Category Archives: Politics and Culture

Dharun’s Lucky Roll

Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times, ,

A life can spin out of control easily. The young man was in trouble. Never, arrested before in his life, suddenly he was facing serious felony charges. There was a potential to spend years in prison. On top of this, he was an immigrant who had come to the US as a child, a conviction would likely lead to deportation after prison.

The evidence against him was overwhelming. His actions, arguably, had indirectly contributed to the death of another. While even the prosecutor wasn’t going to charge him with manslaughter, public opinion was against him. If the case went to trial, the victim’s family would be sitting in the courtroom, a silent reminder to the jury that the young man’s carelessness had had serious consequences.

Yet, he was given a way out. A plea bargain was on the table. Admit his guilt on some counts. Spare the victim’s family a public trial. In return, no jail time and the state would recommend against deportation.

But he didn’t take the plea.

He would tell the press he couldn’t because it would have meant admitting guilt to a “hate crime” and there was no hate in his heart. Maybe he simply believed that the jury would see it his way. He had “committed” a prank, not a crime. You saw much worse on television shows like Punk’d. Nobody could “prove” a connection between what he’d done and what had happened later.

He went on trial charged with four counts of bias intimidation as a hate crime, two counts of invasion f privacy, two counts of attempted invasion of privacy, and seven counts of witness tampering and hindering apprehension based on his actions after the investigation began.

The jury convicted him on ten counts. They struggled only with “bias intimidation” but had no problem seeing his guilt on the other counts.

The young man neither apologized, nor took the witness stand. Many observers found his courtroom demeanor unemotional although when the verdict came in he appeared shocked.

The judge admonished the young man, telling him, “I heard this jury say ‘guilty’ 288 times — 12 jurors, 24 questions, but I haven’t heard you apologize once.”

He could have gone to prison for years.

The judge sentenced him to 30 days, plus court costs, community service and probation. The judge will recommend against deportation to the federal authorities. Except for he brief jail time, the young man got the same sentence as had he taken the plea, with one exception — he doesn’t have to acknowledge his responsibility or apologize for his actions.

Now, one can argue that the plethora of charges brought against him would never have occurred had the roommate not killed himself, had “bullying” particularly of the cyber variety not been so prominent in the news.

One can argue that despite the judge rightly trying to keep the suicide out of the trial, it was there hovering and influencing the jury.

One might say that no amount of jail time would help the young man to grow up, to lose any of the “colossal insensitivity” sited by the judge. Would a longer sentence have been justice?

The problem is that justice in this country is relative. There are people who like the young man chose a jury trial rather than a plea deal. Perhaps the deal they were offered wasn’t as good, and so they decided to roll the dice with a jury. Maybe the deal involved jail time. Maybe they believed they were not guilty in their hearts, as the young man did, that somehow their actions were justified, or just not as bad as the state thought, and they would be able to get a jury to see it that way. Maybe they were psychopaths who thought they could charm the jury. Maybe they were simply innocent.

Still they were convicted, and in most cases the judge didn’t subvert the jury’s intentions in quite the same way. They went to jail. They didn’t get the deal they didn’t take.

So what on earth made this case different?

Some might question the judge’s own bias. His statement in sentencing the young man to learn to respect “those with alternative lifestyles,” shows at least a tone-deafness, if not a prejudice of his own.

Some people wondered if the sentence might have been different if the victim hadn’t been his roommate, but perhaps a female friend — a young woman who had had an intimate moment caught and broadcast on Twitter.

But maybe the bias, was not so much against the victim as for the defendant. Maybe things would have been different if the young man had had a previous offense or two in his record, or this happened at a 7/11 and not at a respected state university. The young man came from a middle class home, from law-abiding people, hard working immigrants. While his dark skin might get him profiled at an airport, he probably wouldn’t be a victim of a stop and frisk unless the police mistook him for a Latino or a Moslem. His is a minority stereotyped as smart and ambitious, rarely subject to discrimination in housing or hiring.

So let’s replay the same crime. An eighteen-year old white girl is working at a 7/11 while working her way through community college. She takes a room in an apartment with a couple of coworkers, also part time students — another female and a young man. One day, the young woman, who is barely out of the closet, invites a date home. They kiss in her room, where the male roommate has a hidden camera. It’s broadcast on Twitter. The woman discovers tons of messages about the event and a possible encore performance. A day later she kills herself. Maybe there were other things happening in her life, and the connection between the two events is peripheral, but who knows? The timing seems to connect them.

Now, lets imagine the male roommate is black AND Hispanic, the son of immigrants, who has already had a little trouble with the law. Perhaps he was stopped once by the cops and found to have a small amount of marijuana. His mouthing off to the police about his “rights” led to a few more charges.

