On the treadmill today I was listening to last week’s All Songs Considered episode about odd musical pairings. Aretha Franklin and George Michael make an appearance, singing “I Knew You Were Waiting.” I was delighted to hear Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “The Face of Love,” I’ve been a longtime fan of that one. Frank Sinatra and Bono’s rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” got, um, under my skin, in the worst way.

But clearly the entire time I was stewing over what song I’d nominate. The answer that came to mind isn’t really a pairing, it’s just one song sampling another – Mariah Carey’s “The Roof,” based on Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt. II.” It’s not even Mariah Carey’s first rap pairing – for her prior album, she’d memorably recruited Wu-Tang’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard (may he rest in peace) to ride shotgun on the delightful pop romp “Fantasy.” But I’d still go with it.

I consider the song itself quite an underrated confection. Mariah had clearly taken to heart critical murmurings that her inevitable ascent into whistle register during her songs was an annoying crutch, a circus trick. So for the album on which “The Roof” appears (1997’s Butterfly), she toned it down. Her highest notes are mostly absent, barely detectable in the texture of the occasional harmony. And in fact, the album’s second number-one single, the Spanish-guitar-inflected “My All,” showcases her smoky lower register. (It’s hard not to hear “My All” as an answer to Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart,” another sultry, Spanish-guitar-filled, deep alto ballad with a very similar melodic structure.)

In “The Roof,” Mariah’s formerly unrestrained melisma just slinks and teases and flirts in the shadows, while a dozen Mariah clones harmonize lushly in sung whispers and sighs. Even in the background, her trills and coos are so delightfully precise that it’s amazing to think this is her holding back. Sometimes she’s just humming melismatically. And the production is top-notch – matching the vocal coquetry with barely audible strings and the hint of a triangle throughout that finally just takes over. It reminded me of something Sasha Frere-Jones once wrote about a Beyonce b-side: “Who feels comfortable with adding so much unexpected, generous harmony to a trifle about a delicious crush?”

The song, as I mentioned, builds off a sample by the gangsta rap crew Mobb Deep – a foreboding arpeggio picked out haltingly on piano keys atop a thrumming, bouncing bass line. The Mobb Deep song is an urban gothic nightmare – all the guns and money and swagger you’d expect, but instead of the usual threats or boasts, it foregrounds the fear itself. Shook – as in “scared to death, scared to look.”

So it’s an odd pairing – this scary Mobb Deep joint with a bit of sexy Mariah Carey cotton candy. It either loses or gains a bit of its oddness, though, when you consider the context.

Butterfly was a pivotal album for Mariah. It came right after she’d broken with her career-enabling ex-husband, Sony’s Tommy Mottola, whom she’d later complain had locked her into a cloying, sugar-pop chastity belt of a public image that obscured the R&B diva within. Fast-forward to today, when she’s perceived as having successfully reinvented herself in the contemporary R&B tradition. To me, contemporary Mariah is about as vocally remarkable as, oh, say, Ashanti (remember her?), but who am I to start railing about kids these days?

Until Butterfly, all we’d ever really seen of Mariah was hints of belly button. But “Honey,” the album’s first video, has her diving into a swimming pool in a bikini and stilettos. And suddenly, she’s an R&B queen! There she is on “Breakdown,” going toe to toe with Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony! (Another candidate for oddest pairing, but again I say – pop romp.) To complete this transition, to move fully from “virgin” to “urban,” she needs cred. She’s gotta go deep. Mobb Deep. Hence, “The Roof.”

And I love it.

Fashion-blogging on Snarkmarket? Just this once. I’ve got to hand it to any men’s fashion site willing to unironically hand its 2009 Clothing Store of the Year award to Old Navy. The photos aren’t quite as lush as the ones at Uncrate, the copy lacks that Esquire sheen, and I don’t approve of body text in reverse type. But taste is the important thing, and Unrefinery has it in spades. I also like that it’s budget-conscious; I’m willing to spend a little on fashion, but you will never see me spend $60 on a reusable grocery bag, no matter how vegetable-dyed its leather straps are. Unlike some prominent men’s fashion sites I know*, Unrefinery seems to accept that a man’s outfit can be complete without a blazer. I don’t agree with everything – shorts have their place, especially during DC’s maybe-hottest-summer-ever. But for the most part, I approve.

