2001-04-13 - 11:23 a.m.

On the internal soundtrack: Madonna's "Like a Virgin"

The "breaking news" on MSNBC right this minute (on TV) is a pink backpack outside the White House NW gate.

You read that right. A pink backpack.

They've been focused on it for the last 10 minutes at least, rambling away about it, and showing us the bag at a distance, and up close with a highlighting circle so we don't miss it.

Some guy in a bomb-proof suit came along and took x-rays. Very, very carefully.

I'm almost hoping there's a bomb in it, seeing as how they've cleared the area and injury is unlikely. But it probably belongs to one of the three million screaming schoolchildren who wrecked my relatives' visit to the city yesterday. Although if you were going to leave a bomb by a White House gate, wouldn't you use something that looked all cute and innocuous like that?

Ooooo the suited guy ... he's opening it! So gingerly! It's ... it's ...

Yeah, it's some dumb schoolkid's backpack.

We all cheered and gave the bomb guy a thumbs-up. You could see, even through the suit, that he was a little disgusted by the whole business. He just dropped the backpack off the ledge onto the sidewalk.

They better follow up on this. I want to know whose backpack that is, how long it took her to come back for it, and how she feels about her backpack being on national TV as a potential threat to the President.

For any of you who are panicking about the arsenic in the drinking water business, here's the SPECIFICS of the matter, from this article by Steve Chapman (link via Kevin):

The EPA arsenic rule, issued in the last days of the Clinton administration, would have cut maximum arsenic concentrations in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion. That may sound like an irreproachable effort to protect Americans from a deadly pollutant. But the available science indicates no cause for alarm.

In many places where it is found, including vast stretches of the West, arsenic is naturally present in ground water, rather than being dumped by evil corporations. But the amount of arsenic currently allowed is so tiny that further reductions may yield no health benefits whatsoever. The administration therefore made the sensible choice not to go forward with the regulation.

Does that mean it's content with the status quo? No. Overlooked in all the controversy is that EPA Director Christie Whitman has promised the old limit will be reduced, not maintained -- but only in accord with "strong science and a thorough cost analysis."

I really don't understand how information gets propagated this way in the media. Or maybe not that, but why people are so quick to believe it. Some newspaper says "Bush doesn't care if you die of arsenic poisoning!" and people take that as truth. It's unbelievable. Do people just accept that when they read it, that Bush doesn't care about arsenic levels? Do people ever stop and think, "Well, gee, what did the order actually say and why did Bush overturn it?" And if they find out, do they freak out at the "50 ppb" or do they stop and ask, "How much is 50 ppb, relatively speaking, and is that a level that is harmful? And how much would it cost to implement the 10 ppb rule and how many lives would be saved?"

The thing is, I don't even think this applies to people who have their own wells. What are those poor people doing? Dying of arsenic poisining? Doubtful. If you're that worried about 50 ppb -- and why you are, I don't know, because I haven't heard anything about multiple deaths due to arsenic poisoning at levels of 50 ppb -- go buy a filter that filters arsenic at the Home Depot. We have one, to get rid of the insane levels of chlorine in this area's water. If you can't afford a filter, ask me and maybe I'll buy you one. For pete's sake.

I swear, if Bush had let this one stand and the rule was 10 ppb, later on somebody would introduce a bill to reduce it to 5ppb and Bush would veto it, and the newspaper headlines would say, "Bush nixes bill to reduce arsenic levels by 50%".

So Jonah Goldberg is in all kinds of trouble now. Apparently some folks over at Asian Avenue got upset with his column and subsequent refusal to apologize. Asian Avenue wrote a column of their own, encouraging people to give Jonah a piece of their mind. The writer had a few interesting points.

Jonah, being Jonah, wrote yet another column in which he also makes some interesting points.

There were even more interesting comments on the Asian Avenue message boards concerning the whole mess, in which every opinion imaginable is expressed, and is the reason why I love the web so much.

