Republicans Raising Taxes?! Oh, Wait.

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.


Full article.

New York Needs to Bring It Down a Notch

I'm glad to have been out of NYC during Irene if only to realize how awfully self-absorbed we/NYC can be.

Instead of snarking that the storm didn't hit the city hard or complaining about lack of transit, everyone should take a minute to reflect on those who weren't so lucky and be humbly grateful.

Start with this slideshow
Or this article

Just because it doesn't happen to New York doesn't mean it doesn't happen.  And matter.

Everyone Stop Telling Me To See "The Help"

I don't want to see that movie.  I don't want to read the book.  I haven't been articulating why very well, I just get an icky feeling from the commercial with the worn-out types: Sassy Black Maid, Hoity-Toity White Upper Class Lady, Sympathetic White Woman Who Will Turn Out Okay.  The white-person-as-hero feel-good flick that glosses over a host of problems that one person ain't solving is not my genre, which is also why I will not waste two hours on The Blind Side, not that I need a reason beyond Sandra Bullock (though Crash was awesome, and imho her only watchable moment).

This op-ed makes a related point:

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case...

...Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.

Stuck

So, yes, I blog less when I have more work to do.

But lately, I've also been hesitant to post because I have been reducing my news consumption, which makes me feel less capable of posting a remotely intelligent commentary on anything going on. [insert joke in the vein of "well that never stopped you before!" har har.]

In other words, there have been lots of things I want to bring up but haven't felt like I can form a succinct post/argument/narrative/story.  But my thoughts and feelings on the things - political, cultural, etc - that I am pondering are strong, and worth pointing out.

Then I realized: maybe the point is just to raise some questions.

Let's give it a try...

In Which The New York Times Prints That Printable Matter is Unprintable... Again.

[part where I apologize for being scarce by validate it by explaining once again that this just means I'm busy with work, so it's good thing]

Not once but twice in last Sunday's Arts & Leisure section, the NYTimes repeated my favorite of its ridiculous policies - instead of printing perfectly printable words, ie the title of the marvelous Broadway play The Motherfucker with the Hat (see it!), it censors itself/its interviewee by glazing over whatever was obviously said by saying it's unprintable.  Once toward the end of an article about Andrew Lloyd Webber (which should be unprintable since his recent work is unlistenable), and then by calling Cee-Lo's marvelous song "Forget You," which has become the acceptable title, which is stupid.

As I've explained before, this drives me batshit fucking crazy.  Because it's untrue.  These words can be printed - look!  I just did it myself with a free blogging platform! So really it's just their (understandable) policy not to print them.  So that's how they should phrase it.  Or!  Have a New York People Who Can Handle Language version of the paper, and another Ultra Conservative And Worried About Superficial Societal Problems Like "Bad" Words version for whoever is writing in a blog that's the polar opposite of this one.

Also in the Arts section, Justin Timberlake.  Love.  And I don't even want to make out with him, I just want to go see dance movies together.  I mean, it's about time You Got Served had a sequel, amIright???

Apparently, the World is Ending Tomorrow...

... at 6pm, by the way.

What, you didn't hear?!  Oh, it's all over the place, even in the New York Times!  Like, see, this guy Harold Camping? He taught himself the Bible? And decided the world would obv start ending Saturday May 21 at 6pm with the rapture of all the Christians and then the rest of us/you would be left to, like, endure five months of plagues and stuff.  Gross!

This whole world-ending-tomorrow thing is throwing me for a loop.  I mean, I have so many questions that no one is answering!

• Am I going to be raptured if I was "saved" or "born again" as a child, but no longer practice Christianity in the traditional sense?
• Should I cancel my date for tomorrow night, or at least inform my poor suitor that I may not show up for our 9pm reservation because I'll have floated up to heaven 3 hours prior?
• Do I get points for acts of goodness, like the cat I saved from a raccoon trap yesterday?  (And by "save" I mean found and told someone else about who did the actual releasing from said trap?)
• Do I get extra points for acts of goodness that would probably be considered more Christian by Camping & Co, like when I handed out flyers condemning abortion in 4th grade?  Thanks for letting me do that, parents!
• What about acts of goodness that hearken back to what the Bible actually talks about Jesus doing and telling people to do, like when I volunteer or donate to those in need, or you know, show love and kindness to people whether I want to or not?  Doesn't count because I don't go to church though right?
• I'm registered as a Democrat, is that going to hold me up at heaven's security gate?
• Should I write a quick will and some goodbye emails or will it just be total chaos anyway, nullifying legal contracts and Google accounts?
• If all my dreams come true in heaven, can all my pagan friends join me?

I need answers, people, and for some reason, none of the doomsayers are bothering to tell me!

Because let's be honest: these people do not a) believe the world is ending and that they are really being raptured tomorrow, or, more to my point, b) give a shit about anyone else (the Bible refers to this as loving others as you love yourself; the American Christians often translate this to trying to save non-believers).

Because if a) were the case, they would be going way more crazy and being way less or way more responsible in these final days.  If you really, truly thought you had 24 hours left on this earth, what would you be doing with your time?  Surely not reading this blog, for starters.

And if b) were the case, they wouldn't be walking past me on the street with just a tee shirt and a smug look.  They would be begging, pleading, crying, not sleeping, to save everyone they love and probably everyone else they could possibly talk to from the horrible alternate, permanent fate.

Because, let's be honest: this is all a marketing campaign for FamilyRadio.com.  So, as a fellow marketer, I will hand it to Harold Camping for his brilliant strategy to get tons of free advertising and publicity and new audiences.  But as far as marketing ethics are concerned, I hope that as of 6pm tomorrow, he's indeed not heard from again.

I Have Read Some Obituaries With Joy...

Mixed Race on the Brian Lehrer Show

My favorite radio show is having a call-in right now on being mixed race - I can't get through so I will blog about it instead.  Apologies in advance for the stream of consciousness.

Click on multiracial on the tag cloud at right or search "mixed" to see my previous musings on being more than one race.

While I appreciate the guests - an interracial couple, I'd like to hear from a mixed race "expert" instead - but that would defeat the purpose of understanding since any one person's experience can't possibly capture it for us all.

You know where being mixes sucks these days?  Dating.  White guys are like "I don't date black women."  I don't know how someone can say this and not feel they're being racist and vastly generalizing (ahem, John Mayer, whose songs I have deleted from my iTunes after his extremely racist and insensitive comments about interracial dating).  And black men do not know what to do with me.

Last week I went to my friend Santana's play reading - she wrote a one-woman show about her experience growing up mixed called "The Other Box."  It was brilliant.  I didn't expect it to be that good this early in development.  But we have some uncommon parallels in our childhood & experience, so it was very hard for me to absorb at points.  The show is going up this month, happy to share info, it is so worth seeing -- you'll laugh and cry and get it.

Woman on radio now is talking about how it's more of an issue in New York.  This is so true.  Of course I was a kid on the West Coast so I may not have been as aware, but I will tell you that in NYC everyone needs to fit everyone else into a box, and it can really suck.  Of course, this is true way beyond race: your job, your neighborhood, your money, your family, your alma mater, your marital status, your hobbies, etc etc.

And.... segment over!  Seriously, I could explore this all the time.  Maybe I will start my own radio show just about being mixed and America from a mixed perspective.  Why not, every other racial group has their own media microcosm.  Take that, Brian Lehrer!

Liveblogging the Oscars!

Let's get a few things out of the way:

1. We all know the Awards are under pressure for the lack of nominees of color, so I anticipate completely inappropriate insertions of black people presenting.

2. Let us all pray that Gwyneth Paltrow does use yet another award show as yet another opportunity to sing. #overexposure

3. I've realized it's much more satisfying to watch awards season unfold as a marketer vs as an artist.  Everything makes much more sense, highly recommend.

Actually, if I'm going to muse in short, perfunctory sentences, that's more fitting for the Tweeting, don't you think?

#takingthischattertoTwitter

Liveblogging the Oscars: Red Carpet

(hit refresh to get the latest...)

It's time for everyone's favorite industry-wide public masturbation session, The Academy Awards!  Let's get some foreplay going with some fashion & celeb snark, shall we?  (We shall, and we shall be referring to the E! Red Carpet for you viewers at home.)

HBHM: The Undercover Black Person

I was overjoyed to find my favorite essay on mixed-ness published in its entirety online - Danzy Senna's The Mulatto Millennium brilliantly captures what it's like, especially for those of us who "look white" and are therefore privy (though I use that term loosely) to all sorts of shades of grey in the chasm between black and white.

White folks were the most uncomfortable with the dissonance between the face they saw and the race they didn't. Upon learning who I was, they grew paralyzed with fear that they might have "slipped up" in my presence, that is, said something racist, not knowing there was a Negro in their midst. Often, they had.

Full article.

On a related note, being the only black and white (and red) person in most of my groups and a big avoider of conflict, I never know what to do when a friend says something I deem racist, whether about one of my races or someone else's.  This happens every so often. Yes, I am probably more sensitive than others due to my racial makeup.  And yes, classification of racism is hugely subjective.  Still, I feel complicit if I don't call it out.  So where's the line?

In Which the Mayoress is on the (kind of) News!

You GUYS!  Last week my friend Sarena called and asked if I might like to go on a Washington DC TV show called Let's Talk Live and give some marketing tips.  Oh, sigh, I don't know, I'm pretty busy... uh, obvs I hopped the first Bolt south, and yesterday I got to go to a real live news studio in our nation's capital (well, kind of - across the river, but greater metropolitan area, right?).

Hold onto your morning joe, stay-at-home parents and unemployed college grads, and get ready for some marketing tips from The Mayoress!



Obviously this has major implications: I am now kind of a pundit, and kind of an expert, and kind of have the kind of TV experience one would need to run for NYC Mayoress in 18 years.  Take that and run with it, exploratory committee*!

Excuse me while I go viral this.

*Or whenever you're done with that cocktail, Babs.