Category Archives: Culture

Not Armageddon Yet

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The Wall Street Journal hid the woman’s face.  Not the usual journalistic fare you see on a Greyhound bus between Austin and Dallas.  The WSJ is more likely found zipping above us on American Airlines on a 35-minute flight.  She sat to my left, within the peripheral range of my one good eye.

Every other week or so when I board the bus to go 220 miles in four and a half hours instead of three by road I resolve to fly the next time or to break down and get a car.  If I get the smallest car on the market, I can minimize my carbon footprint.  But I then think, regardless of the size of the car, about the number of people who would be at risk.  Oh, I can drive.  Recently in a rented car with a package of insurance that could have bailed out the Greek economy, I managed to navigate more than 300 miles safely.  But I still shudder when I think about the old lady I almost ran over with my truck on my way to Christmas Eve Mass at Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington years ago.  The police rightfully would have concluded it was her fault but had I better vision I would have been able to react more quickly.

Behind the WSJ woman, a young man sat fidgeting, his face turned brackish, or perhaps crackish, and dark by either a hard life or drugs or both.  A diamond ring in the ear of an NFL linebacker strutting his masculinity on television on Sundays no longer comes off as improbable.  On a somewhat youngish man who should weigh another 10 or 15 pounds, his stoned ear suggests the rest of him might be too.

Continue reading →

Seriously?

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An Associated Press story last week quoted Alabama’s Gov. Republican Robert Bentley, who signed legislation that targets any HispanicLatino who might appear to be in the state illegally.  The law would have kicked every brown kid out of school had a federal court not intervened.  Bentley, not intending to draw guffaws, wondered why his state is being laughed at across the nation.

“Why are we getting all the publicity? I think it has to do with Alabama’s past and the perception that people have of Alabama over the years…and really don’t recognize the amount of progress we’ve made in Alabama over the last 50 to 60 years,” Bentley said.

If you did not know he was serious, it would indeed be a laughing matter. Continue reading →

And That’s the Way It Is

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I tried to call the fellows at the Politico.com website in northern Virginia earlier this week.  No, not about Herman Cain.  I wanted to make sure that its Friday tip sheet for the Sunday morning news programs includes Fareed Zakaria’s GPS.  The tip sheet gives a heads-up on whom the producers of the main networks have invited as guests, and Zakaria’s Global Public Square by far overshadows anything on the other networks.

This is no small matter, especially for HispanicLatinos who are a globalized population in a globalized world. Continue reading →

Crockett Keller, Meet Joshua

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Years ago as a teenager in the mid-1960s at the height of the civil rights movement, I would take the bus down from the dusty and dry plains of West Texas in August to go to high school in San Antonio in South Texas, returning home for Christmas and then for the summer.

I loved the trips.  The trip south was the more exciting.  Back then buses were clean and safe, and the bus driver through his mirror looked at me to make sure I was secure and he and his bus would carry me to a completely different world.  Listening to my little transistor radio – that age’s version of the iPod – I would stare out the window and watch the land begin to fall and the flat and empty terrain change.  The further south the bus sank the greater the number of trees and the greener the grass got – and some of the rivers actually had water in them.

The Hill Country was always beautiful.  It is like no other part of Texas, especially in December.  The bus would roll by ranch homes, with singular rows of red and green lights outlining their roofs, snuggled in between the hills.  Thin trails of blue smoke would drift from their chimneys.  I was a blessed soul seeing Christmas cards come to life.  I especially liked arriving at little Mason, Texas, whose courthouse seemed enchanted.  It appeared to me like a little Hapsburgian castle.  Ringed by a small stone fence, it seemed to have dropped from an Austrian sky.  I half-expected the Archduke Ferdinand to step out of it and get gunned down by Serbian nationalists.

The reason my thoughts would turn from idyllic and romantic meanderings so abruptly to thoughts of violence was only moments away.  Just as U.S. Highway 87 bends away from the courthouse a huge billboard in black letters on a white backdrop proclaimed “Martin Luther King is a Communist” with the word communist underscored.

