On a church sign not far from our house, while Iain and I were out and about this past weekend:
ETA please see Nezua's post at The Sanctuary
I'm preparing to be whipped into a frenzy about the breakout of a mutated strain of swine flu. What I wasn't prepared for was how quickly the "blame the dirty, diseased immigrants" meme would take hold. This, despite the facts that 1)the source of the outbreak could be a CAFO in Mexico owned by our very own Smithfield Farms and 2)"the US was already looking into cases within our own currently designated borders," as noted by Nezua.
But those facts mean nothing to more rabid right-wingers. From Media Matters: During the April 24 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage stated: "Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico."*
"Mexican@s & Latinos already had a hell of a time w/all the hate," Nezua wrote on Twitter.** This flu outbreak gives right wing pundits an opportunity to ramp it up.
[snip]
"[C]ould this be a terrorist attack through Mexico? Could our dear friends in the radical Islamic countries have concocted this virus..."
[snip]
"How do you protect yourself? What can you do? I'll tell you what I'm going to do, and I don't give a damn if you don't like what I'm going to say. I'm going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the restaurants."
During the April 27 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Neal Boortz asked: "[W]hat better way to sneak a virus into this country than give it to Mexicans? Right? I mean, one out of every 10 people born in Mexico is already living up here, and the rest are trying to get here... ."
In an April 25 blog post... syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin suggested that the outbreak was due to the United States' "uncontrolled immigration... 9/11 didn't convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront reality. Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools* will."
Early signs of what the outcome could be? Already, this flu is being framed as "more of one or another kind of Mexicanicky “spillover.” At Vivir Latino, Maegan suggested that, "swine flu is the new racial profiling," pointing to this summary of Homeland Security Secreatary Napolitano's instructions: Secretary Janet Napolitano also said border agents have been directed to begin passive surveillance of travelers from affected countries, with instructions to isolate anyone who appears actively ill with suspected influenza.
Then there is the story of Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman's suggestion that the flue be renamed the "Mexican Flu." The CDC has advised against non-essential travel to Mexico--and while I can understand how that might be practical, I cannot help thinking how this advisory will be perceived in a country where Mexico is constructed as hopeless, corrupt, and inadequate.
Reading Maegan's and Nez's tweets on this made me reflect on the long history within the U.S. of categorizing "undesirable" immigrants as dirty and diseased. They were undesirable, of course, because of their racial/ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious differences from the WASP-y mainstream. In the 19th century, much of the anti-immigrant sentiment focused on the Irish and Asians (particularly the Chinese); in the early 20th century, "undesirable" expanded to include the "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the disabled, and most Asians.
Part of characterizing these immigrants as undesirable was claiming, in no uncertain terms, that they represented a danger to Americans and the "American way of life." For example, here is George Frederick Keller's (in)famous depiction of what the Statue of Liberty's counterpart in San Francisco Bay might look like:
And I borrowed this from here a while ago to show my students:
A few years ago, I wrote briefly about some works that talk about the old "immigrants carry filth and disease" meme: American citizens tend to impose their own standards of housekeeping and "cleanliness" on immigrants and judge them deficient. Nayan Shah, for example, posits that Americans considered San Francisco’s Chinatown dirty, overcrowded, and unacceptable. From there, Chinese were cast as health hazards, rife with disease and in need of police and medical supervision. Taking this cue, some African Americans in San Francisco complained that, “on the streets of the Chinese section of town… one could find filth actually personified and the stench which arises and penetrates the olfactory nerves is something perfectly horrible.”
