The Pimp and Ho Primary
Posted by admin - 30/06/08 at 02:06:07 am[editors note, another version of this with potentially triggering images is located at http://adonismirror.com/06052008_leader_pimpandho_primary.htm ]
There are people in life each of us just can’t stand. It just so happens that every white liberal I can’t stand picked Barack Obama as their choice in the Democratic primary. Who I do or don’t like probably doesn’t matter much to you, it shouldn’t, and what I’m about to say doesn’t have much - if anything - to do with Obama himself.
However, my dislike isn’t arbitrary or capricious. It has a very specific origin. I detest progressives who claim to be against unchecked capitalism, up until the issue of sexual exploitation is raised. These are the sort of people who mock Wal-Mart shoppers, McDonald’s workers, and other inferior beings in the liberal universe, only to turn around and celebrate the selling of sex as liberation itself. Some of these people are so far gone as to be in favor of human trafficking, if only because George W. Bush had the sense to be against it.
Pundits discussing the 2008 Democratic primary have demonstrated little understanding of power within our country. Their simplistic claim is that racists are refusing to vote for Barack Obama while sexists are giving a cold shoulder to Hillary Clinton. Such thinking is convenient. It’s also utterly egocentric. After all, if a person believes that white men in Kentucky are especially racist, that same person probably feels safe in assuming that those men are especially sexist, too. Only this time their racism won out over their sexism and they voted for Clinton. Could be. It’s impossible to say for sure.
Millions of chauvinist men have voted for Hillary Clinton over the past few months. Millions of white supremacists have happily cast their lot for Barack Obama. Perception comes down to who is writing the narrative. Painting the white men of Kentucky as rednecks brought little opposition in the world of liberal punditry. To be sure, some chaffed at the suggestion, and others warned that it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy come November, but no one posed a similar question that day about the white men of Portland, Oregon. Were they all sexist for voting for Obama?
Such thinking is ridiculous. Those men assuredly have white women in their lives. But no one stopped to think about how they treat the women in their lives. Portland, the same city where Barack Obama drew his now legendary crowd of 75,000, also claims to have the highest number of strip clubs per capita in our nation.
I’m not suggesting a direct correlation. On the other hand, there is a cultural difference between the average town in West Virginia and Portland, Oregon. These differences led to wildly divergent voting patterns - even among the same general demographics. Some writers have declared it cappuccino or latte voters vs. coffee voters. There is some truth to that.
I believe that attitudes about prostitution and pornography are also significant markers along that same cultural divide. Barack Obama became the porn candidate. I’m not speaking of direct industry support. The sex business itself was evenly split between Obama and Clinton after it became clear that Dennis Kucinich, a friend of Larry Flynt, had no future in the race. Instead, I’m speaking of a nation that lives within a pornographic and runaway-capitalist ethos. Young people, especially, have never known any other culture. This way of life was perfectly suited for the Obama brand that David Axelrod would create.
There’s over 300 million different ways to be a sexist and a racist in our society. Yes, I’m counting our entire population there. Larry Flynt wants us to believe that he was shot and paralyzed by a racist who was inflamed by the interracial pornography published in Hustler. Yet the fact that “interracial” itself is a commoditized genre of pornography, with its own iconography and rules, is nothing but racist. There is no hero in Flynt’s story: it was just one kind of racist shooting another kind of racist.
If the people of West Virginia are racist in one way, perhaps Portland’s crowd of 75,000 was racist in another. I’m not calling them out as individuals (just as I don’t think arguments for West Virginians as abject or even noteworthy racists were substantiated), nor am I accusing them of voting under the duress of “white guilt.” Instead, I only wish to speak to a larger issue in our culture.
Early in the primary, certain clever individuals invoked the “bros before hos” mantra. While the slogan was widely denounced as sexist - though not universally, sadly - the racist nature of how whites manufacture black masculinity went unremarked upon. Barack Obama didn’t ask to become a “bro,” nor did he ask to be a pimp, lording over his whore.
