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Recently, my family suffered a devastating, unexpected tragedy.

It is at such times that we are grateful — more than ever — for our loved ones. We are grateful for friends, and we are especially grateful if we are fortunate enough, as I am, to be part of a genuinely close family (apparently, actually liking your family members is often, but not exclusively, a Latino thing).

This site has never been a confessional-type blog, where I express my feelings or reveal my innermost thoughts on personal matters. So I’m not going to start doing that craziness now.

Instead, I will repost, without additional comment, an article I wrote a few years ago about a very special member of my family.

Here it is:

 

Cousin #1 is the second oldest, after me, and in brief, she is the most popular introvert the world has ever known. Cousin #1 seems to be friends with everyone in our hometown, despite the fact that she would rather chew glass than call attention to herself. How then does she build this social circle?

For starters, she has an absurd amount of faith in the concept of humanity. She makes jaded vatos, stressed single moms, and nonplussed grocery clerks feel like they are the most fascinating people to cross her path in eons. This interest cannot be faked, and indeed, it isn’t.

She came to visit me once when I was living in LA. She took a Greyhound bus in, which anyone can tell you is routinely filled with the most deranged, shrill, deluded, and unstable individuals from the lower forty-eight states who can scrape together enough cash to attempt a new start in Southern California. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to take the bus, but she insisted. When I picked her up in downtown LA (itself a hotbed of shady individuals and wild-eyed schemers), Cousin #1 hopped off the bus with a broad smile, hugged one of her fellow passengers goodbye, and told me that she had “met many friends” on the journey. I thought she was insane for even talking to the assortment of thugs, drunks, and crazies who had hitched a ride with her.

Cousin #1 plays violin, and is by far the most musically talented member of our family. In fact, as a teenager, she performed a concert with our hometown’s symphony orchestra after being identified as one of the city’s promising young musicians. In her adolescence, she could be found intently practicing Mozart, although she was just as likely to be blaring KMFDM and Ministry from her bedroom.

Cousin #1 was a social worker for years, and she often went door-to-door in poor neighborhoods, checking in on recent immigrants and third-generation welfare moms to see if their children’s basic needs were being met. She put people in touch with the right agencies or translated documents or just listened to them whisper about how America was a much harsher place than they had been led to believe. In one especially tough neighborhood, she was robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight.

She doesn’t eat in Spanish restaurants because of the conquistadors’ cruelty to the El Salvador natives. And it takes little prompting for her to show off the huge Mayan warrior eagle tattooed across her shoulders. It is an inky proclamation of Latina identity and pride that forces those who see the tattoo to consider it a living entity rather than a mere design.

Because of her chronic compassion, the harshest insult she hurls is “boo-gee,” which sheapplies to items that strike her as inane in their bourgeois popularity. She is often caught between her fierce desire to solve all the world’s problems at once and her drive to accommodate others.

Cousin #1 is, in many ways then, your typical Hispanic, violin-playing, tattooed social worker who effortlessly makes people happy.

 


And Then What Happens?

Among the stranger tendencies of progressives are the urge to instill a purity test on their political leaders, and a failure to identify final goals.

For the former, witness the internecine bloodletting that occurred between Hilary supporters and Bernie supporters in the last election. Plenty of progressives vowed never to vote for Clinton because she was, you know, the same as Trump.

I’m pretty sure nobody thinks that anymore.

In contrast, conservatives had no problem biting their tongues and voting for a loathsome maniac who insulted their principles, their preferred candidates, and sometimes, even them personally. They were focused on winning.

Now I’m not saying that Democrats should go to the extreme boot-licking, semi-treasonous lengths that Republicans have. But I am saying that holding a grudge because the presidential candidate isn’t as liberal as you would like is selfish and short-sighted.

Which brings us to the second progressive flaw: the failure to identify final goals.

Again, many conservatives voted for Trump because they knew he would have at least one Supreme Court pick, and probably more. The GOP had its eyes on the prize. And now we have a misogynistic corporate toady and probable attempted rapist headed for a lifetime appointment. 

