Marco Rubio and the Politics of Nada

Marco Rubio is the most hyped Latino/Hispanic politician in America today. As a senator from Florida, he plays a much more visible role than, say, Luis Gutiérrez, a representative from Obama’s political home, Chicago. And despite the sporadic buzz about Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuño as a possible player in the Republican Party’s attempt at damage control caused by provoking anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hysteria, Rubio may actually have a shot at the Republican nomination for Vice-President.

From this video, it’s obvious that Rubio’s rhetorical skills are quite limited. His speech is littered with platitudes, stale talking-points and inept jokes about Democrats, like the one he makes in the beginning about Obama’s use of teleprompters. I guess he thinks that since it’s been two years since he was caught looking at a teleprompter while telling a similar teleprompter joke, the statute of limitations has run out. From the beginning, he reveals himself to be little more than a glossy “telegenic” candidate whose style is at best clumsy and unimaginative. In other words, the perfect Republican candidate for office.

More talking points: Obama is a “terrible” president because he has “decided to pit Americans against each other.” In accusing Obama of creating class antagonisms he is engaging in the Republican strategy of projecting their own corruption, as the party of the corporate class, which has exacerbated class conflict, onto a scapegoat, Obama. It doesn’t matter that for many in this country Obama hasn’t disassociated himself enough from that corporate class. He represents people of color looking for a “handout.”

There are a series of code words and code agendas, laid out, including an incoherent rambling about a “simplistic tax code,” the need to “invest in national defense,” and how Obama is “bankrupting medicare.” Losing momentum, he resorts to this winning one-liner, which like many of his other assertions, is completely lacking in context: “America doesn’t have an energy policy, it has energy politics!” Wink, wink.

Then, we get to the crux of Rubio’s argument, American exceptionalism. “This idea, that the only way for some people to do better is for others to do worse is what other countries believe.” He invokes the story of his family, who came here, not exactly as emigres fleeing Castro’s socialism, but as people wanting to pursue a prosperity engendered by, in Rubio’s words,  ”the freedom to pursue dreams.” This is conservatism in a nutshell, he explains.

Then he recycles the central myth of the Republican Party since the 1980s, which is that Ronald Reagan restored America to its rightful place as the greatest country in the world. “The American Century has made the world what it is today,” he said. The defeat of the Nazis and the fascist killing machine would not have happened “if not for the power and resolve of the American people.” Turns out those people were led by a Democratic president who the entire room Rubio was addressing would call a dangerous socialist.

That’s where Reaganism scored its greatest victory–by appearing to have vanquished the economically collapsing Soviet Union through the use of rag-tag clandestine armies to confront its presence in Afghanistan and its imagined threat in Central America, he erased the memory of how Germany was defeated in World War II.

So we are told, over and over again, (and Obama is also a willing participant), that the only way of conceiving of our lives going forward is to reassert the primacy of the United States as the “greatest country,” the true purveyor of the contradictory goals of democracy and unfettered free enterprise, by looking backward to an illusory triumph of the will.

There is no future in this vision. Only a distorted past. It’s a bunch of nada.

And so we are left with the shining city on a hill. It’s a biblical reference, you know, Rubio reminds us. Certainly he must have drawn on his moral beliefs to forgive his  sister’s husband, who was convicted in 1989 of possession and sale of large amounts of cocaine and marijuana and served 11 years until paroled. No one here is casting the first stone. What’s inexplicable is how Republicans continue to present crudely crafted ciphers like Rubio in an attempt to get voters, Latino or otherwise, to swoon for the same agenda that has belittled and exploited them for years.

The Food Stamp President?

Luis Gutiérrez is becoming one of the better You Tube orators in the House of Representatives. This one is a little bit behind the news cycle, but it’ll still get you to jump out of your chair with outrage if you let the words sink in. There’s also an element of comedy here, perhaps inspired by the Stewart/Colbert phenomenon. The sobering part is the empty seats in front of him.

Self-Deportation Scoop

Just wanted to congratulate Rachel Maddow and The New York Times for figuring out that Lalo Alcaraz invented the idea of self-deportation, which was somehow conveniently picked up on during recent Republican debates. My reaction when I first heard the phrase was similar to what Lalo has been quoted as saying–it was a surreal journey back in time to the days of Pete Wilson and Prop 187 laid the groundwork for today’s mind-numbing anti-immigrant hysteria. But I figured that somehow the Republicans had happened upon this idea on their own, and had no idea that former California governor Pete Wilson actually used the phrase in an interview, and that Lalo would eventually jolt the media into researching his Pocho-prankster history. Which it looks like he did.

