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Nina Simone, the jazz singer-songwriter and outspoken advocate of racial justice, died Monday at age 70 at her home somewhere in France. (She’d left the US in ’73 in disgust and only came back occasionally on tour.) Her official website has her whole fascinating life story, but it doesn’t include her last local appearance at Benaroya Hall in 2000, a spectacular evening according to those I know who attended.
…wherever we can find it, so here’s a link to some valiant folk trying to preserve the traditional Clallam language.
AN APOLOGY to those who tried to see my photo show the past week and a half. The Nico Gallery apparently had a water-heater explosion. We’ll try to remount the show elsewhere later this year, and will soon post all the images online.
LAST SUNDAY IN THIS SPACE, I discussed the value of continuing to read local newspapers, not just the NY Times.
But I also see value in trudging one’s way thru the Cadillac of American newspapers (i.e., it’s bigger than the others and weighted down with more luxury features, though it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train).
F’rinstance, Paul Krugman’s Sunday magazine section think-piece on America’s immensely growing economic inequality, and how it’s polluted politics, health care, foreign policy, social discourse, etc. etc.
It’s good to see something this honest in a paper that’s long (actually, just about always) been the voice of the economic elite. (I vaguely remember a writer (I don’t remember who it was) complaining a year ago that the NY Times Sunday magazine section’s editors rejected a piece he’d written about the homeless, asking him to make it more upscale.)
The backward distribution-O-wealth toward an increasingly out-of-touch Overclass isn’t exactly an untold story. But it is undertold. Or rather, when it is told it’s in a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees manner.
Anyone who regularly peruses the “alternative” press knows about the symptoms of an Overclass economy:
A Republican Party whose “ideology” is just a ramshackle structure of excuses for big-money butt kissing and power-grabbing.
A “New” Democratic Party concerned solely with preserving its own institutional existence, by striving to become just as big-money-friendly as the Republicans.
A “conservatism” prescribing authoritarian brutality to the downscale, libertine excess to the upscale.
A “liberalism” with plenty to say about recycling but little to say about luxury lifestyles that produce all those wastes; that abstractly worships M.L. King as a courageous leader (a sort-of civil-rights CEO) but ignores most of the issues he fought for; whose favorite “minorities” are upscale white women and upscale white gays.
A ‘radicalism” centered parimarily around issues friendly to the “rebel” kids from affluent families (the fates of plants, animals, and “exotic” humans who conveniently don’t live on the same continent).
A corporate society built not around making stuff, or even around profitably selling stuff, but around supporting the insatiable material demands of top executives by propping up the Almighty Stock Price.
An urban environment defiled by smoggy SUVs.
A suburban environment defiled by minimansions, ever larger and ever further apart.
A dumbed-down “mainstream” media in which only the big-money boys’ side of any issue gets mentioned, in between lengthy pieces about entertainment celebrities.
A dumbed-down “alternative” media in which politics is reduced to demographic target marketing (“Oh how much more englightened we are than those mainstream dorks”), in between lengthy stories about “alternative” entertainment celebrities.
A “digital age” that was aggressively hyped as a tool for expression, empowerment, and equility; but which, in its pre-stock-crash form, generated even more obscene levels of stock-price and luxury-lifestyle nonsense, contributing to real-estate hyperinflation and massive demographic cleansing in many cities.
The Overclass economy might have carried the seeds of its own fall from grace. Between certain CEO scandals and a depression that’s made millions aware of their own precarious fiscal states, it’s at least a little harder this year to make excuses for giving the ultra-rich every damned thing they want.
But a fall from grace ain’t the same thing as a fall.
The U.S. economy might not currently even know how to reform itself toward greater equity, despite experts’ warnings that middle-class consumer confidence might be the only way out of this slump.
Most politicians are deathly afraid of doing anything that might threaten big-money campaign donations.
Most media outlets don’t even want to think of showing or printing anything that would tarnish the upscale image they sell to advertisers. (When I interviewed for a job at the short-lived local mag Metropolitan Weekly, the publisher’s first statement was the minimum average income he wanted his readers to have.)
No, the way out of our socio-political-economic mess won’t come from the systems and institutions that helped us get into the mess.
It can only come by developing viable, inclusive, true alternatives to those systems and institutions; forcing those systems and institutions to adapt or die.