Memories of those times came back to me this week when a news story popped out about a man named Crockett Keller, who owns a gun shop in Mason.  Keller refuses to make his services available to Muslims and to people who voted for President Obama.  Well, that would include Catholic me and most HispanicLatinos. How sad.  It was a far different experience for me when the bus stopped for a few moments in Mason by the side of a store.  I would run in to buy a candy bar and Coke.  The German lady recognized me after my first trip and would always smile.  In between the haters and the angered, other people make the world better.

I wish I could remember when the sign changed.  King was assassinated in 1968 precisely so that no one in the country would be discriminated against as Mr. Keller seems to think he has the right to do.

After the jarring sign, the bus would continue to flow south, and I would get excited.  Within yards of the road just north of San Antonio, a spring would gurgle from the ground.  A real spring.  For someone from the driest part of Texas, water springing from the ground is a near miracle.  Memory unreliably brings back the name of the spring as Joshua, the prophet who led the Hebrews to the new land of Canaan.  In one of the battles the Hebrews had to fight, God is said to have hurled hailstones from the heavens to help them.

My first thought for Mr. Keller was a ton of hailstones, except that after all these years, I remember Dr. King, and I realize there always will be people like the gun shop owner.  He was preceded by the people who put up the long-gone billboard.  They were there in 1965, they exist in 2011 in the likes of Govs. Jan Brewer in Arizona and Robert Bentley in Alabama and the Loudon County Republicans in Virginia who circulated a picture of President Obama shot through the head – and they will persist even until 2065.

But there always will be people like the bus driver and the German lady at the little store.  And there are other many good people in Mason and even in Alabama and Arizona and Loudon County.

And there will be always springs of hope.

Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.

The Education of Marco Rubio

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A friend of mine called to yell at me about Wednesday’s blog on Marco Rubio, whom, my friend supposed, I was defending.  Well I was, in part.

We cannot live in a nation in which people bend to the fringe, in this case the same whacko-birthers who would disagree with Christ Himself if he appeared and told them President Obama is a citizen and is legally entitled to hold his office, having won the votes of more than 69 million of his fellow Americans in a fair election.

When does this nuttiness end?  Now, because a senator’s parents were born outside the United States he cannot be Vice President or President?  Nonsense.  The other side of me, however, disdains the politician who wants to have it both ways – and Rubio clearly does.  But there is much more to the story.

Note: the author served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

In conveying the idea that he is part of the Cuban exile community that fled Castro when in fact his parents departed Cuba for purely economic reasons, Rubio spun the kind of narrative that candidates for high office require.  But his pushing back is against The Washington Post, whose editors published the story that now threatens to ensnare Rubio in his own deception – and not the birthers.

In so doing, Rubio might not be worthy for higher office because he does not appreciate the larger truth:  That the birther movement is the angry expression of the part of the nation’s population that is reacting to its new demography.

Rubio evidently does not realize that throughout the country too many of his fellow party members, like the birthers, are reacting to the nation’s changing demographics in the kind of negative, predictable ways that good leaders would decry – except that Rubio does not.  Yet large segments of his party seek to diminish HispanicLatinos and their standing.  For that same reason, any of the Republican presidential candidates who have not denounced the birthers are giving aid and comfort to anti-HispanicLatino sentiment. The promise of young and talented men and women like Rubio is that they might be able to help the nation transition into a new chapter in its life, not enable the crazies.

However the Post might confront one important HispanicLatino with lofty aspirations, it is not as damaging as the actions of Republican-controlled legislatures passing real laws that push minorities back into the 1950’s with regressive new laws on voter registration and identification that will restrict the very freedoms at the ballot box that Rubio’s parents did not enjoy in the days of the military dictatorship that preceded the Castro regime.  Republicans in states they control are slashing education budgets and in the process myopically crippling America’s future.

When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke at the Reagan Library last month in California, I thought I saw its former governor, Pete Wilson, sitting on the front row.  Wilson was the man who in his re-election bid in 1994 ushered in the modern-day reaction against HispanicLatinos that has now swept the nation.  I wonder if Wilson was in the room at the same library in August when Marco Rubio gave his own coming-out address that, no, by no means, was meant to signal that, yes, yes, he is very interested in being on the national ticket.

Rubio is very much eligible to be Vice President of the United States.  But he might not be qualified for the demands of our times.  Nevertheless, his rights should be defended.  Too bad he cannot bring himself to do the same for others.

Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.

Surely Al Sharpton or Sheldon Cooper Can Help

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The scripted HispanicLatino stood up to ask his question at the Republican presidential debate in Nevada last week.  The incisive power of the question sucked the air out of the room.  Viewers were left reeling.  “What is your message to the Hispanic community?” was Robert Zavala’s riveting question.

Not: Hey, guys, who has caused the nation more harm in the past 10 years:  Bankers and Wall Street investment companies or immigrants in the country illegally?

Not:  Riddle me this:  You say you want to create jobs.  Why do corporations and banks with more than $2 trillion and perhaps $3 trillion in assets not invest in economic development in the HispanicLatino community – or any community?

Not:  Say, I do not know if you have noticed but Mexico right next door each day edges closer to be taken over by narco-traffickers.  You got anything to say about that?  And I have a follow-up question:  If the United States did not have a massive drug-consumption problem would Mexico have a massive drug-cartel problem?

Not:  I’m curious.  What is going to happen in Cuba when Fidel Castro dies?  A massive migration northward?  And is there anything to fear from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela?

Not:  Ah, don’t you get that your trash-talking on immigration makes HispanicLatinos who might vote for you uneasy and is making many more of them angry?

Not:  Excuse me, but:  No one is taking the jobs that HispanicLatino laborers are abandoning in Alabama in wake of that state’s anti-immigration law.  Aren’t we losing jobs and hurting the economy when tomato crops rot in the fields?  Would you as President allow states to override federal law at will?

Not:  You know, insured children are an economic development tool and preventive health care keeps kids out of expensive emergency rooms:  Aside from beating each other up about who had the most uninsured kids in their state when some of you were governor, what do plan to do about it as President?

Not:  With the country nearly bankrupt, how are we going to convince HispanicLatinos – like John F. Kennedy asked the country in 1961 – that they are being called upon to do more for the country than the country can do for them?

Not:  I know you guys are really smart, but HispanicLatinos are, too.  They make up more than 15 percent of the population but only about 6 percent of doctors.  Don’t you think this is something that we should be concerned about as the Anglo population ages?  And wouldn’t some form of affirmative, strategic action help?

I do not know Mr. Zavala but I have a question for him:  What planet do you live on?  Perhaps the geeks on CBS’ The Big Bang Theory can help.  Koothrappali, who cannot speak to girls, whispers into Wolowitz’ ear to ask questions.

At least Koothrappali knows what to ask.

Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.

 

The Unreality of Being Lola

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Everything seems unreal.  The economy is stuck with no prospect of renewal.  We are still in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Greece, its economy about the size as that of Massachusetts, could set off the next financial contagion.  Millions of additional homes and properties are still underwater and face foreclosure.  Next door in Mexico 40,000 people have lost their lives since 2006 as the drug cartels metastasize.  And no one talks about America’s impending decline.  Unreal.

Adding to the unreality was the Republican presidential debate Tuesday in Las Vegas.  Vegas.  The city in the desert that should not be.  The most unreal of cities.  A desperate city of desperate people.

The debate undid the German expression Einmal ist keinmal (once is never), the idea being that if something happens only once it did not happen at all, for how is anyone to know anything about it relative to something similar.  And so the debate was just like the last one, another example of our collective race to the bottom.

The idea that Herman Cain is really in contention to be the nominee of a party dominated by white southerners is unreal.  That Willard Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts signed a version of the Obama health care plan and now disowns it is unreal, but not as unreal as the Republican rank and file willing to forget that fact in their single-minded blood-thirst to beat the President.  That Newt Gingrich – who abandoned his sick wife in the hospital – can talk about the need for the nation to come together as a community to provide heath care is unreal.  And any race in which two Texans are running for office after the spectacular fiasco that was George W. Bush is beyond any reality.

That Michelle Bachman is on stage is equally surreal.  When Harry S Truman became president, the pundits bemoaned his ascension, thinking him unfit, barely educated and corrupt.  Yet Truman was real, and he had studied Latin and Greek and was not the illiterate, uneducated phony the press expected him to be.  That the country countenances someone like Bachman as a candidate for president shows the depths of the unreality that has gripped the country – and the superficiality.