Yet, liberals are insisting that they can stop the Kavanaugh nomination. They can’t, of course, and even if they can, what happens next?

Does anyone seriously think that Trump will say, “Oh my, that choice offended them. I better pick a nice moderate who respects Roe v. Wade”? No, the guy is going to double down and pick someone just as loathsome and possibly even more reactionary (all part of an effort to stick it to the libs) and continue hammering away until that ninth justice is seated.

Progressives just can’t see the finish line.

Instead, we have focused on stopping Kavanaugh as a final result that, if successful, will result in champagne all around and free puppies for the masses.

The same mindset infects people who think impeaching Trump is the end of the story. Make no mistake — the president should have been impeached long ago and hopefully will be soon. But it’s distressing to note how many liberals think that impeachment means that we will be rid of Trump.

Way too many people are unaware that impeachment is only the first step of the process. Once the House presents the articles of impeachment, the Senate has to find the president guilty and vote to remove him from office.

That tiny technicality requires two-thirds of the senators to convict him. This means 67 senatorshave to vote “yes.”

To reach this threshold, Democrats would have to win 18 Senate seats in the mid-terms (they are currently projected to win, maybe, one seat).

Or another way to reach that milestone is if over one-third of Republican Senators agree that removing Trump is in the best interest of the country. Keep in mind that this is the same party that has supported Trump all the way and has been hesitant to even criticize him when he praised Nazis. The Mueller report would have to be one hell of a document to convince almost 20 Senators to yank the president from the White House — an act that, by the way, has never occurred in American history.

So why the hell are many progressives obsessing over impeachment like it’s going to rid of us of this menace? More likely, if Trump is impeached, he will come out of it even angrier and crazier.

Again, where is the end game in that?

Oh, in the highly unlikely event that Trump doesn’t finish his term, we all get President Pence.

So there’s that.

At some point, progressives are going to have to accept the fact that Trump is most likely going to be around until 2020, and the best we can do unit then is to limit his insanity and shame the GOP enough so that it never — and I mean, never — wins another presidency.

That would at least be a realistic goal.

 


Just a Small Band of Rabble-rousers

Now that we’ve gone almost a full week without any bizarre allegations or devastating accusations erupting from the White House, we can turn our attention to other illuminating facts about life in Trump’s America.

For example, here’s a fun fact: Did you now that around 11 million white Americans are basically Nazis?

Hmm, I guess that is less a “fun fact” and more of a “holy shit, what the hell is going on” kind of statistic.

But it is, unfortunately, true. A recent study implies that “whether or not they would describe themselves as alt-right,” about 6 percent of white Americans “share the movement’s belief in a politics that promotes white interests above those of other racial groups.”

What this means, statistically, is that if you gather together 100 white Americans, about a half-dozen of them will say, “You know, Hitler had some good ideas.”

Now, for some time now, we’ve been hearing that alt-right goons are a tiny fringe group making a lot of noise. Certainly, there’s mo more than a few thousand zealots out there — right?

Well, no.

Because this study shows that white supremacist ideas “are more popular than it might seem. Large numbers of people think the way that they do, and shape their political identity around a sense of white grievance and identity.”

In case you think the researchers are inflating their numbers, keep in mind that the study took pains to exclude plain old racists and borderline bigots from the final analysis. The study honed in on those who are at the top of the hate pyramid, people who supported the tiki-wielding assholes in Charlottesville last year, even if they never said it out loud.

As the researchers pointed out, such individuals “may not march around the streets yelling, ‘Jews will not replace us!’ but they are extremely receptive to a politics that positions whites as victims and a growing minority population as an existential threat.”

By the way, that figure of 11 million Americans is roughly equivalent to the populations of New York City (8.5 million) and Chicago (2.7 million) combined. It also means there are enough neo-Nazis in this country to fill the entire state of Georgia (the eighth largest state), with a few leftover.

And in a truly ironic twist, there are potentially more alt-right supporters in this nation than undocumented immigrants.

