vinemaple

I'll admit it, seeing the Mariners choke makes me sad.

It doesn't take an Al Franken to spot this. FOXNews says Solemn Day Doesn't Halt Attacks on Bush:

While he has insisted that he backs U.S. policy supporting Israel, statements made on Wednesday about Hamas raise new questions.

"There is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war," Dean said Wednesday.

Dean condemned terrorism but his description of Hamas — designated by the United States as a terrorist group — as "soldiers in a war" conflicts with U.S. policy. The European Union also approved last week the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

The part about "solemn day" in the headline doesn't jive with the word "Wednesday," unless something bad happened on September 10th that I don't know about. But that's a minor point.

Is Dean saying that Hamas, which is dedicated to destroying Israel (and has something against Rotary clubs), is morally equivalent to Israel? That is big news. Let's see what CNN has to say ... Dean defends Middle East remarks:

Asked if he would oppose the Israeli policy of selectively killing leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, Dean said, "I think no one likes to see violence of any kind."

But he also said that "there is a war going on in the Middle East, and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore, it seems to me that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war."

Apparently Dean approves of Israel's current policy of going after Hamas's leadership. You wouldn't know that from FOXNews's story. Bad FOXNews, bad! Still, the only time Hamas members wear uniforms is during funerals for suicide bombers, so the word "soldier" doesn't apply. If Dean is going to talk about Israel, I'd like him to simply say, "and in Israel versus Hamas, I'm rooting for Israel."

The New Radical Chic: Anne Applebaum sees signs that anti-globalization activists are wising up.

Yet the shift in fashion also reflects a shifting intellectual consensus. Listen hard to Third World activists these days -- Oxfam, say, or the Jubilee Network -- and it is not anti-globalization rhetoric you hear but anti-trade-barrier rhetoric. In the run-up to Cancun, at least a half-dozen people have told me that the average European cow receives $2.50 in daily agricultural subsidies, more money than at least 3 billion of the world's humans have to live on. These agricultural subsidies are, without question, one of the least-discussed, farthest-reaching of international scandals: Every year, the rich world spends many billions more on subsidies and agricultural tariffs than it does on aid to the countries that these subsidies and agricultural tariffs help impoverish. Despite its traditional help-the-poor rhetoric, even Sweden, Norberg points out, makes sugar from sugar beets instead of importing sugar at a fifth of the price from the sugar cane-producing South.

Although there will be anti-globalizers in Cancun, the cutting edge has shifted -- and not a moment too soon. In a perverse way, the movement has in recent years provided a cushion for those politicians -- European, American, Japanese and developing world alike -- who drag their feet about opening markets.

I hope she's right. Then my friends will think I was ahead of the curve instead of a meany who hated people in poor countries.

The key to understanding McWhorter is that he's a nerd, and because he's a nerd, he can't be black. Nobody likes black nerds! The only black nerd in popular culture is Geordi LaForge, who, after Picard and Data, was the 3rd best character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and whose irreplaceable engineering saved the day in about half the episodes. And for that Levar Burton earned a Most Embarrassing Black Person Special Hall of Fame award in The Boondocks. Oh yeah, and Urkel. Look at all the trouble Sean Combs (attended Howard) and Tupac Shakur (went to an arts high school, like on Fame) got into to overcome their nerdiness and establish ghetto cred. Sure, there's the Malcolm X/Chuck D style nerd, but they get a pass because they only talk about being black. Everybody else gets to be a nerd. You can be a white nerd, you can easily be an Asian nerd (try not to), you can be a Hispanic nerd, but you can't be a black nerd.

Let's take another look at McWhorter's main point:

Many writers and thinkers see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. They couldn't be more wrong. By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly "authentic" response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.

The thing is, in America, the only way to move up the economic ladder is to be a nerd. And rap music is the only art form in America that says otherwise. I mean, bluegrass doesn't condemn those who fail to keep it real. Now, I don't know if the lyrical content of rap is the way it is because it reflects the opinions of most young black Americans, or if it's because that's what the mostly non-black market is interested in buying. It doesn't matter. I think a positive step would be to stop pretending that popular gansta rap has serious or productive political content. It's not like the Irish, Jews, and Italians worked their way out of the ghetto because the pop music of the late 1800s told them to go to school, so we know that it's not necessary for gansta rap to be transformed into some kind of simpering self-affirmation life-coaching. Of course, the black middle class grew rapidly in the '90s. At the very best you can say rap's irrelevant. Anyway, it was the macho posturing at KFC that really bugged McWhorter, and it bugs me too. I don't like it from drunken frat guys or anybody else.

