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What’s Really Wrong With Pete Hoekstra’s Ad

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

People are upset about this ad that ran nationwide during the Super Bowl. It concerns the Michigan race for U.S. Senate:

Not many are able to articulate what exactly is so awful about it, they just say it’s obviously racist, end of discussion. Is the ad racist? Absolutely. Not as overtly as it could be. Go-for-broke racism caricaturizes; the only thing that gets close to grotesquery here is when the young lady’s lack of an accent posits an apparently much more stubborn Chinese misconjugation problem (“your economy get very weak”).

No, the Chinese people as depicted by the actress are good-looking, intelligent, and significantly westernized– not the typical racial cartooning at all. So, great! Well, no.

We have here a Chinese woman in her early twenties, living humbly but happily in a farming community. Riding her bike along a dirt road. She’s humdrum. She has no political relevance.

Yet she is giddy because America might be negatively affected by a macroeconomic issue that’s mediated nowhere near her tiny piece of Earth.

More than giddy, she actually uses body language that indicates she’s sexually aroused when talking about her government owning America’s national debt. It’s a good thing that China owns only 8% of the debt; a 15% or a 20% video and she’d be violating YouTube’s terms of service.

This is guileless xenophobia– portraying another nation’s citizenry all the way down to the proleiest of the proletariat as extremely enthusiastic, actively pernicious antagonists of ours. It’s their national character, you’re meant to believe. That’s where the racism lies. Even China’s farmgirls are sarcastically thanking you and reveling in your imminent destruction by debt, America, are you going to just sit there and let them? Er, did I say America? I mean Michigan. Let’s go Michigan, clearly you need to vote for the guy who’s so fiscally responsible he ran a nationwide ad during the most expensive ad time possible to win a state election.

This was an ad made by a GOP candidate for national office. Vote for me, or fetching rural bicyclists will enslave you. This is where we are at as a country. What a joke.

Posted in Non-Volcanic, Politics | No Responses »

The 10 Year-Old Partisan Hack

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

ghwbushI was just about to turn 11 when George H.W. Bush came to my hometown of Westbrook, Maine campaigning for re-election as Reagan’s Vice President. I was wearing a sign around my neck made by cutting a rectangle out of a manila folder. Written on it in ball-point pen was the word “REPORTER”. One word, but five times: once big in the middle, and once at an angle in each corner. With me were three other sixth graders, with their own badge designs.

He stopped his car because he saw our badges. Or someone did. Who knows? The badges were big enough and stupid enough, and he stopped his car. He got out and started giving us some pens and pins. He wasn’t really playing up our claimed credentials though. No interview was playfully offered. No jokes about who we worked for. Swipes at the media wouldn’t play like they do today, I’d say. Or maybe he just wasn’t that good with kids. His son certainly supports that hypothesis.

One by one, the other kids took what was offered and said thanks, or nothing at all. I was last. I don’t remember if I said thanks for what I got. I remember thinking that if I didn’t ask one of the questions we had written, he might just say “easiest interview I’ve ever done” and hop back in the limo.

Here’s the background on the index card that I pulled out and read from, without looking up. In case you don’t remember the time: Bush was doing all the stumping for this campaign. Reagan was taking it easy. Well, why not? Were they in any danger of losing? But I had my question.

“Mr. Vice President, how do you respond to those who are saying that you are doing the bulk of the campaigning because President Reagan is too old?”

To his credit, he gave a decent enough answer that I don’t remember exactly what it was. Failure is always more memorable. He said that wasn’t the case at all, of course. The Iran-Contra scandal would of course find Reagan himself implying that it might have been. Though we’re seeing that “not recalling” seems to afflict politicians at earlier and earlier ages nowadays.

The next day, I was on the front page of the American Journal, the very, very local paper of small town Westbrook. But the day after that, it was old news. Still, I wish I had saved that paper. Man, if I’m wishing, I wish I had it on YouTube. I do wonder, though, what would my poor dad would have had to go through in this day and age if this had happened today and it ended up on YouTube. I wonder what it would be like to see a picture of your son with a Hitler mustache drawn on.

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Sarah Palin, the Facebook Ghost

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

palinghost1Sarah Palin hasn’t been seen since she handed over the largest state to her lieutenant governor, what’s-his-name. The one she sarcastically admonished the media not to hound in her farewell fair warning speech. Her edict has enjoyed a rare, if coincidental, success.

But since then she herself has only been “heard” on Facebook, via a series of propaganda-laden notes. Her big hit was the first one, where President Obama was painted as personally demanding that all medical treatment be withheld from her poor kid saddled with Down Syndrome, as well as from her parents, who were only slightly more lucky with their loin roulette spins. After that, she started writing notes that weren’t quite crazy enough for anyone in the media to care about.

But for your information, those notes include:

1. A piece of investigative journalism in which the lid is blown off of a secret plot by President Obama to buy oil from a foreign country— Brazil! Palin is disgusted that Obama isn’t doing all he can to deplete America’s oil first, while creating a job market for the important and patriotic task of moving us toward the goal of being completely vulnerable to oil embargoes. At this point, you might want to recall that stewarding natural resources was pitched as her strong suit.

2. A plea for tort reform, so corporations can be negligent in a more cost-effective manner. Nothing too exciting there, just basic GOP class warfare.

But what’s going on? Is it even her making those posts? The death panel one sounds somewhat like her, but the rest don’t read at all like other things she’s written. A couple of them are just collections of verbage from lobbyists and their pet legislators.

Is this what she’s offering her cultists in exchange for flaking out on the only thing that could have legitimized her? A mute and invisible “celebrity endorsement” of policies? Sarah, George Foreman got on TV to sell the grill. All you’re accomplishing here is showing people that you don’t know anyone who knows how to upload to YouTube.

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