If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?

Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are you look enough like our received idea of how Americans should look to duck the bite of the question. Unless of course you’re Jewish and your forebears haven’t mixed with Aryans enough, by force or choice, to give you that accepted, that approved look.

Things change, for better or worse. When I was a boy Rudolph Valentino’s foreign face had been romanticized into at least as much acceptance as pizza or kielbasa. But the stardom of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jennifer Lopez would have been harder to imagine. Harder still the stardom of Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry. (more…)

The CNN crawl this morning declared the Flip-Flop Wars. Barack Obama had changed course about campaign finance, deciding not to limit himself to a federal contribution, and John McCain had decided offshore drilling is okay after all.

The more important issue is the press’ mindless acceptance of the received boobism that changing one’s mind, one’s position about issues, is bad. Anyone who embraces this mania du jour doesn’t hold out much promise as a leader. Anyone incapable of course corrections in response to changing circumstances is a meathead.

And yet the press maintains its ludicrous flip-flop watch as if it were a national security alert. If we elect those who never change their minds and never alter course we deserve what we get. The notion of flip-flop is bogus. It panders to ideologues. But insistence on inquiring and flexible minds in our leaders is essential. The press confuses integrity with ideology.

If Alexander the Great had not been what our feckless press is calling a flip-flopper he would have been Alexander the Loser. —DM

Sexism, racism, agism, smoothies, bumblers, swift-boaters, dreamers—all  flavors in the great American apple pie. As we learn to avoid trans fats so we learn, ever so slowly, to wean ourselves from misogyny, racism, agism and all those other nasties.

The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the pundits, the voters and the candidates. But there were triumphs. As Senator Hillary Clinton said in graciously conceding the fight to Senator Barack Obama, there are now eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling, and none of us will forget it. Bless you, Senator. (more…)

West Virginians on Tuesday broke the devil’s deal between the media and the people to talk about racism and misogyny as little as possible. The voters in the mountain state chose to see Barack Obama as half black, not half white. They chose to remind us that racism is alive and well in the United States and might very well hand the general election to John McCain, just as the Southern (read Race) Strategy has been handing elections to Republicans all these years. (more…)

Municipal web sites tend to be passive-aggressive. In the guise of presenting vital information their subliminal message seems to be, And don’t ever say we didn’t tell you anything.

Rather than contribute to government transparency they tend to forestall inquiry by purporting to tell you all you want to know about the government you happen to be paying for. This is a ruse to distract you from all they’re not telling you. (more…)

Hickory dickory dock, Pillory Clinton is determined to turn back the clock, now borrowing $6.4 from herself in her Energizer Bunny effort to convince us we’re not ready to elect an African-American. That’s her message. She can disguise it with talk about Barack Obama’s inexperience and empty eloquence, but the message is we’re not ready to put racism behind us.

This quintessential power elitist and Washington insider will seemingly pillory the Illinois senator for anything she thinks will stick, including his so-called elitism, which is a scintilla of her own. In the name of giving us a real choice, she has buried the real issues under a heap of non-issues, such as her guileful gas tax holiday and the Jeremiah Wright flapdoodle. In the guise of being ready on Day One to take over she has demonstrated not only a startling hubris and pettiness but Washington dirt-mongering as usual. (more…)

Acting in its usual role as the national mind the press has decided that the rising fuel price is bad news, end of story. But it may be just the beginning of a much more important story.

Since the end of World War II we have built a society predicated on cheap gasoline. The suburbs sprawled inexorably into the countryside. Highways sliced and diced communities and farmland. Immense malls rose in remote spots, sucking the blood out of established commercial centers. Schools were consolidated into education factories, giving rise to huge bus fleets and loss of community control. A long-distance tourist industry developed. Small farms fell to developers and agribusiness combines. Agribusiness depends on huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, and on diesel-guzzling farm equipment and long-haul trucks to take farm products to market. (more…)

(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 40, Del Marbrook’s regular podcasts for The Student Operated Press)

The most frustrating aspect of journalism is its daily failure to challenge society’s assumptions.

When television reporters say General Motors or Ford have decided to downsize, they say something like, “Heavily unionized General Motors announced a plan to downsize its North American operations this morning.” Notice the anti-union bias. It is assumed that part of GM’s trouble is its unions. There is never a story saying, “Badly managed General Motors…” or “Unimaginative General Motors…”

But that’s hardly the only problem with this kind of knee-jerk reporting. First, it’s not reporting at all, it’s putting a GM press release on the top of a huge stack of assumptions. There is rarely any reportage about huge salaries and bonuses paid to executives for managing their companies poorly or chopping them up and shipping them overseas. There is never any reportage about whether there should be any more obligation in American society to limit profit margins in order to share more with workers. It is presumed that whatever is good for shareholders is good for everyone. And sometimes it is simply assumed that whatever is good for executives is good for the rest of us. These undemocratic assumptions essentially take healthy discussion off the table—and that is their intent. (more…)

Calling for Iraq’s militias to disband, whether it’s our call or the Baghdad government’s, may be like King George or the Continental Congress calling on the states to disband their militias. Lots of luck with that.

Iraq’s separate sects, peoples and provinces have far less in common than the original thirteen states.

Seen in this context, the debate over how long to stay in Iraq looks very different from the debate the press has framed. The picture we’re getting is that if we leave there will be chaos, genocide and further threats to our domestic security, and therefore discussion about leaving is political blather. (more…)

America is haunted by The Other, by otherness. The fastest approach to an understanding of this is to consider the photographs of the people we send to Washington. They don’t look like our demographics. They look northern European.

We look for The Other to determine who we don’t want in our churches, our neighborhoods, our schools. Worse yet, we look for The Other to determine who should not be helped by our hard-earned tax money. Much of our historic resentment of taxes is actually an unwillingness to provide public help to people unlike us.

In our quest for The Other we have at times considered Asians as well as Italians, Jews, Greeks and other Mediterranean people as non-whites, and today we are inclined to consider Arabs and Hispanics in the same light, whereas at least 47 percent of our Hispanic population identifies itself as white. (more…)