White men in our country pay big money to possess imagery that shows exactly that. We have entire industries dedicated to producing it; not just pornography but mainstream movies, music, and now even cable news networks. We want to see white women humiliated for their weakness, a fragility of our own invention. We use our racist notions about black masculinity, ever brutal and animalistic, to supply the ultimate episode of humiliation. We believe that humiliation is something women of all colors enjoy at the core of their being - that masochism is written into their genetic code.
The pornographic industry can’t admit that’s what they sell. They’ll say all of that is just in my head, that I’m the one with the problem. They’ll say that they’re breaking down barriers. They’ll say that they’re freeing love from bondage. If that were true, many of Barack Obama’s fans wouldn’t have cheered (if only on the internet) when they thought he was giving the finger to Hillary Clinton in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Yes, of course the official explanation was that such a claim is absurd. It unequivocally is. Yet there were people who wanted to believe it, not because they needed another reason to hate Obama, but because they were excited that their pimp finally gave his white-bitch ho what she had coming.
White males are the authors of both black masculinity and white femininity. Both are fictions. Because we own and control their legacy, we are better equipped to take on either part if we choose. Not only is it far easier for a male in drag to mimic a supermodel on a catwalk than the average woman (the odds of being six-feet tall are highly in our favor), it’s easier for us to be “black,” too. There are no repercussions, no institutional racism, just the fun in reveling in someone else’s oppression.
Nothing excites a white man more these days than saying the word pimp. There’s no higher high. Watch us when we say it. Watch our eyes twinkle. Pimp hands, pimped out cars (and even tricked out trucks for rednecks), pimp and ho parties, it never stops: “pimp” is a politically correct way to distill the essence of the N-word into a product that white men can embrace for our own amusement.
White men are the worst imaginable sort of n****rs in our own minds. We revel in the idea and know no greater joy. We want to possess that elite form of unrepentant masculinity, to be a monster among monsters, and yet walk away from it unscathed. We can get our pimp on and then safely go back to being just another guy in the crowd.
Making Barack Obama into a pimp, a cooler than life mythic figure, absolves us of that. In that way, he’s the ultimate white man on the stage, our subconscious belief in our own masculinity. This is a criminal act on our part.
Many progressive African Americans are skeptical of Barack Obama given his support by white men. They reckon that the support is owed to his post-racial politics and his rejection of Black Nationalism. That is likely true. I would add that there’s a sexist reason for that support, and it’s not just sexism against Hillary Clinton, but Obama himself. White men treat him as if he were our id: his cool, distant superiority is our own masculinity at play.
If there’s a direct link between whites who are favorable towards pornography and their support for Barack Obama, I certainly can’t prove it. I do, however, think that it’s a component - and a significant one - of the cultural difference between the whites who embraced him and those who campaigned for his rival, Hillary Clinton.
By all rights, I’m a member of the young, hip, highly educated creative-class, demographics that all but worship Obama. Going into the primary, I had no great love for Clinton, even though she is my senator; indeed, her reinventing herself as a New Yorker was something I loathed. I had planned from the start to vote for Cynthia McKinney. As the campaign wore on, however, a strange realization came over me:
I’ve been writing for several years about sexual exploitation. Because of that, I don’t get to feel young. I don’t get to feel hip. I don’t get to feel especially educated or creative. I’ve been told time and time again that I’m not part of that in-crowd, that my beliefs aren’t part of an avant-garde that views making a sandwich as slavery and performing sex acts with strangers as an art form.
The Nation, the most elite of the progressive magazines, only stopped printing advertisements for sex tourism a short time ago. While activists won out and the ads were removed, it’s abundantly clear from the content The Nation produces and the writers they employ that they still see the raping of children as a matter of free speech. They were also in the tank for Obama.
As were all of the celebrated white liberal blogs: places like The Daily Kos where there have already been several mass exoduses of women over near-pornographic ads. The blogs weren’t just for Obama, they were rabidly against Clinton, causing yet another wave to leave. This hasn’t caused much concern for those men as there will always be more women, one generation of them after the next, to take their place. Everyone wants to be where the power is, after all.
Even feminists, the young, hip, white ones who receive the most attention from those men, were more likely to support Obama than Clinton. Those are the feminists who are also most likely to be favorable towards prostitution and pornography: they don’t have much of a choice if they want to remain young and hip.