As for wiggers, I hate macho posturing from anybody. Is that what you're asking yourself, why do I give macho posturing from black kids a free pass? (Hank Hill once asked, "What the hell kind of country is this where I can only hate a man if he's white?") Or maybe it's just the desperate trying-to-be-ness of wiggers that bugs you.

Can I hate wiggers without being a racist?

The short answer is "No." The long answer is "Yes, but it's going to be damned inconvenient having to explain yourself every time you grumble about the kids these days or make a snippy little crack about white suburban teenagers who buy Rap CDs." But I'm getting ahead of myself...

There is a twofold racism lurking in a certain variety of unexamined resentment of white suburban teens who embrace hip-hop. The resentment I'm thinking of is one that stems from the "liberal" notion that white people shouldn't "appropriate" black culture. The first problem with this is that it stereotypes blacks— anyone who lives in an area with a substantial black population can tell you that not all black teens dress in baggy pants, wear sideways baseball caps, listen to and recite rap all day long, "tag" everything in sight, and glorify drug use, firearms, and misogyny.

The stereotyping problem is damning enough on its own, but there's a second racist aspect to wigger-hating, that being the pernicious notion that white people shouldn't act like black people. I don't think there's any need to explain why this is a racist idea. I mention it only because it seems to have wormed its way into so much of what is thought of as "liberal" politics; all too often, the contemporary ideal of Multiculturalism seems to be no more than an artfully coded rephrasing of the doctrine of Separate but Equal.

This became particularly apparent to me when I listened to a Talk of the Nation segment with John McWhorter, in which he got a call (about 22 minutes into the segment) from a white woman who told him she thought he'd adopted the culture of the oppressor, and therefore didn't represent the "true" black perspective. In other, uglier words, she called him an Uncle Tom.

This does not mean, however, that the caller thought the uppity negro McWhorter ought to stay in his place and stop putting on airs, though she did seem to think he needed to spend more time in those squalid urban ghettos infested with drug-addled, violent darkies, neighborhoods that exist more vividly in the white liberal imagination than in the streets of any real American city.

No, the white academic liberal does not want the negro to live in squalor. Nor, however, does that same liberal want blacks to assimilate into "white" America. They want to preserve "black" culture, as distinct from "white" culture, except they want to use all sorts of social programs and incentives and education and perhaps some reparations and so on to transform "black culture," to lift it up to the economic and power-structural level of the white middle class, and to keep it unambiguously black at the same time.

In other words, this well-meaning but not particularly thoughtful variety of liberal wants a Separate but Equal "black culture," instead of the oppressed one they see when they imagine the squalid ghetto. In short, their goal, at the end of the day, is a segregated America, albeit one in which the segregation is "only" social and cultural, instead of official and governmental.

White academic liberals are not the only source of pro-segregation sentiment, of course— in fact, some of it, noticeably, comes from blacks. Phrases like "stay black" and "keep it real," after all, tacitly proscribe any dabbling in behavior that's "too white," too far over the implicitly accepted racial boundary.

But it's time I got back to the wiggers. I still don't like them, you see, despite the clear racist implications, so I've still got a fair amount of explaining to do.

If there's anything that can be said of all wiggers, it's that they prefer hip-hop to other forms of music. Now, since John McWhorter says hip-hop is to blame for black misbehavior, it follows that hip-hop is what's turning white suburban teens into the sort of people that I'm inclined to dislike, right?

Well, no.

McWhorter's little essay, while amusing, doesn't amount to anything more than the "media causes violence" argument (and its ilk: "media causes greed," "media causes teen pregnancy," "media causes liberalism," "media stole the election," etc, etc.). Needless to say, I don't buy it.

Teenagers who want to act uncivilized don't need any encouragement other than a few peers with similar wishes. Teens were glorifying violence, indulging in misogynist fantasies, acting surly in the face of authority, and spitting in the paths of strangers long before Rap was invented. In fact, it ought to be pointed out that that's exactly how a lot of "the greatest generation" behaved, back in the days of WWII, though you'd never know it from the misty nostalgic pap they've been churning out in recent years.

Of course, Rap isn't quite what McWhorter says it is, either. There's plenty of hip-hop that runs counter to the violent, misogynist portrait McWhorter paints, and contrary to what he suggests, some of it sells well. There's also no shortage today of the sort of good-times "party music" that he waxes nostalgic about (while, conveniently, establishing his Old-School bona fides).

