Remembering My Last Ride on Gran Torino

It would be nice to say that the 2008 movie Gran Torino was the last good Clint Eastwood movie that I remember seeing but as much as I would like to say so, I don't feel comfortable actually saying that. Let's just say I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would...

Anyway, wasn't this movie just a race swap re-make of The Karate Kid?

Yes, in a way, it was. It also seems like a reversal of all those old 1960s and 1970s stories in which the young Caucasian guy (or girl, in the case of the '60s comic book version of Wonder Woman) learned all about self-defense from an elderly Asian man. (Call it the Remo Williams syndrome, if you prefer.)

One of the movie's main subplots had an elderly man (played, of course, by Clint Eastwood) teaching a young Asian boy the fundamentals of American manhood. Eventually the movie had Clint's character trying to protect the young boy's family from a local gang of Asian youths, eventually leading to an unexpected gesture on Clint's character's part that seemed more like a triumph of hope over experience than anything else.

That said, it was not surprising that this movie was more popular with conservative-leaning people like my mother - -who is incidentally a Polish-American who grew up in the type of blue-collar neighborhood that this movie was set in -- than with the more liberal people who have written about this movie online. The movie was a bit on the simplistic side and it was tempting to see this flick as the conservative answer to Crash. (After all, Crash -- save for a few scenes -- tended to take the same shamelessly obvious approach to its issues as well.)

I'm not going to pretend that I liked this movie as much as Unforgiven or The Outlaw Josey Wales -- indeed, I would be very surprised if I still remember this movie a decade from now.

Plus there were quite a few scenes in the movie that I didn't really care for. (For example, it wasn't enough that one character got attacked and beat up, she also had to get raped? Granted, gang members aren't known for their chivalry but still...) Nor does it help that this same plot would have seemed a bit more daring forty or fifty years ago. (Indeed, it makes a sad comment on American society that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is still a market for movies about how violent things can get when "outsiders" move into the neighborhood.)

And yet I was surprised enough by certain plot turns that I found it hard to hate it as much as other critics did. Add to that the fact that my Polish-American mother had no problems with this movie despite the number of times its script used the word "polack" -- a word she has heard directed at herself in anger more than a few times in her life -- and I must conclude that the movie had something going for it. Even if it wasn't as much as Eastwood intended.

Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Shameless (U.S.): “Los Diablos!”

Every time I'm tempted to write this show off as just one long exercise in bad taste, it manages to come up with surprising sharp -- if not always subtle -- social commentary. For example. it seems to be the one show on TV right now which seems to show a little sympathy for the people who have seen their jobs disappear due to changing technology and in this episode, it actually bothered to tackle the very controversial subject of interracial prejudice -- specifically black-on-Hispanic prejudice -- without the usual PC rationalizations. So, good job.

Granted, it might have been nice if the writers had come up with a better solution than having the nice brown-skinned people just go away but I suppose it could have been worse. At least, they tried to depict the problem in a relatively honest fashion without the usual pretenses about how such a problem would never occur in an all-white neighborhood.

The Things We Are Not Supposed to Talk About

A good friend of mine told me today about how one of her granddaughters recently got beaten up by a fellow student for:

1. singing a "black song."

2. responding to a question by said student about whether or not she wanted to be black by saying that she actually wanted to be Latina.

3. admitting that she was in actuality an Arab.

Needless to say, none of these reasons deserved punishment but that's what the poor girl got anyway. And unfortunately, such incidents are not rare. According to my friend, the girl's older half-brother got similar treatment from bullies when he was younger even though he was half-black. For that matter, so did the girl's biracial mother.

And sadly enough, the student responsible did not apologize until several days afterward -- and even then the grandmother suspected that the bully's true motive for apologizing was not genuine regret but a desire to avoid prosecution for a hate crime.

I could go on to say more but then again it should not matter what else I could say. The fact is that the little girl was bullied and I can't help feeling very angry about it. It should not matter if the girl responsible was white. It should not matter if she was black. It should not matter if she was Arab or Latina or Asian or anything else. A bully is a bully is a bully is a bully is a bully and anyone who tells you different is probably either a potential bully or an enabler of bullies.

