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ebogjonson's December 2006 archive
December 13, 2006
so it turns out I went to nairobi
What the headline said.
I'll be here until Jan 2007, and my internet access has been spotty. I'll try to update as I can!
be well, peeps...
Posted by ebogjonson in ebog housekeeping at 3:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
December 7, 2006
al sharpton wishes you a blessed holiday season
In response to slow NYPD reaction to the police shooting of Sean Bell, Al Sharpton wants to shut down Manhattan's 5th Avenue shopping district the week before Xmas. Via Steve Gilliard:
Let's set the scene: what Sharpton is promising to do is to block 5th Avenue on the big shopping Saturday before Christmas. Since the Giuliani era, protest has been restricted on terms favorable to the police. The marchers have not asked for a permit and don't plan on walking on the sidewalks like they make many protesters. This should cost the city tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue and even more in store profits.[NYPD Commissoner Raymond] Kelly is faced with a brutal choice. If he doesn't stop the march, it will cost the city a great deal of money. If he tries to block the avenue with cops, all hell will break loose. I could easily see people charging police lines and the resulting riot would cost more than the march.
People are extremely angry. The cops have tried to claim all three victims had been arrested by leaking information to the local papers, but it hasn't gone far. Their usual attempts to dirty up the victims are falling on deaf ears. A lot of that is due to Nicole Poultre's extremely poised performance on Larry King Monday. The cops are still claiming that there was a fourth man with a gun, but it's as elusive as Judge Crater. Maybe they thought they were watching Heroes or something.
A lot of this is carryover anger from the unsatisfactory resolution of the Diallo and Dorismond cases. It has never been resolved and this time, people will be relentless in seeing these cops jailed on some charges. The race of the cops is irrelevant. People want there to be a resolution where cops are punished for murder. [full item]
White and black folks who hate identity politics and political correctness hate Al Sharpton. They claim to hate him because he lied about Tawana Brawley, or because he can be bought, or because he ran for the Presidency of the United States while wearing a conk, but the truth is that they hate him because he goes about his business without clearing his plans with anyone white, an unforgivable habit for a black leader. Sharpton's #1 constituency, is as always, Sharpton, but his #2 is NYC's black community, better higher placement than most black folks tend to from their leadership.
Also: The day Jane Hamsher can feasibly threaten to shut down the center of the nation's largest city a week before Christmas, she can talk to me about "mau-mauing," but until then she's just flapping her gums. She hasn't come near a real mau-mauing in her life, ever.
Also: Sean Bell was shot just a few blocks away from where Jam Master Jay was shot in 2002. Not a good section of South Queens.
Posted by ebogjonson in race and other identities at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
rips James Kim
I didn't know James Kim (or at least don't think I did), but I've learned from the forwarding tree that five or so folks I do know either went to Oberlin with Kim or worked with him on tech/gadget stuff. The story of his death - staying put and keeping his family warm, venturing out only once they had run out of fuel, dying a mile from where he started after walking though 8 miles of snow drifts in tennis shoes and street clothes - binds a world of inspirations, lessons and tragedies up into one singularly moving story. I can only hope that if I'm ever in an even fractionally similar spot I conduct myself as calmly, selflessly and bravely as he did.
Kim's ordeal of course brings to mind (my mind, at least) the 1999 disappearance of Joe Wood on Mount Ranier. I don't believe in a traditional afterlife, but if there is one I'd like to imagine that Joe (who was the first and best professional mentor I ever had) has been reading the papers and was there to welcome Kim, show him the angelic ropes.
Posted by ebogjonson in mediamemory at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 6, 2006
now THIS is punk rock!
via email from mikev (who needs something I can link to)
Posted by ebogjonson in memory at 10:50 AM | Permalink
December 4, 2006
the dreamlife of potted plants
If I knew more about music, I would say the above mash-up was be sung to the tune of Skrewdriver's "Prisoner of Peace." References to the Firedoglake quotes being paraphrased above can be found here, here and here.
Also, for the big picture, Donna over at The Silence of Our Friends brings the round-up/metacommentary here.