McWhorter's essay inveighs against Rap, but it's worth noting that it wasn't Rap that got him worked up in the first place— it was a particular incident in which he observed a group of rebellious, uncivilized teenagers. Getting pissed about a gaggle of rude teens is perfectly understandable, of course, and now we're finally getting to some firm ground on which I can stand when I proclaim my dislike of wiggers, to wit: a lot of them act like assholes.

Of course, not all of them do, so I can't honestly say I dislike the whole lot of them, either. But there is something particularly nasty about the ones who misbehave, something that lives in an unspoken accusation. The idea is this: that since these surly teens embrace "black culture," then if I have a problem with them, I must have a problem with blacks. In short, if I don't like it when one of them spits on the sidewalk in front of me, then I'm a racist. That's bullshit, of course, and it's bullshit no matter what color the sullen, spitting teen might be. This is also, thankfully, obvious, and I'm hardly the first person to say it. It's what Chris Rock is getting at in his standup, when he tells a black audience, "I hate niggers."

There's an additional unspoken accusation that one encounters, even when dealing with less objectionable wiggers: that non-wigger whites are square, that they don't understand "the black reality," that they're out of touch, that in not paying much attention to Rap, they're a little bit racist by omission. Wiggers who make that sort of assumption don't necessarily strike me as uncivilized, but they do strike me as smug, which irks me, as I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject of black culture, and black history.
When that sort of baseless, disapproving smugness reaches a certain point, it can turn a wigger into an insufferable asshole. It doesn't usually reach that point, of course, because wiggers, thankfully, don't stay teenagers forever.

And that's what I keep reminding myself every time I run across a teenage wigger I don't like— these are only kids. They're still trying to figure things out, things about themselves, and things about the world around them. They're bound to be a bit smug at times, and maybe even do a bit of spitting. I tell myself that they'll probably outgrow it.

Wiggers well past their teens, however, are a different story. Almost all of them seem to be either insufferably smug liberal types, or insufferably hostile, misogynist, asshole types. My reaction to these particular species of old-enough-to-know-better wiggers is a lot less complicated:

I hate 'em.

Well, come on, of course taxes are regressive around here— Washingon is one of only nine states without an income tax, after all. Let's see, the two most populous are Florida and Texas— I seem to recall hearing those two states mentioned together, somewhere before...

Hasn't the Latte tax been in the ballot initiative pipeline for a long time now? There was an article about it in The Stranger over a year ago; is this still the same initiative? And speaking of The Stranger...

Hasn't Dan Savage gone a bit overboard?

I mean, come on. I've been involved in a few email flame wars in my time, but I've never resorted to an FOIA request before, you know? And Public Health of King County/Seattle can't exactly turn around and demand all of The Stranger's internal email to even the score, can they?

I'd just shrug and blame the late summer heat, if it weren't for the fact that Dan wears his personal politics on his sleeve. It looks to me like he's taking Public Health, a local government agency, to task for engaging in politics in order to get its ostensible job done. Oh, the scandal! The outrage! Gee, Dan, do you think you could be any more of a flaming Libertarian?

From what I've read, it does look like Lifelong AIDS Alliance and Gay City are both doing pretty crappy work, but Dan's "The Righteous vs. AIDS, Inc" portrait of the situation doesn't appeal to me any more than the whitewash job LLA and GC seem to be engaged in.

I'm sure Dan would agree that one thing that ought to be done is to spend a little of that public anti-HIV funding trying to figure out what sorts of prevention strategies actually work, but this notion gets scant mention in The Hunt For AIDS Evildoers.

I'm sure you notice the problem with the repeated assertion that AIDS in Seattle is being spread by a core of shadowy, amoral, irresponsible HIV terrorists. Not that it's judgemental— I'll agree with the notion that any HIV-positive person who knowingly engages in activity with a high risk of transmission without informing his or her partner is a despicable shithead. But do you see how many qualifiers it took to say that?

What if the infected person doesn't know he or she is infected? What constitutes "high risk behavior?" Are the partners allowed to determine acceptable levels of risk for themselves, or is that for the newspapers to decide? What if some of these scurrilous, amoral "core" HIV transmitters go so far as to—gasp—lie about their HIV status when they're trying to get laid?

