President Obama’s second term cabinet is being criticized for not being diverse enough. Clearly, for example, victims of American drone attacks would much rather get killed by a secretary of defense who was African-American or Latino than an Ivy league-educated white male.
In the United States, frank discussion of race is sent through he same delusion-blender as discussion on abortion, which is why neither issue ever gets resolved. Everyone in Obama’s cabinet is the exact same color: green, the same green that money is. And they’re all on the same point on the gender-spectrum: that point where power and control are what really get the juices flowing.
If you go through the old textbooks, you can see it defined as sadism. But that’s an old-fashioned term that’s fallen out of favor. I wonder what would happen if anyone who has ever been a CEO or similar level executive on any company was barred from public office.
And let’s not forget, the minority groups that the non-white-male cabinet member is a member of will, of course be thrown under the bus when it comes to actual policy. . . and if you threaten political reprisal in response, faux liberals and Serious People will screech like stuck pigs.
After all, the rightwing democrats will say, the cabinet is diverse.
The other issue, of course, is that racism in the United States is not over by any means, it’s just shifting to other brown people. In 20 years, I’m sure we’ll have some new group to replace all the Muslims and subcontinental Asian people that we’re being conditioned to be scared to death of right now.
The problem with the shift, however, is that you end up with the previously discriminated group having a period of lack-of-credibility. Twenty years ago, if you discriminated against a gay man, you had the opening of a good story at the bar after work. You do it now, and you are going to find yourself on the receiving end of a whole lot of court papers.
Still, gay people get discriminated against all the time. But in the public’s mind, gay discrimination is over. So when someone appoints a gay man, a lot of people have a “why do they keep bringing this shit up” reaction. The gays have equality (goes the thinking), so why is being gay still getting them special advantages?
So government will continue to appoint black people/gay people/whatever people, and leverage those distinctions. Why? Because it helps government avoid the collective population from figuring out: Hey, that gay guy, that black woman, that left-handed albino in the wheelchair? They’re all fucking assholes. They’re all prostitutes for big business and special interests. Why the fuck aren’t these people representing us?
And the reason for why they don’t represent the majority? If you’re gay and of a certain age, you understand what it’s like to be gay and hate it because people call stupid, lame things “gay.” If you’re black and of a certain age, you recall quite clearly — from a first-person perspective — when there was no such thing as “nigga” and “nigger.” It was just “nigger” and it was filled with hate every time. If you’re in a wheelchair, you still contend with every other frickin’ building having stairs. The New York subway is an ordeal if you’re in a wheelchair. The libraries, the museums, almost all the public places make you slot yourself into a little freight elevator so you can get in.
And unless you’re a saint, about a million times in your life, you’ve promised yourself that if you ever get power, you’re going to make everyone pay for every indignity. And then you start trying to isolate yourself from your own group, because you don’t want to have to pay back the debt of all that collective anger that allowed you, in part, to get to power.
As an unemployed person who is about to go down the crapper, I prefer the Secretary of Shoving People Down the Crapper to be at least one kind of Bi. It will console my dying brain as I lie freezing in the gutter while Harry Reid, John Boehner and Obama negotiate the next Democratic give-a-way for no reason.
Thanks for this well-deserved slap to the face of the self-described left who take no issue with atrocities committed by the products of their diversity projects.
Good old Glenn and the fallacy of the un-excluded middle. Just because I think we have far, far, more pressing issues to deal with then drone strikes DOES NOT mean I take “no issue” with them, in point of fact.
Quick sex changes and painting with various tints are in order for Mr Obama’s cabinet, so that criminal polices can be launched by a groups that better represents ethnic and gender diversity in the US….
Publication Date: March 13, 2018Order at Amazon!He thought his church career was drawing to a close. Then he was asked to take over a Catholic Church in crisis.Religiosity was in decline in the West. And the Catholic Church was in bigger trouble than any other institution you could think of. Losing parishioners, shrinking in power and prestige and discredited by corruption and sex…
Publication Date: December 12, 2017Order at Indiebound!
Order at Amazon!