Full disclosure here–I met Lalo in 1992 at a theater festival in San Antonio where I was still trying to figure out the difference between Tejanos and Chicanos. He is one of several brilliant and funny Pochicanos (Culture Clash, Ruben Martinez, Mandalit Del Barco, Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, Marisela Norte, Michelle Serros) who taught me most of what I know about L.A. and greater Califas. This is why, in 1994, he sent me that infamous press release that helped convince the TV editor at the Voice to go with the story you see pictured above. Lalo was really excited because he was about to appear–in character as Daniel D. Portado–on Sevcec, a Donahue-like talk show that ruled Telemundo’s airwaves in those days. I wound up recording the show on my VCR and it became the basis for the piece, which you can read here.

A couple of things about all of this confused me, however, and I’m feeling a little like I did when the J-Lo Fiat story came out. The first is probably a mistake Maddow made when she was congratulating her friends on the This American Life radio show. She says that the interview with Alcaraz was done in 1996, which would be two years after the matter came up, and also two years after my story. So either I scooped This American Life by two years, or Maddow was just confused by the fact that she had just referenced a David Sedaris piece that appeared on This American Life in 1996. My story ran on November 15, 1994, which is six days before the op ed by Safire mentioning Wilson’s use of the phrase “self-deportation” ran in the Times. [Note: I don't think the fact that the late Safire and I went to the same high school has anything to do with this. I mean, so did Stokely Carmichael.]

The other thing is, check out the photo that appears in my piece above and the one in the Lede yesterday.  They look kind of similar, don’t they? The one in my piece was taken by someone who worked in the Voice art department after I gave them a copy of the videotape I made of Lalo’s appearance on Sevcec. It’s so powerful, though. Nothing like the steely horizontal lines of standard definition television reproduced on crisp newsprint. Makes me want to go look at some galleys right now!

So media kids, here’s a suggestion for a follow-up on this story: Explain what “pocho” means and why Lalo branded himself that way. Hint: it has to do with the fact that most Latinos in the U.S. are fully fluent in English. There’s some irony for you.

Anyway shout-out and much respect to Lalo, Esteban and all my pocho peoples.

What Is To Be Done?

When I interviewed them last summer, Betty Peña and her daughter Eliza came to meet me with some avocados they brought from Caguas, where they live. They were shiny and ripe in the basket, a gift for the office full of people that were advocating for them. Betty is a schoolteacher and a member of the union, so when there was a demonstration at the Capitolio on June 30, 2010 about the right of the people to observe the legislature in action, she took her daughter to learn a lesson in democracy. Unfortunately that day Betty and her daughter became front page news because they were beaten and teargassed by the Puerto Rico police, which has subsequently been denounced by a Department of Justice report that was released in September of last year. I wrote about this issue in an article I have linked to here.

Betty had deeply felt ideas about the people of Puerto Rico. “Work is, I would say it is an important ingredient for us to have emotional health. And they know it, they know it’s true, but it doesn’t matter to them. We could be a miracle. We are Puerto Ricans but we could be very rich. My brothers came from the U.S. and said we went to the grocery store and said how is it possible that here we have products from Costa Rica, from Nicaragua, the DR and nothing from here? With so much land we have here, with so many people without work? And then the government doesn’t know that? Because the government isn’t interested in us doing anything for them to have their posts and continue to do whatever they want. Why don’t they see that we’re in bad shape? Because they’re the ones that have us in bad shape.  They’re only looking to satisfy their particular interests. So we, I tell my children ‘if you don’t work, you don’t eat.’ Because work is dignity. And we Puerto Ricans are dignified people, working people.”