The young man is offered a deal. Does anyone think this deal would not have jail time and deportation? And if he chose to take his chances with a jury, does anyone think that after being convicted a judge would give him 30 days and 300 hours of service?

The problem is not so much that Dharun Ravi got off too easy. It’s that justice is a crap shoot, and the dice are loaded. In this case, Ravi chose to roll the dice. They came up snake eyes, but the judge called it a seven.

A Night at the Opera, Another Night at the Theater, A Weekend at Home

book reviews, Idiots at the Opera, New York Stories, Politics and Culture, Travel Blog, true story, , ,

The better half and I try to vacation at least three times a year — my birthday, his birthday, and our anniversary.  This being the Internet, I won’t tell you which one occurred last week, but we weren’t able to get away, and so decided to celebrate at home, in New York City.  Here’s what we did:

Wednesday:  Dinner at Hell’s Kitchen, a trendy “progressive”-Mexican place in (where else?), Hell’s Kitchen.  Being reluctant omnivores, we went for veggie choices.  A recent trip to Italy had made us more aware of the lovely artichoke, which is not on enough menus in the United States, so we started with the poached artichoke quesadilla with idiazabal cheese, roasted sweet corn, and poblano crema.  Yummy.  For main courses we ate light and shared family style:  We ordered  huitlacoche with avocado, and mascarpone cheese. Hutlacoche for the uninitiated is a truffle that grows on corn — or in simple terms a fungus.  It has a unique taste and texture, a bit smoky, a bit spongy.  We are fans.  Plus the cheese didn’t overwhelm the dish, which is one difference between “progressive” Mexican and run of the mill.  The crispiness of the taco created a perfect balance of textures.  As a second main, we had the burrito with wild mushroom,  guacamole and poblano sauce, which was also well balanced and delicious. The mushrooms tasted like they might have been sautéed with a teriyaki sauce, giving them a steak-like flavor.  We split a dessert, banana empanadas with chocolate sauce and fresh whipped cream.  The cream was unsweetened as it should be to help offset the sweetness of the sauce and the banana.  There were other dessert choices that sounded equally good.

Then we walked up to the Metropolitan Opera House to see La Traviata directed by Will Decker with Natalie Dessay, as Violetta, Matthew Polenzani as Alfredo, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky is Germont,  I am an opera ignoramus.  The decision to go to the opera was made by my better-half, based on its being on both our bucket lists.  Neither of us had seen live “grand” opera before, except maybe once or twice on PBS.  We are now both fans, trying to figure out what we can sell to pay for season tickets next year.   We were expecting to be entertained.  We were expecting “theater.” What we got was an emotional wallop.  Even in the back of the orchestra where we were, when Gourmont slaps Alfredo and you hear him fall, there was more than a murmur in the audience.   To train the human voice to do what they do and do it while dancing, laughing, running and crying is amazing. To do it while acting is a miracle.  While we were expecting the tragedy of the lovers, Hyorostovsky’s nuanced performance made us feel Germont’s guilt and regret for separating them as well.  The stark set with its surreal clock ticking away the minutes of Violetta’s life, and the contemporary dress created a sense of timelessness.  This wasn’t a story about a nineteenth century courtesan, but about life, death, love and regret.

The following evening was theater night.  Ducking work, we got to TKTS at 2:20.  The main line was already huge, but the Play Express line was short.  By 3;15, we had two FRONT ROW seats to the Clybourne Park, which had opened earlier that week.   On the one hand, we were amazed at our luck; on the other, hand, it’s scary that almost all the non-musical plays had availability.  The play, itself has been described as a “sequel” to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.  More accurately it’s a re-imaging, with a first act taking place in 1959, the time when the original is set, and the second act fifty years later.  It’s been described as an  “uproariously funny”  comedy.  While it is that, it’s also an explosive drama.  There are several points at which violence seems imminent, and we weren’t prepared for the tragic tone of the first act.  When the curtain came down for intermission, my better half said, “After this, I’m going to need a drink.”  The second half is funnier, broader, more satiric, dealing with gentrification and reverse integration, but that too moves into dangerous territory.

We ate after the theater at Marseille, an unpretentious but stylish, French bistro on ninth avenue.  We ordered snails, of course.  Going carnivore, I ordered the honey glazed duck breast.  The better half had the mussels with fries.  Lots of mussels, and the best fries either of us had ever tasted, ever, in our lives.  We tried to figure out what made the fries so perfect.  Garlic might be one answer, but there was also the lack of grease and perfect crispiness.  The desserts are a bit more extensive than what’s on the posted menu.  We had something mousse-like with dark chocolate, so intensely rich that we were satisfied with just a few spoonfuls (rare for us).

