Nowhere to Fall
16.03.08Filed Under: Local, Civics with 0 Comments
A ubiquitous construction crane for a high rise, tethered to the building it’s servicing by two girders. The crane in question accidentally drops a steel girder on the building, knocking off those two holds.
That crane starts tilting on its boom in slow motion, falling across the street, to hit a high rise apartment building on the opposite side. The jib then flies off the crane to quite literally javelin a townhouse on a neighboring block, crushing it in quite a spectacular fashion.
The extent of the damage is eerily intriguing to me - the townhouse could probably have suffered the damage largely intact from directly above, but was taken at an angle that totally demolished it… from the next block over. It reads as a physics test. Word has it that the patrons in the bar in that townhouse could hear the crash from above and run out in time to see the building go down.
Four construction workers are dead and at this time there are still four or five people dead or alive in the rubble of the townhouse.
What a way to run a city. Now, falling cranes and dead construction workers are a chronic problem with this overheated real estate enterprise - this is actually, by my count, the fourth time in six months that I’ve seen crushed taxicabs in the news - and indeed having a public apology by “51st St. Construction Corporation” (the real company is Reliance Construction Group) is proof that this is par for the course in the cynical dealings of managers that emphasize expediency over safety. Let’s hope Bloomberg cracks down on it.
Funny enough, this is just the sort of crusade we’d want Spitzer to work on.
Dictatorial Propaganda and Buddhist Activism
16.03.08Filed Under: International, Politics with 1 Comment
If the riots in Lhasa are of any indication, it’s that Tibetan Buddhists, while nonviolent, are not by any stretch of the imagination pacifist.
And the Chinese, well. The most innocuous thing that can be said about them is that they’re 100 years behind in the social development of Western Democracy, which would put them about the same time as Australian Aboriginal re-education pogroms, Russian anti-Jewish policies and American, well, American history in general.
A thousand Lhasan monks protest Beijing’s demand that all - all - religious officials meet official decree: This coming from the government that carpet-bombed temples, made illegal the practice of the religion, enforced by a million troops, repopulated the entire area with Han, and even went so far as to kidnap the new Panchen Lama - a crime that’s practically biblical in its scope. This is to say, it’s a composite of the worst excesses of every colonial power (including Israel) squeezed into a space of about 50 years.
Anyway, a thousand monks marched to protest the latest offense. Police surrounded them and immediately arrest about 90 of them. 200 more came from another temple to join in what then became a sit-down protest. Cops proceeded to beat the monks. Citizens witnessed this and, angered, went to torch Han Chinese stores - pull out their stocks and burn them in piles in the street - which the police let run rampant for about two days before word from Beijing said to open fire on the crowds, so open fire they did.
The Dalai Lama says at least 100 Tibetans are killed in the streets by withering army fire. BBC confirms about 80 of them. Radio Free Asia adds another 30 or so killed while detained in prison. The Chinese official mouthpiece admits only 10, of which almost all are Han Chinese merchants. (I’d link Xinhua directly but it’s not even on their front page.)
Journalists aren’t allowed in the region, of course. Anecdotal reports mention people afraid to be seen in the streets lest they be shot. Temple monks report shielding both Han Chinese from Tibetan rioters and Tibetan rioters from the army. Beijing is not only shutting down Lhasa from the rest of the world, but also cities in neighboring provinces with significant Tibetan populations. Tomorrow the same as yesterday.
Role Reversal
16.03.08Filed Under: Local, Society, Politics with 0 Comments
One last post about Spitzer and his dalliances.
The prostitute has basically been given a free ride with her occupation, allowed to give unedited an account of her broken childhood - as the perennial victim - and escape so far (to my knowledge) any hard punishment for something that’s a felony at least in DC (tho only a misdemeanor in NY and, funny enough, not even illegal in NV).
Lemme get this straight: Prostitution is exploitative. There is no doubt about that. It’s a terrible profession to be in that’s all stigma and no future. That said, so is pornography, and while there are a lot of moralists complaining about this woman’s tragic history as a call girl for an internet prostitution ring, there is hardly any comparative complaint about her soon-to-be future on the cover of Penthouse and/or Playboy magazines.
There is also little mention that while our belle has complained at the beginning of the inability to pay for her next month’s rent, what with her newfound unemployment - this is before the $1.4 million and counting from MySpace et al - her rent was $4k a month.
There’s exploitation and there’s exploitation, and if there’s any moral issue it’s that what we have here is a particular section of a profession that deserves to be intensely regulated rather than banned outright. It wouldn’t stop our politicians from being buried (the mere infidelity clause seems to do that perfectly fine) but it would hammer home just what sort of defenses the victims have in the industry.
The Hooker Comes Out Clean
13.03.08Filed Under: Music, Society with 0 Comments
And her John is assassinated politically.