And now, the "new" immigrants of the 21st century--so labeled because they came largely after 1965 and because, more recently, they are traveling to new settlement areas****--are facing the same attacks. Of course, part of the reason is that they share the label of "undesirable" that I defined above. This is a distinction that, as Liss convincincly argues, is becoming synonymous with "immigrant":
Mexican immigrants, too, became a perceived threat to American health and hygiene. According to Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna, the porosity of the border worried U.S. health officials in the early twentieth century. In response to a typhus epidemic in Mexico’s interior in 1915, the U.S. Public Health Service quarantined Mexican immigrants and treated them as if they were “vermin-infested.” Along the border, Mexican immigrants were subjected to invasive, humiliating examinations before they were "certified" disease free. That quarantine extended until the late 1930s, long after the epidemic had passed, a testament to the American perception of Mexicans as infectious germ carriers.***In between the disparate uses and meanings of "immigrant" and "ex-pat" (expatriate) falls everything that underlines the racism, classism, and xenophobia of the immigration debate in America.
John Higham posited that nativism ebbs and flows, and we seem to be at a high period (and seem to have been frozen here for well over a decade). Given that, the fact that anti-immigrant sentiment tends to rise during periods of economic hardship, and the long-standing practice of associating certain immigrants with germs and disease, I don't expect the right-wing attacks to stop.
White, (relatively) wealthy, and English-speaking immigrants are ex-pats, with intramural rugby leagues and dues-drawing pub clubs and summer festivals set to the distant trill of bagpipes.
Non-white, poor, and non-natively English-speaking immigrants are just immigrants.
Ex-pats are presumed to have come to America after a revelation that their countries, in which any white person would be happy to live, are nonetheless not as good as America.
Immigrants are presumed to have come to America because their countries are shit-holes.
Ex-pats are romantic and adventurous, with wonderful accents and charming slang.
Immigrants are dirty and desperate, with the nefarious intent of getting their stupid language on all our signs.
That doesn't make them any less disturbing, however.
(cross-posted)
Many thanks to Nezua, Maegan, and Liss, for pointing me to links and for their own words which helped me work through my thoughts.
h/t Jill and The America's Voice Blog, whose posts I also consulted.
_____________________________________
*According to Media Matters, "Officials think they [some NYC high school students] started getting sick after some students returned from the spring break trip to Cancun." Thus the disease was brought to NY by returning tourists, not immigrants.
**Deeky expands on that sentiment here.
***Discussed works:
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Arnold Shankman, “Black on Yellow: Afro-Americans View Chinese Americans 1850-1935,” Phylon 39, no. 1 (1978): 3.
Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society,” The Millbank Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2002): 765.
Similar characterizations were made of Slovak immigrants, M. Mark Stolarik, “From Field to Factory: the Historiography of Slovak Immigration to the United States,” International Migration Review 10, no. 1 (1976): 96-97.
****Most of my knowledge of new settlement areas comes from my work studying the poultry processing industry, so I'll point you to the works of William Kandel, Emilio Parrado, and Leon Fink.
Why some single women just need to shut up. Hey—don't get mad! It says "some." Geez.
The contemptible bullet-pointed "Story Highlights," for the slack-jawed functional illiterate on the go, are even more loathsome:
· Author calls women who are happy being single "happies"All right then!
· Women who have bad attitudes about being single are called "crappies"
· No reason for happy singles to explain why they are alone, author writes
· Unhappy singles can change attitude by taking care of self, author says
After the WHO raised its alert level over swine flu, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office began advising against all but essential travel to Mexico.See, I would totally like to think that the British government would be constantly monitoring what Pete and Roger feel about the possible epidemic.
"It's late, and I'm paying my babysitter overtime, and I have to pee. So, everybody fucking likes you."—Julia Roberts, affectionately yadda-yaddaing the ass-kissing as Tom Hanks was presented the Chaplin Award at the 36th annual Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala Tribute last night.
Maybe I just like this quote because I can imagine saying the same thing in the same situation.
Unless I were presenting Deeky with an award, in which case I would naturally say: "So, everybody fucking thinks you're an asshole."
The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed "Mexican" influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, according to an Israeli health official.As a member of a predominantly Hispanic family, allow me to go on record here by saying we, as a group (that is, Mexicans, not just my relatives) have enough problems without being branded as carriers of disease and source of a global pandemic. Just sayin'.
Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and "we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu," he told a news conference Monday at a hospital in central Israel.