The Seattle School Board has just decreed that West Seattle High School’s sports teams shall no longer be known as the “Indians.”
Fair enough; about time, some of you might say. But the board also declared the name be replaced before the start of the next school year. That means the school’s students might not get to vote on a new name.
So it’s up to us, the loyal friends of youth, to help come up with some possible replacements.
The best new WSHS team name I can think of, the “Alkis,” isn’t a tribal name but does derive from the
old “Chinook Jargon” trading language, and hence might still be too native-oriented to qualify. (And besides, some say the name’s correctly pronounced “al-key,” something the authorities might not want to be associated with minors.)
Other possibilities, equally neighborhood-centric but more palatable, include “Admirals” (from the north WS business district) and “Cranes” (from the beautifully rugged cargo-container lifts flanking the Duwamish River). But there’s gotta be something better out there. Email me with your suggestions. I’ll pass them all along to the school officials.
INANE POLITICAL IDEA OF THE HALF-WEEK: Sanctimonious, bipartisan hypocrites in the U.S. Senate have drafted an all-purpose bill to allow police to shut down virtually any public gathering at which drugs might be consumed or even discussed—raves, Hempfests, neo-hippie country festivals, and potentially even scrictly political events at which someone might state that the war on drugs wasn’t a great thing. The bill has already passed one Senate committee. You might consider letting certain people know you think this stinks.
LET’S ALL PLAY
SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPE
MYSTERY DATE!
This proposed role-playing game will involve two separately-shuffled decks of cards.
The female player draws a card at random from the Pink Deck to determine which of the following grossly overgeneralized female character types (taken from popular images in “mainstream” and “alternative” media) she must adopt.
Then the male player does the same from the Blue Deck, containing various one-dimensional male character types. The two players then proceed to have a bitter verbal argument, in their characters.
The loser: The player who breaks character first.
The winner: There are no winners.
The point of the game: NOT to have fun, but to be as adamant and as miserable as you can be.
THE FEMALE ROLES:
Description: Says she’ll love you; will really kill or at least totally humiliate you.
Visualization: Blonde, sultry, with a come-hither expression, cleavage, and a knife held behind her back.
Description: Stuck-up high school brat
Visualization: Perfect body, perfect hair, perfect clothes, the facial expression of someone who’s just confronted horse feces on the sidewalk.
Description: Believes stereotyping people by gender is the worst crime in the world, that it’s done by no women and all men, and if you disagree you’re part of the universal male conspiracy.
Visualization: Butch in leather with a permanent scowl.
Description: The emotionally abusive, all-purpose victim of everything. Transforms in an instant from bawling to anxious to wrathful.
Visualization: Overemotive Shakespearean actress; or the couch-swooner from that Edward Gorey book cover. Might be finishing a drink carried in one hand while pouring another drink with her other hand.
Description: Completely lacking a mind or will of her own. Enslaved by TV and magazine ads that don’t want her to buy stuff, just to make her feel miserable.
Visualization: mirror in her hand, standing on a scale, rail-thin but seeing herself in the mirror as voluminously obese
Description: Victim of the Mean Teen’s putdowns for merely looking insufficiently ladylike. Because she has the skankiest reputation in school, no boy will have her–and none ever has.
Visualization: Not seductive, merely “cheap” and semi-pathetic looking. Ill-fitting denim jacket, last year’s jeans style, the wrong brand of cigarettes, too much makeup.
Description: Her mischievous giggle and batting eyes can make men give her fortunes, which she’ll waste in an instant on one really fabulous consumer purchase.
Visualization: Carefully contrived fake absentmindedness.
Description: The woman every man’s supposed to go absolutely crazy about and if you don’t what’s wrong with you?
Visualization: An almost kabuki-like absurdist characterization made from her own thoroughly-surgeried body; plus overbleached and overteased hair, big vacant eyes, surgically-thickened pouting lips, impossibly high heels, and a vinyl or gold-lame jumpsuit.
Description: Diligently works to create a society where everything’s uniformly blah and anything that could even possibly be fun would be outlawed.
Visualization: Stern emotionless behind big round glasses, blah hair, blah clothes,
Description: Your new boss, who uses conniving and treachery to get to the top (whereas your old male boss simply used bluster and bullying).
