March 2010
S M T W T F S
« Feb    
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

Random Thoughts: Suicide and Heroes

I’ve been trying to sort my thoughts this morning.  I feel like writing something, need to write something.

Organize the chaos of sentiments. Assert my rational capacities over and against my dark irrational self.

I’ve been trying to understand suicide recently: Continue reading Random Thoughts: Suicide and Heroes

March 8th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: culture, feline friends, film, media, meditations, television | Leave a comment

Can you spell a-p-p-e-a-s-e-m-e-n-t?

Maybe I’m being unfair, too hard on him, expecting too much for a man of color, the first to be the President of a nation that continues to be in denial about its history of institutionalized racial inequality. (Tea Party anyone?)

Maybe I should be like others who give him a break for trying to be fair-minded with his political and cultural opponents in an attempt to change the way politics are done.  (As Rodney King asked post-police beating, “Can’t we all just get along?”)

Maybe I should agree with him and, implicitly, his handlers–those cagey strategists who so expertly read the opinion/political/historical tea leaves to shape such a pathetically limited vision for the candidate of “hope”–whose  incremental style is supposed to make Obama “not-Bush” and “not-Clinton” in order to create the conditions for a profound presidential legacy.  (Not!)

Okay.

Enough snide sarcasm. Continue reading Can you spell a-p-p-e-a-s-e-m-e-n-t?

March 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , | Category: culture, politics | 2 comments

Incorporating the imagined body

Since I watched controversial Russian ice dancers Domnina’s and Shabalin’s faux Australian aboriginal folk routine earlier this week during the 2010 Olympics “original” ice dance competition, I have been thinking about how the cultural “other” is imagined and enacted to reproduce notions of cultural authority and power.

More specifically, I have addressed in other essays on my blog the importance of the culturally imagined/defined body as a site of colonization and imperial control.  Indeed, the body as an experienced reality is simultaneously a metaphor that is ideologically mapped with value and power in cultural, economic, and political/ideological terms.  It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that fundamental to any examination of social and ideological relations of power, bodies and the way they are imagined would be at its center implicitly, if not explicitly. Continue reading Incorporating the imagined body

February 26th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: culture, media, politics, television | Leave a comment

Not so nice Obama

In a recent blog I wrote critically about the fearful tendencies I experienced growing up in a conservative white community as a biracial child.  I drew the parallel of my own experience to current U.S. president Obama’s seeming need to be “nice” and respectful, to avoid confrontation for fear offending anyone, especially the real and imagined power of the white “master.” The underlying need to be liked, I suggested, had/has a racial component whose content is a constant sense of inferiority which exhibits itself in unconscious ways such as pandering and self-deprecating behavior–i.e., submission as in tail between one’s legs behavior–in order to deflect scrutiny of one’s racialized self.

So, for me, it was nice to hear and see Obama’s assertive management of disrespectful Republicans and cowardly Democrats in the healthcare “summit” yesterday. Continue reading Not so nice Obama

February 26th, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: media, politics, television | Leave a comment
 
  Older Entries »