Associated Press reporter Laurie Kellman, on Al Gore's appearance before a House committee considering global warming legislation:During the 2000 campaign, the media's insistence on casting Gore like a boring, humorlesss, know-it-all dork was both unprofessional and irresponsible. (Not to mention just patently bloody inaccurate.) After 8 years of seeing what result actively rooting for the "fun guy" wrought, any member of the media still tooting the Geeky Gore horn is just a fucking asshole."I have read all 648 pages of this bill," Gore bragged, a boast that would surprise no one who caught his teacher's-pet performance in the 2000 presidential race. "It took me two transcontinental flights on United Airlines to finish it."The schoolhouse metaphor is appropriate, if not for the reason Kellman thinks. There are perhaps only two groups of people who view knowledge as a flaw, and ignorance as an asset: Seventh-graders, and the Washington press corps,
For years leading up to the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore committed the sins of taking policy seriously, and of knowing what he was talking about. As punishment for those sins, reporters like Kellman mocked him as a "teacher's-pet" and a dull, lifeless buffoon. They propped up a dim-witted Texan (by way of Greenwich Country Day, Andover, Harvard, and Yale) who had run business after business into the ground, and skipped out on the National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam by virtue of his father's accomplishments. On the other hand, he called reporters "Stretch," and they loved him for it. And so George W. Bush became president.Exactly. Exactly.
Given what happened over the following eight years, you would think the media would have enough of a guilty conscience that they would avoid treating Al Gore with precisely the same petty, stupid middle-school-cafeteria derision that led to thousands of deaths in an unnecessary war, torture, warrantless surveillance, a stunningly incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, and a Vice President whose shooting of a friend in the face doesn't even rank among his top fifty most offensive actions.
But no: Associated Press reporter Laurie Kellman is still pointing and laughing at Al Gore, because he bothered to read legislation that deals with his life's work before testifying about it. What a nerd.
Oh, by the way: Gore wasn't bragging. He was answering a direct question.Sob.
Veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter told colleagues Tuesday that he switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party, Sen. Harry Reid says.If Al Franken is actually ever sworn in as Senator in Minnesota, Specter's switch will give Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority of 60 seats. Woot!
..."Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right," Specter said in a statement posted by his office on PoliticsPA.com.
"Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans."
Specter, a five-term Senate veteran, was greeted by a loud, sustained round of applause by dozens of constituents outside his Washington office shortly after the news broke.
"I don't have to say anything to them," a smiling Specter said. "They've said it to me."
President Obama called Specter shortly after learning the news during his daily economic briefing in the Oval Office on Tuesday morning, according to a senior administration official.
"You have my full support, and we're thrilled to have you," Obama told Specter.
Hope and Change, For Real
When President Obama won the election, I noted that part of the importance of America's having elected a black president was the crack in made in the perfect veneer of an international patriarchal system that privileges straight, white, wealthy, well-educated, cisgender, (mostly) able-bodied men:
[M]illions and millions of people, inside this country and out, [will] take inspiration from that glitch in the Matrix...will pick up a fucking teaspoon because they see hope and possibility where they saw none before.Today, CNN has an article on how First Lady Michelle Obama is inspiring women all over the globe in exactly that way, and what a difference it makes for a woman of color to be seen in such a powerful and respected position:
It's not just straight black men who look at Obama and see hope and possibility. It's anyone who isn't a straight, white, wealthy, well-educated, cisgender, able-bodied man, and looks at Obama and thinks, "Well, maybe there's a chance for me, too. I'm gonna give it a try."
Heather Ferreira works in the slums of Mumbai, India, where she has watched thousands of women live under a "curse."What's amazing is that India has had a female prime minister, Indira Gandhi, yet there is still such a desperate need for female role-modeling (not just in India, but everywhere, including the US) that Michelle Obama fills it from thousands of miles away. Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, long before the internet and the information age; the images and stories of women's leadership are more accessible now, especially to women, many more of whom around the globe are literate than 25 years ago.
