8/14: What I Accomplished Today

1. Prepared my photocopying (except for one document) for the first week of school. Feeling very smug about this. It took a long time.

2. We watched several comedy shows, largely George Lopez's comedy special on HBO. He's very funny, but the show is depressing to me overall; if those are the assumptions of most Hispanic men (which I know is an unfair assumption to make), no wonder the college's completion ratio for is so low for them. (One of his lines was something like, "To an Hispanic man, anything done correctly is.." and he used a not-very-nice word for "homosexual." His examples were very funny, and very in keeping with Hispanic men I have known, loved, and admired ("feo, fuerte, y formal"), but that sort of eliminates the possibility of education being a way out of anything, or even a serious option, for starters.

I think his observations on immigration are spot-on. I lived in the San Fernando Valley long enough to know that, without immigrants, a good percentage of whom are no doubt illegal, nicer neighborhoods will collapse in less than a week; there would be no clean and decent homes, yards, or children.

Three things in addition to the overall tone bugged me (and again, these do not lessen the fact that it was a funny show). a. He had a whole section about "Kids today wouldn't last an hour the way we grow up," and then he used his own kids as examples. Well, duh. Your kids wouldn't last an hour in the barrio where you grow up because your kids have a father with his own sitcom who is asked to do specials for HBO. You chose not to raise them where you grew up for reasons, and I'm betting they were damn good ones. By the same token, but for very different reasons, you wouldn't have lasted an hour in their world at their age. It seems disingenuous to change kids' exposures and then blame them for it. (And most of the things he was bemoaning that his kids wouldn't understand weren't all that fabulous in the first place: for instance, his kids wouldn't know what to do in a world where they aren't offered a whole Popsicle. Good. Tragic loss, that.)

b. The next section was berating his aunt, who does the proverbial "sheep in lamb's clothing" bit and lives in the past. Hmmm. Remember the section before? And what, precisely, were you doing then? Romanticizing and idealizing an earlier age? Yeah, you have a lot of room to make jokes about someone else doing this.

c. This is a strange point, and I know, at many levels, that this is wrong. Nevertheless, I think there's some validity to it. I keep thinking of my parents, who still live where I grew up. In the school system we attended, there were three black families. In the entire school district. It wasn't a big school district (my graduating class had 93 people in it), but figure that's 1200 kids in the school. Three families were black. One of those families only had one child.

In this community, I realized when I was in college that there was an Hispanic family. We hadn't known it at the time because frankly, we lacked the vocabulary to know we were supposed to think about it. But when I went to college and learned a little about diversity as an actual topic for consideration, I realized, "Hey! Steve, Judy, and Joyce were Hispanic!" The last name was Hispanic, and their skintone had been puzzling; they probably benefited that we lacked the background to understand their ethnicity.

Anyway, in a community like that, the only exposure most people are going to have to an Hispanic person is on television--and if the only show about Hispanic culture they choose to watch is this George Lopez show, their image is going to be skewed. (Well, actually, it will be very accurate--but only about a very limited portion of the community. You could make the same accusation in the other direction if people's only exposure to black people had been The Cosby Show.) Of course it's wrong to ask an individual to represent the entire group to which he or she happens to belong; it's unrealistic and foolish. On the other hand, at a basic factual level, for big chunks of America, George Lopez is the only Hispanic who's going to show up on the television semi-regularly. I'm a little disturbed by that.

4. Level 32 Draenei Shaman. Finished first round of Thousand Needles quests. Did some cleanup in Duskwood. Did the first batch of Stranglewhatever quests (including the first five hunter quests). Dinged 33.

5. Have a meeting tomorrow at 1, and I should go to school and turn in my copying. Not remotely interested in going to sleep, but I suppose I should.