Visualization: Nordstrom-suited adult version of the Mean Teen. Shoulder pads capable of playing football in.
Description: doesn’t want to kill you, just enslave you.
Visualization: Perect demure smile, bridal gown, holding handcuffs or a lasso, perhaps dreaming a “thought balloon” of screeching children and a minivan.
Description: In high school she was the Mean Teen. In adulthood she will be the Dresser for Success. But now in college, she’s sowing more oats than Quaker–and will voraciously defend her right to do so.
Visualization: Standing up in the back seat of a convertible, either flashing or simply thrusting her bosom forward. Expression of out-of-control glee.
THE MALE ROLES:
Description: Ape-ish, vulgar, boorish, yet boistrously unaware.
Visualization: Abercrombie & Hilfiger designer slop, backward baseball cap, puking while holding a bottle of Goldschlager.
Description: Can’t read, speak, or think. Can barely stand. Yet fantasizes about being a drug-running, woman-beating street tough.
Visualization: Baggy butt-cleavage jeans, blank permanent-stoner expression, skateboard, lanky and hunched over.
Description: Believes in Breaking All The Rules, especially rules that prevent him from doing anything he wants to anything (or anyone) he wants.
Visualization: Loud “GQ” attire, Ray-Bans, smug smirk, cocky strut, posing in front of a huge-ass vehicle with anti-environmental and/or just plain rude bumper stickers.
Description: Wishes for the chance to create, from violence and chaos, a new world of total purity. Doesn’t yet realize such a world would immediately declare him not pure enough.
Visualization: Crew cut, huge-ass gun, stern stare, KKK robe showing beneath his fatigues.
Description: Watches TV and doesn’t read “alternative” newspapers; and hence is personally responsible for everything wrong in the whole world.
Visualization: The vacuous ’50s daddy figure from the cartoon This Modern World.
Description: Exists only to oppress women; dreams of a world where men are men and women stay barefoot & pregnant.
Visualization: Malicious-looking brute with slick hair and a slick thin moustache, in a disco suit with gold chains and a thick mound of fake chest hair.
Description: From man-bashing TV commercials, the clueless househusband who can’t even open a can of beans without a woman to help.
Visualization: Clumsy oaf in the middle of a pratfall.
Description: Believes the only way a male can have a soul is to renounce his body. Eats a special macrobiotic diet devised by Chinese monks to completely suppress the sex drive. Women frequently tell him of their platonic respect for him, in between relationships with Patriarchists.
Visualization: Ponytail down to here; paisley pajama-esque clothes, open-toed Earth Shoes.
Description: The school principal, college professor, company president, court judge, government official, parole officer, doctor, cop, father, banker, or other authority figure whose only joy in life is keeping you down.
Visualization: A sadistic yet somehow blasé expression, a more or less wrinkly face, and a more or less formal business suit.
Description: The perfectly trained mate. Ready and eager to perform any chore (from cunnilingus to grouting) without notice. Will be cheated on within a year and divorced within two.
Visualization: Sweater, tastefully poofy curly blond hair, the expression of a puppy dog eager to please. Perhaps cooking, gardening, or mending socks.
Description: White women see him as a potential stealer of purses. White men see him as a potential stealer of jobs.
Visualization: Thin; dressed in an overly-anxious-to-fit-in looking formal suit. Face is silhouetted (the particular ethnicity of this man, whatever it is, isn’t the point).
Description: Perfect BECAUSE he’s gay and therefore safely unavailable; the object/recipient of female fantasies involving every possible virtue.
Visualization: Perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed, boyish looking (but not queen-y).
A UW survey claims young white male workers have a worse start in life, and fewer opportunities for a better life, than their early-’80s forebearers.
Undoubtedly, the Dittoheads will misinterpret these findings to claim affirmative action has gone too far, that women and minorities are now the privileged castes and society must now focus on returning the erstwhile sons of privilege to their supposed rightful place.
What it really means is a new caste system has developed in the U.S., based less on race and gender than on the purer inequalities of money and power. There are still bastions of white-male privilege, in the corporate boardrooms and the corridors of political power. But remember, most rich people are white but most white peope aren’t rich. And the nonrich whites are in the same unstable boat as the nonrich blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and native Americans.
