God Bless America!

said the army recruiter, via email, (sgt. marcia ramode) to a gay black man trying to join up:
"Go back to Africa and do your gay voodoo limbo tango and wango dance and jump around and prance and run all over the place half naked there."

haha. it wasn't bad enough that recruiters, falling far short of their quotas on account of a FUBAR war, were caught soliciting sex from potential recruits, among other violations? then they had to come with this noise? i love the Arnold Schwarzeneggar-esque "there" at the end. nice touch ramode.

i hadn't had extensive experience with the gay community until my year and a half stint at IKEA's corporate office, with about 90% (not an exaggeration) of the 300 or so employees there being either female or gay males. while some of these cats were certainly flamboyant or eccentric (think miss jay on top model flamboyant. yeah i watch top model, what?), i certainly didn't witness any voodoo, not even from the carribean cats that worked there. though there was some limbo and tango dancing at the winter party.

but in this sargeant's pleasant missive we see a few things of note. most striking of all, we see the kind of hatred that starts well early, maybe with an uncle that can't keep his hands to himself and also happens to be gay. maybe with a drunken, be-slippered (word?) mother who spent every waking moment of her life either boozing or falling down or cursing the faggots or the niggers or some other large group of people who've done nothing to her. the kind of fury that begins in the youth, under the tutelage of some fuck up adult, and never really dies away. these fucks are everywhere. i hear that was adolf hitler's trip. yeah.

additionally, amidst the talk of don imus (which will be more or less hushed thanks to the VT nightmare), america is all of a sudden reexamining its stance on racism and hate speech and blah blah blah. nike even took out a full page ad in the nyt: "thank you, ignorance. thank you for starting the conversation." with that monolithic swoosh above the bold print.

what? wtf?

i love a fresh pair of nikes like any other red blooded american male, but fuck! starting the conversation? so after a pretty terrible human rights record over the span of four or five centuries, we're just starting the conversation? christ.

i love when this kind of thing goes down though. everyone all of a sudden going all hypersensitive to the feelings/sensibilities of all human beings (except the rappers of course, they don't give a fuck about a ho), really concerned with the plight of the country's underclass or whatever. people acting like racism went extinct, then reemerged in small pockets like a persistent virus; an event truly warranting ceaseless press coverage.

then three weeks pass, customary media fatigue, and back to our daily routines. gotta get paid, gotta get laid, gotta get made. "racism doesn't exist anymore. this is america."

major social changes take generations, so if we're just "starting the conversation," the prejudice and biases that typify our _____-ist (fill in the blank children) culture will be fleeting memories in about four or five centuries. cheers.