Eliza, who last year entered her first semester at the University of Puerto Rico (she wants to study accounting), was completely in awe of her mother, and felt strongly about following in her footsteps. “I’m 18 years old. I’ve lived in Caguas for as long as I can remember, since I was born and so since I was a child I’ve always adhered to the value of having love for my country, for the land, for the flag of Puerto Rico. We lived two years, from when I was 9-10, we lived two years in Arroyo, and there she told me a lot about how she lived, what she did to eat, how she went to school, that she had to get muddy and take off her shoes to get there. When she got home she could eat an orange with pride because she picked it from that little orange tree. When we were in Caguas, she woke up early every day to go out and harvest things. And I’m like mom, you always get up early, you can’t stop, you’re always picking fruit, mom, please. And she’s like, it’s something that you feel, and I’m like I understand because when I got to pick fruit and you’re under that sun, and then you realize that, look, I got a meal because today I harvested, I worked the area where there is vegetation, and it’s that passion of knowing that you’re tending your land, that you’re taking care of your country, that you’re contributing to the environment, and she always told me that no one can tell me different.”

The government waited almost a year after the Capitolio incident to “ease out” José Figueroa Sancha, the superintendent of police ultimately responsible for the beating of Peña and many others, and in his place named an older man, Emilio Díaz Colón, who many have called incompetent. Now there are rumors that Díaz Colón is to be replaced, but by whom, and when? Is there no sense of urgency from a government facing serious repercussions from the DOJ and an island wide crisis over drug trafficking and criminal violence?

The next few weeks might bring answers.

S**t People Say About Puerto Rico

Huffington Post Latino Voices Still Medicore

Okay, maybe it’s not fair to trash the whole Huffington Post Latino Voices “channel” or whatever it is, but this “opinion” piece or whatever it is, might in some ways be worse than the sight of Amaury Nolasco in a dress. I will refrain from calling this an example of a blowhard dilettante choosing to dump on Puerto Rico in the same condescending way generations of blowhard dilettantes have done in the past, because it isn’t quite that. Thankfully, we are moving past the time when blowhard dilettantes dominate public discourse and a real solidarity between Latin American and Caribbean people begins to produce a productive dialog to confront the global elites that try to define us even as they attempt to destroy our culture, economy, “territory,” and communities.

But really, this idea of someone who hasn’t gone to Puerto Rico in three years and seems to base an entire piece on a couple of weeks in tourist areas to paint a morbid picture of Puerto Rico to fulfill some unexplained fantasy is just, well, it’s the product of mediocre thinking, and I think I’m being kind. I mean I went to Colombia in 1998 and the first thing I saw upon arrival was a copy of the local Bogotá newspaper that had a 2-page feature story about scores of taxi kidnappings a week where people were forced to withdraw all their money from ATM machines and dumped 30 miles out of town with no shoes. And I wound up writing a piece that had nothing but praise for the beauty and intelligence of the Colombian people.

First of all, we exist. In fact, we have one of the strongest national identities left on a planet where globalization has been busily trying to destroy nationalism. What’s even better is that this nationalism is not built around the idea of a militarily projected force–a territorial country–but an idealized, or imagined nationalism that ties people together culturally and socially in a way that other nations envy. The people who don’t find value in that wind up emigrating to Orlando.

Second, don’t quote Gabriel García Márquez. I went to the café in Barranquilla where he used to hang out as a beat reporter and talked to his disembodied spirit, and let me tell you, you’re no García Márquez.

Can’t say much for the writing style here. You get paragraphs that begin like this:

Nothing is black or white. There are millions of colors and many shades of grey. But in general terms the place is somehow affected by polarizing extremes.

Then we get these provocative statements:

Its society is consumerist to nauseating levels, however it doesn’t even produce its own basic foods.

Most people there think agriculture is something denigrating, as if a food’s more natural environment was a can.

Educated people are often very ignorant of their own culture and history.

It’s unspeakable how insulting and ignorant those comments are. I was tempted to not even dignify them with a response but I come from a family of people who worked the land. We still eat stuff we grow in the backyard. We know that English was forced on Puerto Rican schoolchildren in the early part the 20th century. We know that the primary reason we weren’t considered for statehood is that we were considered a racially inferior people by a bunch of superior intellects in the U.S. Congress. We know that limbers are named after Charles Lindbergh because when he visited the island everyone thought he was cold as ice.

