In the Eyes of the Beholder

Nearly 19 years ago, when I was still working as an AT&T public relations specialist, a monumental corporate-wide brouhaha was sparked by some creative graphic artist who thought it was a good idea to use a cute little monkey talking on a telephone to designate the goliath’s customers in Africa on a map of the world. Every other country of the world appearing on that cartoon map showed human figures, also on telephones.
Many, if not most, of the readers of this post might be scratching your head, thinking, whaaa????  But those of you who are Americans of African descent are crystal clear about the cause and effect of that infamous misstep. 
In America, there are certain seemingly innocuous items that, when linked in a generalized way with African Americans, are potentially incendiary enough to cause heads to roll in corporate offices.  Watermelon.  Fried Chicken.  Red Cadillacs.  Apes.  Monkeys.  Baboons.
Standing alone, none of these words are particularly evocative.  Use them in a description of a “typical” black person, though, and drama will ensue.
The person who approved the final rendering of that stylized map, which was used in an employee publication, was mystified by the rolling thunder that image caused among the company’s thousands of African American employees.  Who could deny that there were gorillas in Africa?
Disconnect.

AT&T apologizes for its 'racist cartoon' depicting African caller as a monkey - American Telephone and Telegraph

Fast forward to 2012.  This time, the innocuous item in question is a pair of shoes.

These $350!!!!! pumped-up kicks were designed by quirky designer Jeremy Scott, shown above-right.  Mr. Scott’s designs for Adidas have included many whimsical offerings based on cartoon characters, comic books, and kitsch.

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Other Jeremy Scott for Adidas designs

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So what’s wrong with them, other than their insanely high price point and their butt ugly appearance?
When I first saw them, I thought Scott was joking about the tendency in certain urban settings to get one’s shoes taken at gunpoint if said shoes are the latest iteration of “the latest.”  It would be best to “lock” your shoes up, using the rubber leg shackle. That, of course, brings up a whole ‘nother point of contention:  corporations targeting inner-city kids with must-have footwear that few of them can afford.
When Jesse Jackson first saw them, he thought American black slavery.  He fumed that the shoes were an obvious racist reference to the shackles in which captured Africans were transported and enslaved.
The designer, who appears to be white?  He says he based the shoes on a 1980s children’s toy called My Pet Monster, which has similar shackles.

Disconnect.
On June 18, the German sports apparel manufacturer Adidas aborted its plans to market the Shackle Sneaker this summer, after its recent Facebook preview of the shoes caused considerable outrage.
Washington Post: Slaves to fashion: Jeremy Scott, Adidas and fashion’s race problem
So tell me, what do your eyes behold?

Chris Brown, This is Your Fault!

 

Just about every morning I wake up naturally between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m.  It takes me a few seconds before I realize, once again, that I do not have to get up just because I wake up.

This morning when I clicked on the TV to the just-beginning Today Show, I was greeted by the treacly sound of Ann Curry’s voice solemnly recapping the Rodney King saga that touched off a heart-stopping race riot in Los Angeles in 1992, when police who beat King bloody on camera were acquitted of any crime.

Early Sunday morning Rodney King was found dead at the bottom of his backyard swimming pool, assumedly drowned. 

As I surfed through the articles online related to this story, I came across another story I had heard about in passing.  Chris Brown – yes, THAT Chris Brown; the one who rearranged the face of the beautiful Rihanna a while back – was in the news again for brawling with another one of the fair Rihanna’s ex-loves, the rapper Drake.

You probably think this post is about celebrities behaving badly or the star-crossed nature of some people who simply cannot seem to stay the hell out of trouble.  Nope.

This picture was reportedly taken just before someone threw a bottle and left a deep gash on Brown’s chin.

My attention was immediately drawn to those tattoos!  And my curiosity, as usual, was off to the races.

Wow, look at those tats!  Man, I bet that hurt.  Why would he do that?  Who else has such dramatic, body-covering tattoos?  Isn’t that dangerous?  What happens when tats go back out of style?  Will Chris have to spend millions of dollars and months of pain trying to laser them off?  Will they even come off with a laser?  I wonder how long people have been using their bodies as billboards?

Poor Rodney King’s fate, sad as it is, was left in the dust, along with any further thought of how pathetic Chris Brown is for setting himself up for another onslaught of negative publicity.

Wondering how I ever existed with this rampant curiosity of mine without Google at the tip of my fingers, I found example after example of celebrity men who have endured similar inky needle attacks in an effort to decorate their already heavenly bodies.

David Beckham, soccer star and Hollywood pinup.