I know that is fashionable in some sections of modern society to pretend differently but I prefer not to think that way. After all, when a former co-worker told me about how her younger sister had once been bullied by Mexicans, my first reaction was not, "Yeah, you Anglo girls deserved that." It was "My God, how would I feel if something like that happened to my sister!"

I also know that it is fashionable to rationalize the desire to not talk about such incidents on the grounds that such talk will only encourage people to get the wrong idea about certain minorities. This is an understandable sentiment but unfortunately, it is also a bit shortsighted if for no other reason that most of the victims of such bullies are themselves minorities. And even if they were white, the same attitude would still be shortsighted. After all, few white people -- especially white liberals -- would be flattered by the idea that there is absolutely no difference between them and the average white bully. Yet this is very often the type of assumption that white liberals are expected to make in regard to nonwhite bullies: that there is no difference between, say, the Mexican who beats up on little kids and the Mexican who does not beat up on little kids. And even if such assumptions could be "proved" to be just, the fact still remains that most people -- regardless of race-- resent like hell the idea that it's okay for people to beat them up.

In any event, this is not a recent problem. Some of my older Mexican-American cousins used to complain about the bullying they experienced in Detroit schools back when they were young. And I somehow doubt that they were the only ones who experienced such problems.

For that matter, I don't kid myself that any one ethnic group has a monopoly on school bullies. But I also don't kid myself that any ethnic group is immune to the temptation to bully.

As for the notion that we just should not talk about it:

1. The one thing we should have learned in the 1960s is that major social problems don't just go away because certain people don't want to talk about them.

2. Said problems are likely to affect people's behavior and attitudes whether we talk about them or not. So it is not very helpful to society to just pretend such problems don't exist.

3. Just because you don't want to talk about certain problems doesn't mean that people are going to stop talking about them. They just won't talk about them to you. And that attitude, needless to say, can come back to haunt you.

Words Fail Me Yet Again

My condolences to the victims of the mass shooting in Pennsylvania this past Saturday and their next of kin.

Despite all the funerals I have attended in my life, I cannot begin to imagine what the latter must be going through but my prayers are with them nonetheless.

Quote of the Week

We must admit that people of color can be racist, and this racism is an idiotic mindless support of a system that beats us down. We have to commit to stop being racist against each other. Because by being racist against each other, we bring racism on ourselves.
--Steven De Castro, “Identity in Action: A Filipino American’s Perspective.” From the anthology, The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, edited by Karin Aguilar-San Juan

Quote of the Week

Yet it makes me cringe to read, for the millionth time, the words black and Hispanic as synonyms for victim. How many times does one have to read that linguistic link before the brain fuses ethnicity with wretchedness? How does this link affect people who come in contact with blacks and Hispanics? How does it affect blacks and Hispanics themselves?
--Enrique Fernandez, “Label Warning,” The Village Voice, November 5, 1991, vol. 36, no. 45

Quote of the Week

Since I began to publish in 1962, I have often been asked, by people of all colors, what my experience of racial prejudice in the science fiction field has been. Has it been nonexistent? By no means: It was definitely there. A child of the political protests of the '50s and '60s, I've frequently said to people who asked that question: As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force —- until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.

We are still a long way away from such statistics.

But we are certainly moving closer.
--Samuel R. Delany, "Racism and Science Fiction"

Quote of the Week

So here I am, bringing my own viewpoints to a genre I love, which doesn’t always love me back. I can’t change the books already written, but I can have hope that future writers will bring their own changes.
--Mira, "The Gothic Novel and Antisemitism," For the Gothic Heroine, December 28, 2017

My comment:

Hey, I resemble that remark...

But seriously, folks.

I suspect every non-Aryan like myself has a similar love-hate relationship with Western literature. As well as with Western movies, Western music, Western TV shows, etc. And like Mira, I would like to hope that future writers will bring their own changes to the genre. And I don't just say that because I hope to be one of those future writers...