Again, the study focused on hardcore white supremacy. So the percentage of white Americans who are at least a little racist is even bigger.

For example, you might be amused to know that almost 40 percent of white Republicans have personally used the n-word in the past five years. Again, that’s not “have you ever used the n-word in your life?” That’s just within the past five years.

But don’t worry, just 27 percent of white Republicans think using the n-word is acceptable… wait, shouldn’t that be 0 percent?

In any case, these findings fit “with a larger body of work finding a sea change” in the Democratic Party’s attitudes toward race “without any corresponding movement on the Republican side.”

Basically, a lot of white Americans — Republicans in particular — truly think there are good people on both sides.

 


The Options on the Table

Now that Bob Woodward’s career has come full circle — from uncovering the corruption of a bigoted Republican president (Nixon) to uncovering the incompetence of a bigoted Republican president (Trump) — we can focus on where we go from here.

Yes, it’s long been perfectly obvious to every liberal, most moderates, and many conservatives that Trump is a reckless, addled moron who never should be trusted with a houseplant, much less the nation’s nuclear launch codes.

We have books from disgraced reality television stars, smarmy journalists, and Pulitzer Prize winners that all basically say that the United States of America has elected a blithering idiot and hate-filled lunatic as president.

And it is not the looney left that is screeching that Trump is a danger to America. It is the people who are closest to him — who work with him every day — who are verifying his doddering incapacity, chronic dishonesty, and complete inability to handle the job. It is only his most fervent supporters — people who live in a bubble of paranoia and have no idea how the government or the Constitution work — who still think everything is just fine.

The rest of us are trying to figure out who the mysterious New York Times editorialist is, and why he/she thought this article would make us feel better (it sure the hell doesn’t), and why admitting to pulling a presidential coup de tête makes him/her an “unsung hero.”

By the way, it’s darkly ironic and vaguely hysterical that Trump is correct that a “deep state” is indeed out to thwart his agenda. But it’s not a nest of bureaucrats and sinister liberals. It’s his own people, the ones he appointed. Yes, he created his own deep state and brought it with him to Washington.

And now the calls are coming from inside the house.

In any case, here is what the Times editorialist should be doing, instead of trying to reassure us that “there are adults in the room” (a pathetically low standard when we’re talking about the Oval Office).

He/she should be going on the record, offering proof of his/her most shocking claims, and resigning from this administration, thereby putting the pressure on the rest of Trump’s enablers to follow suit and for Congress to perform its constitutional duty.

Let’s be blunt. If half of the claims in the Times and Woodward’s book are true, the recourses are impeachment or the 25thAmendment. Removal is the only way out of this mess.

Anything less is a half-ass half-measure that is analogous to letting a crazy man run through your house naked, trashing your possessions, on the condition that he is “contained” to the living room.

As for Trump’s fans, well, they have options as well.

Unless they finally, belatedly withdraw their support, the best that can be said of them is that they are in deep, crippling denial, to the point of delusion.

The other three options are as follows:

 

They are racists

They are idiots

They are cowards

 

The latter category is primarily congressional Republicans.

The other two categories speak for themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Out of Your Mouth

It is, perhaps, the most pathetic attempt in a long line of pathetic attempts to distract from the president’s colossal failures and massive corruption.

I’m talking about the right wing’s frenzied, frantic endeavor to get you to focus on the tragic death of Mollie Tibbetts, a young white woman who was allegedly murdered by — and I bet this is the first you’re hearing about it — an undocumented Latino.

The grotesque individual who killed Tibbetts supplied the perfect imagery for the Republican Party, which wantsvoters to believe they’re living in a horror movie” as part of their plan for avoiding disaster in the midterm elections. You see, “it is no accident that a president whose supporters are overwhelmingly white and less educated, who tend to live among other whites, are being targeted” and motivated to vote Republican based “on fears of the other and the unknown.”

I mean, what else are they going to run on? An unpopular president in legal jeopardy, a tax cut for billionaires, and a total lack of progress on health care, the opioid crisis, and the fabled wall with Mexico are not very compelling highlights.

