Shirley Sherrod

This woman has gotten royally screwed, and it's a national disgrace. If you don't know who I'm talking about, you're probably not much for paying attention to the news. Understandable, I say, when the news is so full of information that makes one a little bit stabby. Regardless, Shirley Sherrod used to be the Georgia State Director of Rural Development at the USDA. She held that post until the useless piece of human excrement over at biggovernment.com decided it would be just awesome to cut video of a speech she made at the NAACP back in the 1980s to make it seem as if she was bragging about withholding assistance to white farmers (Ms. Sherrod is black), post it, and make sure Fox News got its subhuman little hands on it. From there it was a short trip to mainstream media and the government, who demanded her resignation, calling her on her BlackBerry to let her know her career was over, and telling her she needed to pull over to the side of the road so that she could email in her resignation ASAP.

Okay, deep breath. If this woman had actually been boasting about being a racist, and had followed up her statement of "I did not give (a white farmer) the full force of what I could do," with "I told that cracker to go fuck himself!", then yes, she should have lost her job. But, oh, hey, she wasn't standing in front of the NAACP regaling members with her bigoted shenanigans, she was telling a story about how she learned to overcome her own prejudices and recognize that white farmers were as deserving of help as black farmers (by the way, those prejudices may have been formed when her father was murdered by a white man who was acquitted, despite overwhelming evidence, by a white jury. It's a possibility).

And it might be easy to see why people got so upset about this and jumped the gun, except for a couple of issues. One, you would have to be a combination of crazy and stupid to think that the edited clip was the extent of the point she was making. I've seen it, and she is clearly making a bigger point than "I don't like white people"; there is quite obviously more to the story she is telling.

Two, you would have to be lazy as fuck to take the word of an anti-government Tea Party blogger, and run with the bait he so carefully laid out, rather than, oh, I don't know, practice a little journalism, a little research, and see what the entire speech said. No one should ever take the word of any blogger, including me. Look it up for yourself and get your own accurate and reliable information before you open your cakehole. Blogs are free and easy to set up, and having one only guarantees that the blogger can type and navigate the Internet. That's all. Everyone in the media, as well as the government, should be good and goddamned ashamed of themselves for being such a bunch of unquestioning, let-others-do-the-work-for-you suckers. I'm amazed they're not all broke from sending their bank account numbers to deposed Nigerian princes.

And three, the fact that so many people blindly accepted this pile of crap as true shows their own racism, in that they think that such an open statement of bigotry would be par for the course at an NAACP meeting, as if such gatherings are all about celebrating situations when they were able to stick it to Whitey. This may be the most depressing point of all. The NAACP is far from perfect, but the assumption of inherent racism in their organization, and the antagonism between the races that has been teased out of this whole fucked up story makes it abundantly clear that we are nowhere near the "post-racial society" that all of the idiots on CNN and MSNBC were crowing about on Inauguration Day.

Dog and Pony Show

So, like just about everyone else with a blog and two sentences to string together, I want to write about Susan Boyle. Susan Boyle, she of the unkempt eyebrows and stunning vocal talent, who has been all over the news this week for, apparently, shocking the hell out of everyone with the news that physically "unattractive" people aren't totally worthless.

There are a number of approaches to take with this story. This is a really great piece about how satisfying it is to watch all of those rude, smug, eyerolling motherfuckers have those smirks wiped right off their faces as soon as she opens her mouth. And there is a lot of truth to that, and she's right, there's something very inspirational about watching it happen.

But here's what's chapping my ass about this story: the fact that international news has been made by the idea that this woman is an "unlikely talent" because she isn't pretty and she's older and she's kind of awkward. In some of the news coverage, she's presented as something akin to a dog that can do trigonometry, like some kind of astonishing conundrum. Which is so unbelievably offensive and such a depressing statement on what we as a society value and how we make snap judgments on the worth of another human being.

The fact that all of those people were scoffing at Susan Boyle, ready to dismiss her without hearing one single note of her singing is fucking gross. And not one of those judges, who were rolling their eyes and reacting in exactly the same way as the teenage mean girls in the audience before she started singing, expressed any shame at their shallow judgment of her; their comments after the song all equate to, "Wow, good for you for having something so amazing to offer, who'd have guessed."