Who are these people? 

That is the question the Republican electorate seems to be asking itself.  One survey suggests that almost 70 percent of Republican voters remain undecided about the current lineup.  I have to wonder how many will still be undecided after the nominee is chosen.

The GOP debate on Tuesday started at the same time as the telenovela on Telemundo that chronicles the life of the tragic Lola Volcán.  Over-the-top soap operas on Univision and Telemundo are easy ways to re-enforce one’s Spanish.  Dashing dudes and curvacious women do much to conjugate.  Verbs, too.  Thinking that the candidates’ show on CNN was more important and real than Lola’s latest travails, I started watching the debate.  Lola was hands down more real. And so I escaped into that reality, at least for an hour, as she battles yet another demon in her life, an evil named Diana Mirabal.

If we could only stand up to the demons confronting the country as bravely and as resolutely as Lola does hers.

But our unreality, alas, is real.

Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or invariably in between.

 

The Manchurian Candidate as the next Steve Jobs

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The 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate was a great movie for the days when communism aimed to dominate the world.  The movie narrates the Chinese government’s attempt to take over the United States by subverting the mind of a solider who is the son of a would-be President of the country.  Chinese intelligence agents turn him into a political assassin bent on eradicating the opposition.  The film’s most iconic image is the crosshairs of his rifle.

The remake of the movie in 2004 was a flop.  That is about the only thing regarding anything Chinese that has flopped lately.  Fifty years after the original movie, the Chinese are closer than Mao ever imagined to global predominance.  And who would have thought back then that the United States would create its own Manchurian candidate by allowing its middle class to be hollowed out and by failing to develop a HispanicLatino population that daily is becoming a greater part of the nation’s population.

Experts disagree on how quickly China is going to develop into a superpower and “overtake” the United States.  If the question boils down to a debate about the wealth of the “average Chinese household” and the “average American household,” the United States wins.  The standard of living for individuals in the United States is higher – by many times over – than for individuals in China.  That is important until one considers that the Chinese number 1.3 billion and the United States 315 million.  A ratio of more than 4 to 1.

The numbers tell a more subversive story than any movie ever could: If only a third of China’s population achieves middle class status before its demographic growth levels off, that amounts to almost 400 million people – by far more than the current population of the United States, whose middle class currently is shrinking and whose HispanicLatino population makes the story more interesting more quickly.

Since 1970, the actual income of the average HispanicLatino household has decreased – this for a group whose proportion of the national population is increasing while the size of the rest of the white population is decreasing.  For a country the size of the United States to remain relevant, those lines should be trending upward, but two of the three are not.

Aside from the demographic drama being played out, the reason why China will overtake the United States in due course is that it will have more people doing more things and probably more people doing more things better.  The future of the world will also be decided by those with harder – not necessarily better – societal values, so that any population that does not have hard work, focus and attention as core values will suffer.

It leaves an impression on the mind, indeed, to walk by a college library – almost any library – late on Saturday nights and early on Sunday mornings.  Only Asian students from foreign lands are working and studying – with literally no one else around.  In the new world of absolutely maniacal global competition, the most absolutely maniacal workers will win.

Thinking that somewhere in a room off campus a Steve Jobs is inventing the next economic revolution is sadly simplistic and shortsighted.  We need scores of Steve Jobs – and those willing to sacrifice as he did throughout his life but certainly early in his career.

All of us – HispanicLatinos especially – are in the crosshairs of history, and we probably won’t get a shot at a remake.

Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or in between if essential.

Pssst — the Passat

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It happened suddenly this year.  Almost as instantly as changing a television channel.  I do not know the actual count, but the number of commercials that now include more than a HispanicLatino “feel” has exploded.  This is more than about brown-hued actors, words in Spanish or surges of guitar music.  It signals the start of the era that goes beyond the HispanicLatino at last being imprinted on the national consciousness – which in and of itself is nothing to sneeze at.  The slew of ads is about what happens next politically and socially and ultimately, when language is at the core of a globalized world.

The larger story wittily and wittingly is contained in an ad promoting the environmentally-friendly Volkswagen Passat TDI. The commercial is entitled Vamonos, setting the departure point of the country’s new journey into the future.