Then the writer, after expecting “heavy drinking” in the streets of Old San Juan as part of her tourist enjoyment of the island, expresses fear and loathing because there were no streetlights on the road to Dorado. “Junkies steal the copper wire of the light posts,” the cab driver explains. This paranoid hallucinogenic vision extends to absurd extremes:

Today, there are homeless junkies in every town. They are particularly notable because the local dealers cut heroin with horse anesthetics and the result is a drug that rotten the bodies of heavy users. They look like zombies, or the cast of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. So in general terms the society is widely unhealthy, uneducated and broken.

Tourist alert: there are zombies patrolling the streets and countryside! Do not feed them because that will make them even hungrier and they will eat you!

Here’s the thing. Of course there is a big problem with drugs, violence and the economy on the island. It’s a shame that we don’t have self-sustaining agriculture (although there is plenty of local produce available on roadside stands and in the informal barter economy). But it’s really ridiculous to make sweeping generalizations about people without knowing que carajo you’re talking about. (I know because I’ve done it and learned from it.)

Frankly, I’m tired of people from outside the island and on it who say things like this writer: “To solve the pressing emergency on the Island they will have to stand up, work hard, be united, combat ignorance, learn to love their land and respect it.”

The fact is, there are many, many people in Puerto Rico today who have done all these things and continue to do them. The fact that they have always, and continue to love and respect this land is the reason it does, in fact, exist. People involved in education, culture, environmentalism, law, some underground, some grassroots, artisans, fishermen, post office workers, basureros, nurses, taxi drivers, some actually elected officials!

The problem is that the media does not cover them. They choose to focus on a cartoonish vision of Puerto Rico that says that we do not work, do not care, are ignorant, and would probably (laugh, it’s only a sitcom) make good drug dealers.

Martí and the Ugly Truth

José Martí, claimed by both sides in the Havana-Miami civil war, once wrote an essay called “The Truth About the United States,” which is of course a loaded phrase, kind of scary to contemplate, but why not start with the above, which is a picture of a 1949 incident in Old Havana’s Parque Central in which American sailors urinated on a statue of, as fate would have it, José Martí. The photo has been circulating here and there following the revelation that American service personnel urinated on apparently dead Taliban. This heavy-handed news flash is what began the weekend just past, the one that purported to honor one of this country’s great leaders and orators, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

And what a weekend it was. Almost immediately after this revelation, which shocked and dismayed most humans, the relentless 24-hour news cycle began to spit out things like “Bill Maher doesn’t think it’s such a big deal” and then a CNN personality named Dana Loesch also agrees.

 

 

Then you got the eloquent ex-Republican presidential candidate from Texas, Rick Perry–taking time off from making sure Obama doesn’t flood the schools with homosexual Christmas haters–implying that the actions of the Taliban corpse pee patrol was sort of understandable. His first reaction over the weekend was almost apologetic, only to explode on Monday night with this amazing outburst of blood rage, setting us straight about what exactly is utterly despicable:

 

 

Perry’s was just one of several moments in the most recent debate–held in South Carolina, rapidly making a case for itself as a state to avoid at all costs–that made me wonder whether the Murdoch Primary rules are back in effect: Demagoguery, not Divinity, defeats Democrats. Let’s be real–in the Anybody but Romney battle between frantic Santorum evangelicals whose main concern is gay marriage and Roe v. Wade and the Trump/Bush/Murdoch/Ailes/Rove/Carlyle Group/Goldman Sachs/Chase/Koch Brothers money guys, whose main concern is, uh, money, who’s going to win?

A look back into the relatively recent past might shed light on this. Some of you might remember Willie Horton (not the pinch-hitter for the Detroit Tigers):

 

 

We sure have come a long way since then, haven’t we? That little awkward, low-budget spot made all the difference then, but times were so much different. Mild scare tactics backed by a simple syllogism sufficed. Nowadays the voter sitting home watching this stuff needs a series of ugly, blood-curdling, teeth-gnashing puñetazos to get the message straight. (The message: Obama must be defeated at any cost.)