Order at Barnes and Noble.Legendary infiltration journalist Harmon Leon is at it again, this time teaming up with ferocious political cartoonist Ted Rall answer the question most of America has been asking: "What the hell happened in 2016?" In their new book, Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America, Leo…
Publication Date: July 26, 2016Order at Amazon!Everyone in America thought they knew Donald Trump: the real estate magnate, reality TV star and bigger than life personality lived his life in the tabloids. Little did they know - though he hinted at it repeatedly - that he planned to take American politics by storm. This graphic biography explores the little-known episodes that helped form…
Publication Date: January 19, 2016Order at Amazon!As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders was surrounded by grinding poverty that turned families against each other as they scrimped and saved to pay their bills.Bernie saw politics as his chance to give a decent life to everyone, not just those born to wealth or the lucky few who hit it big. But the Democratic Party and the co…
Publication Date: August 25, 2015Order at Amazon!As many as 1.4 million citizens with security clearance saw some or all of the same documents revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Why did he, and no one else, decide to step forward and take on the risks associated with becoming a whistleblower and then a fugitive? Rall's all-comic, full-color biography delves into Snowden's early l…
An independent account—in words and pictures—of America’s longest war from the beginning of the end to the end of the beginning.I traveled deep into Afghanistan—without embedding myself with U.S. soldiers, without insulating myself with flak jackets or armored SUVs—where no one else would (except, of course, Afghans).I made two trips, the first in the wake of 9/11, the next ten years later…
How did a charismatic young president elected in an atmosphere of optimism and expectation lead the United States to the brink of revolution? From a chance encounter in the early 1980s to the Democratic primaries of 2007-08, I was one of the first to size up Barack Obama as we know him now: conservative, risk-averse and tone deaf. In The Book of Obama I revisit the rapid rise and dizzying fall of…
A revolutionary manifesto for an America heading toward economic and political collapse. While others mourn the damage to the postmodern American capitalist system created by the recent global economic collapse, I see an opportunity. As millions of people lose their jobs and their homes as the economy collapses, they and millions more are opening their minds to the possibility of creating a radica…
This autobiographical graphic novel is a collaboration between me (my story, my writing) and Bluesman cartoonist Pablo G. Callejo. Travel with me to 1984, the year I lost everything. The place is New York City. In the space of a few months, I got expelled from Columbia University, fired from my job, arrested for drugs that weren't even mine, dumped by the girl I thought was The One, and evicted. I…
My fourth cartoon collection collects the work that made me America's most controversial cartoonist. Here are the classic "dirty dozen" cartoons that shocked and awed newspaper readers after 9/11: "Terror Widows" and its sequels, "FDNY 2011," the Pat Tillman series. There is also a lengthy introduction and commentary, which includes behind-the-scenes looks at the hate mail and death threats that p…
This is the book I wanted to write instead of To Afghanistan and Back — everything you ever wanted to know about Central Asia, without having had to attend grad school — but didn't have time. Five years later, I was able to release my Central Asia brain dump, a book anyone can read cold and come away understanding the importance of the region and why it's so interesting.
Comprising travelogue, po…
The final volume in the "Attitude" trilogy of alternative cartoonists is dedicated to the first wave of webcartoonists (cartoonists whose work is exclusively distributed online). Includes interviews, cartoons and personal ephemera about some of the most exciting artists to lay pen to paper — or stylus to Wacom. Here you'll find political cartoonists, humorists and dazzling graphic experiments, and…
"Generalissimo El Busho" is my chronicle, in essays and cartoons of the most polarizing presidency in modern American history, a tragicomic week-by-week dissection of the Bush Administration's follies and crimes.I've traveled to Third World trouble spots,so I recognize a dictator when he see one. Having seized power extraconstitutionally, Bush and his cabal of corrupt businessmen made it obvi…
My first all-prose book marks the beginning of the end of my belief that the Democratic Party was redeemable. Although I have come to believe that moving beyond the duopoly is necessary, liberals and progressives who have not followed me down the radical path will find much to like here.Declaring that there hasn't been a "real" Democrat in the White House since Lyndon Johnson, I decried the hi…
The second installment in the "Attitude" trilogy of interviews, cartoons and photos of America's top alternative cartoonists emphasizes cartoonists who deploy novel approaches to humor and the comics medium. Politics are still important, but take a back seat to social commentary in this collection.Includes the work of well-known artists like Aaron McGruder, who draws the daily comic strip "Boo…
The result of painstaking research and analysis, "Gas War" is the definitive behind-the scenes story of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAP) project. Conceived during the 1990s under Bill Clinton, the idea was for the United States to control the vast, newly-tapped Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves — which by some measures exceed those of Saudi Arabia — by building an oil and gas pipeline from Turk…
"The New Subversive Political Cartoonists" is the first volume in my '"Attitude" trilogy: the definitive record of the political cartooning scene that exploded in alternative weekly newspapers during the 1980s and 1990s. It features interviews of, cartoons by and photos and ephemera about 21 ground-breaking alternative political cartoonists who revolutionized the form. The Iowa City Gazette called…
The first book about the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan is also my first work of comics journalism, a mixed-media "instant book" comprising a 50-page "graphic novella," photos and essays.When bombs began falling on the Taliban in the fall of 2001, I traveled to northern Afghanistan, where I spent three weeks covering the U.S. bombing campaign for The Village Voice and KFI, a Los Angeles radio st…
A collection of 150 of my political cartoons published between 1995 and 2000. These pieces tackle the disappointments of the Clinton years, popular music, the dot-com boom to screwed-up relationships. I added commentary below most of the cartoons to place them into historical context.Search and Destroy includes cartoons from my transition from obscure alternative publications to big national m…
One of my personal favorites, but also my worst-selling book, this graphic novel is a homage to/parody of/updating of George Orwell's novel of totalitarian oppression 1984. I faithfully attempted to follow the structure of Orwell's classic with a new take on twisted take on dystopia. The threat to our freedom isn't some totalitarian tyrant — it's our own, lazy, easily-distracted selves, wallowing…
In the United States, frank discussion of race is sent through he same delusion-blender as discussion on abortion, which is why neither issue ever gets resolved. Everyone in Obama’s cabinet is the exact same color: green, the same green that money is. And they’re all on the same point on the gender-spectrum: that point where power and control are what really get the juices flowing.