So instead we have GOP leaders publicly admitting that they want to make Tibbetts’ murder a midterms issue.

And yes, this is the very same political party that insists any talk about gun control after a mass shooting is “politicizing” tragedy (by the way, there was another mass shooting just this week).

However, the opportunistic xenophobia of conservatives has disgusted Tibbetts’ family, which has called out the racist fear-mongering and callus exploitation of their agony. It has prompted at least one family member to tell right-wingers to “keep her name out of your mouth.”

But of course, Trump and his enablers are not going to allow little things like overt racism, blatant hypocrisy, and a devastated family’s loss get in the way of their political playbook. They fully intend to keep insisting that undocumented immigrants are killing their way across America.

Oddly, conservatives can write whole impassioned editorials about the Tibbetts murder without once mentioning, even in passing, the well-established fact that immigrants — including undocumented ones — are substantially less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

Also lost in the conservative outrage over Tibbetts’ death is the fact that the woman died because a man decided he had the right to take her — and take her life — without a moment’s hesitation. Acknowledging misogyny’s killer strain is not big with the Republican Party, which tends to appeal to men and female apologists for sexism.

However, “the truth is that any young woman like Mollie Tibbetts has a much greater chance of dying at the hands of a husband or boyfriendof any type than meeting harm at the hands of an undocumented immigrant.”

If you don’t believe me, just look at the week’s other big story about homicide. Apparently, some monstrosity in Colorado murdered his wife and two daughters — or triple the women that Tibbetts’ killer has confessed to.

But hey, at least that guy was a citizen, so I guess it’s no big deal, right?

 


How to Botch a Presidency

To be fair, who could have possibly known that a corrupt, venal, ruthless, cutthroat businessman would turn out to be a corrupt, vicious, conniving, disastrous president? I mean, what are the odds?

Certainly we can’t blame the white working class, who are still merrily chanting, “Lock her up” even as their mighty hero faces the most overwhelming legal trouble for a president since Nixon in the throes of Watergate.

And the Republican Party leadership could not possibly have foreseen that a man whose views were antithetical to their supposed values would break laws left and right in an amoral drive for power over principle, leaving them mute and impotent with their moral cowardice on display for all the world to see. Talk about a whoopsie.

Cleary, the question at this point is not, “Are there grounds to impeach Trump?”

The question is, “How do we choose which grounds to list in the articles of impeachment?”

Yes, it is odd that in this cavalcade of corruption, the silver lining for so many conservative media figures is that the word “Russia” has not been mentioned once.

But all this proves is that Trump has pulled so much horrible shit that we don’t even need to get into the Russia mess to verify that the man is a walking, talking personification of crime, unethical behavior, and grotesquery.

And believe me, we still have to get to the Russia mess at some point.

In any case, these are dark days for America’s favorite unindicted co-conspirator. If Democrats take the House in three months — likely but not a slam dunk — we can start betting on whether they will vote to impeach on the first day of the new Congress or sit back and let the orange menace sweat it out for a week or so.

Wow, it’s almost like an episode of some really bad reality television show — almost.

 


Rewind, Fast Forward, Pause

At this point, it would be more of a surprise if a tape existed of Trump not saying the N-word.

Yes, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming.

After taking a few weeks off to address racial, cultural, and political issues that have nothing to do with the accursed occupant of the White House, we have now returned to the source of so much of our current calamity.

And just in time too — as revelations of the president’s bigotry and idiocy dribble and drab from certain disgruntled former staffers and/or reality television stars.

What is the result of these shocking allegations? Has the president apologized or resigned in disgrace or…

Ha, that’s all bullshit of course.

Trump has attacked, which is the only thing that he is actually good at. After admitting that he hired an unqualified, horrible person solely because she flattered him, he called his past-tense BFF a dog, then sent out his lackeys to defend the honor of the president. And those lackeys said, more or less, maybe there is a tape of the president spouting racial epitaphs.

Hey, who even knows anymore?

