Is Your Baby Racist?

No, but if it’s born in America, it might grow up retarded.

This is basically the message I am taking away from the recent malarky over Newsweek’s controversial cover story (Sept. 14th.) While Newsweek now seems to be closer to The National Enquirer in terms of content than to a reputable news source, I admit that I did pick up this one. I was on an airport layover in Denver, Colorado, and as I passed a newsstand, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the baby with the deep innocent eyes and the words “IS YOUR BABY RACIST?” stamped across its enormous baby forehead. As I locked eyes with the sweet little thing, and let it draw me across fifteen treacherous feet of crazed travelers, I imagined its little cupid mouth opening to coo at me: “Yeah that’s right. You walk right on over here and pay six dollars fifty for this magazine that you don’t need because your parents get it delivered to their house. You nigger.” What can I say? I fell for it hook, line and sinker (it was the second time in my life I have been called a nigger, but that’s a story for another time.)

Between Denver and San Jose, I read the article. I expected an analysis of the infant brain – an in depth scientific look at the chemistry that makes up racism. Is it a genetic thing? Is there something inside the human brain that makes certain people assholes? I didn’t know. And after reading this article, I still don’t know. What the article told me was basically that kids begin to distinguish groups (racial or otherwise) much earlier on in life than we have been giving them credit for, and that by the time most parents deem it “appropriate” to discuss race with their children, it is too late. It also called for the necessity of specific language when addressing children about race. “We’re all friends” is apparently too vague a message for children to understand that it refers to skin color (and probably especially confusing when the message is being delivered by an enormous yellow bird, an angry green pedophile in a trashcan, and a meth-addicted blue…cookie monster guy.) I don’t know if it’s just the way I feel about the subject – and perhaps I am being naïve here – but I just don’t think it is necessary to talk to children about race. Kids can see that everyone is different. And they usually don’t care. They only begin to care when adults make them feel like they should. Bringing up race to your child, even if your intentions are good, is racist. Children are not born racist: we make them racist. “You look at a baby, and it's so pure and so free and so clean. And adults are, like, this mess of sadness...and... phobias.” So says Mary in Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind. And I agree.

Anyway, invalidating the article wasn’t really what I set out to accomplish here (though let me add as a final spur that after ten pages, the article just…stopped, as though someone forgot to put in the last page. I don’t know if it was just my copy, or if someone at Newsweek had a few too many at lunch, or if they just ran out of room and figured nobody would notice, but something was wrong. And I did notice. And it was fucking weird.) The reason I started writing was because of another Newsweek article I read today, in the Greenest Big Companies in America issue. It was a follow-up to the racist baby article, and it dealt with everybody’s favorite Rush Limbaugh, who accused Newsweek of using the story to speak in code to liberals. According to Rush, “Is Your Baby Racist” actually translates to “Republicans Don’t Support Obama Beccuase They’ve Been Racist Since Birth” (Newsweek, Sept. 28) He went on to whine about the fact that liberals continually label Republicans as racist because they refuse to support Obama, and talk about Maureen Dowd’s comment that Joe Wilson’s outburst at Obama’s healthcare address was actually racist code.

Which brings me to my point: why is everybody in this country so fucking insane? And, yes, by “everybody,” at this particular moment I mean “Rush Limbaugh,” but honestly, let’s stop for a moment and take a look at the bullshit that has gone down recently:

Death Panels/Sarah Palin in general. Yes, it was absolutely ludicrous that anyone with half a brain was swayed at all by her presence in McCain’s campaign. Yes, it is frightening, to say the least, that people can be so easily manipulated. But you know what is worse? The fact that John McCain chose her in the first place! How can a man who believes himself to be in a fit state to run a country have possibly made such a ridiculous decision? Did he talk to her at all before appointing her? (I mean, apart from the part where she asked him if she could suck his dick in exchange for the position and he said, “By all means.”)

Joe Wilson’s tourettes-induced freak out. I mean…come on. How could anybody in their right mind think that yelling “You lie!” at the president during an important speech is a good way to get things done? And even if it was, as some suggest, not a moment of coke-induced derangement, but a coded racist slur (and don’t even get Rush Limbaugh started on that) it doesn’t change the fact that it makes Joe Wilson look crazier than Kanye West in a Crazy Suit, holding a sign that says “I’m with crazy” with an arrow pointing to himself.

