Posted by Irresponsibility
As statistics go, this is a real stomach-turner: “The Mexican government has been trying to crack down on the drug cartels, an effort that has left more than 10,000 Mexicans dead in the last 18 months.”
What makes it even more absurd and awful is that it isn’t even the point of the story. Just a fact tossed casually in, several paragraphs down, in a New York Times article about Mexican cartels recruiting American kids as hired guns. We are not meant to be impressed. 10,000 dead Mexicans is an aside.
America’s War on Drugs has called down a holocaust on Mexico and the USA’s unapologetic disregard for human life is subtly justified by the tone of James C. McKinley Jr’s sensationalist front-page story, literally demonising his subjects. Nineteen-year-old convicted killer Rosalio Reta is pictured, black ink licking up his face: “he paid a fellow prisoner to tattoo flames and horn shapes on his face, giving him a demonic look”. Actually, he looks more like a badly made-up mime.
Instead of asking sensible questions like: why might kids who “grew up with nine brothers and sisters, living in a tiny wood house, propped up on cinder blocks” or grew up with “an abusive, alcoholic father” be tempted by the prospect of fast money and the power that comes from holding a gun in your hand? The NYT revels in ridiculous, gory detail. An ‘investigator’ is quoted recounting that the accused: “collected the victims’ blood in a glass and toasted La Santa Muerte, a personification of death worshiped by some Mexicans”.
It is a memorable, gruesome and totally unverifiable detail that serves only one purpose: to paint Mexicans as blood-drinking savages. Why? Because it justifies the carnage. It whispers they’re not like us. Mexico, captured in this light, is not a perfectly ordinary place full of ordinary people but a dark-hearted hinterland crouched slavering at the border of (white, Protestant, American) civilisation.
The facts of the story limp along under the weight of the necessity to create Mexico as a monstrous threat to all that is right and true in America’s national character. Reta is quoted as saying that some of the assassins “sleep as peacefully as fish”. It is supposed to illustrate his callousness but is so obviously plagiarised from a half-remembered gangster film it is sad rather than ominous. His family’s report, to the police, that he “described killings in Mexico that he had witnessed and, in some cases, participated in. He sounded so excited when he talked about all these things” suggests not a cold-blooded professional killer but the braggadocio of a marginalised teenager desperate for a whiff of the macho cool denied him by his cinderblock shack upbringing.
The problem is not, as the article invites us to believe, that the sinister lure of the black-soulled South (”Most of the American youths were recruited in a discothèque, the Eclipse… a darkened dive where teenagers go to drink, dance and flirt while reggaetón thunders”) but the crisp indifference of the North to its lost children. America reserves its love for the rich, powerful, successful, well-educated. Dirt-poor kids with names like Rosalio don’t figure in its plans.
Detective Garcia, who with his partner in the Laredo Police Department, Carlos Adan, helped put Reta and his friend in prison, is on the mark when he says the Mexican cartels “wave that power, that cash, the cars, the easy money” that America’s children are taught to believe is their birthright. But he misses the point when he adds: “these kids all have that romantic notion they are going to live forever.” That’s not it at all. The problem is that the Rosalios and Gabriels growing up in grinding poverty along the US-Mexico border know they won’t live forever; know, in fact, their lives are worth nothing at all.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Some chumpnut Bible-basher is having a Bring Your Gun to Church day because, says Ken Pagano, the MENSA candidate minister behind the idea: “God and guns were part of the foundation of this country”. Everyone knows all the ideas they had back then, like keeping slaves and counting them as three-fifths of a person for polling purposes, were so insanely brilliant we should continue to implement them in daily life. Or just pull out our ‘piece’ and shoot anyone who disagrees with us.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Clint Eastwood’s musclecar hymn to all-American masculinity, Gran Torino, upset me so much, initially, I couldn’t write about it.
The problem isn’t that I hate the film. Quite the contrary. I like it. Or did until the point where the only viable female character, Sue Lor (Ahney Her) in the film is brutally raped. She goes from the intelligent, articulate, high-spirited catalyst for the relationship between curmudgeonly Walt Kowalski (Clint) and her gormless teenage brother Thao (Bee Vang) to a mute object. When Walt heads out to confront Sue’s rapists it is not for her benefit, but for his. Her suffering is the stage on which Walt and Thao perform the blood-rites of masculinity. Then, the lady vanishes. In the film’s final scene Thao cruises down the highway in the Gran Torino. A man in all his glory.
Gran Torino’s “women only exist to make men possible” theme is depressing enough. Worse, the men I’ve talked to about it not only see nothing wrong with that; they don’t see the message at all. Apparently men are so utterly comfortable with, and accustomed to, being the centre of the universe it never crosses their minds that women object to being treated with casual brutality (onscreen and off) and then discarded when they cease to be useful to the male narrative.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Media, governments and health experts are catagorically avoiding the real issue with swine flu. It isn’t the flu we should worry about. It’s the factory farms, stupid.
There is an excellent to-the-point article in the Guardian detailing how intensive pig farming caused the mutant flu virus. It should not come as news that “genetically improved” animals, bred in the millions and stuffed full of antibiotics and vaccines are fetid breeding grounds for new diseases. Christ knows, pigs are repulsive enough creatures in their ones and twos, much less a battery farms worth of them (as Jules said in Pulp Fiction “I don’t eat filthy animals… sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal“).