This "core," it seems to me, must have some pretty blurry edges. If it didn't, after all, then how could the AIDS-causing "core" be infecting people outside the core? If the "core" is the only part of the population engaging in HIV-transmitting behavior, then shouldn't the incidence of AIDS be dropping as the members of the "core," who expose their dread virus only to other "core" members, inevitably succumb to the disease?

OK, I've misrepresented Dan's position, and wandered off on a tangent, but it's in the service of a point. It's not at all clear that Dan thinks any AIDS education should be undertaken at all— after all, he's said right there in the paper that he believes current efforts do more harm than good, and I didn't notice him calling for any replacement program.

To the extent that he actually favors any course of HIV prevention, it seems that what Dan really wants is to stigmatize (or, perhaps, re-stigmatize) unsafe behavior. But what does "unsafe behavior" mean? Is it just sex without condoms, or is there more to it than that? With the talk about "disclosure," is Dan saying that there ought to be a taboo against sex that is not preceded with medical discussion, and truthful medical discussion, at that? No sex with multiple partners, no "open" relationships? No sex without a note from the doctor? No one-night stands? No more Wild Oats or Youthful Indiscretions?

If he really wants to change the culture and behavior of gay men in the service of ending the spread of AIDS, then it looks to me like Dan might eventually find himself advocating Gay Abstinance until Gay Marriage.

P.S. Did you know that Jen, the co-owner of Victrola quoted in that article, lived across the hall from me for a semester, back in ye olde college dayes? She borrowed some truly crappy music from me at one point, if I remember correctly.

Proposed Tax Rouses an Already Jumpy City:

SEATTLE, Sept. 1 - In these lean times, cash-poor states and cities across the country have pondered and enacted a host of creative taxes and fees, raising the cost of snowmobiling in Montana, trout fishing in New Mexico and marrying in Massachusetts.

But now there is the proposed espresso tax in Seattle.

Seattle is the coffee capital of the nation, the birthplace of Starbucks, a caffeine-crazed city where espresso is available at gas stations, hospitals, roadside stands and drive-through windows. Seattle is so identified with the liquid produced by forcing steam through ground coffee beans that an espresso tax is like a tax on the city's very soul.

The formal name of the espresso tax, which would add 10 cents to the cost of every beverage served in Seattle containing a half-ounce or more of espresso -- but would not apply to regular drip coffee -- is Initiative 77. Sponsored by the Early Learning and Care Campaign, it will go before voters on Sept. 16.

Hey, that picture is of my local coffee shop, Victrola. They don't like the proposed tax:

"I think it is a bad public policy," said Jen Strongin, a co-owner of Victrola Coffee, adding that she would probably raise the price of espresso drinks by 10 cents if the tax were approved. "I think it sets a precedent for future taxation in the city that would be a bad idea: taxing specialty items like espresso or salmon, something that someone deems a luxury item."

(I'd like Victrola a whole lot more if they cut back on the live music. I think it's there to keep people from staying too long).

Anyway, is this tax progressive? The initiative's sponsor says yes:

Mr. Burbank said the tax was a fairer way to raise money at a time when the economy was weak because it would affect people with higher incomes more than it would affect the poor.

"Lower-income people drink less espresso than upper-middle-class people," he said. "I've already had two tall double lattes, and I'll probably get another today."

He added: "If you don't want to pay it, you can buy drip coffee or tea. But I believe people are more likely to want to consume espresso if their morning purchase doesn't just go to giving them a buzz but goes to children."

Or as Helen Lovejoy put it, "Won't somebody please think of the children?!"

On the whole, I would bet this tax is more regressive than progressive. Based solely on my experience as a Seattleite, a person making $20,000 is probably drinking up to 5 lattes/week, usually on the way to work. A person making $40,000 is probably having 10/week, one in the morning, and another in the afternoon. Not many people have more than that. So if you're making $100,000/year, you're paying the same in this tax as someone making $40,000. Granted, the richer person is probably getting a more expensive latte, but that doesn't matter, because the tax is fixed at 10 cents per drink. So at the extreme low end, say, for the homeless, they're paying nothing, but after that it's regressive.

According to research by the District of Columbia (page 27), Seattle's city and state tax burden is the 4th more regressive among the largest cities in the 50 states and DC, after Anchorage, Las Vegas, and Souix Falls. A family making $25,000/year in Seattle pays 7.5% of its income in various taxes, while a family making $150,000/year only pays 6.3%. For a city that fancies itself progressive, that ought to be a surprise.

As for me, since I don't like coffee, I'll pay no latte tax.