, and provoke a tsunami of fear, rage, hatred, and violence that will last for years to come?
Yeah, that guy.
Whatever happened to him?
