I’ve almost reached the point
where I view media from outside the country (such as the UK’s The Guardian) as a more credible source
of information about what is going on here. One “foreign” observation is the
craven way in which CNN—which has no problem in disseminating and defending
Elizabeth Warren’s lies—was the first media outlet to cave in to Nick
Sandmann’s libel lawsuit, with another dozen or so lining up to line Sandmann’s
and his attorney’s pockets. Last year, the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s published an opinion piece in which
the author declared that “Yes, a MAGA hat is a symbol of hate,” pointing out
that it was racist the way that Covington Catholic school students were “wearing
MAGA hats shouting at (Native American) elders, dancing mockingly, and
pantomimed tomahawk chops” and that one of them (Sandmann) made his way to the
front of the crowd to stand almost none-to-nose with Phillips (an elder), and
smirking in his face.” Sandmann’s actions, aside from his lying about it in
interviews, was clearly meant to be intimidating on a racial power level. Sandmann,
his attorneys and the media have somehow made the Black Israelites presence the
“bad guy” in all of this, but it is pointed out that the real instigator was
the crowd of white males wearing MAGA hats, which has become a symbol of hate
and white nationalism, and the Black Israelites had nothing to do with the way the "boys" were behaving toward the elders. The article ends by insisting that “if the hood (meaning
the MAGA hat) fits, wear it.”
The New York Times credibility has also taken a hit, even if many
won’t admit it yet, by endorsing both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for
president because they are “best equipped to lead.” The Times’ undermined that assertion by being blatantly biased in
giving voters a one or the other choice solely between two women. While I (and
most people) have no opinion one way or another about Klobuchar, that only
helps to explain the fact that her polling is in the low single digits and she
has almost no shot at the nomination. One can only surmise that The Times, in realizing that Warren is a
polarizing figure, wanted to give voters this false choice solely on
gender.
The American media’s hypocrisy
can try even the most cynical voter. While MSNBC brought on an “expert” on body
language to claim that Bernie Sanders was “lying” at the last debate, the media
conveniently overlooked Warren’s long history of lying—even to anger family members
by her belittling of her father at campaign events in an attempt to further her
working class “cred,” and then failing to mention that she and her husband (who
is rarely acknowledged) are worth $12 million according to Forbes. The Times gingerly
noted that Warren was a “gifted story teller”; others would call those stories
evidence of pathological lying that actually have something to say about her
fitness to be president. The website Healthline
describes pathological liars as people who “create a false history, such as
saying they’ve achieved or experienced something they have not” and that “they
are the victims in many of their own stories, looking for sympathy.” The
pathological liar is “not deterred by guilt or risk of getting found out” and
“tend to be natural performers. They are eloquent and know how to engage with
others when speaking…They are creative and original and quick thinkers, who
don’t usually show common signs of lying, such as long pauses or avoidance of
eye contact.” These descriptions fit Warren to a “T.”
The media also seemed to be
overly impressed by Saturday’s “women’s march.” It apparently did not occur to
many media observers that the marches had two aspects that Democrats should
find troubling: they were much smaller than previous years’ marches, and that
they seemed to be almost wholly attended by “radical” groups who do not in the
main represent mainstream opinion. Furthermore, such
feeling-good-about-feeling-bad events don’t address the fact that 53 percent of
white women voted for Trump in 2016, or for “ethnic” male voters like me there
is little difference between anti-Hispanic immigrant ranters like Laura
Ingraham, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin and all those “educated” white women
who wear their ignorant paranoid fear fantasies front and center—the kind of
women that Warren is counting on.
I have “stories” too, except that
unlike Warren’s they happen to be true. After graduating from college I lived in Sacramento for a couple years before
moving on to Seattle, and while there I decided to take some graduate courses at what was then called
California State, before it renamed itself Sacramento State. This is what my
day was like during the year I was in school there: having already begun
working a night-shift job, and deciding to keep it to pay my rent and tuition,
I would wake-up at 6 AM so I could make it to my first class at 8 AM. The last
class usually ended at 2:30 P.M. which allowed me to catch a bus and then a
light rail train to work at 3:30 PM. I worked till midnight and then jogged to
the light rail station catch the last train at 12:30 AM. I would arrive at my
tiny one-room apartment, which was astride the “mall” which faced the state
capitol building, at around 1 AM, and went to sleep (the room was unfurnished,
so I slept on a cot) by 1:30 AM—meaning
if I was lucky I got 4 and half hours of sleep. Most of the school day I
suffered from sleep deprivation and stomach cramps that made it difficult to
concentrate, although over the course of year I still managed a “B” average,
I then decided I didn’t need any
more schooling because I just wanted to write, and so I sold most of my belongings,
packed the rest in an old Army duffle bag, and retreated to Seattle, because I
liked the area from my few months at Fort Lewis before I was shipped back to
the former West Germany for a couple more years, where the “highlight” of my
tour would be to receive a personal hospital visit from the three-star corps
commander, after a few of my bones were broken while trying to avoid a head-on
collision between my puny 1/4 –ton jeep and a German’s vehicle, whose occupant
was driving so fast around a curve on the Autobahn that centrifugal force had
“guided” his vehicle right into my lane. It was as close to death as I have
gotten; I remember the windshield breaking, and then I was out cold before
reviving in a German ambulance. Ironically, I was returning from a trip to pick
up spare parts from wrecked jeeps.