Trailer of the Week: Hidden Figures

When you grow up hearing stories about how your Mexican-born father was the only Hispanic in a computer room who wasn't a janitor, you learn early on that there are just some movies you are not going to be objective about.

This is one of them.

Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Davey and Goliath: “The Polka Dot Tie”

It has become so hip nowadays to make fun of the old stop-motion animated children's TV series Davey and Goliath that I sometimes forget how progressive this show could be. For example, this series once devoted an episode to a 1962 parable about racism which never quite mentions racism yet comes closer to mentioning it than most other animated shows of the era. Yet today hardly anyone remembers it.

Granted, messages of racial tolerance were not rare in 1962 when the African-American civil rights movement was in full swing, but they certainly were not very common in most American cartoon shows. And given the fact that Davey and Goliath is usually considered a conservative show because of its emphasis on overt Christian messages, the anti-racism message in this episode seems especially astounding.

To be fair, the episode never comes out and overtly argues on behalf of racial tolerance. But it was one of the first episodes to feature a black character and it is not very hard to connect the dots between the fuss title character Davey makes over said character's polka dot tie and the fuss many real-life adults in 1962 would have made about said character's skin color.

Of course, this being a positive show, Davey eventually comes around and accepts the friendship of the black character after his sister Sally spends the entire episode treating Davey as a fool for initially doing otherwise. And no one thinks anything of it.

It would be nice to believe that all racial conflicts were so easily settled back in 1962, but alas, I suspect otherwise. However, it is nice to see that even back then, some people's hearts were in the right place.

Comic Book Image of the Week

These two scenes from The Uncanny X-Men number 193 are among some of the few times Marvel Comics scribe Chris Claremont ever mentioned Latinos -- and naturally, he can't help getting it a little bit wrong. After all, few Latinos -- unless they're talking to a member of a different Spanish-surnamed ethnic group -- would use the phrase "us Latinos" when it would sound much more natural to say "us Cubans", "us Puerto Ricans", "us Mexicans" or even "us Americans."

Granted, this is a small quibble -- and even the Latin creators of the comic strip Baldo can't resist repeating the same trope -- as if their title character is suddenly going to become less popular if he turns out to be part of the "wrong" Latino ethnic group.

Then again it all depends on how literally you interpret the words "hermano" and "bro" in this scene. After all, it's not likely that Jaime Rodriguez would be using the words "us Latinos" to his own brother unless he really wanted to be very politically correct.

Of course, if you want more context for those two scenes, there is always this:

Pop Song of the Week: "Go Home"

Some prejudices even the Hag can't overcome... Dammit!

It Isn’t a Choice; It’s a Spectrum

You know how it goes. You go for years without meeting one openly bisexual woman and then it seems like they’re all over the place. Ironically, I didn’t encounter that many female bisexuals until after I got involved a few years ago with a young bisexual who was so deeply in the closet it was a wonder she was not covered with plaster. And it says something about my gaydar that no matter how many such women I meet, I’m usually the last to know unless they announce it out loud at our first encounter.

Of course, it could be argued that most bisexuals are just gay people in denial and I’m sure that for some such people, that’s actually true. However, you spend enough time listening to a woman talk about the troubles she has with both her ex-boyfriend and her ex-girlfriend and spend even more time with an openly bisexual woman who talks more about child custody arrangements than gay marriage and you realize it’s not always that simple.

It’s not that I believe all gay people have a choice. Indeed, it’s obvious from history that many gay people would have as hard a time pretending not to be attracted to the same sex as most heterosexuals like myself would have pretending not to be attracted to the opposite sex. And no matter how many attempts at conversion are directed their way, that’s not likely to change.

But it’s also fairly obvious that many people are fairly flexible when it comes to the gender of their sex partner. And ironically, the very social openness that makes it so comfortable for so many die-hard homosexuals to come out of the closet also makes it possible for bisexuals to come out as well.