In any case, we know that the person making these accusations is an unreliable sell-out, but oddly enough, that doesn’t matter as much as it should in these cases. And that’s because the accusation is so positively, absolutely credible.

I mean, raise your hand if you’re at least a little surprised that Trump hasn’t shouted, “Wetback!” at a Rose Garden ceremony by now — yes, I’m raising my hand.

About half of Americans believe that the president is a racist. And one presumes that a big chunk of the other half at least suspects as much, or is too embarrassed to admit it to pollsters.

So let’s say that there is a tape out there with Trump uttering the vilest word in the English language. What would happen?

Well, keep in mind that “the fact that Trump still managed to get 63 million Americans to vote for him after the notorious Access Hollywood tape shows that his supporters are fully adept at setting aside offensive speech.”

And as for Republican leaders, they “would say they disagree with the president’s rude remarks,” and they “might even issue what would appear to be a strongly-worded condemnation.” And then they would promptly and decisively “do absolutely … nothing.”

And what about the rest of America? Well, to be blunt,“if you think a racial slur is the only way to determine if the president is racist, you haven’t been paying attention, and you don’t understand what racism is.”

So cue the tape. Ultimately, it won’t matter. Because we all know what kind of person the president is.

But what kind of country we are… well, that still remains to be seen.

 


Breakdown in the Boardroom

So I’ve managed to go a couple of weeks without commenting on how the president is mangling America into a twisted, charred homunculus of bigotry and hatred.

The past couple of weeks, I’ve been distracted by my hometown’s embrace of a bigot, as well as my brush with death(when all I wanted to do was go grocery shopping).

In any case, completing this trilogy of non-Trump stories, we have the sad tale of

Paramount Television President Amy Powell, who was recentlyfired “after allegedly making racially insensitive remarks in the workplace.”

Powell, who apparently “made statements about black women being angry for various reasons“ during a conference call, denies the accusations and is considering legal action.

Hey, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what was said in this specific case.

What I do know is that Powell is the “latest exec to be fired over alleged racist remarks.”

Apparently,it is too much to ask of white corporate titans to make it through a meeting without denigrating ethnic minorities or, you know, casually dropping the n-word.

This recent trend of powerful white people getting canned over bigoted statements provokes two thoughts.

First, if this is so commonplace today, just imagine what executives said behind closed doors in previous decades, when prejudice was more overt, ethnic minorities were even less represented, and racist statements just flowed out sans social condemnation.

Second, keep in mind that ethnic minorities — especially Latinos— are still incredibly underrepresented in film and television. Is it hard to imagine why, when top execs feel they have every right to slander non-white people in open meetings? And these are so-called Hollywood liberals too.

No, it will most likely be awhile before I get to pitch my idea for a Latino-themed television show (it’s a killer, trust me). And when I do, I have to hope that the powerbroker sitting behind his desk doesn’t just sneer at me and make a dumb joke about Hispanics.

But he probably will.

 


Balk

One thing I don’t understand:

Why would anyone jump on Twitter and post a racial slur or homophobic tirade?

What is the upside? You rile up a dozen of your followers for 30 seconds?

Because the downside is that you look like a total fucking asshole to millions of people years from now, when your idiotic tweets are uncovered, and your career is threatened and your reputation is ruined.

That is a really bad return on investment.

Recently, major league baseball has had to deal with the fallout of several of its players who have had their old bigoted tweets unearthed.

Among them is reliever Josh Hader, an All-Star who pitches for my hometown Milwaukee Brewers.

Hader, like his fellow misguided tweeters, has apologized profusely for his words and insisted that his hateful outbursts are not indicative of who he is today.

OK, sure. Let’s go ahead and give the guy the benefit of the doubt. He was a dick when he was a teenager, but now he’s older and wiser, and not a racist jerk.

But this issue goes beyond a couple of pitchers who may or may not have issues with ethnic minorities.

You see, when Hader took the mound in Milwaukee for the first time after his apology, Brewers fans gave him a standing ovation.

I can’t be the only one who found that distasteful. I’d like to think that most of my fellow fans were just trying to be supportive of Hader’s quest for redemption.