Not to mention that the feds may have gone a bit overboard when investigating this, considering that the tactics used were meant for anti-terrorism, not prostitution, and the federal Mann Act had a speckled history for getting rid of unpopular figures on moral charges on top of its more mainstream use of hampering human trafficking. But that’s speculation at this point.
Anyway, what may be funny is that her two songs have been selling like hotcakes, with thousands if not millions paying 95 cents a pop to download a piece of history.
And they say crime doesn’t pay.
Spitzer Swallows?
11.03.08Filed Under: Local, Politics with 1 Comment
Does it make him an immoral man? Yes.
Does it make him a spectacularly flaming hypocrite as the anti-corruption ticket? Abso-fucking-lutely.
Does it jeopardize his career and hurt the Democratic party in New York state politics? A-duh.
Does it have anything at all to do with his capacity to administrate as an effective governor? Not a bit.
And that’s what makes it political theatre.
Democrat Gets His Winky Whacked, News at 11
10.03.08Filed Under: Local, Politics with 2 Comments
One wonders whether Spitzer should have taken a page from Clinton’s book and, in the words of Tacitus, taken refuge in the audacity of his crime.
I mean, don’t just hire a high-class prostitute and get caught two weeks later. Hire a high-class prostitute, get caught on tape two weeks later, publicly deny it, bring it to court and spend the remainder of your term in office in litigation quibbling over every minor detail until the public wonders what sort of prosecutor would be insane enough to waste taxpayers’ money to discover whether or not you got your winky whacked.
And watch your popularity soar. And really, Sharkface could use some more popularity. Otherwise it’s less of an entertainment bombshell and possibly even more politically deleterious than McGreevey’s coming out one day, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m gay. Oh, and by the way, I quit.”
I mean, you’d think a guy with an illustrious career as a very successful attorney general would make a better corrupt politician than this. He knows all the tricks!
Racism
07.03.08Filed Under: Society with 9 Comments
It’s another month and a half away, but Rockstar Games is making yet another Grand Theft Auto game, this time revisiting a stylized NYC for the third or fourth time, depending on how you’re counting all the previous iterations.
The entire series is terribly schizophrenic in terms of how it’s portrayed in the press. On the one hand, it’s basically the only game of its type - a freeform adventure/third-person shooter/racing game set in a huge “living” environment - and thus created new inroads into computer and console gaming.
On the other hand, its main audience is clearly suburban white males, because its depictions of NYC, Miami, LA, San Fran and Las Vegas (in GTAs 1, 3 & now 4 and the colorfully named Vice City, San Andreas and Liberty City Stories) are praying on the idea of crime-ridden ultra-violent cesspools run mainly by thoroughly corrupt ethnic minorities, and all its copycats are even more thoroughly hyperbolic than it in trying to depict a gangland universe.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg went out of his way to comment on that, and that’s the first time I can remember that a politician whose name wasn’t Gore had something to say about any particular computer game.
Having played pretty much the entire series (being, sadly, the resolute gamer I am) and basically noting how much they’ve pulled from such sources as The Godfather, Scarface and New Jack City, I can not remember a single positive image for Blacks, Mexicans, Cubans, Jamaicans, Colombians, Haitians, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Japanese, one Jewish lawyer (!) and soon in the upcoming game, Russians and Serbians; not to mention the constant lampooning of liberals and homosexuals. Mind you, of course, there are never any white gangs. There’s the occasional allusion to rednecks, but throughout most of the game the people in the sights of the player’s rather large retinue of weaponry tend to be blessed with ample amounts of melanin (or at least funny accents).
Funny enough, since Rockstar Games basically gets at least one major lawsuit a year (I think it’s part of their normal budget now), their most common excuse for this insipid behavior is that, because their constant use of stereotypes is so widespread, they cannot be faulted as being racist at any one ethnicity. It’s an equal-opportunity putdown for all! I think South Park’s creators use that excuse. But then, South Park tends to have the same audience and this audience I’d love to find and beat to a pulp with a shovel.
Not that these kinds of games desensitize me to violence or anything.
“As blind as white people to racism,” comes to mind when I write this, and GTA4 wasn’t the main impetus for this post. What was, was a particularly liberal coworker of mine’s issue with his black students calling each other ‘faggot’ in the obviously pejorative sense, but could not figure out why they took offense when a mutual coworker used the term ‘ghetto’ as an adjective on them, as his knowledge of the word only had connotations with Jews, not necessarily Blacks.
This is after a week’s long school-wide debate on the word ‘nigger’ following a student’s recital of the poem I am the Nigger by Carl Sandburg in an assembly. (Mind you, 88% of the school is Black. The rest are basically Latino. There is maybe one white kid in the school, though the paraprofessionals think she’s Dominican but won’t admit it.) Considering the demographics and the actual meaning of the word ‘ghetto,’ I couldn’t see how he didn’t understand why the students would bristle at the term - both in terms of classism and racism.