 

His choices include two full sleeves, a half chest and some kind of Chinese character. I wonder how wife Victoria feels about all this.  The ink, I mean.

 

 

Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock, former wrestler and current movie star.

 

 

Johnson’s left shoulder adornment is cultural, as in Polynesian.  His Polynesian shoulder art is a tribute to his half-Samoan heritage.  Look at those…colors.  Vivid colors.

 

 Shamar Moore, star of TV’s Criminal Minds

 The kingly lion on his right     shoulder caught my eye while I was watching CM reruns one day.  Then I remembered him as a teen playing American Legion baseball against my son’s team.  Focus returned.

 

Then I found this:

L’il Wayne, rapper

 

My response?  Ewwwwwwww!  From the cross on his forehead to the gang wannabe teardrop on his face, which denotes a person killed in gang communities, denotes fashion statement for this pretender.  This father of four looks like he was rolled in slightly wet newsprint!

 

 

According to a National Geographic Magazine article, body art via tattooing is somewhere around 5000 years old.  Scientists, in 1991, learned from the remains the Copper Age “Iceman” they named Ötzi that powdered charcoal tattoos found on the lower back, ankles, knees and foot might have been used as a medical treatment for pain relief. 

Whatever the purpose, tattoos have been a part of human life ever since.

Okay, enough serious history.  Now I started wondering what these elaborate tattoos would look like later in life, when the earth’s gravitational pull starts creating nooks and crannies, slopes and slide on the bodyscape.  I wish I had stopped while I was ahead.

What Did a Douchebag Ever Do to You?

Everybody seems to have accepted the term as a way to describe a jerk, a cad, a boor, an asshole or a dweeb.

When was dirt bag – a term I could wrap my brain around, given its obvious reference to the unwashed and disgusting – replaced by the ubiquitous low-blow designation of douchebag?

I wonder if half the people running around calling each other that have a clue about the actual item they’ve employed to bitch-slap some poor slob for being a pri…er, a di…well, a not-very-nice-person.

Ah, maybe that’s it!  So many of the popular putdowns have been references to male body parts, none of which have a comparable piece of apparatus to change the PH balance of said part, some guy probably decided to even the slaying field by enlisting an otherwise innocuous tool of feminine hygiene.

What a minute!   Tool?  Isn’t that another name we like to call people who are infinitely pitiful, obnoxious, out-to-lunch losers? 

Come to think of it, speakers of the English language (and probably every other language on earth, but I don’t know that for sure and I don’t want to be a douchebag about it) have created a list of unflattering (to say the least) terms to call one another that could probably stretch from here to the next county. 

When I was a child, I tried very hard not to be a doo-doo-head, something I learned from the little brats who ran around like wild indians causing all kinds of trouble.  Out on the front porch every evening, my grandfather would shake his head and mumble about the cowboys who were driving their cars too fast to keep safe the little brats he happened to love .

As a teen, the hoods (short for hoodlums) would run their hands through their Brylcreemed DAs (duck’s ass) and sneer out of the sides of their downturned mouths and call me a social climber.  Only our mothers referred to girls other than their own daughters who were somewhat loose as sluts. We called them cool!

In college, my pejorative vocabulary soared.  The shit -for- brains GDIs (god damned independents) thought we sorority girls were lunch buckets who had to get our fraternity member boyfriends to take our exams for us. Those lunchy Alpha Chis they called us, the little twits. On a given Saturday night, just about all of us were out of it from drinking too much brewski.

As an adult I have seen dweebs morph to geeks, geeks become nerds, social climbers turn into yuppies, and for my kind, buppies. There were gangbangers, thugs, bikers, biker-chicks, and hos; not to mention the boatload of racial and cultural slurs that continues to grow as the social segments of our collective brains seem to shrink.

When I was a career counselor in the giant corporation I was employed by, I used to put employees through an exercise, asking them to make a list of their strengths or talents and a separate list of their weaknesses or developmental needs.  I could predict with 99% accuracy the list of negatives would be at least twice as long as the list of positives.

Negative self-talk is almost as common as creating nasty names to call one another.  Why is that?  Have we somehow been taught to dwell on our faults?  Is it a matter of simple transference, that thing that makes us want to come up with zany and nonsensical zingers to toss at and about others?

