About good hair

Tonight, the parents of my children's school were given a chance to view and discuss the 2009 Chris Rock movie: "Good Hair." As you can see from the following YouTube trailer, the film is characterized as a "comedy," and there were certainly many lighthearted moments throughout the film. On the other hand, the subject of the film is also tragic, in that it is the story of millions of African-American women who have been convinced that their natural hair is not beautiful. Chris Rock documents the extreme lengths that many African-American women go to to cover up their African-American hair. The story starts when one of Rock's young daughters asked him, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" What can an African-American woman do when she wants to have "good hair"? The options include the use of highly caustic sodium hydroxide for straightening the hair (with its potential for painfully scalding the skin). I knew about that particular practice, but I had no idea that so many African-American women have actually covered up their own hair with "weaves," straight dark human hair grown by women from other cultures. Rock traces some of the most sought-after weave hair to India. Many Indian women periodically give up their hair (having their heads shaved completely bald) in religious ceremonies called "tonsure." From those temple rituals, that hair somehow ends up in the United States, where it is purchased by African-American women at prices ranging from $1,000 on up. It's even more amazing to consider that so many women of modest means work so hard to cover up their hair with weaves. Several of the women stated that an African-American woman simply cannot succeed in the business world without hair that has been straightened or covered with a weave. Many of the women featured in the film indicated that taking care of a weave is extraordinarily difficult--no swimming for these women, and many of them wouldn't dream of ever letting a man touch their delicate fake hair, even their lover. I had no idea that so many women would go to such extraordinary lengths to have "proper" hair, or that so many women consider it to be more "natural" to display hair that is not their own natural hair. Watching this film was a wonderful anthropological journey for me; this story is thoroughly about people and in the lengths to which they will go to display themselves in what they see to be culturally appropriate ways; it's not just about hair. I truly enjoyed viewing the delightful interviews of the many people Chris Rock artfully stirred into his vivid mosaic. The broader lesson is not about hair, or even about African-Americans. It seems to be about consumerism and the deep need of humans to display their traits to each other in expensive ways.

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Who is crazy?

The mainstream media is going after anyone who dares to stray from what they consider to be the proper boundaries of discourse. He dares to treat mainstream political discourse "as the political freak show that it is." That's why Alan Grayson, who is one of the few people in Congress who is really working hard to get to the bottom of serious problems, has a big target on his back--he is being labeled as crazy by a mainstream media that doesn't know what to do when someone asks real questions about real issues. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com explores this problem at length, pointing out the other side of the coin, that in Media-World, those who are certifiably insane are being labeled as "sane" as long as they stay within predesignated boundaries. For example:

Just consider who is supported and embraced by those who slap the "crazy" label on the forehead of every perceived dissident. Hillary Clinton -- the ultimate embodiment of Democratic Party Seriousness and Sanity -- supported the invasion of Iraq by warning of scary weapons and Al Qaeda ties that did not exist . . . and she spent her campaign beating her chest and doing things like threatening to "totally obliterate" Iran. While in office, Barack Obama has endorsed putting people in cages with no charges, assassinating American citizens with no due process, eavesdropping on Americans en masse with little oversight, increasing military spending beyond its shockingly inflated levels while searching for ways to cut Medicaid and Social Security, and blocking judicial review of presidential felonies and war crimes on the ground that those criminal acts constitute vital "state secrets" and must be protected. Most Serious, Sane Democrats have supported all of that insanity.
What honest person can argue with Greenwald's list? But he was just getting warmed up. There's a lot more, including this:
Meanwhile, the GOP establishment from top to bottom spent a decade cheering on torture, disappearances, abductions, unprovoked wars, chronic presidential lawbreaking and truly sick McCarthyite witch hunts. Both of the Sane Parties conspired to transfer, with little accountability, massive amounts of public wealth to the very Wall Street firms which virtually destroyed the entire world economy, while standing by and doing very little about tragic levels of joblessness or the future risk of Wall-Street-caused financial crises; kept us waging war for a full decade in multiple countries (while threatening others) even as we near the precipice of bankruptcy, the hallmarks of under-developed nation status and the disappearance of the social safety net; and are so captive to the corporate interests which own the Government that they viciously compete with one another over who can be a more loyal servant to those interests.
Greenwald is not suggesting that those who step out of the mainstream are always correct about everything they say. But he does give credit to Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for not buying into most of the rubbish that we are being fed by the media. We live in world painted upside-down by a media that is largely not about traditional Fourth Estate values. Rather than feed us information that will allow a democracy to thrive, the mainstream media, based on its constant miserable failures over the past ten years, is clearly more interested in destroying those who dare to ask questions that might threaten our corporate-military-prison-industrial-Complex.

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Another anti-gay reaction formation – a growing list.

Here's the report from Huffpo (with video):

Early Wednesday morning, State Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Calif.) was pulled over and arrested for drunk driving. Sources report that Ashburn -- a fierce opponent of gay rights -- was driving drunk after leaving a gay nightclub; when the officer stopped the state-issued vehicle, there was an unidentified man in the passenger seat of the car.
Based on the constant stream of incidents like this, we ought to just assume that men who disparage gays are gay. Freud calls this type of situation a reaction formation.

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Building lifeboats

I know that my past few posts have been bleak (see here and here), but now I must temper that sense of despair with some hope. Things are bad, and will probably get worse, but that's not to say that they will not get better. But here's the trick: we all have to stop relying upon someone else for solutions. Forgive me if I sound like a politician for just a moment: we must "be the change" we want to see in the world. I cannot tell you how to solve the peak oil problem, or the unfolding economic collapse, or climate change, or the corruption which has become endemic in our political system-- you have to figure it out for yourself. I'm not selling a prepackaged kit which contains all of the answers, and I would probably distrust anyone who was. But that's precisely why I still have hope. If we are going to make it through the challenges facing us, we must learn to pull together again as a community and actually attempt to create our own solutions. There can be no more delegation to those in Washington. We cannot afford to wait for decades as they attempt to muster the political will to combat the flood of money which has so damaged our electoral and political processes. We simply don't have time to fix the system that's been damaged beyond repair.

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Climate: OJ and the Haystack

Why Climate Change Denial Is Like the O.J. Trial is an interesting article. The essence is that the climate denialists are using the same techniques as the OJ defense team: Find anything resembling a needle in a vast haystack of data, then claim that the presence of the needle casts doubt on the character of the haystack itself. Because there is an overwhelming pile of evidence in support of anthropogenic global warming, there are bound to be occasional pieces of data that can appear to contradict the mass of affirmative information. The pile is overwhelming, especially to non-scientists. Therefore few have the patience to understand the whole thing. Those who want to spin the counter argument claim that, because the two sides are both represented, therefore the issue is in doubt. And, as in the OJ trial, if there is cause for doubt, then no action is to be taken.

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