The women she meets in the squalid streets where "Slumdog Millionaire" was filmed are often treated with contempt, she says. They're considered ugly if their skin and hair are too dark. They are deemed "cursed" if they only have daughters. Many would-be mothers even abort their children if they learn they're female.
Yet lately she says Indian women are getting another message from the emergence of another woman thousands of miles away. This woman has dark skin and hair. She walks next to her husband in public, not behind. And she has two daughters. But no one calls her cursed. They call her Michelle Obama, the first lady.
"She could be a new face for India," says Ferreira, program officer for an HIV-prevention program run by World Vision, an international humanitarian group. "She shows women that it's OK to have dark skin and to not have a son. She's quite real to us."
[Michelle Obama's] personal story -- born into a blue-collar family; overcoming racism and once even making more money than her husband -- makes her a mesmerizing figure to women across the globe, says Susan M. Reverby, a professor of women's studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.An educated woman. An accomplished professional. An uncursed mother to girls. A respected wife.
Reverby says this is the first time many women have seen their class and color reflected in America's first lady.
...Sue Mbaya of Nairobi, Kenya, says the first lady inspires African woman to assert themselves in their personal and professional lives.
Many African women are conditioned to be subservient, she says. They're prevented from rising to management positions in the workplace, and their families often relegate them to taking care of household tasks while sending their brothers off to school.
But Obama is a high achiever who didn't intimidate her husband, says Mbaya, a native of Zimbabwe who is the advocacy director for World Vision's Africa's region.
"I've always liked knowing that she was Barack Obama's supervisor when they first met," Mbaya says. "He once said that he wouldn't be where he is without his wife. That really appeals to me."
That's conservatives for ya.
Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism.Really? Really?
When I clicked through to CifA this morning, this was the picture that greeted me at the top of the page:
100 days of the media's trivial pursuit:
[T]he Obama coverage has often featured a toxic combination of trivial pursuit with a passion for process. The results have, at times, been gruesome, with the news media obsessing over White House iPods, and fashion "showdowns," and puppies, and soft drinks, and parking lots, and condoms, and hand gestures, and gaffes, and laughs, and celebrity magazines, and teleprompters, and rounds of golf, and sleeveless dresses, on and on. The list of press inanities has grown quite long in just 100 days.Read the whole thing here.
It's been distressing to watch the emergence of the media's permanent -- preferred -- state of trivial pursuit and the suddenly open assumption that trivia, often in the name of process, is just as important and noteworthy as actual news.
The trend has been impossible to escape, and even some journalists have acknowledged it. But they've suggested that it simply reflects our sped-up, lightning-fast media landscape and that new technology is forcing reporters and pundits to make instant calculations and premature political pronouncements.
Baloney.
Brand spanking New York Times conserva-columnist Ross Douthat is off to a rollicking start by observing: "Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration's interrogation policies, it's been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008."
When you become the lead singer (or guitarist, or keyboardist, or drummer, or whatever your fancy) of the greatest band that's ever lived, what will its name be?
Obviously, mine will have to be Queen Cunt of Fuck Mountain and the Cult of the Feminazi Cooter.
We don't want to play The Tonight Show, anyway.
"It was pretty exciting; they were cheering out there."—Marilyn Hebing, of the Pottawattamie County recorder's office, as the first same-sex couples tied got hitched in Iowa today.
51. The percentage of Americans who favor a government investigation of the use of "harsh interrogation techniques" in a new Gallup poll.
Greg Sargent notes:
What's particularly interesting [about the numbers], though, is that a solid majority of 55% also finds that the use of such techniques was justified, versus only 36% who say it wasn't — and yet a slim majority still favors a probe. That suggests, I think, that voters are capable of wanting a thorough airing of precisely what happened and when, even if they don't necessarily oppose the use of torture.Yes, imagine that.
In other words, these numbers suggest that the electorate doesn't generally think a government probe would necessarily amount to retribution or revenge, as so many pundits keep saying, and merely view it as a necessary accounting of what actually happened. Imagine that!