More repugnant still is the meat industry itself, a sick monopoly — four companies control about 85% of US production — built on greedy and cruelty. Meat packing is filthy, brutally hard, dangerous work. Human Rights Watch conducted a study of which concluded there are “are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.” The reality of life on the “line” makes harrowing reading: exhausted, harried workers using heavy machinery or sharp knives, dangers to themselves and others. The recruitment of immigrants who vulnerable to abuse, fearful of organising and hampered by language barriers means packing plants are nothing but vicious sweatshops with a thin veneer of legality.
Because the meat industry has money and power, and the people suffering don’t, the ugly reality of corporate meat is being suppressed in favour of conjuring pandemic hysteria. Forget face masks. If you’re worried about swine flu the first thing you should do is stop eating meat. The only way these corporate monsters will change their behaviour is if it costs them money, so it is time to banish bacon and bangers.
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Posted by Irresponsibility
Shamelessly cribbed from the excellent and ever-acerbic Demockrazy.com — a Manifesto for a Civilised Society
The principles of civilized society:
1. No aggression of any kind is permissible except in self defense.
2. All individuals shall be free to act according to their own conscience without restriction except when such an act causes harm to another.
3. No individual may compel another to act against their own will.
4. No right of private ownership of property shall exist.
Click to continue reading
Posted by Irresponsibility
After a month of blissful protection from random verbal harassment, men following me down the street, aggressive staring and the odd obscenity I’ve had a cold-water dunk back into the reality of being an unappropriated female.
I’ve spent the weekend mooching about on my own, sans boyfriend, and presto! the magic invisibility shield is gone. I hadn’t thought about him in terms of actual, physical protection, until I realised how treacherous being on my own feels by comparison.
Yesterday, I pottered down the road to visit a cenote and — at the top of the dirt track leading down to the swimming hole — bumped into the fat, mustachioed gatekeeper. He stepped aside to let me pass. “Is it just you?”
Yes.
He hesitated a moment, then said: “there are 16 chicos down there, and no women.”
I couldn’t see the cenote from where I stood, didn’t know how far down the track it was. He might have been fucking with me. He might have been being unduly condescending. He might have been completely out of order. But he didn’t sound like he was fucking with me. He sounded concerned. How much was I willing to bet his warning was merely patronising? Was I going to go down a dirt track on my own and do a head count? Three months ago, maybe I would have ridden that road, out of sheer cussedness, but not now.
“It’s not worth it,” I said aloud, wheeling my bike around.
“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. I set off ahead of him and when he caught me up he called one last time, “sorry!”
My mind was spinning considerably faster than my peddles as I wheeled back towards town. I felt one of those poor mutts with an shock collar — I had no idea where the fence was till it sent a bolt of electricity through my neck.
It jarred me badly to realise how unsafe I feel alone. The last few weeks have been a fuzz of relatively welcome obscurity. Attached, I am invisible. Men ignore me. If they want to know something about me, they ask him. They give him the menus, bring him the bills, make eye-contact with him. There’s a little punk at the gym who used to ask me to parties now studiously avoids me.
None of this is owed to late-blooming respect for me as a human being. I am still a non-entity. Only now I belong to someone. They leave me alone because they consider me his property, and therefore harassing me would have consequences. Without him, I’m fair game.
Posted by Irresponsibility
Men liking pussy no more empowers women than men liking steak empowers cows.
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Posted by Irresponsibility
Possessing a vagina is risky business. A quick skim of the news headlines shows that in Pakistan it will get you flogged, in Afghanistan it gives your husband permission to rape you and if you’re anywhere in Africa it makes you a walking target for HIV. Yippee.
Contrary to what “post-feminists” and MRAs think, this isn’t just a ‘developing nations’ problem. Violence against women is endemic right here in the First World (lucky us). I was googling ‘Britney Spears court reports’ and came across three stories on an LA news site. No link, apart from the fact they’re all about horrible crimes committed against people who had the temerity to be born without penises.
First: Man arrested for murder after his 74-year-old year ex-wife is found strangled in her home.
Second: Man arrives at nursing home with a gun, looking for his estranged wife. Murders eight.
Third: Man stabs to death his 17-year-old and five-year-old sisters, police turn up in time to save nine-year-old sister.
If only there were something sarky I could say that would make this less depressing and horrible, but there isn’t.
Posted by Irresponsibility
The Telegraph reports that Michelle Obama’s time in London has been a success. She’s been “celebrated for her fashion choices.” Awwww. Isn’t that nice? What more could an Ivy League-educated lawyer want?
Posted by Irresponsibility
Some wrong-end-of-the-stick grabbing chump has meandered across Dumbing Down pt 1: “English Too Hard for Children” and decided I’m a foul elitist for thinking youngsters should be taught to read and write proper English (nt txt spk).
That doesn’t rattle me. I am a foul elitist by pretty much any standard. Book-camps where children are forced to read the classics sound hunky-dory to me. Not, however, for the reasons Mr. ‘You’re Such a Word Bully’ supposes.
People who think kids should allowed to rot in (presumably blissful) semi-literate ignorance are far more dangerous than word-pushers. Their faux-egalitarianism actually reinforces existing social hierarchies because, like it or not, language equals power.
Language is the spark of culture. It is how we learn, how we construct value systems, how we understand ourselves and the world. Not having full control of a language is like not having full control of your bladder: embarrassing.
I didn’t appreciate this until I washed up in Mexico and instantly turned from an adroit wordsmith into a tongue-tied ignoramus. Turns out being unable to express yourself is frustrating and demeaning. It makes you feel dumb, even when you know you’re not; it makes you keep quiet when you want to speak up; it corrodes your confidence; it makes work, socialising and even grocery shopping a minefield.
Insisting that children are competent and confident in their native language isn’t about snobbery or “shaming” them. It is about protecting them from the shame of spending their lives baffled and beset by words.
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