Perhaps the whole issue of sexual orientation was best summed up in an old Ellen episode in which Ellen’s attraction to an old boyfriend was explained as her being part of a spectrum with people who were one hundred percent homosexual on one end, people who were one hundred percent heterosexual on the other, and Ellen somewhere in-between. It could be argued that the bisexual women I have encountered are also somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

I can see why many people would have a problem with this. The Christian Right would prefer that only one end of the spectrum exist and of course, gay rights activists find it easier to fight attempts at conversion and discrimination by arguing that it isn’t a choice. And as I noted above, in a sense they’re right. It isn’t a choice -- for some. For others, however, it is. Anyway, the most moral question involved in gay rights should not be whether or not homosexuality is a choice but whether or not it is “bad” enough to deserve sanction or punishment. I don't believe it is and I don't see why we spend so much time as a society pretending otherwise when there are so many serious crimes out there that could use a bit of the attention we focus toward homosexuality.

Ideally, the matter of sexual orientation should be treated like the matter of religious belief; if it neither picks my pockets nor breaks my leg nor causes any harm to an innocent, it should make no difference which gender my neighbor chooses to sleep with. Moreover, it shouldn’t matter whether my neighbor’s choice of gender in sex partner is voluntary or involuntary. There are so many incidents in which people afflict actual physical harm onto other people that I’m surprised we spend so much time on an issue like this in which people do not get hurt.

This doesn’t mean that I approve of the bisexual man who cheats on his wife or the gay pedophile who preys on innocent kids. I like to think it goes without saying that certain deeds are not worth defending, no matter what the sexual orientation of the person who commits them.

But the person who seeks only love and companionship from another consenting adult and who has no desire to harm another person -- either physically or emotionally -- that person should be free to choose his or her own beloved, no matter what the gender of the would-be beloved might be. And if that choice interferes with the philosophy of another person, well, said person doesn’t have to emulate said choice if he or she does not wish to.

Hey, I Remember This Show: All in the Family

Based on one of the few British comedies to never turn up on PBS or BBC America, this sitcom was very easily one of the most politically controversial TV shows of the early 1970s, attracting strong criticism from both liberals and conservatives. So naturally it turned out to be the most racially and politically influential show of my generation. Call me shameless if you will, but I, for one, happen to think that was a good thing. Most people of my generation may not have grown up to be like Mike and Gloria Stivic but they generally considered themselves damned if they were going to be anything like lead character Archie Bunker.

Hey, I Don't Remember This Show: Love Thy Neighbour

Back in the early 1970s, adapting British sitcoms with strong racial elements into American TV shows was all the rage for American TV networks. And indeed, two of the most successful shows of the time -- All in the Family and Sanford and Son -- started out in just such a fashion.

Unfortunately, the American version of the British sitcom Love Thy Neighbor proved to be the great exception. Not only did the American version flop so badly that hardly anyone save yours truly remembers it, but the show which inspired it appears to have become one of the more obscure Britcoms of the 1970s -- so obscure, in fact, that I never even realized it existed until just last week. Perhaps because it wasn't classy enough to appeal to the type of people who liked shows like Benny Hill and Are You Being Served?...

Quote of the Week

I am obviously not arguing that discrimination against the Irish or the Italians or the Poles is or was anything like that which our black brothers have had to endure, but I am suggesting that bigotry is by no means a lower-class phenomenon and that compassion among the elites is by no means universal. And yet, an attitude of compassion towards one group mixed with bigotry towards another group is, in the final analysis, intolerable -- intolerable on moral grounds because it is hypocritical and intolerable on political grounds because it is self-defeating. The intellectual who “loves” the blacks and the “poor” but has contempt for the Irish or the Italians or the “middle class” is in the final analysis every bit as much a bigot as the blue-collar worker who “hates niggers,” for both are asking, “Why Can’t They Be Like Us?” And to this titular question in this book there can be but one satisfactory answer: “Because they don’t want to be and in the United States of America, they don’t have to be.”
--Andrew M. Greeley, Why Can’t They Be Like Us?: America’s White Ethnic Groups

Cuento de Mi Id

“Balcony Scene”

It was Saturday night at the local movie theatre and Cinnamon Rivers was dancing across the silver screen with Alfredo Aster while dozens of pure-bread couples looked on in envy.