Let’s recall an earlier presidential debate, this time between the Republican and Democratic nominees in 1988, when CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw asked this question–an early display of cable-news driven shock journalism in the service of “values-driven” fear-mongering as a tool to distract voters from real issues:

 

 

Now let’s re-imagine that moment. Instead of a journalist asking a direct question evoking fear of violence, as well as the emotions of guilt and shame, fast forward 24 years to a journalist now in the employ of the Murdoch/Ailes team, passively asking a question designed to incite the mob of South Carolina extremists to seethe with anger:

 

 

Note Gingrich’s seemingly rehearsed pause when he responds Williams’ suggestion that Gingrich’s implications about lack of work ethic among the poor are irksome to people of color: “First of all…Juan.” [Not only is Williams African-American, but he's got a Latino name!] “The fact is…that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama…than any president in American history!” [Picture this, Obama, behind his desk, personally entering thousands of new food stamp recipients, lacking no work ethic whatsoever, into a shiny new computer paid for by your tax dollars!]

Cheers! Confederate yells! Put him in his place! The south shall rise again…Juan.

Afterwards the Fox pundits could not contain themselves. Almost every last one of them declared that solely based on this Two Minutes of Hate, Romney was totally in trouble and could easily lose the state that has picked the Republican nominee each time in the last 32 years. It is over before it’s over!

What a way to end the late Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. A garish spectacle of race-baiting, jeered on by an unruly mob. Add that to Martí’s uncomfortable truth.

Work It: The Reactionary Backlash

“Life would be much simpler if people who are subjected to persistent marginalization and disparagement weren’t so “sensitive” and just took their insults and degradation, or pretended they weren’t really about them. Persistently marginalized and disparaged people should not speak up because they are to blame for their own problems. Identifying with marginalized victimhood prevents them from enjoying the benefits of the American dream.”

These are the voices of the reactionary backlash against the idea of protesting the dehumanizing joke uttered by Amaury Nolasco in last week’s episode of the largely tasteless sitcom “Work It,” soon to be canceled by its creators, the American Broadcasting Company. The reactionary element that still has so much power in American discourse suggests that presenting “the other side of the story” involves the reasonable assumption that well, after all, Puerto Rico is a drug-riddled island, so is the joke really offensive?

A Huffington Post (Latino/a) column puts it this way:

The 3,515-square-mile island has an average of three violent deaths per day. According to U.N. figures for 2008, the island averaged 20.3 murders per 100,000 residents. Mexico, by comparison, had 11.5 murders per 100,000 residents in that same year. And the documented corruption of the island’s police force corruption has even lead to fears of it becoming a ‘narco state.’

The reality painted by these disturbing figures should be a focus of debate among Puerto Ricans, said Mariana Vicente, Miss Universe Puerto Rico 2010, in defense of Nolasco.

“We are not in a position to demand that the media guard our reputation when in our country we don’t even respect ourselves, brutally killing people, firing bullets in the air and so much violence in the home,” she told Primera Hora. “Let’s start out by caring for ourselves and demonstrating the contrary to the rest of the world.”

I’m not sure about the logic of setting up Ms. Universe as a spokesperson in a political debate, or someone to initiate a serious dialog, but i guess that’s what happens in a celebrity driven culture and the media outlets that promote it. It’s telling that the post uses a link to Fox News Latino to establish the idea that Puerto Rico is in danger of becoming a narco state, and not the more informative piece in the Christian Science Monitor, nor one of its major sources, the DOJ National Drug Intelligence Report , which clearly states that the increase in drug traffic in Puerto Rico has been caused by a shift by Venezuelan and Colombian drug traffickers to points in the Eastern Caribbean to avoid the DEA’s ineffective machinations. It is clear that the drug problem that has exploded in Puerto Rico is not self-generated, unless you think Puerto Rico is such an integral part of the US that it deserves partial blame for the largely disastrous decades-long failure known as the War on Drugs! Here’s one argument against that idea: Puerto Rico has never had a single elected representative in Congress who could even exercise the right to vote for or against the disastrous failure known as the War on Drugs!

So, let’s have a debate on this: Should we agree or disagree on the deployment of the War on Drugs? We have no choice in the matter. Should we limit our own consumption? The major cause of the drug problem is the fact that Puerto Rico is a transshipment point for the distribution of drugs to the mainland US, and not the island population’s consumption of drugs. Should we ask Americans to limit their consumption of drugs? Wait a minute..we are Americans. If we stop firing bullets in the air, will that help the DEA shift the transshipment point somewhere else?

I won’t even mention how the current government cut 20,000 government jobs and used Obama’s ARRA (stimulus) funds as a way to boost the island’s employment figures even though their rhetoric claims that the private sector is the best hope for job creation. More jobs = less drug dealers. The absolute silence of the Puerto Rican government on the “Work It” controversy speaks volumes.