The Wii incident, brought to my attention by the marvelously irate Tyler Compton. (http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=138462866364&ref=mf) Do the people in charge of this country really have nothing inside them except an empty hole for the money to fill, and an intense hatred for everything good? The people at the tops of our major news corporations are so completely and irrevocably blinded by the light reflecting off their Bentleys and shiny bald heads, and so deafened by the sound of billions of dollars worth of loose change floating around in their pockets, that they have finally come to a pinnacle of luncacy in this country: they are being paid to report the news without actually having to report any news. And, as far as anyone can tell, they aren’t going to start reporting any news any time soon.

“Obama is a Nazi.” This goes hand-in-hand with the previous paragraph. Obviously, insurance companies have contracted that fatal disease that has become so common among America’s aristocracy: Crazymoneybrain – a condition in which there is so much money in one’s wallet that it actually starts to seep out, through the back pocket of your trousers (in this case, really expensive, and yet somehow still hideous, slacks) and into the blood stream. Once in the blood stream, the liquid cash goes strait to the brain, where it clogs up nerve endings and blocks synapses, severely interfering with motor-skills and even the most basic levels of human understanding. This is why insurance companies are so unable to grasp the concept that PEOPLE ARE DYING because of their inability to do anything decent and not financially motivated. This is why they fund ridiculous “Obama is Hitler” propaganda-campaigns that get everyone riled up and distracted from the real issue at hand. I suppose it’s really not their fault: they literally have money on the brain, and it makes them technically retarded.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go out and buy a helmet. The kind Mike Myers wore in that SNL skit where he’s chained to the climbing frame. I’m going to buy this kind of helmet because I have a theory: that theory is that if I wear something on my head for three years, people will catch on and it will become trendy. It happened with those awesome headphones I have (which they now sell at Urban Outfitters), and it really should catch on with this; considering that everyone in America either is, or is slowly becoming, retarded, and could really use this kind of head protection. I’m going to wear this helmet night and day, in the hopes that the constant pressure on all sides of my cranium will combat the pressure building inside it. In this way, I hope to stop my head from exploding before I have time to go out and buy my AK-47 (I don’t condone guns, but desperate times and all that) and my big-ass boat, and sail into the middle of the Pacific Ocean where I will spend the rest of my life eating Mercury-tainted tuna and twitching. The gun is really just there for show – if I run into any Somalian pirates, I will probably just beg them for sweet release.

Go Away Alice

I.
In the dream, there is a girl. The girl has no name, or at least, I don’t know what it is. She’s quite young – perhaps twelve or thirteen – and she lives in one of those little houses in New York that are surrounded by more houses on both sides, with a stoop out front that you can sit on. She’s a happy little girl.
At some point, close to the beginning of the dream, she meets another little girl, called Alice, a ragdoll of a girl with a dismal gray skirt and a threadbare wool sweatshirt. Alice is a bad girl. We know Alice is a bad girl because she has vacant eyes and sunken cheeks, and drowns kittens in her spare time (she says.) I never witness her doing these things in the dream, but it is one of those things that is blurrily assumed.

II.
Barack Obama has the hardest job in the world. Not only does he have to keep himself from being assassinated on a daily basis, he also has to sort out the disaster we like to call “America.” When we elected him, it was with an almost violent fervor, a palpable excitement for the change he was going to bring us. I remember watching his inauguration with my knees curled up to my chest, one eye closed, praying, “Oh please don’t let him be shot. Please don’t let him be shot.” Every step he took onstage was another small triumph – every moment that his brain was still inside his skull, and not splattered Kennedy-style all over the front page of tomorrow’s paper, was heart-pounding relief.

III.
The night sky. What number of carefully arranged adjectives and hopelessly imperfect sentences can describe it? It’s like a velvet blanket covered with spilled talcum powder. On a clear night, when you can see Orion and Cassiopeia and Signus; when you know you are in Santa Cruz because the North Star is there to your left and the Summer Triangle is directly overhead, it is one of the most heart wrenching sights a human’s eyes can absorb.