And I’m getting this jacket.

Thinking about standing turns out to be a great Ockham’s razor that clarifies almost any problem. If you’re not familiar with it, the legal concept of standing basically says that you can’t bring a lawsuit unless you can show you’ve been (or soon will be) materially harmed in some way. It’s a great way to get a case tossed before it’s even started, which is why it’s a go-to move for any lawyer.

For instance, let’s say Sarah Palin wanted to bring a lawsuit to stop the Cordoba House from being built near the WTC site. So long as she can’t show that she, personally, is harmed by its being built, all she can do is say how much she doesn’t like it on TV.

This, essentially, was what Barack Obama, good law professor that he is, said. It’s on private property. You might not like it, but you don’t have standing. Shut up. Later, when he “rolled back” his “support,” what he was really doing (I think) is saying, “We don’t even have to argue the wisdom of it. That’s it. It’s done.” This is the smart lawyer move. Set every other question aside and focus on the one that wins the case.

The Prop 8 case in California also shows standing at work:

Even though Judge Walker did not immediately let same-sex couples in California marry, the ruling provides important insight into the merits of the issues that the Ninth Circuit will consider on appeal. For example, in his ruling today, Judge Walker casts serious doubt on whether the proponents of Prop 8 even have “standing” to pursue an appeal because they do not speak for the state of California, and the official representatives of the state agree that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Standing refers to whether a particular person has a legal right to bring an appeal. In his ruling today, Judge Walker said: “As it appears at least doubtful that proponents will be able to proceed with their appeal without a state defendant, it remains unclear whether the court of appeals will be able to reach the merits of proponents’ appeal. In light of those concerns, proponents may have little choice but to attempt to convince either the governor or the attorney general to file an appeal to ensure jurisdiction.”

Just think about that for a moment: no one, no individual or group, can show that they’re harmed by permitting gay men and women to marry, while those couples can easily show they’re harmed by prohibiting their marriage. You often hear arguments tossed out of the form “how does two men/women marrying hurt you?” as if that question is supposed to incline you to support or permit gay marriage based on a minimalist “it’s none of my business” ethic. And sometimes that feels a little unsatisfying, because “it doesn’t hurt anybody” is a pretty thin grounds for substantive acceptance and equality.

But that’s not what it’s for. In a very real sense, it’s about establishing whether or not someone has the right to speak for or against a legal decision. And that, ultimately, is how the law is shaped.

Now, because the whole point of establishing standing is to formally limit what can be said and who can say it, it comes with all sorts of limitations as part of the package. It ties you to considering issues where you have bodily harm or monetary loss and clear legal ownership. More nebulous kinds of damage, like harm done to animals, the environment, or landmarks, give you fewer places to stand. (This is one reason why the fate of the fishermen in the Gulf is of such interest in the wake of the BP disaster. Killing all those fish doesn’t matter in a tort case except insofar as it hurts the livelihood of fishermen.)

But you can also expand standing by using it as a metaphor for who’s given legitimacy to speak about something in any context, not just a court of law. This is what law professor/author Derrick Bell does in his essay/dialogue “The Rules of Racial Standing,” in Faces at the Bottom of the Well:

FIRST RULE

The law grants litigants standing to come into court based on their having sufficient personal interest and involvement in the issue to justify judicial cognizance. Black people (while they may be able to get into court) are denied such standing legitimacy in the world generally when they discuss their negative experiences with racism or even when they attempt to give a positive evaluation of another black person or of his or her work. No matter their experience or expertise, blacks’ statements involving race are deemed “special pleading” and thus not entitled to serious consideration.

Here’s a quick summary of rules 2-5 (all paraphrases mine):

2. Black judges/jurors are assumed to be partial in cases involving race and are asked to recuse themselves.
3. Enhanced standing is given to blacks who publicly disparage or criticize other blacks.
4. Blacks are actively recruited to refute or condemn outrageous statements made by other blacks.
5. Identifying rules of racial standing helps you understand racism, but cannot help you repeal them.