I don’t think this is a new phenomenon.  On the contrary, we Americans seem to have come by it honestly.  Take a look at some of the British pejoratives I found, just under the ‘b’s in this British slang dictionary:

big girl’s blouse: n chicken (as in person who is afraid, not as in bird). Exclusively applied to men: After we’d had a couple of beers we all jumped off the bridge into the lake, except Andy, who turned out to be a big girl’s blouse.

bird: pron. ‘beud’ (London); ‘burd’ (Scotland) n woman. Well, not really. Bird is used by blokes looking upon the fairer sex with a slightly more carnal eye. It’s not quite at the stage of treating women as objects but the implication is certainly there: I shagged some random bird last night (a popular usage), or: Hey, Andy, I think those birds over there are looking at us. You’d never describe your grandmother as a bird. It’s popular in Scotland to refer to one’s girlfriend as “ma burd" but do it in front of her and you’ll be choking teeth. About the only thing worse would be to call her “ma bint,” which will warrant a foot in the testicles and a loose tongue concerning your sexual prowess. The word itself is derived from the Old Norse word for “woman,” and the closest American English equivalent would probably be “chick.”

bloke: n guy. A bloke is a Joe Public, a random punter, ”any old fellow off the street. Unlike “guy,” however, it can’t apply to your friends. You can’t 'walk up to a group of your mates and say ‘blokes, what’s up?” as they’d all peer at you as if you’d been reading some ill-informed, cheap dictionary. Without question, the most common usage of the word is in the phrase “some bloke in the pub.” 

Think about it.  How many nouns can you come up with that refer to a positive aspect of a person?  Things like trooper, mensch, team player, sweetheart, etc.

On Being Special

 

A man I’ve never met face-to-face, but whom I adore, said something in his recent excellent post that inspired this essay.

In Stop Your Damned Whining, David McClain wrote, among many other things,  the following:

One last thing. Stop being afraid to voice your opinions just because you think everyone is smarter than you are because you have shit for education. Own your beliefs and don’t be afraid to state them. If someone gets snippy with you, well you just tell em to take a flying fuck with a spider monkey.

This really got to me.  I started wondering just how many other people out there in OS land and beyond feel their opinions are subject to being shot down out of hand because they have “shit for education.”

One of the many benefits of reaching the age of 67 alive is the ability to see things from a looking-back perspective.  There was a time when I might have bought the idea that a person who didn’t attend college, or didn’t finish high school, or, as was the case with my late and beloved stepfather, didn’t even finish 8th grade, would not be able to hold his own in a conversation with a group of people with a bunch of the alphabet strung behind their names.

I am here to tell you all – that is simply absurd.

On June 1, 2012, David McCullough, Jr. delivered a commencement speech to the privileged students of the tony Wellesley High School in Massachusetts. It was one of the bluntest and probably the profoundest in that school’s history.  It went viral and was featured on just about every newscast in the nation.  Why?  Because he said, without sugar-coating, without preamble, “You are not special.”

You are not exceptional. Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been nudged, cajoled, wheedled and implored. You’ve been feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie. Yes, you have. And, certainly, we’ve been to your games, your plays, your recitals, your science fairs. Absolutely, smiles ignite when you walk into a room, and hundreds gasp with delight at your every tweet. Why, maybe you’ve even had your picture in the Townsman! And now you’ve conquered high school… and, indisputably, here we all have gathered for you, the pride and joy of this fine community, the first to emerge from that magnificent new building…

But do not get the idea you’re anything special. Because you’re not.

The empirical evidence is everywhere, numbers even an English teacher can’t ignore. Newton, Natick, Nee… I am allowed to say Needham, yes? …that has to be two thousand high school graduates right there, give or take, and that’s just the neighborhood Ns. Across the country no fewer than 3.2 million seniors are graduating about now from more than 37,000 high schools. That’s 37,000 valedictorians… 37,000 class presidents… 92,000 harmonizing altos… 340,000 swaggering jocks… 2,185,967 pairs of Uggs. –David McCullough, Jr.

Those pampered young graduates, who worked their butts off in a rigorous curriculum that only a private school can offer, were probably shaken to their educated cores.  After all, these are the kids who were raised by the Me Generation, the parents who enrolled them in the best schools the day after they were born!  Their parents believed, as most of the rest of us did, that education was the key to everything.  Anyone who failed to educate themselves was doomed to cipherdom, right?

Well just look at where all that education has gotten us!  Look around the world and show me where higher education has prevented the mistakes made all along the way that led us to the current state of affairs.  Famine? Check. Massacres? Check.  Wars?  Check.  Hatred? Check  Peace?  Nope.

I have a B.A. in Psychology.  Does that make me any more entitled to an opinion than my stepfather, who taught me more about life at our kitchen table than I learned in the four wonderful years I spent learning how to learn in college?  ‘Cuz that is exactly  what the takeaway was from my college experience.  Sure I learned a lot of things I might otherwise have skipped.  I certainly never had occasion to use the Chemistry-Physics I almost failed to learn in the one and only class that I earned a D in.

I learned where to find the answers to my questions, how to reason through a problem, and when to know I was in over my head.

Our friend David does precisely the same things with what he calls his “shit for education.”  He just learned it through hands-on, on-the-job experience – the school of Hard Knocks.  From where we sit, in roughly the same age group (although I think David is younger than I am) we seem to have come to the same exit on the freeway of life.

It is my fervent hope that anyone reading this post who harbors similar thoughts about their educational inadequacy will take a moment to take a second look. 

Just a housewife?  Ridiculous!  You have managed a business called a family, which requires people skills up the wazoo; fiscal responsibility for household income, regardless of its source or amount; problem solving that ranges from keeping the baby from burning his hand on the stove to finding a way to pay for the gutters that failed to stay un-rusted  long enough for your ship to come in.

A rancher?  Oh my gosh, where do I begin? Animal husbandry, agriculture, small business skills to buy and sell livestock, survival in the “wild” habitat that includes bobcats, coyotes and God only knows what other beasties cavorting around those prized horses, teeny tiny piglets and goats that faint when startled. 

Anybody who lives a life, any kind of life, becomes educated about the ways of the world and survival in it.  It is my humble but strong opinion that living long enough to reach an age that makes you eligible for Senior Citizen benefits entitles every last one of us to hold an opinion and to express it without fear of intellectual judgment by anybody else.

I am not any more special than anybody else.  Neither are you.  We may have more in terms of years in the classroom and general “stuff,”  but we are all going to end up in the same condition at the end.  Dead. 

Herding the Skinny Cats

 

Suddenly I was driving a vehicle.  It must have been a mini-van, because of all the people.

As we drove along I noticed the shimmering surface of water in the intersection, which didn’t make sense because the sun was brilliant and the sky cerulean.  Without so much as a lightening of my foot on the accelerator I drove straight into the body of water.

As if by magic, I watched what ensued from a distance that meant I was no longer inside that van.  I stood (or did I sit?) and watched as the van slowly sank and flailing arms beat the surface of the extremely deep pool.  Screams.  They were all screaming for help.  And there I stood, fascinated by the theater and utterly unphased.

I woke slowly.  When I was fully awake I realized I had that feeling I get when I am feeling a strong emotion – rapid pulse, shallow breathing and anxiety. 

It was only after I realized I had been dreaming that I calmed myself and puzzled over what on earth such a dream could mean.

I was the one who drove the vehicle into the standing water.  How could I simply stand and watch as people struggled and drowned?  That is not something I would do.  In fact, I would be screaming my head off for help or diving into the water to attempt to save at least one of the passengers.

No, as is the case with most dreams, it had to have been symbolic. 

It’s no secret that I am extremely concerned about the condition of our country.  I do delve into the politics that others avoid like the plague.  It matters to me that the people of America appear to be falling prey to a relatively small group of people who intend to set the agenda for the future.

It drives me mad to hear people even less well off than I parrot the talking points of fat cat politicians who sleep with the enemy that is Big Business.  I realized the dream represented that concern of mine. 

The driver of the van wasn’t actually me, it was the conservative right.  The passengers in the van were the millions of people who will be driven to the polls in November, where they will cast their votes in direct opposition to their own best interests. 

The driver of the van will stand back and watch them as they work their bodies into disrepair, fall behind on their mortgages, become unable to feed their families and drown in a pool of despair.

Now that I’ve figured it out, I am not surprised I would have such a dream.  It was in line completely with the way I think when I am awake. I take a complex issue and try to reduce it to a sound-bite-sized scenario to help me understand the issue and explain it to someone else before they tire of listening.

The human brain is the most mysterious and wonderful living thing on the planet.

The Look of Love

 

Love.  We all seek it.  And we all think we know what it is – or least we can recognize it when we see it…or feel it.

We all know there are a myriad of sources from which it comes.  And we know it is powerful.  It hits sometimes without warning.  Other times it sneaks up on us, but when it gets our attention, it still does so by bopping us upside the head.

Contrary to popular retorts to the lovelorn, love does sometimes hurt.  Not physically, of course, but in the heart and soul and sense of self. 

Love has a way of changing over time.  In the case of romantic love, the first flutters of infatuation – those thoughts that take the bottoms from our stomachs, letting in the butterflies – are gradually replaced by a strong mutual respect and admiration, an easy lightness of being together in silence.  It morphs from lusty urgency to drifting off to sleep as spoons, content to feel the closeness of the other’s essence.

Or not.

Too many times love disappoints us.  The expectations, one from another, fail to balance, to match in our synergistic dance.  One or both of us fail to remember what it was that pulled us together in the first place.  She might mistake his dominance, his jealous rants and controlling demands as true love.  It is not.  He might mistake her helplessness and neediness for love.  It is not.

The kind of love we have for our children is miles apart from the love we have for those whose union created us.  We tend to love our children no matter what;  whereas our parents are easy to resent for their possibly well-intended methods of rearing us.  But we are our parents’ children, and as parents ourselves we come to understand how our resentment toward them makes them feel.

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  So said a character in the wildly popular movie of a distant time, Love Story. It turns out, that is not correct.  In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite.  Love is what makes us step up and admit when we have done wrong, by mistake or with purpose.

Love is not a thought.  It is a behavior.  It does no good to think with love, or speak of it, if our actions deliver a contrary message. "Loving thy neighbor’ is not just something we talk about on the Sabbath in a structure we visit only once a week. And “thy neighbor” is not just the couple next door. 

It is the kid sitting on the other side of the classroom.  It is the family in the next block who do zany things like turn live goats loose in their front yard to mow the lawn.  It is the person who lives in a different region of your country, who speaks with a different accent and lives her life in a totally different way.  It is the country to the south of us and the continents across the seas.

The love of self is a behavior, too.  Love of self is not bad; it is essential.  Love of self is a prerequisite for loving any others.  It is not enough to say we love ourselves.  We must behave our way to good health – mental, emotional and physical.  We cannot defile our bodies with poisons and recklessness and truthfully claim to love ourselves. 

If you have it [Love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.  ~Sir James M. Barrie

Bloomberg is Grasping At Straws

 

Every time I go to a movie theater or a fast-food store and order a soft drink (diet-only for me) I am shocked that the size of the “small” has increased to what was once considered excessively large.  Portions have gotten so big, one might as well smuggle a 2-liter bottle of their fizzy liquid of choice into the establishment.  That’s about the size of the Big Gulp-type cups these days.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s call for restaurants to limit the size of sugary soft drinks to a maximum 16 ounces struck the moderate portion of my politics when I heard about it this morning. Almost like a bona fide conservative, I thought “Wait just a damn minute!”

Do I think the government in the form of this mayor is overstepping its boundaries with this measure?  Yes, I kind of do. It’s just probably not for the same reasons as my Republican compadres will be yelling about tomorrow.

Sometimes our leaders, regardless of their ideology, spend too much time and treasure trying to fix the wrong problems.  It is easy enough to regulate the Coca-Cola and Pepsi portions served in public venues. In the interest of public safety we have seen laws passed to mandate seatbelts, helmets for cyclists of all levels, and smoke-free environments for diners and workers alike.  Why not try to fix our nation’s epidemic of obesity with another law?

I have never run across a child who didn’t want to drink more sweetened juices and sodas than s/he should or than the parents would allow.  My own son would have consumed Hawaiian Punch until it squirted out of his tear ducts I we had let him.  He would drink his beverage first and become too full for the food he needed, but would rather not have eaten.  Rules were put into place to save the sweet beverage until AFTER the meal.  Sip water, if you must, while you are eating.  Of course, his consumption was automatically controlled that way – at least when we could see him.

Our country’s struggle with obesity is complex and perplexing, but I just cannot see how limiting the serving sizes of soft drinks is going to change anything.  Yes, the retailers create the illusion that buying large sizes is cheaper by the ounce, so why not buy the larger cup and save money?  Smoke and mirrors for sure, but that’s how the cinemas and fast-food joints stay in business. 

There is nothing to stop consumers from simply buying two 16 oz. drinks or four or however many they please.  Some of us cheapskates would probably think twice about that, but young people who have the money in their pockets  or who have super-indulgent parents might decide to spend their popcorn money on soda instead.

Sugar is the enemy of public health, I am convinced of that.  Should the government ban the production of granulated sugar next?  I sure don’t thin k so.  Americans need to stop blaming their every trouble on some evil outside element and start taking responsibility for their own “private health.” 

Children must be trained to make good food and beverage choices, just as they are trained to do everything else they do.  Most of us don’t cave to the pressure of indulgence when our toddlers stick their fingers in outlets or put their hands on the oven door.  We teach them that to do that will cause them pain.

Of course, it will do no good for Mom and Dad to require moderation of their children if they themselves order super-sized portions of everything. 

Mayor Bloomberg says everybody is screaming about this problem, but no one is doing anything about it, so he did this.  The one thing it has done is have every media outlet in the nation talking about it.  But will it make any difference in the collective poundage of the American population? I seriously doubt it.