Anyways, my time in Sacramento
was generally unmemorable, which despite being the capitol of California
generally had the reputation of a “cow town,” arising out of nowhere right in
the middle of mostly semi-arid country. I do recall taking a look at the
boarding house that had been run by the “Death House Landlady,” Dorothea
Puente, which was about the only thing interesting in Sacramento other than
Jerry Brown’s portrait in the State Capitol building, which I suppose was meant
to be “impressionistic” and thus real “art.” And I remember attending a rally
overseen by Brown, Jesse Jackson and Cesar Chavez in support of healthcare for
state workers; and then there was the time I was returning from one of my bus
trips to San Francisco one Saturday, when I learned that an earthquake had just
hit there—the one made “famous” during Game 1 of the 1989 World Series.
But there was something else. One
morning while I was taking a shower I became vaguely aware of some muffled
rumbling from somewhere. As I was leaving my room to conduct some business the
person in the room opposite mine appeared and told me that a white male had
been banging on my door and making threats. Her recounting of what she had seen
and heard told me the following: that this was a student from a media class I
was in (there were only six students in it total), and he was threatening
physical abuse because I had “hurt” the feelings of the instructor. By the
description given of him, I recognized the student as the same one who had made
an offensive (at least to me) statement that was an oblique reference to the
black male student there who was paralyzed from the waste-down, about how he
felt perfectly “justified” in not feeling “guilty” if he didn’t feel compelled
to assist a disabled person.
But what had I done? The
instructor (actually a professor) was a self-glorifying feminist who was a fan
of Madonna and occasionally inserted comments about how Madonna had “changed”
society in such and such a way, which I thought was mostly baloney but kept my
views to myself. Then one day she was talking about how Madonna had changed the
dynamic of sexual discourse, in which it was “OK” if the female was the
“aggressor” and used males as her sexual “toys”; of course it would be a lot
easier on males if this was in fact the case, but in this
damned-if-do-damned-if-you-don’t “MeToo” world, that societal change never came
about because women (at least those of gender political bent) prefer to be
“victims” in matters of sexual interaction.
I didn’t question her thesis, but
as a fan of Seventies music I felt compelled to mention that there were other
female musicians who predated Madonna in sexual assertiveness; one day I
interjected that Sylvia Robinson wrote herself and recorded a song called
“Pillow Talk” way back in 1973 which has as a very strong insinuation of an
adult woman trying to persuade an underage boy to allow her to show him the
“ropes” of sex, although it didn’t excite the kind of attention that Benny
Mardones’ hit “Into the Night” did on that score (or for that matter, a
33-year-old Ringo Starr covering “You’re Sixteen”). The professor offered
counter arguments, but I was unpersuaded, and this seemed to make her “sad.”
But this was not what caused a
classmate to take “action.” One day in class during a self-satisfied discussion
of race relations in the country in which the two minorities present were not
expected to contribute, I blurted out that white people shouldn’t be the ones
to decide whether racism still exists or not, and furthermore, I had the
audacity to mention that white feminist Eleanor Smeal was going around talking
about “racism against white women,” and that on the contrary I thought that
white women could be just as racist as white men. I didn’t mean to cause pain for
the professor—I was just tired of the self-satisfied hypocrisy. The next day, a
Saturday, was when I received the aforementioned “visit.” On Monday it was as
if nothing had happened; I suspected the student was hoping I hadn’t been
around to report it. As for the professor, I observed that she had posted
something new to the surfaces outside her office, besides various feminist platitudes:
some note she found somewhere about racial equality, which I suppose was
supposed to assuage any “guilt.”
Come to think about it, there was
something else, too. I was on a temp
assignment at a shop that did mailer piecework, just sticking brochures and
newsletters inside folders. At the end of the first day of this assignment, the
supervisor, a white male, called us all together, and started pointing at
“random” persons in the crowd, and once he reached a certain number, he stated
that this was all the people he needed going forward, and the rest of us were
not to return. Being a college-educated person, my observation of the selection
process took note of a certain irregularity: far from being “random,” it had
been deliberate in its calculation: everyone the supervisor “counted” and chose
to return were all of the white females in the room. The rest who were
rejected were all of the minorities and white males. I had the impression that
the supervisor picked out the women he wanted in his personal “harem.” By the
time we went into his office to have our time cards signed, I was stewing. I
just went out and stated flatly “You know, we
need the work too.” I observed that some of the other people looked “awed” that
someone had actually had the gonads to say something about the unfairness and
blatant discrimination of the selection “process.” The supervisor looked up and
seemed surprised that someone had noticed what he had done, but surprise quickly
devolved into a smirk that dehumanized all of us.
This is a real story in the real world. Elizabeth Warren has
never told a “story” about anything that is real.
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