In the audience, Rubia Keeler looked up at Cinnamon and tried to imagine herself in the same role. Just suppose I was a dancer, she thought. Just suppose I was a movie star and all those people in the audience were staring up at me.

Stop having such silly dreams, her conscience told her. Be grateful that you were lucky enough to get that job at the shop around the corner. Mr. Matuschek may not the best of bosses but he's sure better than that factory foreman who tried to peer down your dress or that guy at the warehouse who was always trying to get you to climb a ladder just so that he could try to look up your skirt.

But I don’t want to work in that shop, she thought. I get tired of having to be nice to all the angry customers and the lecherous co-workers. And I just know the new salesgirl is dating the owner’s assistant. No wonder she gets so many privileges.

If only I could be a star, she thought. Then I could rise above all that and I wouldn’t have to worry about where to go or what to do or how I was going to pay my rent. At long last I could just be me.

Just then the lights came up. Rubia realized that the movie was over. She took care to sneak out the side door so that no one would see her in the lobby, praying against hope that no one she actually knew would see her.

She had just gotten to the street outside when she heard someone call out, “Hey, Rube!”

She turned. Coming down the street was Marta, one of her cousins from across town. She seemed to be smiling and beneath the radiance of the nearby street lamp, her bronze cheekbones made her look like one of those Mexican movie stars that her late father used to like. She appeared to be in a good mood but you could never really tell with Marta.

“What’s the matter, Rube?” she said. “You too good to sit with us in the balcony tonight?”

“Er, I didn’t realize you’d be going to see this particular movie,” she said. “Besides, I -- er -- just didn’t feel like sitting in the balcony tonight.” She started edging her way down the street.

Marta grinned. “It must be nice to have a choice about that, Rube. I wasn’t aware that it was possible for a girl like you to have a choice. But then I guess that’s why you don’t hang out with me and my sisters like you used to. So you could have a choice.”

“Oh, please, Marta. Not here.“

“Why? You think those people up the street actually care what we say? That our opinions matter to them? What type of booze have you been drinking?“

“I just wanted to sit on the ground floor for a change,” said Rubia. “I get tired of always having to sit in the balcony whenever I go to the movies.”

Marta frowned. “I get tired of sitting up there, too. How come you didn’t think to invite me to sit with you? Or to invite my sisters and my mom to sit with you? Is there something you’re trying to tell us, Rube?“

“Er, you know why,” Rubia said.

“Yes, I do,” said Marta. Her smile was no longer so beautiful and the nearby street lamp no longer seemed so bright. “I know why. I know exactly why.”

Marta walked off into the darkness.

If only I was a star, Rubia thought, that wouldn’t happen to me. I wouldn’t have to worry about what section of the movie section I had to sit in or what restaurant I could go eat at. Even Marta and her snotty sisters would have to look up to me then. If only.

Rubia walked off in a different direction than Marta, hurrying past the signs that said “No Mexicans allowed” and past the department store where her mother had said a young Mexican woman had been once forced to stand in a store window with a sign around her neck that said “Shoplifter.”

That will never be me, she thought as she remembered that. I do not intend to end up that way. I am an honest person.

And she kept telling herself that all the way home.

What the Hell?

I saw this cartoon from a nineteenth-century issue of Punch on Wikipedia and I'm hoping that it's a joke by some modern artist. But knowing the prejudices of nineteenth-century Englishmen, I somehow doubt it.

So apparently I'm not the only one who reads political messages into fictional characters. Unfortunately.

Fortunately, whoever drew this is long dead but still...I really don't want to see a modern equivalent.

Random Thoughts

I never was much of a John Wayne fan but I did admire his taste in women.

If love is the answer, what is the question?

Just exactly where is Suffragette City located?