But I also know my hometown. Milwaukee has long had problematic racial issues, even by the problematic standards of the USA.

I can’t help but think that some of those fans were cheering for Hader because he wasn’t “politically correct” or because they wanted to stick it to the libs or some bizarre motivation like that. And some of them, unfortunately, were cheering for Hader’s original tweets and wanted to indicate that he nothing to apologize for.

If that sounds paranoid or accusatory, let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine that Lorenzo Cain, also a Milwaukee Brewer and also an All-Star, had old tweets surface in which he denigrated people of a different race. The catch (and I’m sure you saw it coming) is that Cain is African American, and let’s pretend that he slurred white people.

In such a scenario, it’s difficult to“imagine thousands of white fans rising to their feet and giving him a standing ovation, even after he apologizes and blames youthful indiscretion.”

It’s not just about my hometown, of course. You see,  “baseball has the oldest (average age of an MLB viewer in 2016: 57) and one of the whitest (83 percent in 2013) viewerships of any major American sport.”

It means that baseball — despite its prominence in Latino culture — has a fan base that is more likely to be both more socially conservative and more forgiving of white athletes who screw up.

And this means that young white fireballers who tweet vile things are more likely to get standing o’s, whether they are deserved or not.

By the way, I do indeed have a Twitter account. You can check it out here.

Go ahead and dig around. You won’t find any racist tweets.

 


Ten Minutes

“Why are those helicopters circling?”

Our five-year-old son asked us that as we drove toward the grocery store. I answered that I didn’t know why all those helicopters were hovering overhead.

The reason became apparent a moment later as we turned the corner and saw the police closing off the street. A dozen or so cop cars, with lights flashing, were parked in front of our neighborhood Trader Joe’s. Bystanders milled about, and I recognized a few employees of the store who sat on the curb, heads in their hands or just sobbing.

Yes, it was that Trader Joe’s, the one where a deranged gunman crashed his car, exchanged gunfire with the police, and then ran inside to take people hostage.

My wife and I have been going to this particular Trader Joe’s ever since our son was an infant, and the place has earned a spot as a neighborhood hub. We’ve gotten to know many of the employees, and one of the cashiers even became our son’s babysitter. As cheesy as it sounds, it’s part of our little environs.

But on this Saturday, a young man who was pissed off at the world, and who had easy access to a gun, decided that his problems were everyone’s problems. And he did what so many American males do, which is shoot the women who are making them angry, then unleash violence on random strangers.

And at the end of it all, one of the Trader Joe’s employees — a woman my wife and I knew, although not well — was dead. A cop’s bullet caught her as she tried to flee the crossfire.

Some will say that a fabled “good guy with a gun” would have stopped the carnage. But of course, more people firing more bullets means, logically, more people getting hit, not fewer. In fact, the woman who died was killed by the ultimate good guy with a gun: a police officer. If a trained cop who has received untold hours of marksmanship, and who works full-time at stopping bad guys, wound up shooting an innocent civilian, it defies belief that a regular dude with a conceal-and-carry permit could bring down a running, armed madman without even grazing anybody else.

No, in a sickeningly repetitive scenario — virtually unique to America among all industrialized nations — an angry man grabbed a gun and started shooting.

They have angry young men in England and Japan and Denmark and all the other first-world nations. But those furious losers have trouble getting firearms and destroying strangers’ lives. This is only a serious, reoccurring problem in the United States.

But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

In any case, I’m feeling a little closer to this particular gun tragedy, not only because the sole fatality was an acquaintance and because it happened in my neighborhood.

You see, my wife and I were running late on Saturday. Our son, the master of the stall, had delayed us. So we got in the car to drive to Trader Joe’s later than usual.

We found out later that, if we had been just ten minutes earlier, we would have been trapped in the store when the gunman arrived. We would have been hostages. And my five-year-old would have had to duck gunfire.

That scenario should not be a concern when all you want to do is go shopping.

And it doesn’t happen anywhere else but America.

 


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