The subject of the commercial is symbolically a road trip that begins with two young men in a car that soon crosses a bridge into time and into the kinds of terrains and vistas that can found anywhere in the country – just like the HispanicLatino population.

“Road trip, buddy, let’s put some music on,” says the uninformed passenger to the driver.  The passenger like so many Americans wants to feed his fixation on entertainment in the midst of change on a global scale.  He is interrupted from the dashboard of the car – representing the engine of HispanicLatino demographic growth – by a female voice, itself symbolic.  At the root of all culture is the mother tongue: “Welcome to learning Spanish in the car.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” says the passenger, who like many Americans today is not pleased by what he hears and sees around him.

“Yeah, this is good,” says the more-knowing driver – the like of which cannot be found in Arizona or Alabama.

The first word in Spanish learned in the commercial is “gracias,” perhaps a thankful demographic tip of the hat to HispanicLatinos who are saving America.  Without HispanicLatinos, the nation’s population eventually would run out of gas, except that the car arrives at a service station and store – and a new beginning.  The passenger alights from the car now speaking impeccable Spanish thoroughly and although still miffed signals that nothing is impossible.

“Trece horas en el caro sin parar y no traes música!”  (Thirteen hours in the car without stopping and you bring no music!)

“Mira, entra y compra unas papitas!” the driver retorts. (Look, get in there and buy some chips!)

They remain the same but are changed.  Unlike most Americans – including many HispanicLatinos – these two are already in the future around us, even the recalcitrant one.

“This is good,” the driver said.

Actually, it is priceless — o de valor incalculable — to quote another commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oOVqUInA6w

Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or variably in between.

Not Gone With the Wind

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And so the average HispanicLatino is watching the evening news.   Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law is front and center.  The upshot is that from this day forward, if you are HispanicLatino, you are automatically suspected to be a criminal — a little more than a runaway slave back in the time.  It does not matter if you are an attorney from Miami coming to close a real estate deal in Birmingham or an optometrist from San Antonio in for a conference or a student from Seattle changing planes at the airport or a hotel worker recently relocated from Chicago.  If your skin is brown and you’re in town, you are a target.  It is that simple.

How exactly should HispanicLatinos feel about this?  First, any HispanicLatino who supports these laws would be well-advised to stay away from Alabama.  Dreamlands have a way of collapsing.  Having been the only HispanicLatino in line at the driver’s license bureau a few years ago and having been the only one asked to prove his citizenship, my younger brother, who before that moment had never cared about politics and had hardly voted, is a changed person.  Imagine how the blood of a HispanicLatino veteran would curdle with rage at being confronted by anyone about his or her citizenship status.

As more local and state governments enact Alabama-style laws, they are increasing the probability that each HispanicLatino will face such a moment if they have not experienced it already.  It is a moment of truth that will shape America’s future.  Are we seriously thinking that, having taken its cue from Arizona, Alabama is the way forward to how the country deals with immigrants who are in the country illegally?  When it separates all HispanicLatinos from the whole and makes HispanicLatinos feel more separate within themselves?  Does watching HispanicLatino immigrants flee Alabama make the rest of HispanicLatinos in the country feel any better about themselves?

When it defended its citizens’ “right” to own slaves – and took up treasonous arms in rebellion to do so – Alabama invoked the Bible but had little inkling of how civil conflcit would harm the state.  Through the years as a result of a war, it lagged behind socially and economically so that today Alabama is barely more than Mississippi.  Today the descendants of those gone-with-the-wind ironically invoke the same Constitution they once trashed to target HispanicLatinos.  The result will be just as harmful, for in the years ahead, when America needs to be the most united and unified, states like Alabama will have caused disunion again.

In a day when the nation will try to survive global demograhic competition that is putting hundreds of millions of hands to work to outproudce the country, shouldn’t we be welcoming immigrants and educating all of them – and educating everyone else in the country –  instead of making suspects of an ever-growing HispanicLatino population?

And shouldn’t average HispanicLatinos unperturbed as Arizona and now Alabama swirl around them stop and consider how quickly their résumés already are being deleted from the computer screen in human resources departments – and how quicker still will be those of their children in the future?

Blogs published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or in between if essential.