This means progressive-lefty types need to rethink 30-year-old (or older) notions of a world where “white” plus “male” equals “oppressor.” There are millions of pale penis people stuck in the same no-future rut as millions of women and minorities. A liberalism that worked would reach out to these people, inviting them in to a movement to try and make things better for everybody.
…has come and gone, and I would not at all be surprised if you didn’t notice it unless you either had the day off from work/school or if you’d waited for mail delivery on Monday.
Mainstream-media coverage of the day was reduced to the bare minimum (Sunday op-ed pieces about The State of Race in America; quick TV clips of politicians’ speechifying about the great man intercut with children’s choirs doing old black spirituals).
Even the traditional MLK corporate “public service” ads, re-imaging Dr. King into corporate America’s preferred idea of a visionary (someone who shifts paradigms and thinks outside the proverbial box), were noticably diminished this year. Part of that could do with companies cutting back on expenses deemed unnecessary for fiscal survival.
But there might be another potential reason. The politicians, the companies, and particularly the media just might (might, I say) be particularly uncomfy this time around with Dr. King’s real messages. The man wasn’t just a dreamer. He was a dissident. He demanded to challenge the U.S. status quo, to insist this country live up to its professed ideals of liberty and equality. To King, being a proper American didn’t involve sanctimonious complacency. It meant working, fighting, to make this a better place, a more just place.
It’s almost certain that if King were around today, Lynne Cheney’s think tank would brand him as a bin Laden sympathizer.
At first, I thought the sudden emergence of an overriding central political issue would render irrelevant all the littler things progressives obsess over, such as gender-role images in the media or PoMo deconstructions of texts.
But then it dawned on me that all these sub-issues relate, at least indirectly, to the main tasks at hand: Getting the U.S. going again, not letting Bush pull us toward an inevitably-futile armed conflict, and getting the U.S. out of the colonial-empire game that got us into this mess.
Herewith, a few speculative ways some of the heretofore largely separate progressive causes might tie into the new Cause #1 (finding a way out of this new military-political situation without losing lots of innocent lives here or elsewhere):
Thus, it takes PoMo thinking to find a response to the attacks that doesn’t end up destroying modern (western) society in the name of saving it.
So don’t for a minute buy into the notion that the conservative prowar contingent’s got some inevitable monopoly on the nation’s hearts-‘n’-minds.
The things progressives have talked about all these years are more relevant, and potentially more promotable, than ever.
A critic lists the “Top 50 Cliches of the Art World.”
“Why Whites Think Blacks Have No Problems.”
Longtime tech-biz observer Adam Engst has some inside insights about the Internet grocery biz in “Where Webvan Went Wrong.”
The following is the “long version” of one of the short items to run in the Stranger obit column later this week:
Rev. Fred Beaver Chief Jameson, 46, was a member of the Lummi Nation, a spiritual leader, musician, and social activist, who worked among Seattle’s Native American community and also in the local art and music scenes.
He lectured across North America and Europe; he’d married a Swiss woman and was planning to move to Zurich. He was the Seattle School District’s Native American liaison in the ’70s. He led drum circles and made recordings of Northwest Coast Salish music, including the 1999 CD Red Cedar Medicine Circle Songs.
One of Jameson’s friends in the music community, Sky Cries Mary founder Roderick Romero, said he was “the most significant native of this area that I’ve encountered. His whole purpose was to bridge the indigenous culture and that of what he called ‘the settlers,’ and try to heal the pain. His dream was to have a children’s center where children could learn more about the indigenous people of this area…. He had a massive impact on Seattle, not just because he was a native but because he stepped out side of those boundaries.”
“He was open to every religion,” Romero added. “He didn’t alienate anyone; he was always open to what anyone had to say or was feelng. He married Anisa and I. He blessed our houses. When Anisa was going through cancer, he was there for her. He was one of the most significant people in my life.
“He was planning on moving to Switzerland with the woman from Zurich he’d married. He was so accepted into any culture, I thought he’d be such a great person to speak for the States. He always had something positive to say.”
In the local neo-pagan publication Widdershins, writer Amanda Silvers called Beaver Chief “a wise man, teacher, healer, singer, storyteller and all-around funny guy who is very serious about spirit.”