A popular feminist blog, Amptoons.com, was sold by its creator to a marketer of hardcore pornography. One of the websites it currently advertises depicts Hispanic women performing sex acts on immigration officials to avoid being deported. While many of the feminists abandoned blogging at the website after the sale, some stayed. It’s an Obama stronghold.
As month after month passed in the primary, I became aware that I felt a certain affinity for Hillary Clinton supporters. I felt that I was part of their world, if not exactly by choice: after all, who would choose to be old, unhip, uneducated, and non-creative? By extension, I began to care about Clinton too, something that surprised me immensely. As one of the “ugly” people, she represented me on the public stage.
Again, I don’t mean to suggest that every Barack Obama supporter is a porn fiend. Many of the most misogynist rapists in our country back Hillary Clinton; I still count her husband as one of them. There’s 300 million ways to be a sexist, after all. But by using pornography as a lens, it became clear to me that there was a rather stark divide among whites in our country, with one side believing that they were part of Obama’s world, while the other remained part of Clinton’s.
There are an infinite number of other lenses though that can bear witness to the same division. Not all of them are nefarious (cappuccino vs. coffee), and of those that are, neither coalition is without fault. (Although both, I’m sure, would prefer to blame the libertarians in our midst for any excesses, a too convenient theory I don’t find particularly convincing.) In listening to various discussions, the language and the imagery I saw revealed an immense amount of hatred for both candidates, even if the authors of it preferred one.
I do think it’s a salient point that their preference was almost always a black man over a white woman. However, Obama’s dominance in this imagery was not his own: he was a surrogate, just as the performers in interracial porn are proxies for the white males who are running the show, the business, and ultimately the country. It would be remiss to make a one-to-one comparison to Obama’s role in that imagery to his role as a statesman. It would be equally negligent to imagine that an entire culture of violence and pornography holds no sway over our presidency.
Is John McCain Gay?
Posted by admin - 25/06/08 at 03:06:19 am
Afishionados,
Kudos to Mike for the idea. It just needed the Official John McCain Logo on it. How nice of John to use the Optima font and star clip art from Photoshop. And a few words to help the search engines find it. Homosexual John McCain and his gay lover support gay marriage! There, that oughta do it.
Step away from the zucchini
Posted by admin - 20/06/08 at 10:06:52 pmThat’s what police told 11 year old Katie and 3 year old Sabrina Lewis recently. Their crime? Running a curbside vegetable stand at their home in Clayton, California. That’s a commercial enterprise in a residential area. Kids these days, I tell ya …
Clayton’s Mayor, Greg Manning, apparently gave his internal editor the day off. He said, “They may start out with a little card-table and selling a couple of things, but then who is to say what else they have. Is all the produce made there, do they make it themselves? Are they going to have eggs and chickens for sale next?” Leaving aside the obvious non-vegan nature of eggs and chicken, is this really the most important problem facing Clayton? Somehow, I doubt it.
Mr Manning went on to say, “I wish everyone would follow the rules and not be just self-centered.” Ah yes, the refrain of the incompetent bureaucrat, I know what’s best for everyone and anyone who doesn’t see that is just being selfish.
I predict an interesting election next time around in Clayton. The slogans just write themselves; Vote for Manning, he’ll protect us from illicit produce stands!
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Medicare 31.5% error rate
Posted by admin - 17/06/08 at 06:06:35 pmWhy does this not surprise me? Your taxdollars at work.
From The Wall Street Journal:
So government auditors have uncovered evidence of fraud in Medicare. Or rather, more fraud. The politicos lingering around Washington can barely keep a straight face as they claim to be shocked.
A draft report by the inspector general of Health and Human Services — circulating on Capitol Hill and leaked this week — determines that Medicare may have paid $2.8 billion in improper or fake claims for medical equipment in 2006. That’s an error rate of 31.5%, in a single corner of this colossal entitlement.
Could this possibly be because it’s a giant government-ran bureacracy swimming in red tape and fraud? Nahh. According to the Democrat perspective, it’s all Bush’s fault.