If you go through the old textbooks, you can see it defined as sadism. But that’s an old-fashioned term that’s fallen out of favor. I wonder what would happen if anyone who has ever been a CEO or similar level executive on any company was barred from public office.
And let’s not forget, the minority groups that the non-white-male cabinet member is a member of will, of course be thrown under the bus when it comes to actual policy. . . and if you threaten political reprisal in response, faux liberals and Serious People will screech like stuck pigs.
After all, the rightwing democrats will say, the cabinet is diverse.
Tokenism: the gift that keeps on giving.
The other issue, of course, is that racism in the United States is not over by any means, it’s just shifting to other brown people. In 20 years, I’m sure we’ll have some new group to replace all the Muslims and subcontinental Asian people that we’re being conditioned to be scared to death of right now.
The problem with the shift, however, is that you end up with the previously discriminated group having a period of lack-of-credibility. Twenty years ago, if you discriminated against a gay man, you had the opening of a good story at the bar after work. You do it now, and you are going to find yourself on the receiving end of a whole lot of court papers.
Still, gay people get discriminated against all the time. But in the public’s mind, gay discrimination is over. So when someone appoints a gay man, a lot of people have a “why do they keep bringing this shit up” reaction. The gays have equality (goes the thinking), so why is being gay still getting them special advantages?
So government will continue to appoint black people/gay people/whatever people, and leverage those distinctions. Why? Because it helps government avoid the collective population from figuring out: Hey, that gay guy, that black woman, that left-handed albino in the wheelchair? They’re all fucking assholes. They’re all prostitutes for big business and special interests. Why the fuck aren’t these people representing us?
And the reason for why they don’t represent the majority? If you’re gay and of a certain age, you understand what it’s like to be gay and hate it because people call stupid, lame things “gay.” If you’re black and of a certain age, you recall quite clearly — from a first-person perspective — when there was no such thing as “nigga” and “nigger.” It was just “nigger” and it was filled with hate every time. If you’re in a wheelchair, you still contend with every other frickin’ building having stairs. The New York subway is an ordeal if you’re in a wheelchair. The libraries, the museums, almost all the public places make you slot yourself into a little freight elevator so you can get in.
And unless you’re a saint, about a million times in your life, you’ve promised yourself that if you ever get power, you’re going to make everyone pay for every indignity. And then you start trying to isolate yourself from your own group, because you don’t want to have to pay back the debt of all that collective anger that allowed you, in part, to get to power.
As an unemployed person who is about to go down the crapper, I prefer the Secretary of Shoving People Down the Crapper to be at least one kind of Bi. It will console my dying brain as I lie freezing in the gutter while Harry Reid, John Boehner and Obama negotiate the next Democratic give-a-way for no reason.
Thanks for this well-deserved slap to the face of the self-described left who take no issue with atrocities committed by the products of their diversity projects.
Good old Glenn and the fallacy of the un-excluded middle. Just because I think we have far, far, more pressing issues to deal with then drone strikes DOES NOT mean I take “no issue” with them, in point of fact.
Ted,
I keep running into a database connection error problem. Here’s the link to fix the problem.
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-the-error-establishing-a-database-connection-in-wordpress/
Whimsical, nonsensical again.
Despite its brevity, the meaning of my statement seems beyond your grasp and over your head.
Minorities in leadership fail to make better lives even for the minorities they claim to represent.
Clear enough for you?
Glenn — I believe you hit a nerve.
Quick sex changes and painting with various tints are in order for Mr Obama’s cabinet, so that criminal polices can be launched by a groups that better represents ethnic and gender diversity in the US….
Henri