Hispanic Fanatic

You know those horror movies where gypsy crones cast unspeakable curses upon innocent white people? Yeah, they’re pretty cool.

But it’s never explained why these powerful sorcerers are inevitably portrayed as enfeebled, misshapen paupers. I mean, if you could conjure dark forces and unstoppable demons to perform your bidding, wouldn’t you devote a little time to, say, whipping up a batch of proper dental care? At the very least, why are you living in a ramshackle hut, when you could demand a palace?

Well, a similar cognitive dissonance occurs in the world of politics.

A large percentage of right-wingers truly believe that a nefarious cadre of liberals are working with the deep state to thwart conservatives (i.e., the real Americans).

However, it’s never explained why, if liberals are so powerful, they can’t pass basic gun control or universal health care, like every other industrialized nation. And why is Biden’s agenda in jeopardy, despite the fact that most of his policies are popular and Democrats control Congress?

And why is a moron who lost an election months ago, and has brought his party nothing but ruination, still in a position of absolute power within the conservative realm? 

Hey, maybe he’s the crone.

Did you ever think about that?

Like just about every Latino of my generation, I was raised Catholic.

And just like many Americans under the age of 60, I am no longer religious.

Yes, you have no doubt heard that for the first time, less than half of American adults are members of a church, mosque or synagogue, and that the “number of people who identify as non-religious has grown steadily in recent decades.”

But wait, it gets worse (if you’re the god-fearin’ type), because it’s not just those vague “non-religious” people whose numbers are increasing. We’re also seeing more straight-up atheists, who were thought to constitute about 3% of the population but whose actual percentage “could be much larger, perhaps even 10 times larger than previously estimated.”

Yikes! That’s a lot of godless heathens running around.

To continue reading this post, please click here.

You use just 10% of your brain.

Chameleons change color to match their surroundings.

The Great Wall of China is the only human-made object visible from space.

These are all well-established, commonly known “facts” that are, alas, completely wrong. To this list of misconceptions, untruths, and erroneous assertions, we must add another whooper.

To continue reading this post, please click here.

In 1937, a young Cuban woman became America’s first “illegal immigrant.”

No, she wasn’t the first person to enter the country without permission (that would be Christopher Columbus). But when the New York Times wrote about Sara J. Rodriguez’s attempted suicide, she became the first person to be described as an “illegal immigrant” in an American news story.

Naturally, the bastards would start all this off by slandering a Latina.

In any case, the subsequent decades have seen terms such as “illegal immigrant,” “the undocumented,” or even “the brown invasion” used to describe people who cross or crowd America’s southern border.

To continue reading this post, please click here.

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.