And then we get into the funniest article I've read in a while, from a web site owned, run, written by Blacks, in which a bunch of people, mostly Blacks, are quoted making horrible stereotypical references to Hispanics. I mean, they are bad. If you don't click any other link on this page, be sure to click on that one. What I can't figure out is why the web site allowed it to be published. Do they agree with it, do they just believe in free speech, or are they holding it up as an example of how not to think? The article is not representative of the site as a whole, that's for sure.

I'm not even going to try to be coherent here, or it'll never get written. I'm not going to be happy with any of this, I can tell. If anyone reading this thinks I'm dead wrong about something, I hope you'll tell me.

Jonah Goldberg was trying to be funny. For some people it works, some it doesn't. I thought they were too lame to be really funny. I'm a big fan of what Poindexter calls "observational" humor, and observations of the culture of ethnic groups can be funny when it's true. Chris Rock's standup comedy is a good example of this. Jonah, however, was relying on some really stupid hackney cliches. I mean, eating his dog? Come on. It's just so, so lame.

The Asian Avenue article makes the excellent point that Jonah Goldberg is perpetuating stereotypes. This is something that bothers me. There are enough people out there who develop their own weird ideas about ethnic groups (see the Black Press USA article for evidence of that). We really don't need the National Review encouraging these weird ideas. I think it's human nature to lump people into groups and make judgements about them, and it needs to be constantly fought by encouraging people to think of others as individuals. Cutting it out with the stereotyping is one way to do this. Basically, I think that the whole thing was stupid and undermined some of the important points Jonah was making.

On the other hand, anyone who is too narrow-minded to think beyond stereotypes is probably not reading NRO, and I'm not terribly worried that Jonah is corrupting any heretofore open minds. The magazine doesn't exactly cater to the lowest common denominator of what's considered "conservative". The attention the article is getting from Salon and Asian Avenue is probably causing it to be read by people who wouldn't otherwise read it, and it's getting far more attention than it deserves. We really, really, need to start dismissing this sort of thing as stupid and irrelevant rather than getting all het up about it and giving it so much exposure. Rather than getting upset, people could have said, "Jonah, that was really stupid and lame."

The Asian Avenue article was wrong when they said that Jonah is ignorant. He isn't ignorant. I'm sure he knows all about the interment camps in WWII and about the critical role of Chinese-Americans in building railroads. In addition, he did apologize (rather ungracefully, though) for his failure to acknowledge the difference between American owners and employees of Chinese restaurants and the folks actually living in China.

Jonah had a very good point that if the people he were making fun of were French, he wouldn't be considered racist. (An uncultured jerk, maybe, but not racist.) Apparently it's okay to make fun of other cultures ONLY if the people whose culture you're making fun of are the same shade you are. Now, nobody's worried about his perpetuating stereotypes about French folks. Maybe the problem is not the stereotyping itself, but with the underlying racism in this country which stereotyping can help perpetuate. But how much of it is really racism, and how much of it is just annoying stereotyping?

There are people who spout stereotypes and appear to believe them, and yet they do not behave in a demeaning way towards the people they stereotype. Many older folks are like this. I know an older man who has some of the most stupid, awful things to say about every ethnic group there is. I keep questioning the stereotypes, but it doesn't seem to change his mind one bit. AND YET. He doesn't consider race when he deals with individuals in his work and never has. He's been in a position to choose people to be hired at work, and all he cares about is whether they're good at what they do. He doesn't judge individuals based on the stereotypes he holds about groups.

All right, now, the one thing I really do agree with Jonah about is that people are placing FAR too much emphasis on feelings nowadays. Well, shit, it "hurts my feelings" when people presume I'm evil and heartless because I've voted Republican in every Presidential election, but if you accept that as true without getting to know me as an individual, then you're not worth my time. We can't define "racism" based on how somebody feels about something someone thinks or says. It doesn't become a problem unless it infringes on your rights and freedoms. If you don't like how someone behaves toward you and you believe they are motivated by racism, there's rarely anything forcing you to accept that person in your life in any way. And if there is (like if it's your child's schoolteacher), the law, popular opinion, and most of the media are your side.