If a sensitive, intelligent person like Jane Austen couldn’t find love within her lifetime, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

Were they really that prudish in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day or are the kissing scenes in The Other Side of Paradise an euphemism for acts that the censors of his era would not allow him to describe in detail?

If everything is art, then ultimately nothing is art.

If drag is taken from Shakespeare’s “dressed as girl,” then drab must mean “dressed as boy.”

Love that does not endure in the face of adversity ultimately means nothing.

Living with someone you love is way better than living alone, but even living alone beats living with someone you don’t like.

The most dangerous prejudices of a society are inevitably those that are most fashionable. Why? Because those are the ones which are least likely to be either questioned or opposed.

It is all too often easier to question someone else's prejudices than it is to question one's own.

All groups have their bullies and bigots. The problem is that they’re not always recognized as such.

It doesn’t take a great act of courage to demand a sacrifice from someone else.

The mentality required to get out of poverty is rarely possessed by those who never had to worry about poverty. And if it is, it is all too often actively discouraged.

The strongest efforts towards reform inevitably come from those who are most likely to benefit from such reform. Unfortunately, those who are least likely to benefit from a change in the status quo are inevitably the same ones who have the most power to change it.

Avenue Q Vs. Cabaret

Sometimes I wonder if the most apt comment on racism comes not from the “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist” song from the Broadway musical Avenue Q (which always seemed kind of banal to me) but from the setup for the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” number in the play Cabaret.

Specifically the part just before the song in which we discover that the charming businessman who has been helping out the play's protagonists, Cliff and Sally, is actually an ardent Nazi Party member, and that the cute little German streetwalker with which we the audience have been encouraged to sympathize is actually a hardcore anti-Semite.

In the movie version, of course, the filmmakers choose to omit this part, preferring instead to have “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” sung by a random crowd of strangers whom the audience never really gets to know the same way we get to know the streetwalker and the Nazi Party member in the play. The result makes for a powerful moment, that's true, but alas, it's not as powerful as the same moment in the play in which “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” (the ultimate hymn to Nazi superiority) ends up being sung by people who are not strangers. People whom we the audience have come to know throughout the play. People whom we have even been encouraged to like.

True, the notion that Nazis were people too is not a new message, but it's not a popular notion either. After all, Nazis were in a sense the ultimate racists. People who took the notion of racial superiority to the ultimate limit and killed millions of people because of it. To see them as little more than fellow human beings (as opposed to devils incarnate) and worse yet, as likable human beings inevitably implies that we the audience might very well end up acting like them if we're not careful.

And yet the song makes an important point. After all, racism and other murderous prejudices have rarely been held in real life solely by unlikable misanthropes who have absolutely no appeal at all to their fellow human beings. They have been more often than not held by people that even most liberal people would find to be quite likable under most circumstances. Indeed, the notion that racism and other prejudices are only held by “bad” people is itself a dangerous concept because it implies that “good” people -- and it should be noted here that many of the Nazis did consider themselves to be good people -- have no need to examine their prejudices. That bigotry in a sense is only a valid problem for other people, preferably strangers. And that, sadly, is just not true.

I must confess that there have been many times when I've encountered real-life bigots who nevertheless proved to be every bit as likable as the characters who sing Cabaret the play's version of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” And, of course, such people have inevitably forced me to examine my prejudices as well.

In many ways, I consider this a good thing. For one cannot realistically deal with a problem unless one realistically examines how it exists in the real world. And one can't realistically examine such a problem if one insists on treating silly little ditties like “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist” as if they were genuinely meaningful.

In a sense, the Avenue Q song is correct. Everyone does tend to have their share of prejudices, racial and otherwise, and everyone does tend to favor or dislike certain racial groups for reasons that aren't exactly logical.

But there's more to it than that. Some people are more apt to act upon their prejudices than others, some are less inclined to examine or contradict their prejudices than others, and of course, some people are more inclined to use their prejudices as motives for genuinely antisocial actions. To blithely dismiss all this by singing “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist” ultimately trivializes racism.

And trivializing racism ultimately assures the type of people who would sing a song like “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” the ultimate victory.