Finally, let’s talk about the drug dealers, who make up a tiny percentage of the Puerto Rican people. Let’s talk about how the Amaury Nolasco character was someone living in the U.S., and the fact the overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. have nothing to do with drug dealers in Puerto Rico. And let us note that while there have been some Latino characters in network television network shows over the last few years, I can’t remember a single one that was Puerto Rican! Not Ugly Betty, not Desperate Housewives, not Sofia Vergara. The last thing I can remember is that flag burning on Seinfeld, and because some of us chose to speak out they will never show that on the air again. And this really hazy memory of Freddie Prinze. So, when there finally is one, the first thing he says is “I’m Puerto Rican, I’d be great at selling drugs”?

This is not an insignificant grievance that can be compared, as this misguided Chicago columnist did, to the drug-dealing white suburban dealer in Weeds. (“Get a grip,” she says. “If you go around looking to be insulted, you’ll never be disappointed”.) But for every Mary Louise Parker weed pusher, there’s…well, there’s just about every other character on network television to contrast her with! The entire cast of Friends, The Office, Cheers, Seinfeld, Married With Children, How I Met Your Mother, Mary Tyler Moore, Will and Grace, Taxi, The King of Queens, Beavis and Butthead.

As a drug dealer, she is an exception. A shining example of American exceptionalism. The one who can deal drugs and remain attractive and upscale without being imprisoned. For Puerto Ricans, there’s Amaury Nolasco and…no exceptions.

We live in an era where synagogues are being trashed with swastikas, nooses turn up in parks and universities, people are given receipts in fast food places that read Lady Chinky Eyes, young people are committing suicide over their sexual identity, and our freely elected President has been portrayed in every racist way imaginable by right-wing Republican activists. While this backlash cannot be blamed on sitcoms, they demonstrate that somehow messages of intolerance are being transmitted with increasing velocity, and network television shouldn’t be part of laying the groundwork for this.

When is it going to stop? It’s certainly not going to stop if reactionaries discourage people from speaking out against these things, by pining away for a return to time when people weren’t constrained by “political correctness.” Their time, thankfully, is 30 years past.

Top 10 Offensive Things About “Work It”

The new ABC sitcom “Work It” has caused instant outrage in the Nuyorican community, mainly over the following line, delivered by an island-born Puerto Rican, Amaury Nolasco, about his skill set for a job at a pharmaceutical company:

“I’m Puerto Rican — I’d be great at selling drugs.”

This is of course incredibly offensive and demeaning to Puerto Ricans since it implies that a criminal activity caused by racial discrimination in terms of educational and job opportunity is an essential trait of an ethnoracial group from an island still held as a colony of the American Broadcasting Company. While not as egregious as the Seinfeld Puerto Rican flag episode, which literally desecrated our desire for self-determination as a people, this takes us back to the days of our across the board characterization as knife-wielding spics.

That being said, “Work It” is an equal-opportunity offender, a kind of lowbrow Mad magazine cheap-shot fest that seems like a desperate attempt to attract supporters of ex-candidates Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain bored by the Republican primary race. In the hopes that the rest of the 99% will share in our Boricua Indignation, here are the Top 10 Offensive Things About “Work It.”

10. Amaury Nolasco, whose job at a taco shop is supposed to be funny, looks horrible as a woman.
9. While women have nudged to over 50% of the workforce, they earn on average 20% less than men do. “Work It” traffics in the myth of a “man-cession” where women are portrayed as winners of the Great Recession.
8. Women in the office are portrayed as hysterical idiots who largely communicate in high-pitched shrieks.
7. Transgendered people are implied to be freaks with shameful secrets.
6. The loss of health insurance by a large swath of Americans is a thigh-slapping punch line to a joke about prostrate exams.
5. Pushing high profits for mega-pharma drug companies is shown as a desirable career track.
4. Ben Koldyke is a really horrible looking woman.
3. For men to imagine themselves as women is so shockingly horrible it’s supposed to be funny.
2. The rape scene in “The Accused” is invoked as part of a joke about a prostrate screening.
1. The Great Recession, and its ravaging of the middle, working, and lower classes, is a huge joke that is essential to the premise of “Work It.”