I was hoping the week-long discussion on the word ‘nigger’ would open most people’s eyes to the connotations of various words - and how they evolve into (and maybe out of) epithets and pejorative attacks - but apparently the lessons are only applied but so far.
About fucking time!
06.03.08Filed Under: International, Local, Politics with 0 Comments
I’ve been up in the air as to what to expect as 2008 plods on.
Bush gets the lowest approval ratings any president in modern history’s ever seen, yet his endorsement of McCain isn’t seen as the kiss of death (not to mention that McCain’s knee-jerk bluster of war escalation strangely isn’t sealing his fate). Democratic infighting, long a sign of weakness in the party, is now lauded as their greatest asset as the primaries grind out every sense of dignity from both candidates (though the constant media attention isn’t all bad), but at least Clinton admitted that a combined ticket isn’t totally out of the question.
But let’s get back to the war. There hasn’t been a protest in a long while, even after it was basically stated that the war is now rapidly approaching the total constant-dollar investment of World War II, except this one’s grossly mismanaged, happened during a tax cut and severe economic downturn and is fighting a spectre of an enemy if we can even call it that.
So why did it take five years for a sign of resistance other than the ineffectual mass protests of 2005? This may be the budding anarchist in me, but the only response I have for the bombing of the Times Square army recruiting station this morning was, “What took you so long?“
Black History Month
29.02.08Filed Under: Society, Civics with 0 Comments
So the Brooklyn Public High School that I work in (demographics: 88% Black, 10% Latino; go go integration) did an assembly with students choosing and performing materials based on African American cultural heritage. It was in many ways inspiring. It was in many ways surreal. A few highlights:
- A sixteen year old girl with severe hair and pantsuit giving an awe-inspiring and very vivid recital of Cesar Chavez’ Lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that the audience, high school sophomores and juniors, reacted to strongly and cheered in all the right places.
- Those same kids laughing and heckling their way through a stocky girl singing Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit.
- A teacher storming out, horrified and offended, that a student would choose Carl Sandburg’s I Am the Nigger, arguably missing the point in a rather spectacular fashion.
There were a variety of dances and gospels throughout, but what got me was that a student chose to recite Dudley Randall’s A Poet is not a Jukebox.
I find the concept of poetry as the Ur mode of communication: A point - an episode - in time and space through the lens of the individual writing it; the pure experience of the protagonist at that very moment in time, and as such an art form both immune to and extremely vulnerable to co-option by ulterior motives, whatever they may be. That is to say, poetry becomes trite and nigh-unreadable when it’s forced, and as such poetry is maintained because it’s so obvious when it’s been forced.
Mind you, this school, like all public schools, is having trouble with literacy parity with grade level. But more than that, even I in high school had a dim (as in vague, not contemptuous) view of what poetry really was, and I came from what was arguably the best arts high school in the country. That this kid would choose this piece and present it with vigor gave me hope, hope amidst the lamentation of just how limited our current education is.
Will Obama and Clinton please shut the fuck up now?
29.02.08Filed Under: National, Politics with 1 Comment
No, seriously. It’s getting to the point where neither of them are taking any snipes at Bush, McCain or the Republican party with any degree of regularity that they sling mud at one another. Meanwhile, “100 more years” McCain’s sailing relatively smoothly along in his coronation considering he apparently wants to continue the war’s escalation a la Vietnam. Now that he’s apparently tolerating (or even accepting) Bush’s support as something other than the Kiss of Death and professional election spoiler Ralph Nader’s joined the fray, perhaps they can edit their rhetoric towards something that helps us all move forward in the right direction.
Don’t get me wrong: I prefer Hillary, if but for the fact that she’s weathered - nay, thrived in - the neo-cons’ vile invective for her long career. She knows exactly why the 1993 health care plan failed (the budget) and, if we are going to get a universal health care plan in America in my generation - and that’s a big if - it’s going to be under her. But I’m not so adamant that it’s Hillary Or Bust considering what’s at stake here. I’d rather both candidates at this time honed their considerable ability on making sure we actually win the general election.
Sure, the Republican party’s destroyed the economy through overspending on unwinnable foreign wars and dismantling important federal institutions (cough, cough, NEA, cough, EPA) while removing regulations (important ones, like ones that stop banks from giving out - and subsequently selling - terribly bad loans) and watching domestic programs go under - even ones they started. Sure they’ve done all that, but they’ve also got pretty much every important member of their cabinet retired or transferred before injunctions could be levied against them by the stillborn Democratic majority. I don’t know what strings have been pulled, but we can’t even impeach what is now officially the most unpopular president in the history of the United States and is arguably the worst.
Simply put, the election is not in the bag. Not by a long shot, what with the spineless fools we have. But either Barack or Hillary is eons better than anything else we can put and it’s important we give them the biggest mandate possible to deal with the epic clusterfuck we’ve gotten into.
So I ask the two top Democratic candidates: Can you to please shut the fuck up about each other and start burying McCain and the crazies who are keeping Huckabee in the race?