We hardly left the house over the weekend, except for errands and long walks to local parks — Central Park, Fort Tryon, Morningside and Riverside, where everything seemed to be in bloom.  Saturday night, I started to read Just Kids,  Patti Smith’s memoir of her time in New York as a bookstore clerk/struggling artists/poet and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.  I kept reading into Sunday morning when I finished. I mention it here because like our two nights out, the  book could only have taken place in New York, although the New York, Smith writes about where young artsy types could somehow eke out enough of a living to afford the smallest room in the Chelsea Hotel is long gone as are the bookstores where she worked Brentano’s and Scribner’s.  Argosy somehow survives.  Gotham Books which published her early work, gone as well.

Smith, herself, has been quoted as saying that New York is now beyond the means of struggling artists who would be better off going elsewhere. Still for those of us, artist and non-artist who remain or are just visiting, and have limited incomes, some discounts are available. Our two front row theater seats costs were about $60 a piece at TKTS, and though we paid full freight at the opera, discounts and standing room are available.  Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen offers many reasonably priced restaurants.  Walking is still free, as is browsing, and books remain here and elsewhere the most affordable form of entertainment going.

For those of you who might not make it to the Met this year, here’s a clip:

The Tragedy of the Never-Was — Another SNL Player is an Embarrassment

Politics and Culture, , ,

Victoria Jackson, a novelty act whose main talent was headstands, has become a full on “birther” and right-wing activist, trying to push her “conservative version of The View” featuring anti-Islamic rants and song, in which she and her cohorts bitch and moan on Youtube about how they are being repressed by the “govment”, as evidenced by their inability to land a prime time network gig.

Dennis Miller another of the more limited alum, turned his nonsensical rants right and became a Fox news blowhard who somewhere along the way, lost the little funny he may have once possessed.

Now, it seems Jon Lovitz, primarily known as the “liar guy” has started ranting about his “50%” tax rate. Poor sap, maybe he needs a better accountant, or maybe he wants us to think he’s doing well enough to have a 50% tax rate, even though such a thing doesn’t exist. He’s also calling the President a “fucking asshole,” having apparently mistaken him for his agent.

A recent article described him as a “former SNL star,” but that’s just wrong.  There is no such a thing as a “former SNL star.” There are stars who were once on SNL and then went on to do brilliant work, these include most (but not all) of the original “not-ready-for-prime-time players,” and many from the following seasons, including Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Robert Downey Jr., Will Farrell, Tina Fay, and dozens more. A few may not have received that level of fame, but have gone on to respectable careers as character actors or theater stars (I’m talking about you, Miss Christine Ebersole).

Then there are all those other not-ready-for-prime-time players who never became ready for prime time, never grew as performers, and for whom SNL represented the pinnacle of their success. The one-notes. Some may have squandered their talents with drugs and alcohol. Others never had much to begin with. While many of them have disappeared gracefully, a few will do anything to get attention. They rant, they whine and they blame others for their failure, including the “govment,” the President, and a public that has ceased to care.

Don’t Ask Why If You Already Know the Answer

Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times

It’s the racism.
It’s the racism and the firearms.
It’s the racism, the firearms and vigilante culture.
It’s the racism, the firearms, the vigilante culture and everybody wanting to be a hero and enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame.
It’s the racism, the firearms, the vigilante culture, everybody wanting to be a hero and enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, and it’s the isolation of the gated community.
It’s the racism, the firearms, the vigilante culture, everybody wanting to be a hero and enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, the isolation of the gated community, and anybody who’s not in a car must be up to no good.
It’s the racism, the firearms, the vigilante culture, everybody wanting to be a hero and enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, the isolation of the gated community, anybody who’s not in a car must be up to no good, and badly written law.
But mostly it’s the racism.

Rush and The Other C Word

Politics and Culture, , , , ,

“What a shock! It was all a BIG PRODUCTION! The Democrat’s token abused college coed is actually a 30 year-old hardcore women’s rights activist.”   — Gateway Pundit

“The Fluke Charade.  Oh, and the “young coed” turns out to be 30, which is what less evolved cultures refer to as early middle age.” — Fox Nation

“What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.”

— Rush Limbaugh

The backlash against the backlash is in full swing. Rush Limbaugh went too far in attacking Sandra Fluke for speaking before Congress about the need for private insurance policies to cover oral contraceptives, which are prescribed to women for a number of conditions besides pregnancy prevention.  Now every rightwing blog is coming out with identical talking points:  Poor Rush was set up.  Fluke was not a “23 year old coed”  but a “30 year old” full-grown lady law student who had an opinion on the matter and was not chosen at random.  Congress actually plans speakers when they set up hearings! Why that’s almost as shocking as twenty year old footage of Obama hugging a tenured Harvard professor!