Jameson also wrote the book A Handbook For Human Beings, in which he said about himself: “I am a bridge. A bridge to help you understand our culture and combine it with your own… NOT to replace it, but to combine it.”
Jameson died of a sudden aneurysm on June 8 at the Queen Anne post office. Services were held last Wednesday at the Bonney Watson funeral home on Broadway, followed by a ritual burning of his belongings at the Swinomish Medicine House near La Conner.
I CONTINUE TO RECEIVE letters and emails asking me to stop using the word “yuppie” in the online column.
So, at least for today, I’ll use a different term to describe the only people Seattle’s political and media elites care about–the Monoculture.
In the Monoculture aesthetic, everyone who lives in Seattle (or at least everyone who deserves to live here) is affluent, childless, in an office-type profession, educated yet decidedly non-intellectual, “culturally aware” yet relentlessly middlebrow, “active in the community” yet devoutly pro-business, a devout attender of high-volume, high-priced restaurants, and a strong supporter of “diversity” just as long as everybody looks and behaves identically blandly.
Entire retail empires, publications, and political campaigns are built on this dubious premise.
And now, there’s a slick free monthly, Colors NW, showing that you don’t have to be of pale Euro descent to be part of the Monoculture.
The magazine’s second issue, out now, has a Bon Marche ad on the back (why, by the way, doesn’t the Bon still have a real website?), smaller inside ads for mortgage consultants and liposuction clinics, and features within about the Film Festival, a dot-com executive, and pricey restaurants.
The Bon model is Asian American. The liposuction ad’s before-and-after model and the dot-com exec are both African American. The restaurant reviews hype “upscale soul food” and “down home Japanese.” Otherwise, they’re hard to distinguish from similar features in Monoculture-obsessed media.
“Yeah,” you might be saying if you’ve already read the mag, “but what about the cover story on the history of Asian American political activism in Seattle? Or the profile of Samoan hiphop DJ Kutfather? Or the little back-page essay by a Seattle U student advisor on the identity confusion resulting from her own half-white, half-Filipino heritage?”
Yes, the mag has all those things. But these three pieces depict their subjects as ideal citizens of Seattle-The-Good. Even the Asian-activism story is written as a tale of earnest progressives striving to rectify wrongs that all nice Reagan Democrats can agree are wrong (racist ad images, for example).
And in the context of the magazine’s more consumerist material, the profiled activists get the same overall aura you see in corporate-sponsored Martin Luther King Day ads. That is, they become seen as out-of-the-box-thinkin’ political entrepreneurs, the social-justice equivalents of “new economy” CEOs.
But that’s not necessarily all that bad. After all, there’s something to be said for the idea that ethnic striving oughta be about making it, succeeding in the melting-pot and taking pride in that success.
Even if it means conforming to the white-dominated zeitgeist of the Monoculture, and not to the “true diversity” zeitgeist of white lefties such as myself.
IN OTHER NEWS:A tiny news brief reveals what critics of “get tuff” welfare policies have long claimed–that draconian aid regulations cost more in paperwork and enforcement costs than they save in denied benefits.
NEXT:“The arts” as an economic development scheme.
ELSEWHERE:
Some folk in Boston are archiving those “we’ll set your poem to music” records. The ones they don’t consider good enough to reissue on CD, they’ve posted online (found by The Interstellar Cafe)….
TODAY, I’M PLUGGING a book you can’t buy yet.
But I want you to remember it; it’s just that great.
The Golem’s Mighty Swing, by original Stranger art director James Sturm, is the first comic I know about (and one of the best narratives of any sort) about that relatively obscure but avidly-followed-by-some corner of sports history,
Jews in baseball.
It’s also an astounding feat of storytelling, finding the Universal in the Particular by creating specific characters and situations that show off these characters’ personalities.
And it’s an amazing piece of art.
Remember a while back when I raved about Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, that brilliantly written and drawn “educational comic” about the medium’s aesthetic principles? The Golem’s Mighty Swing could be a textbook case for many of these principles. Every frame is exquisitely composed. Every figure, every face, is a mini-masterpiece of action and characterization in deceptively simple ink lines. The baseball-playing scenes by themselves are frozen-action renderings that outpunch almost all superhero comics ever drawn.
The plot, you ask? The Stars of David are a barnstorming baseball team, traveling across 1920s middle America in a broken-down bus, playing local minor-league teams in exhibitions. They play up their ethnicity as an exotic selling point to the small-town audiences. But a fly-by-night promoter convinces them to take the act further, dressing their physically biggest player (who’s really black) as a golem, the man-made monster of Hebrew legend (and of a popular silent film of the era).
What neither the team nor the promoter realize, until it’s too late, is that the golem character’s visage on publicity posters helps inflame the anti-Semitic sentiments of the town where the team’s next game is scheduled, leading to vicious attacks and a dramatic climax you’ll never get in any yuppified baseball-as-Americana tale.
The book’ll be out in a couple of months from Drawn & Quarterly Publications. I’ll let you know when it appears. When it does, get it.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last week’s piece about the new book Fast Food Nation drew a quick email response from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. He wrote that I shouldn’t have been so hard on the book’s author Eric Schlosser, who, despite the book’s rants about big restaurant chains and their corporate-agribusiness supply system, claims to still be a meat-and-dairy consumer and a loyal patron of his hometown indie pizza joint.
NEXT: The original Seattle Weekly crew was never as “alternative” as it apparently thinks it used to be.
THE DEMISE OF PUNK PIONEER JOEY RAMONE, of lymphoma at age 49, struck me more than that of Elvis Presley (at an even younger age).
Not just because, unlike Presley, I’d actually seen the Ramones live several times, but because of their respective places in the advancement of rock as an art form.
Presley hadn’t been the first white white singer to copy a hard R&B style. But he was the first to make a huge business from it. The process of his schtick was to bleach the blackness out of black music, to make it just acceptable enough for white consumption while still being “wicked” enough to draw prudes’ ire.
When that territory got too crowded, he turned on himself in a series of self-deconstruction movies. This inward obsession finally manifested itself in drug-influenced lethargy and obesity.
Joey and his fellow faux-bros. emerged on the scene as Presley had disappeared into the recursive trap of self-parody. The Ramones took self-parody as one of the four corners of their group persona (along with ’60s garage-rock, Phil Spector-Brill Building pop, and biker leather wear).
But instead of retreating further into self-referentiality, they started by jokingly depicting themselves as cretins and pinheads, then expanded outward with a hard, fast recapturing of the vital energy that had been sucked out of rock by the post-1960 Presley (and by flower power, Sgt. Pepper, prog rock, soft rock, mullet-head metal, etc.). As Joey allegedly once said, “We wanted to play rock n’ roll, not drum solos.”
Along the way, they reinvigorated rock, launched (not singlehandedly but almost) the punk revolution, directly and/or indirectly inspired thousands of bands (yes, including many here), and churned out dozens of mini-masterpieces of two-minute, three-chord perfection.
While Presley turned ever-inward until he died alone, Ramone kept spinning out toward the allegedly-real world. Joey eventually (at least indirectly) renounced the just-kidding aspect of his original schtick with the anti-Reagan song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” In it, the singer who used to sport swastikas on his leather jacket as a cheap anti-PC gag got serious to denounce a president who’d become too forgiving about the real Nazis.
Also, nowhere in Ramone’s originals or his carefully-chosen cover recordings did he ever pretend to be black. (Ex-bandmate Dee Dee Ramone did, on a misguided rap CD, but that’s another tale.) A strange ’90s book called Hole In Our Soul saw this lack of minstrelism as a renunciation of the whole R&B tradition and, hence, of everything wonderful and heartfelt about America’s cultural heritage. I think that’s bunk. What Joey and his punk pals and proteges did was find themselves enough heart and, yes, soul in the garage-rock heritage, and could express themselves while respecting black music enough to not try to take it over.
P.S.: The afternoon Ramone died, I happened to be at the Museum of Flight and happened to see U2’s elaborately painted private jet taking off from Boeing Field following their Tacoma Dome gig. U2 would never have had that jet, let alone a career, if it hadn’t been for Ramone–one who, at least publicly, decried the whole material-excess lifestyle and rock-star aesthetic U2 now relishes.
NEXT: A chant, re: The art of Art Chantry.
SEVEN DISGRUNTLED MICROSOFT EMPLOYEES (current and former) have filed this here $5 billion race-discrimination lawsuit. They claim there’s a “plantation mentality” at the software giant, in which black employees were routinely denied promotions and raises and were subject to retaliation if they complained.
