PeeWee Herman's Christmas Special

This Christmas I watched PeeWee Herman's Christmas Special with my sons and my mother. I was amazed at how ethnically diverse the casting was. Obviously PeeWee had a number of major recurring characters played by black actors (Cowboy Curtis, Reba the mail lady, the King of Cartoons), and there was the Mexican-American pool boy. But on top of this, his Christmas special had a wide range of guest appearances by actors and musicians, many of whom were black, some Spanish-speaking, and a few gay singers (I'm thinking of kd lang, who belts out carols in an extended session). And none of it felt forced—they simply booked the best singers within the eclectic, kitschy taste of the show, and if you're looking for good singers in the US, invariably many will be black. This is how multicultural representations are supposed to be, not so much a token inclusion of diverse voices, but rather a simple effort to not actively exclude people of color. I was amazed that this was done without much fanfare or controversy by this quirky kids' show in the late 80s, at the height of the conservative culture wars. Come to think of it, I'm amazed that PeeWee's extravagant, not-so-subtly-veiled gay camp style and aesthetic that imbued just about every aspect of the show was able to fly under the radar of the fervent conservative culture warriors who were seeing gay indoctrination and erosion of family values under every stone they turned. Or maybe it didn't fly under the radar—maybe PeeWee's fall from grace in an exagerrated Puritan witch hunt after being arrested at a porn theater was in fact a reaction that was long in the making.

Memorial Day violence in Chicago

Here are a few articles about the recent uptick in murders in Chicago. This one is a profile of thevictims of last year's Memorial Day weekend, often one of the city's most violent.  Though ironically, Memorial Day weekend 2016 seems not to have had such a high rate of violence as compared to the rest of the year.  I don't know yet how things went this past weekend in 2017. Here is a reflection on the relative immunity from violence in Chicago offered by one's white skin. I vouch for the author's words—I and lots of other white folks (construction workers, business owners, commuters, civil servants, etc.) spend a lot of time in neighborhoods that are statistically very dangerous, but the real danger to us is minimal, since we seem to be covered by a different set of rules than the full-time residents of color in these areas that are terrorized by violence.

Lastly, here is an article about a proposal that I wasn't aware of to begin with, but that apparently posited that crime could be reduced in Chicago by putting certain neighborhoods like Englewood on lockdown. This type of proposal seems emblematic to me of a widespread unwillingness to confront problems like violence as collective problems, but rather a desire to isolate them to certain pockets of the population that we deem as being less deserving of comfort and civil liberties. Of course in walling off a neighborhood that is violent because it is isolated, you isolate it more. It may work in the short term to limit the geographical extent of the violence, but ultimately it will exacerbate the inequality, suffering, desperation, and resentment that fuel violence, and the city as a whole will suffer, not just the pocket you thought you'd confined the violence to.  Luckily, the article spends most of its time detailing a different approach more similar to Bogota's campaign to make its city more inclusive and just, and that seems to have borne fruit in terms of drastically reduced rates of violence.

Robin Hood embittered

I just finished reading Howard Pyle's classic retelling of Robin Hood.  It was written by an American author in the late 1800s, so it's entirely an invented, imagined Merry Olde England, complete with its own not-very-authentic dialect.  It's a great read, especially for kids, and in fact I think that this manufactured archaic English is part of the charm.  It challenges kids' ear to decipher something that isn't quite like their real, living language, but that they can understand if they put a little effort into it.

Most of the book is jolly stout yeomen being merry and lusty, clobbering each other in quarterstaff matches before clapping one another on the back and quaffing ale together from a skin.  Lots of hail fellow well met, tricks, macho jokes, and the like. 

The exception is the last scene, where Robin becomes disillusioned with the world, breaks promising, and calls his men to insurgent, nihilistic anarchy after they've become law-abiding citizens.  He is then hunted down, and betrayed by a cousin, who opens deep wounds in his arms under the guise of curing him of a fever, but does it in such a way that Robin is locked up in a room while his strength slowly ebbs from his veins.  I was surprised at the cynical, dark tone after so much merriment and good-natured, well-meaning derring-do.  But I thought it was kind of cool.  I wonder what Pyle was trying to do with this part.