Obviously, these expanded rules of standing can be applied to plenty of things besides race; #2 became an issue in Prop 8 when critics of Judge Walker argued that a gay man couldn’t be expected to judge a case involving gay marriage without bias. The Daily Show had my favorite take on this:

But let’s even go outside of politics. Journalism turns out to have its own rules of standing, too. Think about media journalism: who has standing to speak? John Gruber at Daring Fireball is definitely an Apple expert and a great writer, but he’s regularly dismissed by many of those we could call (to use the Latin) playa hatas as biased because he only writes about Apple, he’s a self-proclaimed fan of their products, and he’s overwhelmingly positive about them.

This, I think, is the subtext of Jay Rosen’s terrific argument about pursuing a citizen’s agenda in political journalism. In an election — or even in a news cycle — political parties, candidates, interest groups, pundits, and yes, media outlets all have clear things they can win or lose based on how it goes. In other words, as interested parties, they all have standing. But citizens have standing, too:

One of the big advantages of deploying a citizens agenda in campaign coverage is that it substitutes for that default agenda we’re all familiar with: horse race journalism, and the inside baseball style of coverage. Instead of that, this. Use the citizens agenda to shrink the horse race narrative down to a saner size. Meaning: it’s fine to keep track of who’s ahead and point out what the candidates are doing to win. That’s part of politics. But it should not be the big lens through which journalists view the campaign because it’s simply not useful enough for voters.

In fact, the citizens’ standing matters a lot more than those other groups — but it’s overwhelmingly considered last (if at all). That’s partly because besides the ballot box and contrivances like town hall forums and YouTube debates, citizens have very few courts in which they can be heard. (The parties and candidates and pundits don’t have that problem.) We need to find a way to turn that around.

Where else can we take standing? The concept, to me, is so simple, yet so powerful — I’ve got a suspicion that it’s very nearly a universal acid.

I finally read Farhad Manjoo’s much-and-well-maligned “How black people use Twitter” essay. Until I read it, Instant Vintage’s spoofs of the brown Twitter bird and Danielle Belton’s “Things That Are Not Surprising: Black People Use Twitter” were plenty entertaining enough.

When I read the actual essay, though, I thought, “eh, I expected worse.” It actually reminded me a little of Steven Pinker’s take on The Shallows , where what you already know about the author and outlet just gives the writer very little wiggle room. In Pinker’s case, he uses straw men and can be flippant and condescending. With “How black people use Twitter,” it’s the convergence of “Slate doesn’t write about race well” and “Farhad Manjoo can be a superficial tech columnist.” Plus more, I’m sure. At any rate, those are the reasons I thought of, because those are the reasons I don’t regularly read Slate or Manjoo anymore.

That said, it is hilarious to read things like “In April, Edison Media Research released a survey which found that nearly one-quarter of people on Twitter are African-American; the firm noted this was approximately double the percentage of African-Americans in the current U.S. population” and “Are other identifiable groups starting similar kinds of hashtags, but it’s only those initiated by African-Americans that are hitting the trending topics list?” and transfer this to something other than Twitter. “Why can’t white or Asian people get on trending topics? Something about this doesn’t seem right.”

It reminds me of Ross Douthat’s disproportional argument in his “Roots of White Anxiety” op-ed, and the weird sentiment you sometimes encounter where people will say things like, “you can’t get into an Ivy League school unless you’re a minority.”

The Middle East is anxious about what’s perceived as a decline in Arabic:

[C]alls to forestall the language’s demise are accompanied by cautionary tales about parents who encourage their children to learn other “more useful” languages like English and French, only to find that they can scarcely recite the Arabic alphabet when they get to university. Meanwhile, teachers across the region warn about the rise of “Facebook Arabic,” a transliterated form of the language based on the Latin script. Exemplifying their concerns are the oratorical fumbles of some of the region’s younger political leaders like Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, whose shambling inaugural address to the Lebanese parliament provoked much local tittering. Not everyone is amused: Fi’l Amr, a language-advocacy group, has launched a campaign to raise awareness about Arabic’s critical condition by staging mock crime scenes around Beirut depicting “murdered” Arabic letters, surrounded by yellow police tape that reads: “Don’t kill your language.”