I guess success is the best revenge and it's not like anyone would actually expect any of those shallow tools to engage in anything approximating serious soul-searching, but it would be nice to see some kind of reflection on why this story has become international news. It says so much more about our values than it does about Susan Boyle. But in any case, I hope she becomes incredibly rich and famous and stays true to herself, and only waxes her eyebrows if it's what she really wants to do.

People Who Get Paid to Say Stupid Shit

So I was reading the paper today, minding my own business, when I came across this little editorial by Kathleen Parker. In case you don't want to bother with the link, she was essentially discussing the people who have their collective panties in a bunch over the prospect of Caroline Kennedy being named to the Senate because they think it's unfair that she might get that job while Sarah Palin, who does have actual government experience, was considered unqualified to be Vice President. As Parker (more diplomatically) points out, it's a stupid argument, and I highly doubt that anyone who supports Kennedy for the senate seat would claim that she had the background to be one metastasizing melanoma away from being President of the United States. Senator does not equal Vice President on the scale of importance, symbolic though it may be.

In any case, I don't really care all that much whether Caroline Kennedy gets Clinton's Senate seat, and I was reading along with only mild interest until I got to this:
Suffice to say, she (Palin) worked hard to get from Wasilla High to the governor's mansion.
Not so Kennedy, who, upon her marriage to Edwin Schlossberg, never changed her name. The girl-child of Camelot, Kennedy was to the political manner born and heiress to a famous brand.

Oh. I didn't realize that married women who don't change their names automatically have ulterior motives! Silly me! And here I thought I chose not to change my name because it was the name I grew up with, the name I had for close to thirty years, and I felt really uncomfortable with the idea of a new name. If Kathleen Parker hadn't informed me otherwise, I would have made the same assumptions about any woman who kept her "maiden name" (and gag to that phrase, by the way), Caroline Kennedy included. I wish I'd known it was such a subversive act at the time; I would have made a really big fucking deal about my radical street cred.

Just sit there and look pretty

So I just read this piece in one of my favorite lefty news websites about “nerdy” women becoming sex symbols in these new, enlightened times. Fucking great, except, well, it isn’t.

While the author of this piece does a pretty good job of picking out the problems with this trend, she doesn’t mention that pop culture media seems to conflate “nerdy” with “smart/clever/witty”. They’re not the same thing. A nerd is, by definition, someone “who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities” (thanks, wikipedia!). This means that someone like their prime example, Tina Fey, who is smart as hell AND hot, is not really a nerd. In fact, none of the women they mentioned can really be called a nerd. They’re incredibly awesome and their intellect is a boost to their hotness, which is a great thing. But calling them “nerds” kind of defeats the whole “yay, smart ladies” thing—why does a woman who knows her shit automatically become a nerd? Why can’t she just be smart?

Don’t get me wrong, this is a step in the right direction. However, as the author points out, the “sex symbol” aspect comes with some very tired definitions of what sexiness requires. One example given of the New Sexy Nerd is Danica McKellar, mathematics genius and portrayer of Kevin Arnold’s object of affection, posing in a bikini for “Stuff” magazine. Millions of men in their late twenties and early thirties would agree, Winnie Cooper was sexy before she posed in a bikini, and a lot of them find the fact that she’s crazy-smart to be even better. Pin-ups are great and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with cheesecake, it just doesn’t need to be held up as evidence of hotness, like, “See, smart girls have nice tits too!”

So, basically it seems like it’s not that we’re recognizing the inherent sexiness in a smart, funny woman who can carry on a conversation, it’s that they’ve started wearing lipstick! So now they’re sexy! Isn’t that great?

Um, not really, no. I mean, I like makeup and everything, and I guess I’m all for anything that starts to shift the Sexy Ideal away from the Jessica Simpson/Tara Reid/Jessica Alba template, where it doesn’t really matter what, if anything, they have to say as long as they look good in a tube top. But you know, regardless of what she’s wearing, Tina Fey is sexy because of, not in spite of, her intelligence, and I think that’s what the media, in rushing to declare the newest definition of what makes a Hot Lady, seems to be missing.