More on segregation in Alabama schools

A few months ago I wrote about segregation in the Tuscaloosa school district.  Now I just read another great article about how white Birmingham, AL suburbs are conforming new school districts so they won't have to integrate with poorer, blacker students from the rest of the county.  And lest we Northerners become too complacent about this problem, the article references something I'd linked to a while ago, about a black NYC parent trying to select a school for her child.

I think the key lesson here is that, until parents in the US become more interested in improving their nation as a whole than in giving their kids unfair advantages in an immoral system, it will be damned hard to improve life across the board.

Development against a wall

Here is an article from Sonia Nazario arguing that, in order to stem massive migration from Central America, the US would do better to invest more in economic development and crime prevention programs in countries like Honduras, as opposed to building an expensive and ultimately ineffectual wall on the California-Texas border.

Reading instead of writing

Lately I've been writing a lot less, both on my blog and in my diary.  This may surprise some people to hear, since my blog continues to publish a post every two days or so.  But usually what I do is pre-schedule a lot of posts when I am in a prolific writing mood.  So what you're reading now was often written weeks before.

Anyway, I've been reading a lot recently.  Novels, memoirs, some history.  Lots of women authors, since I usually read men and wanted to change and challenge my routine (among other things, I'd highly recommend She's Not There, a memoir by Jennifer Boylan about being transgender).  Above all, I've just been more interested in hearing other people's perspectives, absorbing what they have to say, as opposed to pontificating myself about this or that topic.  I guess we all go through phases, sometimes feel one way and other times another way, and I think that's all to the good.  Especially for me, it's probably healthy to listen to others instead of my instinct to opine and have others listen.  Life is just too varied and broad to cling too tenaciously or dwell too long on the necessarily narrow experiences and ideas of any one person, including oneself.

What is aid meant to do?

Here is a call for a comprehensive review of the foreign aid delivered by the US, framed by the author as a way to regain wide buy-in for foreign aid from Republicans.  I think the last paragraph is the most relevant, for the US or any country, to be clear on what they are trying to achieve through their aid.

"Finally, a review should include a conversation about the basis on which the United States sets its priorities for allocating aid — whether it is determined by need, merit, national security, the potential return on investment, or other reasons. There is no single right answer, nor are the many justifications for aid spending necessarily discrete. But understating the values that are the basis of U.S. aid would help us better understand what America’s goals should be, and what it expects aid to accomplish. The answers could provide some surprises in terms of finding common ground, and would provide a much clearer explanation to a skeptical public about the importance of global development."

Gangs in middle-class neighborhoods

This is a fascinating and sad account of how gangs have become more prevalent in one specific area of Chicago, the Pill Hill neighborhood so named for the prevalence of doctors and other professionals that used to live there.  It is the personal story of one family, from the Great Migration, to entry into the middle-class, to present-day kids fascinated by the thug life.  It reminds me a lot of similar trends in Colombia, where sordid gangs and violence are so prevalent in the culture that even middle-class kids are swept up.  I guess I understand to some extent--economically comfortable kids in suburbs throughout the US and probably in other parts of the world have long been drawn to the mystique of the criminal life.  Witness upscale suburban teens listening to music from the inner city in the 1990s, adopting some of the outward aesthetic styles of gangster rap.  The difference is that economic and physical security is much more tenuous in places like Colombia or Chicago's South Side.  So kids that may flirt with the thug life in these latter contexts don't have the barrier of affluence or whiteness or geographical remoteness that can shelter the rich kid in Malibu or Iowa or Glenview, Illinois.  After a point, the normal, middle-class kid that was just going through a phase begins to look, especially to outsiders, more and more like the "authentic" hard-core guys that are in the life with no exit.

Ode to Chicago

This is a nice piece from Chicago magazine on reasons to love the city.  It's much more in-depth and thoughtful than Chicagoans' typical boosterism.  There's stuff in here that I didn't even know about. 

Communism vs. Socialism

From time to time I become unsure what I and others are talking about when we refer to Communism or socialism.  Here is an article gathering a few different takes.  My summary is that Communism has come to describe the totalitarian-style states of the late 20th century Iron Curtain, while socialism more broadly refers to any organizations of economic production by means other than a laissez-faire market.  In this sense, almost all countries have lots of socialist aspects of their economies, like public schools, roads, healthcare, social security, price controls for certain products and services, etc.  But there are only a handful of Communist countries left in the world (Laos, Cuba, North Korea, China, and Vietnam, to be specific).

Kiss of the Spider Woman

I've been on a real reading binge lately, and one of the objects of my drive has been Manuel Puig's The Kiss of the Spider Woman.  I have seen the film a number of times and like it very much, so I took advantage of a recent trip to the Southern Cone countries to finally read the book. 

I was very much impressed at the experimental style employed in the book.  Most of the text consists in dialogue between the two protagonists, Valentin the Marxist militant, and Molina, a seemingly gay man fascinated by classic Hollywood films.  This format is occasionally interrupted by chapters consisting in more formal dialogues between Molina and the prison director, official reports from the prison director to his higher-ups in the Argentine military junta, and some stream-of-consciousness internal thoughts that intersperse themselves within the dialogue chapters between Molina and Valentin.  Most distinctive, experimental, and to be honest jarring, are the copious footnotes that begin to pop up during the dialogue passages.  These footnotes are a pseudo-academic study of homosexuality, also getting into (and mixing sexual preference with) gender identity, gender expressions of masculine vs. feminine, etc.  They include lots of real references to psychologists and Marxist authors, but then they also include some made-up scholars.

What was most jarring to me about these footnotes (aside from their interruption of the narrative thread) is that they start out with an antiquated explanation of homosexuality, which mixes sexual orientation, normative statements implying the inherent inferiority or abnormality of homosexuality, and pathological descriptions of homosexuality.  But little by little the footnotes explicitly discredit most of these arguments of "why" homosexuality exists, and implicitly show the entire conceptual framework of these thinkers to be flawed and even absurd.  This surprised me in a book from 1976, that essentially it was advocating for a movement beyond "explaining" or diagnosing homosexuality, to just accepting that there is a broad range of sexual and gender identities and expressions among different people.  This was way ahead of its time. 

One aspect of the discussion of homosexuality that is more a sign of its own time is the author's Marxian analysis of the links between machismo, heteronormativity (though he doesn't call it that), and larger trends of social and economic oppression.  These may not speak as much to many contemporary readers in our declassed, depoliticized age, and may even offend those who would advocate for gay rights within the prevailing bourgeois framework of society.  But they were also interesting. 

I was amazed at how advanced and unique and progressive Puig's treatment of sexual orientation was, until just now when I read a wikipedia article on him in preparation for writing this blog post.  I guess I am the only person who didn't know already that Puig himself was gay, and furthermore it appears that he was a member/founder of a radical Marxist group called the Gay Liberation Front.  So now it seems that Puig was in fact present in both characters, both Valentin and Molina, and surely the dialogues and debates between them were things the author himself had devoted much thought to.

Here's a much more expert analysis of the work than my own.

The old high school spirit

This is a story about a student from my alma mater high school in Chicago.  She and a friend reimagined Rosie the Riveter as an Arabic-speaking woman, and put the design on T-shirts.  There used to be a link in the article to buy the shirts yourself, but it seems to be inactive now.  Anyway, it is another proud little story coming from the independent-minded students at Lane Tech.

Another group of adolescents who seem to be more committed to our nation's founding principles of pluralism, generosity, and human rights are these young men who decided to wear matching T-shirts in support of marginalized groups.  They won their district's basketball championship.

Race and the NRA

I have written before about how Bill of Rights-loving white militia-type gun lovers should in theory be natural allies for their compatriots in the inner city whose rights are constantly being stomped on by an abusive police state, though it seems that many of these gun lovers' racial animus against people of color is stronger than their commitment to the Bill of Rights.  Here is a humorous but also very insightful firsthand account of these dynamics at play, written by a black gun rights supporter who visits the NRA annual convention.