[Democrat Pete Stark] aims his real outrage at the Bush Administration, which says it has stepped up its efforts to combat fraud and reined it in more than the inspector general alleges. “To look better to the public, you cook the books,” Mr. Stark continued. “This agency is incompetent.”
I wonder who the Dems will blame eeeeeeverything on once Bush leaves office?
“Votes for Women”
Posted by admin - 14/06/08 at 11:06:03 pm
The sudden appearance of a self-described “hockey mom” on the national political stage might send us scrambling to our history books and search engines for context. A trip to the Brooklyn Museum could do the trick. An exhibition called “Votes for Women” runs until November 30 in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
NYT (6): National Politics
Posted by admin - 12/06/08 at 09:06:48 amhttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/weekinreview/31tanenhaus.html?sq=art&st=cse&scp=4&pagewanted=print
The Art of the Possible
“Convention dramas aside, vision has its limits. Compromise has its opportunities.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/weekinreview/31zernike.html?sq=hillary&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print
Can You Cross Out ‘Hillary’ and Write ‘Sarah?’
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/magazine/31bush-t.html?sq=final&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
The Final Days
“As he hands over control of his party to John McCain, what does George Bush really think about his former rival, the fall campaign and his own presidential legacy?”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31view.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print
Is History Siding With Obama’s Economic Plan?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31every.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print
Obama’s Questionable Stimulus Plan
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/magazine/31wwln-lede-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
First Nation
“McCain and Obama both say America should lead the world. Do they know what follows?”
How Much Are Our Politics About Comfort?
Posted by admin - 05/06/08 at 03:06:14 pmI was reading a rather interesting post this morning about American’s feelings towards China, in view of the recent Tibetan confrontations. As I read the article and the comments by other readers, I really started to think (even though it’s the weekend).
The way I see it, Americans seem to want to focus on the human rights, health, etc. etc. etc. issues in other countries, rather than looking at what we need to straighten-out here at home, because no real action is required on our part. We’re really a naive bunch, when you think about it.
Human rights violations in China, Tibet, Darfur are unpleasant to think about, so let’s claim to be offended and then continue on our merry way, gathering-up quarters from the sofa pillows to buy gasoline to go to the store to buy the cheapest products we can find. Survival first!
I think most Americans are unaware of the real risks this country faces. At a time when we should be solidarizing and strengthening internally, we are being torn apart by bipartisan politics and finger-pointing from within.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my observations of the political decisions made by ANY administration, it’s that we are schitzophrenic. We want every country around the world to do things our way but we can’t agree among ourselves what OUR WAY should be.
Furthermore, our dependence on foreign oil will keep us from confronting evils, unless pushed into a corner, or turning a blind eye towards how much the USA is hated among certain populations.
But even more frightening is that our dependence on foreign money will shackle us to those very countries we claim are such abusers. The average American has NO concept of the amount of Chinese money invested in the USA. They could easily pull the rug out from underneath us, with one hand tied behind their back.
This sword they have hanging over our head is possibly one reason that Bush will be the first U.S. president to attend the Olympics when it is being held anyplace other than on USA soil (in spite of the fact that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are asking him to boycott the opening ceremonies, to protest the China-Tibet ‘thingy’).
With Chindia (China/India) poised to take over the economic reins of the world, most Americans have no concept of how powerful China is. We will never invade China. Let’s hope they don’t decide to invade us.
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The troops are voting with their dollars
Posted by admin - 04/06/08 at 04:06:43 am
If money is any indication of our troops’ approval of our current military policy, then Americans might want to pay attention to whom our troops are donating in the presidential race.
In analyzing to whom troops in the battlefield are making their donations, the Center for Responsive Politics got quite a surprise. Among these troops, they are donating to Barack Obama’s campaign at six times the rate they are giving to John McCain’s campaign. To further illustrate that the troops are clear in their desires, they are even donating to Ron Paul’s campaign at four times the rate for donations to McCain and Paul suspended his campaign some months back.
Additionally, Obama lead McCain in military donations, overall, with some 57% of presidential donations going to his campaign.
The message: support our troops and vote for Obama.