Just for the stupids in the world, I want to say that I am in no way directly suggesting that any Firedoglake front-pager is a skinhead or Nazi. I'm just testing the limits of punk / photoshop communication on blogs. The point here isn't that anyone expects perfection from their bloggers. It's that if someone calls bullshit on you, try not to respond by offering up your ridiculous, delusional, fantasy alter-egos, this as if your schtick actually constituted some kind of aesthetic, political or programmatic rationale. No offense, but you guys ain't punk rock for shit, not even do-gooder SHARP punks. I'm not saying I am or was, but I ran into a few back in my youth and I kind of have a feeling they would think you're poseur idiots.
Posted by ebogjonson in blogishmemorypolitricknal sciences at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
December 3, 2006
the mahablog: naughty words and pictures
Wherein your humble narrator comments on the ongoing lack of a clue of some white progressives have vis-a-vis the proper care and feeding of the blackface loa. [This format is evolving, so please bear with me.]
My comment:
It's disappointing (but a certain kind of typical) for white folks to be so right about their own issues (sexism here) and yet so wrong about everyone else's. That said, you have fairly instructively mischaracterized the problem with the Billmon blackfacing.First off: It wasn't that anyone thought Billmon was a Michael Richards-style racist, it was that many people of color thought his use of blackface was inept. Given the wild, memetic power of those images, people also suggested that there had been no pressing need to invoke those particular loa to deal with the Blitzer/Cheney CNN segment, leading us to the fairly straightforward question of why he might have felt the need to go there. Billmon and his readers' reaction to those specific and contained complaints? Petulance, defensiveness, attacks on people of color for "distracting" them from the important work of saving America, self-serving Peretzian irony about how the last true believers in the values of Dr. King were the brave white folks reading Billmon, Tomaskian whining about how their beloved left was being destroyed by "special interests," and, of course, the clarion call to the actual racists in the woodworks to write "n-word, n-word, n-word" in the comments completely apropos of nothing.
You write above that :
If you are writing from power, you assume some responsibilities. One of these is a responsibility not to contribute to the problems of racism and sexism by using racist and sexist language to diss people.
And yet at that being said, you also just can't resist saying that there have been "some episodes" where no amount of explaining could "placate" "them" because "seeing the point requires an advanced ability to think abstractly" and you cutely "'spect" things "just plain flew over a lot of peoples' heads." Then, just for kicks, you assure us that any "lynch mobs" that form in retaliation will have to get along without you, which, I have to say, is really mighty white of you. You quote Zuzu approvingly on attacks on your gender - "It's easy to reach first for the gender-based insult" and yet the first thing out of your mouth is how smart you are compared to those childish coloreds, but, just in case anyone has gotten you all wrong, any lynching is DEFINITELY going to have to go on without you. Nice work, Kimosabe!
Comment by ebogjonson -- December 3, 2006 @ 4:29 pm
The preceding context:
In the inciting posting, blogger Maha waded into the ongoing controversy regarding use of the word "whore" to attack a female Republican hack on liberal blog Firedoglake. Maha is down with idea that the post and poster can be rightly accused of sexism, but, nonetheless feels the need to separate her apples and oranges by defending blogger Billmon for recent his use of blackface in a post about Wolf Blitzer. (My comment on this related issue can be found here.)
In response to my comment, Maha abruptly closes down commenting in her thread on the argument that:
I really don't want to open up the "blackface" wars again, so I am closing comments before I get slammed with more commenters calling me a racist.I appreciate that the blackface imagery is extremely painful, which is why I have never used it myself. However, blackface imagery speaks as much, if not more, about white racism than black oppression. For most of the 200 years or so blackface was part of popular culture, only white men wore blackface. It was only a relative short time in the late 19th and early 20th century that black performers wore it, also. It should be viewed with more shame by whites than by African Americans, who don't have anything to feel ashamed about in this case.
And I still say the intention of Billmon's post had nothing to do with racism, and if you can't see that then it went over your head. I'm sorry if you take that as condescension, but it's a fact.
Comment by maha -- December 3, 2006 @ 5:02 pm
Rating:
As an intervention into the Mahablog discussion, this comment could be rightly rated as inconclusive to unsuccessful, as the comment had no impact on the attitude or tone of the poster. While there was certainly some excitement to had in Maha's decision to turn off commenting (!), her final insistence that the problem here is a lack of intelligence on the part of her colored readers is a classic racialized assumption, echoing greats of the genre from the Bell Curve to "What do you call a black guy with a ph.d?"