This actually seems to be the last big problem where racism is concerned -- how to identify and define racism, or whether racism is actually anything worse than a dislikable characteristic about a person at this point. There's very little institutional racism left to fight anymore. There are no Jim Crow laws to protest -- it is no longer legal nor socially acceptable for someone to say you can't sit at their lunch counter for racial reasons. There's nothing left to fight but assholes, pretty much, and they tend to be kind of scattered around, as opposed to big organizations in which every person is bound and determined to keep the "furriners" out.

And individuals are harder to fight than institutions, especially when their racism is just something they feel and they're not in a position to wreck your life with it. This last stage is going to be difficult. If it's an institution that's racist, you have a huge entity with a lot of money and visibility, something solid and concrete to fight. But if it's just one person, somebody who asked what country you were from when you're a fifth-generation Chinese-American, what can you really do? Walk away? Tell him you, your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all born in this country and hope he stops to think about it for a minute? That doesn't give you a lot of satisfaction, and it gets tiresome, I'd imagine.

Well, the good thing is that everybody's free-speeching everybody else to death. You're always going to have insensitive Jonah Goldbergs and paranoid Walt Littles, but at least those kinds of voices are becoming more and more in the minority. Sometimes I wish today's young people could go back in time for a day, just to see how bad it really used to be. I'm not saying it's time to sit back on our laurels yet, but we have made progress and there are plenty of people in this world fighting to make it even better.

Are you reading the ingredients labels on your Doritoes and Cheetos, by the way?

There was a funny comment on the Asian Avenue message board, from someone identified as TrAgIc: "Crap, don't people read the ingredient labels? Your chips have MSG!"

This is true. MSG stands for "monosodium glutamate". Go look at your Doritoes or your Cheetos. There it is, buried toward the end of the ingredient list. Show your friends. MSG is what gives them the quality that makes you want to keep eating them even when you're sick of them. I have NO idea why MSG in Chinese restaurants in the States is such a big freaking deal. Nobody uses it anymore, anyway.

So I have to put up with an overly emotional husband for the next couple of weeks, if not longer. He's having mood swings -- alternating between being gleefully happy and a combination of pissed off and depressed.

Stanley Cup playoffs, you know.

He loves playoff hockey, so he's excited. But his team, the Sharks, isn't doing so well right this moment, and he's mad at them for being "stupid". When other teams are playing he can just enjoy the game, but when the Sharks are playing he takes it personally.

Today I took the afternoon off (Poindexter took all day) and hung out with the relatives.

He and I took the girls to the park this evening. We spent about five minutes on the swings and jungle gym, then I suggested we go exploring. We wandered down to the creek and, well, that was our last stop. We stayed there for close to an hour while the girls threw stone after stone into the creek (the bank of the creek is composed of rocks) and messed with sticks and paid little attention to where the rocks ended and the creek began.

We got home and Lynn asked me, "Why are their shoes wet?"

"Um, well, because they kept stepping in the creek."

Hey, if they want to have cold clammy feet, don't bother me none. I kept mine dry, thanks.

After their bath we beat Poindexter up.

Earlier in the day I was screaming at him for deliberately planting a song in the internal soundtrack that I really hate, and I said I was going to beat him. Kelly perked up at that, and said she wanted to help. So we brought pillows down, and as soon as there was a commercial break on the Sharks game (I'm not quite that evil) we beat him to a pulp with the pillows. He curled up in a ball, hands over his head, and yelled a lot, then whimpered for a while when we stopped. I think Christie was actually a little concerned at first.

One more reason why I shouldn't have kids: Poindexter pretended as though the Easter baskets we got them were from the Easter Bunny. When they were looking through their loot, I said something about picking out purple bracelets for Kelly because there was no pink, sorry about that. Duh. Kelly said, "How did she know?!" and MIL had to say, "I think Aunt Evelynne and Uncle Poindexter are the Easter Bunny in this case." She should've just said I went shopping with the Easter Bunny. That would be fun.

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