Imagine There’s No There There

When we last left you, there was some weird episode involving J-Lo and a Fiat, and then there was the Fox News Gingrich candidacy, which kind of suckered me in but now it seems as if it might have been just another Murdoch-Ailes distraction from who knows what, some Hugh Grant voicemail. Of course, it might be plausible that all the corporate money, which is now personal money, is behaving like a chaotic mob of people, and there is no plan as far as electing a particular candidate, and it’s just a bunch of drunken sailors, bloated beyond belief by staggering, exponential growth in their personal worth, shooting craps in the alley and it doesn’t really matter whether Romney, Paul, Santorum, Bachman, or Gingrich’s name comes up.

So why is Cee Lo’s picture here? I was about to get to that. Not a big fan of Cee Lo’s, but not because I’m an offended John Lennon fan–it’s just hard to be impressed by the likes of him after having grown up listening to Al Green and Marvin Gaye. Apparently he has accomplished the astonishing feat of inciting people who are ostensibly atheists to cry blasphemy by changing the (most controversial) lyric in “Imagine,” “Imagine there’s no countries, and no religion, too” to “and all religion’s true.” I think.

I am actually surprised that “Imagine” has become so mainstreamed these days, although in retrospect it is one of the tamer songs of the early John Lennon solo recording era. “Imagine” if Cee-Lo, or Gaga, or anyone else with a duo-syllabic nonsense name attempted to perform this tune from Lennon’s first solo album at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Super Bowl or some other pomo spectacle? I would die to see Public Enemy perform “Fight the Power” at halftime. (I know, “She Watch Channel Zero” is perhaps more appropriate, but it’s way too politically incorrect.)

I almost forgot. I actually believe Cee Lo’s explanation. Believing in something like religion is important. It’s almost like when Al Sharpton is so steadfast in his defense of Obama, because he knows that the Supreme Court can be packed in such a way that we’d all have to be carrying Identity Cards (most likely holographic retinal scans) in the year 2020 and have no government-funded anything, and no abortion, too. Lord have mercy. Gotta believe in at least holding the line against that. The drunken sailors might just crap out, temporarily, long enough for a brief cleansing of the spirit.

Murdoch Lets Boricua in the House?

Don’t look now but some conservatives, possibly following a Murdoch agenda, have begun touting Puerto Rico governor Luis Fortuño as a possible Republican Vice-Presidential candidate. Yesterday the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal published yet another puff piece on the right-wing governor, which opened with these lines: “He’s young, dynamic, and well-spoken. As a Republican vice-presidential nominee, he could help with Latino voters in 2012.”

The author repeats the Republican mantra about Fortuño standing tall in the face of criticism when he slashed government jobs and imposed austerity on a reeling working class. He cuts him slack on the unpleasant reality that “Puerto Rico’s economy continues to struggle” by saying that “Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher also had some grim years before their own economies picked up.” He later mentions Fortuño and Sarah Palin in the same sentence. Something about vetting.

On the same day, Ross Douhat, the New York Times‘s token conservative columnist, wrote a column called “Myths of the Hispanic Vote.” Commenting on a Washington Post observation that Democrats fear current front-runner Newt Gingrich’s “ability to…win Hispanic voters,” he  cautions against what he calls “a common misconception about the Hispanic vote: Namely, that it contains a large bloc of voters that can be easily woo’d and won by any Republican who takes a liberal line on immigration, picks a Hispanic running mate, and engages in a little Spanish-language outreach.”

That link above is to the aforementioned WSJ puff piece. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if the Republican presidential race is boiling down to a rift between old school, Bush-Rove Republicans and the Tea Party-fueled Murdoch rogues, with Douhat trying to break the Murdoch-Ailes momentum. Didn’t the Bushies invent the whole sympathy with the Hispanic immigrant thing, due to its clan’s own intermarriage messiness? Maddow did a really nice piece the other day explaining the concept of the “Murdoch Primaries.”

So, if Gingrich is now the favorite to win the “Murdoch Primary,” has there already been a decision made on who would be his running mate? Could Fortuño be slippery enough to ditch his previous ties to Bush-Rove and make a bold move into Gingrichlandia? Makes you wonder how serious he is about that second term as Governor of Puerto Rico.