Her middle argument that whites, in effect, "own" blackface given their extensive use of it is a doozy, as is the non-dichotomy between "white racism" and "black oppression." All the same, these notions might be useful to explore via photoshop and regarding other racial outrages, such (to take a word introduced in this mix by Maha's post) the lynch mob. It strikes me that if, for example, you sever the racism of the lyncher from the oppression of the lynchee, you mostly end up privileging the subjectivity of the killer over the killed - i.e, the white over the black. But maybe Maha had some other effect in mind?
While no one in any way shape or form called Maha a racist (I admit to calling her "typical" and "Kimosabe," but both fall under the rubric of legitimate snark IMHO) her knee-jerk reaction is that she has to act "before I get slammed with more commenters calling me a racist." This indicates some confusion about how guilt, intent and action operate in discussions of racism, and this confusion is fairly global in her thinking, extending back to her reading of the initial Billmon incident: "I still say the intention of Billmon's post had nothing to do with racism." Sure, I guess, but it seems fairly straightforward to suggest (as we did way back when) that Billmon's intent might be distinct from the racial dynamic engendered, unleashed by or at play in his decision to pull out the cork. That Maha confuses all these points in the process of (rightly) attacking a male blogger for the sexism of their purported "non-sexist" use of sexist imagery, is, as they, icing on the cake.
Posted by ebogjonson in ebog o'blivionmediarace and other identities at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
ebog o'blivion
"The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye. For that reason, I refuse to appear on television, except on television. O'Blivion is not the name I was born with. It's my television name. Soon, all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode-ray tube to resonate."Dr. Brian O'Blivion, from Videodrome
I've been thinking a lot about what to do with this blog, or, more accurately, how to do this blog. I'm not really getting the amount of value I feel like I should be getting from my current blogging habits, which, as currently constructed, mostly allow me to procrastinate from other stuff near endlessly without a commensurate uptick of posting on here. I also have a gut-level feeling that I want to do less essayistic posting about, say, how John McWhorter's entire politic stems from his having been beaten by a girl when he was four, and do more impressionistic/imagistic posting of lists, dreams, spreadsheets, snaps, rips, photoshop gags, and so on. To make matters worse, I'm going to Kenya for a month and I have been desperately trying to figure out how to document that in a non-trad yet nifty way. (Snaps? Uploaded video? GPS google mapping?)
All of which is to say, that while I'm drawn like a moth to certain kinds of android flames, I think that moving forward I'm only going to do certain kinds of blogging in the comment sections of other people's blogs. Doing so is attractive to me on a number of levels, first, of course, being the perverse, Videodrome
The above rule, will, of course, be immediately broken. For one, there are going to be topics that no one has written about first, and there will also be things that won't fit into a comment or a photoshop gag. (That review of Ayiti: Cost of Life that I keep needing to write, for example.) Additionally, I intend to still link to stuff via the del.icio.us box on ebog home, or, maybe, I'll implement the reblog hack instead. (Either way, those of you reading this via feed should subscribe to the new feedburner feed to at very least make sure you get those del.icio.us links in your reader.)
And that's pretty much that. Let's see how it goes, shall we?
Posted by ebogjonson in ebog housekeepinginternet tubes at 1:44 PM | Permalink
December 2, 2006
heaven can wait
From ABC News (hat tip Huff Post):
Rice Not Ready to Discuss U.S. 'Mistakes' in IraqSecretary of State Suggests Reflections on Likely U.S. 'Mistakes' in Iraq Will Have to Wait Until She's Out of Office
Although she is not yet ready to explain herself, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is admitting that the United States has made mistakes in Iraq.
"As to whether the United States has made mistakes: Of course, I'm sure we have," Rice told the Arabic satellite television station Al-Arabiya. "You can't be involved in something as big as the liberation of a country like Iraq and all that has happened since, and I'm sure there are things that we could have done differently."
However, Rice told Al-Arabiya that now is not the time to talk about U.S. mistakes in Iraq.
"Frankly, we are looking ahead," she said.
Once her tenure as secretary of state is over and she is back at Stanford University, she said she will reflect on the war.
"I can look back and write books about what we might have done differently," she said. [full item]
Posted by ebogjonson in politricknal sciencestalking androids at 9:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 1, 2006
today is world aids day
It's a Friday, a fine day to check out some resources at the Black AIDS Institute.
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