Really, though, it’s not actually Arabic that’s suffering, but a particular grapholect, fusha, the Modern Standard Arabic that closely resembles the classical Arabic of the Koran. And fusha has always been more of an imagined commonality binding together the Arab world than a reality.

In a very basic sense, there is no such thing as Arabic; or, at least, there is no single language that all Arabs speak, read, write, and understand. Instead, Arabic is, like English and many other languages, a constellation of various national dialects, regional vernaculars, and social registers bearing different degrees of resemblance to each another. What sets it apart from a language like English is its diglossic nature, whereby the language of literature and formal address (newscasts, political speeches, religious sermons, and so forth) is markedly different, on multiple structural levels, from the language of everyday speech.

You can overstate this, but it’s a little bit like 19th-century Western Europeans watching literacy numbers boom while wringing their hands over the fate of Latin.

As recently as 1970, three out of four Arabs over the age of 15 were illiterate, according to Unesco. Two decades earlier, illiteracy among women was close to 90 per cent. Even in a country like contemporary Egypt – which has long prided itself, as the old saying goes, on reading the books that Iraq writes and Lebanon publishes – less than two-thirds of the population can read. To speak, therefore, of helping restore Arabic to its former glory, or of helping it to “reemerge as a dynamic and vibrant language” as the government of the UAE has recently committed itself to do, is to ignore the reality that Arabic – both in its classical and modern standard incarnation – has never had as many users as it does today. Even taking into consideration the sway that English holds in the private and educational sectors of various countries in the region, or the important position that French occupies in France’s former colonies, it is impossible to pinpoint another moment in the history of the Arab world when so many people could communicate (with varying degrees of ability) in fusha.

This article I’m quoting was written by my friend Elias Muhanna, who blogs about Lebanese politics as Qifa Nabki, and published in The National, then picked up by The Economist. Whoo-hoo! Comp Lit PhDs FTW!

Shaquille O’Neal talks to the NYT about LeBron’s Decision, and where he’ll be taking his talents once he retires:

Are you concerned about the declining fortunes of Cleveland now that you and LeBron James have left?
We would have liked to have given them a better ending.

Have you spoken to LeBron since he signed with the Miami Heat?
No, no.

Did you watch along with the rest of the world when he monopolized ESPN for a night to announce where he was going?
No, I didn’t. One, I was with the kids, and two, I didn’t know it was going to be on TV.

I didn’t watch it, either.
That’s because you’re mature and you’re my age and we have a different mind-set.

Age has given O’Neal perspective.

Do you find it difficult to be an aging athlete?
A little bit. We live in an impatient world. Everybody is always looking for the next big Kobe, the next big LeBron, the next big Twitter.

And did you know that besides Twittering, hosting TV shows, raising his kids, visiting his dad, and hooping it up, Shaq is writing his dissertation?

Do you think you’ll ever be a sports announcer, like Charles Barkley?
Hopefully not. When I’m done playing basketball, I want do something bigger. I’m working on my doctorate right now at Barry University in Florida.

What are you writing your dissertation on?
My topic will be “How Leaders Utilize Humor or Aggression in Leadership Styles.”

You’ve been called the Big Aristotle, among other nicknames.
I’m done with the nicknames. Actually, when I obtain my doctorate, I will not allow people to call me Shaq anymore, either.

What will they call you?
Dr. O’Neal.

It might seem like I’m making fun of Shaq, but I’m really not. (I do think he’s funny.) I like and respect him a lot, all the more so for pursuing whatever he’s been interested in.

In my Kottke post this week on how athletes are different from you or me, I included a quote by Bill Simmons about how Michael Jordan really bordered on sociopathic behavior during the years he contended for a championship. I didn’t mention that the quote is actually from Simmons’s section on Shaquille O’Neal.

Simmons’s point was that Shaq never became quite as great as Jordan, despite having comparable talent, in part because he was a more-well-rounded person; his drive to succeed wasn’t so singularly focused on beating people on the court, except really during his four championship seasons.