In its statements of denial, MS officials essentially said such a thing could never, ever have occurred at a company so forthright, so diversity-conscious. The routine tech-media gang of MS defenders has gone on to share this line.
Why are some people so shocked to hear about the Microsoft discrimination suit? You all oughta know by now how the software giant’s got this corporate culture in which only a certain type of person (the Gates clone wannabe) gets ahead.
The MS corporate culture was, at least indirectly, inspired by that of Nordstrom (which, you may recall, faced its own discrimination suit a few years back).
In both companies, and in whitebread Seattle society in general, the real goal of preaching “diversity” isn’t to bring more minorities into the corridors of power but to allow the white folks already there to feel better about themselves. If corporate Seattle could figure out a way to support minority rights without having to actually deal with real black (or hispanic or American Indian) folks in their own offices, they would.
One quintessential example of this hypocrisy is the awful movie version of that breast-beating, locally-written novel Snow Falling On Cedars.
It’s ostensibly about the WWII relocation camps and other racist acts against Japanese Americans in our state not too long ago. But the movie (in which no Asian-American actor is billed higher than eighth!), and the novel, are really all about raising audience sympathy for the nice white-boy hero, a noble hack journalist (and the author’s presumed alter ego).
This past week’s local Martin Luther King Day public-service ads further exemplify this faux-diversity mindset.
The ads all venerate King as a visionary, a leader, a forward-thinker (i.e., a representative of the values CEOs often imagine themselves to have). The ads then close with pats-on-the-ol’-back to the forward-thinking corporations who pitched in to pay for the ad space or time. Little or no mention is made of the real social issues King confronted, many of which still need confronting today.
So it stands to reason that a theoretical company that participated in these and other “diversity” themed self-celebrations (which theoretically might also include donations to inner-city schools, representatives at minority recruiting fairs, and internal sensitivity-training classes for white employees) might theoretically, and informally, decide it’s been doing enough to feel good about itself diversity-wise, and that it doesn’t have to go that extra, often-unpublicized step and actually demand fair treatment for actual minority persons within its own employment ranks.
If that’s what really went on, I (though perhaps not top company management) wouldn’t be the least surprised.
TOMORROW: I know what IT is. Will I tell you? Find out.
BLACK ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION was seldom among the proudest examples of African American cultural achievement.
Its schedule relied heavily on music-video blocks, including a lot of the gun-totin’ and woman-dissin’ gangsta minstrels manufactured by L.A. promoters for mall-rat consumption. Its original shows were heavy on the kind of self-deprecating comedy acts that Spike Lee savages in his new movie Bamboozled. And it ran as much as 12 hours a day of infomercials.
But black audiences were often willing to give the channel at least a little grudging respect, because it was “their own.” It was officially owned by a black entrepreneur, Robert Johnson. (Even though its financing and ultimate control came from TCI’s Liberty Media subsidiary.)
But AT&T, which now controls Liberty, has been involved in some major corporate reorganizing; while Johnson’s tried to start a new commuter airline.
So BET will soon disappear as a nominally independent entity, to become just another of Viacom’s many cable properties.
Some commentators have mourned that the only black-owned national TV channel’s going to be just another piece of a media conglomerate.
What they’re not fully considering is that a Viacom-owned BET just might be a more effective voice for black America. Not just with more and costlier original shows, but with a more respectful atittude toward its core audience.
Viacom’s MTV and UPN channels have certainly traded in the kind of jive talk and booty shakes vilified by BET’s critics. But its Showtime pay-TV channel has commissioned perhaps the most respectful black-middle-class show since Cosby, Soul Food (and its Hispanic counterpart, Resurrection Boulevard).
These shows, along with HBO’s The Corner, expand the notion of “TV Worth Paying For.” Those with just plain old broadcast reception get Af-Am role models limited to over-the-top sitcom mugging and Oprah. Those with basic cable can also see Li’l Kim’s cleavage, Wyclef’s loverboy posturing, and CNN’s Bernard Shaw.
But for the adventures of more-or-less ordinary black families with more-or-less ordinary relationship and career problems, ya gotta pay extra.
Maybe, just maybe, that’ll change.
TOMORROW: Bjork’s dander in the dark.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
