Sago Boulevard

I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a movie I hadn’t seen in years, on HBO last night. I had forgotten just how great it is. First of all, the premise of blending animated, ink-and-paint cartoon characters with flesh-and-blood live actors is amusing. Having grown up with Looney Tunes, I appreciate the tribute it pays to the cartoon industry and its most famous characters. The plot is a clever spoof of hard-boiled American crime fiction. The dialogue, especially between the live actors and cartoon-characters, is witty and hilarious.

The best movies are the ones that are both fun to watch and interesting to think about afterwards. Who Framed Roger Rabbit definitely qualifies in my book.

(via Susanna)

The Seattle Public Schools’ website lists and defines various kinds of racism (via VC). “Cultural racism” is defined as follows:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Up until the list of examples, the definition seems fairly reasonable: attributing normality to whites, devaluing non-whites, etc. The first example - “defining white skin tones as… flesh colored” - is also pretty straightforward. After that, I’m confused. First of all, what the heck is “a future time orientation”? Some of the commenters at VC say that it might refer to certain capitalistic attitutudes towards career-planning and higher education. I fail to see how that has anything to do with race, though. Planning well for the future seems like a plainly good thing to do. Is there any argument against this? Are there cultural or religious groups who ideologically oppose “future time orientation”?

As for individualism, it’s true that it refers to a mentality associated with America and Western Europe. Believing that everyone ought to follow the norms of your culture, first of all, isn’t racism; it’s cultural elitism. But in this context, “individualism” is far too vague. Can school emphasize the value of individual rights, individual freedoms, individual responsibility, individual choices? Without some very specific qualifiers, using individualism as an example of racism is a little ridiculous. (It might be ridiculous with the qualifiers too, depending on what they are.)

The issue of standard English is a little more complicated. The problem is that it’s pretty much unavoidable. How do you teach rules of grammar and syntax without assuming one standard English? If schools do in fact teach the English of the educated elite (which they do), it’s disingenuous to talk about the equal legitimacy of other dialects. Incidentally, the website is written in very clear standard English.

Last night, I saw Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up performance with my brother in Baltimore. As expected, the entire show was laugh-out-loud funny. Almost all the material was new and there’s no indication that he’s slowing down anytime soon. Expect more first-class Seinfeld comedy for years to come.

Yet another columnist laments the left wing bias in the media. The Monitor’s Matthew Towery argues:

By looking through an elite pair of myopically focused glasses, these media movers deceive themselves that everything revolves around their own business and social circles in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Citing two of Bernard Goldberg’s books, “Bias” and “Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite“, Towery’s suggests

moving some of the major national news broadcasts to new locations outside New York. How about the evening news from Topeka, Kan.; Dallas; or Jacksonville, Fla.? According to Goldberg, that would force talking-head superstars to interact with mainstream Americans. And why not the same prescription for Hollywood and Wall Street kingpins?

So many of these half-baked theories about media bias miss what strikes me as an obvious point. Maybe it’s not so much that journalists have a liberal bias as it is liberals have a propensity for journalism. Journalism is the profession of whistle-blowers, a medium for challenging authority and advocating change. It’s the kind of thing liberals drool over. The problem isn’t that media outlets are based in New York instead of Topeka. It’s that North Eastern Liberal types are the ones who want to be journalists. I think the same is true for liberal biases in Hollywood and sociology departments.

Think of it this way. Would anybody be surprised if I told you there’s a conservative bias in the military, a libertarian bias on Wall Street, and a socialist bias among factory workers?