I.
What we don’t find out until later in the dream, is that Alice is not actually a real girl at all, but a figment of the other girl’s (for some reason I’m beginning to think her name is Sally) imagination. Alice is Sally’s dark side, her psychotic break – the part of her that will tear through the silk screen that separates a dream from a nightmare, and drag her screaming into inky blackness. Alice is, I suppose, the thing that we all fear the most inside ourselves. That part of us that bites our nails until they bleed, smokes cigarettes, refuses to be a good hostess, hates making small talk, wants to fuck just for the hell of it even though we know it will make us feel worse. Because we are bored with the rules and decorum, and, most of all, the effort it takes to be a functioning member of society.



II.
Barack Obama’s campaign was based on Hope. The hope that we could drag ourselves out of this quagmire and emerge, dripping and cursing, a powerful Empire. There is no doubt that America is the next Great Empire. And there is no doubt that, like Rome and England and China and Spain, the Empire is crumbling. It is crumbling the way all Great Empires and mediocre cookies crumble – from the inside out. The reason it is crumbling is because it is an Empire built on nothing. It is an Empire built so far ahead of itself that it has nothing to stand on. America exists in a cloud seventy feet or so above the earth. Everything that can be done in America nowadays can be done online. That is why there are no decent railroads, factories or solid institutions. America is the youngest nation in the world, and consequently, it is being built on the youngest technologies in the world, before it has had a chance to establish the old technologies. Countries like England, France, China, have all had a chance to root themselves to the Earth with sheer manpower and brute strength – wooden ships filled with iron men. America, poor young bastard sibling that it is, is attempting to build an Empire out of air – paper ships filled with wires and plastic and a computer for a brain. It is a premise that has the potential to work, but only if the youngest people in the world are willing to take the wheel of these new technologies, learn how they work, and use them to steer the ship – or at least remotely control it from the harbor.

III.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that is older than the night sky. Nothing. Hundreds of bajillions of years ago, cavemen with badly plucked eyebrows and broken noses looked up at more or less the same sky that we look up at today. They saw more, because there were no horrible, cancerous cities like Los Angeles to pollute the sky with their artificial light, but the basic premise was the same. Stars have come and gone, burned out and been born, but the same constellations have pretty much been there. The same three little dots in a diagonal line with three even littler dots falling away from them have been Orion’s belt and sword. And it is somewhat relieving to know that no matter how much invisible matter we vomit into the universe in the form of emails and youtube videos, the blackness that surrounds those splattered stars will never become cloudy or spaghetti-gray. We Hope.

I.
Eventually, Alice becomes such an overpowering force in Sally’s life that Sally goes completely insane. From her pole position in the back of Sally’s head, Alice tells her to do terrible things, and Sally, being the blonde little innocent that she is, cannot handle it. She is sad all the time. She hates herself and she hates Alice, but as we all know, something so evil and so strong cannot be easily banished.

II.
This is why I feel (I know) that the future of America depends on us. We cannot be a nation of apathetics anymore. We are the iGeneration, the generation that elected a “just add water president.” We are so used to instant gratification that we expect our president to be an immediate solution to our problems. Need I remind anyone that Kool-Aid powder does not become Kool-Aid simply by adding water? You have to stir it. We seem to think that our job is done: we elected him, and that’s all we had to do, right? Wrong. Obama is a great leader. But a great leader’s job is not to fix a country’s problems. It is to inspire the country’s people to want to fix the problems themselves. That is what Obama does. That is how he won his campaign – through inspiration and Hope. How many of us remember watching the inauguration? How many of us remember going outside onto our balconies afterwards, smoking a cigarette, looking at the world and thinking, “Yes. I can do this.”? And perhaps you don’t have a balcony, and perhaps you don’t smoke (you shouldn’t, according to everyone) but you know what I mean. Changing this country is not Obama’s responsibility. It is our responsibility.

III.
When the sky is foggy in Santa Cruz, you can’t see a goddamn thing at night. The clouds settle over the Earth like a lid. During the day it’s like being in a pot full of water about to be boiled. It’s a welcome change from Los Angeles, where you can’t see the sky period. Where the night sky isn’t black and white, it’s vaguely orange. Where the entire sky looks like one big Northern Light (except you’re in the South.) In Santa Cruz, the fog hangs like cobwebs until about noon, when suddenly the sun shafts through and everything is burned away within a matter of minutes. It’s like watching the curtain rise on a magic show. In Los Angeles, the smoke and grime seem to intensify the sun, pulling it closer to the Earth, trapping and heating it until even shadows sweat. In Santa Cruz the sky is covered by fog. In Los Angeles, the sky is covered by smog.

I.
The most vivid part of the dream, the part that everything else seems to be hazily surrounding, is when Sally comes home from school one day and Alice is lounging on the steps outside her front door. Taking up the entire stoop like she owns it. It is the first time I have seen Alice in the flesh. She has stringy black hair and a stitched-up cut on one cheek. Her head is sewn onto her neck. She looks like a twelve-year-old junkie. Sally is so scared of Alice that she cannot get into her own house. She panics and doesn’t know what to do, so she decides to run away and hide until Alice is gone. It is then that she notices what is written on the wall next to Alice:
GO AWAY ALICE
Exactly like that, but with an ‘x’ dotting the I. And Sally realizes that she must have written it herself, at some point within the last two weeks, or two months, or two years, or however long it has been since Alice started haunting her. She wrote it herself, in a moment of madness, trying to get Alice out of her own head. It is not a strong statement. It is not a stern warning to Alice that she’d ‘better get out of town or there’s gonna be trouble’: it is a plea. A weak and desperate attempt to gain control of herself and rid herself of this nightmare.

II.
We have two choices before us: we can give up and give in to the downfall of America – allow it to collapse and crumble and become a crazy hobo on the sidewalk of the world; or we can fight. The trouble with fighting is that it takes effort: it takes character and strategy and cunning and all the things that we, as a generation, seem to lack. Sure, we have education. Sure, we have a smarmy attitude and great sales skills. But do we have the character it’s going to take to tie the American Empire to the Earth and make it something lasting? Or if we can’t make it lasting, can we at least leave something valuable behind? What is our Mayan Calendar? Where are our aqueducts? Do we even care?

III.
On my ceiling, I have a representation of the night sky. It took me about three days, when I was fifteen, to paint it. I cut out stencils from cardboard, saved money to buy spray paint, spent days on a ladder with a tiny paintbrush dotting stars onto my ceiling. Sometimes, when I go to bed, it is my lullaby. A sky full of stars sings the most beautiful lullaby when you are lying on your back with your hands behind your head. Other times, though, it is a map. Like a pirate, I can memorize the patterns and constellations, I can look through the pinpoints to the greater picture behind them. Usually, the way I see them depends entirely on how exhausted I am at the end of the day – if I’m tired, I’ll let them sing me to sleep; if I’m wired, I’ll sail off into an adventure (second start to the right and strait on til morning.) Sometimes, though, I like to force myself through exhaustion and into the next big adventure. It’s a test of my character, strategy and cunning. It’s a much more rewarding way to spend an evening than lying on my back with me hands behind my head, ignoring everything and seeing nothing, pretending to be asleep.

I.
So the little girl runs away down the street and huddles next to a brick garden wall or something like that, because she’s too afraid to go into her own house. Suddenly, the dream becomes a montage – all I see is the girl huddled next to the wall like a hobo, growing older and older. So time is passing – the seasons all lend their different hues to the picture (spring is green, fall is red, winter is stark and white.) She sits by the same wall until, at the end of the dream, she’s a very old, very fat, very bald man, whose head is on backwards and who walks on all fours like a crab with a head that looks up at the sky. The man wears glasses and is pitiful. The very end of the dream is almost an interview – a perky but severe-looking woman with a microphone is about to ask him questions about his life, but he just looks up at her with eyes full of regret and limps away.

II.
We are a generation huddled next to a brick wall, scared to go into our own house. At the end of this dream, when Barbara Walters sticks her phallus in our faces, will we tell her about the aqueducts we built, or will we simply look up at her, through glasses full of regret, and limp away?

III.
Four hundred million bajillion squadrillion years ago, that star to your right died. How long will it take for people to forget about you?