There was no charade.  Fluke was introduced by Nancy Pelosi as a third year law student and “leader” active with Law Students for Reproductive Rights. There was no mention of her age by Pelosi, nor did Fluke herself mention her age when she spoke and presented herself as a third year law student and past president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Rights. I’ve yet to find a single source on the web that misrepresented Fluke’s age or student status.  Yet in the rightwingoverse, she was somehow “passed off” or “passing herself off” as something she was not, and as someone worthy of being called out as a slut and prostitute.  Here’s a quote from Pam Geller, taking time off from her duties as a professional Muslim-hater:

“A 30-year-old poses as a 23-year-old, chooses a Catholic University to attend at $65,000 per year, and cannot afford ALL the birth control pills she needs… so she wants the US taxpayers to pay for her rampant sexual activity. By all accounts she is banging it five times a day. She sounds more like a prostitute to me. She must have an gyno bill to choke a horse (pun intended). Calling this whore a slut was a softball.”

Not that any of that b.s. is worth the time it would take to refute, but (1) Fluke never misled anyone as to her age, (2) her testimony references that she is not simply speaking for herself and that as a public interest law student she did not pay full tuition, nor (3) did what she was supporting have anything to do with charging “taxpayers.”  Geller seems to share Limbaugh’s confusion regarding how oral contraceptive works.  Surely, someone should take them aside and explain that it does not work like Viagra.  You only take the pill once a day, no matter how many times you do or don’t “bang it.”  As for the rest, interesting choice of words for someone known for vlogging in a bikini while spreading her legs.

At least Geller does not use the word “coed” as do most of her cohorts.  The Merriam Webster free online dictionary defines the word first as: “a female student at a coeducational institution,”  “short for ‘coeducational student’, first known use circa 1878.”

The top choice that comes up on a Google search is COED Magazine a suspiciously old-fashioned e-zine allegedly for “college guys” featuring plenty of “eye-popping” pix.

Despite Merriam-Webster’s using the term to describe female students, that usage seems to have slipped unceremoniously from everyday speech, not so much because of its political incorrectness, but because it makes no sense. The default for institutions of higher learning, at least in the US, has been coeducation for many years, so why would female students get the approbation “coed?”  It’s doubtful that most actual undergraduate students are even familiar with the term.  If they’ve seen or heard it, it was probably in a tabloid or on Fox news at Granny’s. Unlike some words that get “owned” by the groups to whom they refer, “coed” is not used by members of the group when talking to each other.  You will never hear one female student say skeptically to another, “Co-ed, please!”

The word still makes sense when describing activities that have not become coeducational by default, such as youth sports teams. A quick search on the NY Times website shows they haven’t used the word to describe a female student since 1974, “Defendant Waives Jury Trial in Slaying of Coed.” They last used it to describe people in a 1980 article on “male-coeds” — young men entering traditional women’s colleges that had recently gone coed.

Lest anyone think that usage depends on where one sits on the political spectrum, it should be noted that like the Times, the Wall Street Journal uses the term only as an adjective to describe coed activities. The New York Post, however, uses it frequently, recently to describe the woman who made a tape of her dalliance with Ashton Kutcher, as well to refer to one of Anthony Weiner’s sext-partners. It has also been used by The Post to describe victims — missing coeds, suicidal coeds, murdered coeds.  My own quick poll of newspapers including Newsday and USA Today, would indicate that the Post’s usage might be somewhat idiosyncratic.

In tabloidese, the “coed” never simply means a female undergraduate student. It always signifies something lurid — innocence defiled or a (privileged) girl gone wild.  But I’m not suggesting that Rush purposely chose to describe Fluke this way.  He might simply think of all female students, graduate or undergraduate as usurpers in a male domain.  Given his videotape suggestion, he might be turned on by the racy images “coed” invokes.  Or it may simply be that he is so out of touch that he doesn’t even realize the term is dated, kind of like some very old white person using the word “colored” because that’s the one he grew up with.

The take-away is simple, wherever you stand on Fluke’s testimony, she never tried to pass herself off as anything she was not, and she never was what Rush and company labeled her.  Other than an admission that he was back on the drugs, there’s nothing to mitigate Limbaugh’s bitter attack or mock apology.

As for the word “coed,” that should be relegated to some bin for irrelevancies, along with Limbaugh himself.

For those interested in actually hearing Fluke’s testimony, here it is: