Friday, October 06, 2006
Weird and getting weirder...
Apologies to any loyal readers I may still have for being a Bad Blogger... Events, which I will write about soon, have overtaken my life, making it hard to get here.
The strange week we've had being on my mind, I thought I'd paste here what I wrote in an email yesterday to a friend living in Hong Kong. That he is out of the country gave me some perspective on the weirdness of it all. More soon.
The strange week we've had being on my mind, I thought I'd paste here what I wrote in an email yesterday to a friend living in Hong Kong. That he is out of the country gave me some perspective on the weirdness of it all. More soon.
Public life here is very weird right now, with the Foley page scandal (did I need to read those IMs? It's like the Clinton thing - the cum-stained dress forever lodged in our imaginations...); the horrid, awful shootings of girls in schools, with their powerful undertow of misogyny; and, almost lost in it all, the signing away of habeas corpus in this miserable detainee bill.
How could it be a weirder time? Well, how about this - in the VA US senate race, the Republican incumbent Allen called a Democratic worker of South Asian descent "Macaca," which turns out to be a derogatory term for dark-skinned people in French-speaking Algeria, where Allen's mother grew up. Then it turns out Allen's mother came from a prominent Jewish family, grew up Jewish, converted, hid her past from her son his whole life - it comes out via the press last month. Jokes such as "Mel Gibson asked for his campaign contribution back" abound. So, last night, a staffmember for a Democrat running for VA House seat refers to Allen in an email as George "Macacawitz" Allen... and is promptly forced to resign. Allen's campaign issues a statement that this "continues a pattern of anti-Semitism among Democrats." Hunh? "Macacawitz..." Couldn't make this stuff up.