This is also one reason Barkley, who was friends with Jordan and battled with him and probably came closest to beating him during his championship years (’93, with the Suns), could never quite get there, and got bogged down with controversies and politics during his career — and yet he’s a better announcer than Jordan ever could be. Definitely a better interview. Probably a better friend. He always had other things on his mind.

Recent efforts by Tony Judt, Christopher Hitchens, Atul Gawande, following on slightly older ones by Joan Didion and Phillip Roth, make me wonder whether we’ve achieved a new breakthrough in our ability to write about death — perhaps especially protracted death, death within the context of medical treatment, in a secular context, which as Gawande reminds us, is comparatively new and certainly much more common.

I just learned that Chris Meadows, smart writer and one of the most prolific bloggers at e-book site Teleread, was (until very recently) unemployed for sixteen months:

I’ve recently taken on a new full-time job, after sixteen months of life on unemployment, and in the rush of having money again have been considering a number of possible purchases—including an iPhone 4. But some articles I’ve been reading lately have started me thinking about whether I really even need one.

This resonates with me, because I’ve been unemployed and in need of a new laptop since the end of the summer; I cut my cable off and started writing and tweeting like crazy. And it’s no secret that my last big surge in Internet writing happened when I was stuck in the hospital.

What if what’s seemed like a sudden flurry of interest in and great writing about technological devices, much of it coming from no-or-low-revenue producing sites, has been driven by the economic crisis — a torrent of talented writers, information workers, and tech enthusiasts who not only couldn’t find full-time work (freeing up their time and attention to write), but who in most cases couldn’t even afford to buy the devices they were writing about, leaving them nothing to do but sublimate that desire into distanced obsession, and fantasies of unrealized alternatives?

There’s something so moving and human about that to me. Here’s my fictitious (loosely autobiographical) internal monologue:

If only Apple would make a smaller version of the iPad, that made Facetime calls and supported ePub. I have so many good ideas, if only someone will listen to me, and give them a chance. I guess we can’t afford a sitter to go to the movies — I’ll just see what people are saying about the new Blackberry phone. I know where LOST went wrong. Just one more, and everything will be perfect.

It’s the dark side of Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus, where technology and education haven’t just created a new pool of leisure time, but a pool of high-skill knowledge workers devastated by structural unemployment, with nothing to do but create and imagine and argue, struggling to hold on to the lives they imagined for themselves, or used to lead.

Update: Definitely check out the link Saheli posted in the comments to Richard Morgan’s “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup.” I’d read it earlier in the week and almost definitely (and unconsciously) had it in the back of my head writing this post. Also see the now-quasi-classic Tina Brown essay “The Gig Economy.” I say “quasi” only because I don’t really know if it’s widely seen as a classic, but Rex built a company based partly on the idea, so, whatever.

Finally, for kicks, read The Gervais Principle and “Lost” and the High Narrative Price of WTF, two smart pieces of pop culture criticism that also try to make sense of how this decade’s economic crisis has already been represented for us.

Freelancers, amateur tech/culture bloggers, unpaid interns, adjunct lecturers, Demand Media — it’s all a part of it. A grand mashup of “Stuff White People Like” and When Work Disappears.

This column/essay/interview with avant-short-story-writer/French-masterwork-translator Lydia Davis, written by Emily Stokes for the Financial Times, just made me smile from start to finish. I’m really looking forward to her take on Madame Bovary. (Which would be the third French novel to complete the trilogy of cultural touchstones + undeniable awesomeness? I’m thinking maybe Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.)

I met Davis briefly at an event she did at Penn just after publishing her terrific translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way. It was a joint event at the Kelly Writers House with Edith Grossman, who was just about to publish her also-excellent translation of Don Quixote. (Note – I’ve read Proust in French, but not Cervantes in Spanish, so I can’t vouch for fidelity, just joie de lire.)

I felt badly for them, because the place was virtually empty. I don’t remember if it was on an odd night or the advertising got confused, but there were maybe a dozen people in the room. I wasn’t going to miss it, because I was working up this whole theory about the relationship between Proust, Don Quixote, and slapstick comedy that ended up becoming the coda to my dissertation. (Basically, read Bergson’s On Laughter, Walter Benjamin’s long essay on Proust, watch a whole lot of Buster Keaton, then think really hard about photography, and it will all make sense.) I was taking a seminar on Proust that semester, and only my professor and I showed up (and she hadn’t known about it until I told her). It was strange.

Also, Davis (as you’ll gather from the piece) is a little quirky, introspective, more comfortable in the text than in conversation. Grossman was garrulous, which doesn’t quite actually mean what I want it to mean: aggressively but charmingly outsized, yet totally at home with herself. Davis cares about the squeak of the pepper grinder; Grossman would care about the ravioli. I am Davis, but pretend to be Grossman. Harold Bloom wrote the introduction to Grossman’s translation, and there’s a little bit of Harold Bloom in Edith Grossman. She spoke to this intimate room like Jim Harrison eats food.

After the talk, Davis and Grossman both sold their books, in hardcover, for $20 each. Now, the Quixote, if I remember correctly, normally retailed at $40, Proust at $30. Also, Swann’s Way was already out in stores; Don Quixote hadn’t actually been officially made available yet. Plus, I had exactly $20 cash in my wallet. So, being a good economic rationalist, I bought Grossman’s book, which she signed and we talked about Don Quixote. It was great. Davis, meanwhile, floated on the edge of conversation, with a glass of wine I think, barely touched, watching everything, waiting for her host at the Writers House to take her out to dinner and then to a hotel.

I got to talk with her for a little while just before, during the Q-&-A, about Proust and comedy; she was insightful, and funny, in very much a Samuel Beckett way. And it’s a Beckett take on Proust she’s got, which is pretty much my take too, which is probably why I liked her translation so much once I finally got the chance to read it, which didn’t happen until Christmas 2007. I read most of it out loud to my son, who was about four months old then. In retrospect, it’s probably why he gets such a kick out of kissing his mom and me goodnight. But jeez — I really wish I’d had more cash that night.

This is a long way around of reading the essay at hand, where Davis parts with two different stories that I think taken together manage to say everything I want to say about reading and the encounter with media. The first is from an actual short story of Davis’s, at the end of this paragraph; I’ll keep the whole series to preserve the rhythm.

As Lorin Stein – previously Davis’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, now editor of the Paris Review – once noted, Davis’s narrators are “precise about feeling muddled”, occasionally so precise they can seem a little “unhinged”. In one story, for instance, a speaker writes a scientific report of 27 get-well letters sent by a class of fourth graders. In another, a woman struggles to find the correct tense with which to speak about a dying man. In another – which pops into my head as we sit down to eat (there is a Davis story for most occasions) – the narrator describes how, on reading a line of poetry while eating a carrot, she finds that she has not really read the poetry – or hasn’t really “consumed it, because I was already eating the carrot. The carrot was a line too.”

The second is from an anecdote, related by Stokes:

As we walk to the car, she tells me about a recent project, based on dreams and dream-like experiences, inspired in part, she says, by French surrealist Michel Leiris, whose work she has translated. A thunderstorm is brewing outside and Davis drives me to the train station. As we draw up outside it starts to pour but Davis hops out of the car to stand under an awning for a moment so she can show me two pictures from her wallet. The first is her home – a large redbrick schoolhouse covered in ivy with large windows. The second is a photograph of two cows – standing in the snow like black cut-outs on white paper, staring flatly at the camera. Something about the picture is irresistibly funny.

She sent the photo, she tells me, to her friend Rae Armantrout, a poet, who called her afterwards. “She asked me why I had sent her a picture of two pigs strung up on a spit,” says Davis – and then turns the picture upside down.

I can see what she means; the line of horizon does resemble a wire, and the cows do look a bit like pigs. “It was just one of those confusions,” she says, shrugging.

Then she bids me farewell, and drives away.

I realized today that the entire Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod/Obama administration scandal, and arguably the entire Tea Party/conservative/media pundit civil-liberties and “reverse racism grievance industry” can be explained in this sketch about the heavy metal band Wicked Sceptor from the Mr Show with Bob and David episode “Show Me Your Weenis!”:

“Guys, you gotta see this tape. It’s a black official being TOTALLY racist in front of the NAACP!” A guy gets a tape from some random college student the Underground Young Republican Tape Railroad, dubbed so often it’s practically worthless, that doesn’t really show what it’s supposed to. But the guy — and I don’t know if this recipient is Andrew Breitbart, or if Breitbart’s the guy from the Underground Tape Railroad and cable news is the recipient — says “No shit?”, watches it anyway, and decides to cynically pass it off as what it’s claimed to be.

After all — you’ve already paid for the tape, what are you going to do, not show it to your friends? Even if it isn’t what it says it is, you can get some entertainment out of debating whether or not the tape really shows what it says it does. The elephants [get it?] aren’t really fucking, but who cares? You can have a “conversation on race,” one that’s exactly as serious and informed as the conversation college kids have sitting on a couch watching a viral video together.

Meanwhile, the guys in charge watch a little bit of the tape and freak out. Every blogger in the country is downloading this! Tour’s cancelled, career’s over.

Okay, now the metaphor shifts. Now the band, Wicked Sceptor, are actually the Bush-era conservatives who have suddenly turned around to see racism, erosion of civil liberties, economic disaster, failing wars, a man-made ecological disaster on the gulf coast, a bottomless budget deficit, and the spectre (scepter) of a totalitarian regime everywhere they look.

They’re watching two videotapes, one of the years when conservatives were in power, and all of those things were happening, and another of the lunatic, demagogue fringe that’s gradually defining the institutional and ideological center of the Republican party, engaging in all manner of incompetence, parodic levels of racism, making jokes about eating ribs and witch doctors and anchor babies and the NAACP and Obama secretly wanting black people to stay poor and stupid and they’re saying, what’s the big deal? It’s just a party tape.

Then we say to the conservatives, “guys, I’m gonna take your tape out, and I want you to do me a favor and watch this OTHER tape of the Democrats being racists and fascists and acting hateful.” Meanwhile, we’re actually taking the same tape, putting it behind our backs, and putting it in the VCR.

And when they see it, they’re horrified. Outraged. Disgusted. They can’t believe what they’re seeing.

And we scream, “That’s you!!” And they laugh and dance around and sing, “alll-rii-iight!”

Then someone tries to be reasonable. Tries to break it down and explain the complexities and the nuances of the situation, and how we’re all, all of us, implicated in the horrible history of our country, its racism and wars and intolerance and political dysfunction and neglect of the sick and the poor and its energy addictions and terrible media culture and general short-sighted willingness, even eagerness, to murder the future to pay the interest on the present.

And they say, “Racist!”

Meanwhile, Shirley Sherrod says, fuck it. I’ll go to Fire Island.

Ta-Nehisi sums it up:

It’s always a marvel to me to watch this guy [Colbert] go in on somebody. As much as I love Stewart, Colbert is act is for the ages. He is channeling all of our simmering left-wing anger and refracting it through the mask. From a black perspective, it is very familiar–but I need to re-read Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to tell you specifically why.

A few years back, he sliced up D’Nesh Dsouza so bad, that I don’t think he knew he was bleeding until a week later. And now, here he is according Laura Ingraham all the respect that she so richly deserves. That this woman can satirize Michelle Obama for eating ribs all day, and when wonder why anyone would think she was racist is vexing. I actually regret that–the anger, I mean. Frustration with these people, so often, feels useless. And then you see it turned into something like this, and you understand that rage has its purposes.

And:

We had a few years, post-9/11. where it seemed like this sort of language disappeared–at least as it related to black people. Now we’re back to situation where the most publicized political movement of our time believes, that charges of racism have destroyed “whole cities,” that the NAACP is as bad as the Klan and is perpetrating “racial terror,” that white people should have the right to say nigger, that the amendment that granted African-Americans citizenship should be repealed, and that “white America” needs to “see black people condemning the NAACP.”

It’s worth remembering that this is the Tea Party’s reply to charges of racist elements in their ranks. It feels like something out of 1986.

See also here, here, and here.

And then you have to read the final thought.