Combat! - Page 269 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Let’s compare two instances of contemporary blackface

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized May 9, 2012 8 Comments

Scandalously, all these girls are actually Kulap Vilaysack in whiteface.

Now that Twitter and an HBO sitcom have finally convinced me that racism exists, I see it everywhere. It’s like when you first learned who Black Eyed Peas were: you thought that you were being followed by a child reciting nursery rhymes while someone tried to drop pinball machines on her, but actually that’s a song. Racism works the same way. It’s everywhere and bad, but some of it is also maybe kind of okay. It so happens that the last month in popular culture has given us two examples of blackface, one of which is the bad kind of racism while the other is okay—by which I mean okay, still probably bad. Video of Ashton Goddamn Kutcher after the jump.

Finally, Shepard Smith is creeped out

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized May 8, 2012 4 Comments

httpv://youtu.be/YuF03PTNpp8

Years of cognitive dissonance seem finally to have broken through Shepard Smith’s head membrane at its weakest point, his mouth. For those of you who threw away your GOP primaries character chart, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were enemies. Strangely, of all the obviously not true things Mitt Romney has said this year, “Ann and I are proud to call Newt and Callista friends” is somehow the most galling to me. Don’t lie about who your friends are. Just because the Republican Party has to form back into Voltron now doesn’t mean they all have to be friends; you can endorse someone politically without endorsing him personally. I don’t want to read too much into this, but the fact that Shepard Smith still has a job after this impromptu, on-air editorial regarding the fundamental nature of politics might tell us how psyched Fox News is about candidate Romney. I’m going to say roughly as psyched as Ann and Mitt are about Pictionary at the Gringriches’.

A theory of rhetorical ethics

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse May 7, 2012 4 Comments

Friday afternoon, The Heartland Institute announced that they would stop running this billboard over the Eisenhower Expressway. That’s Ted Kaczynski, who worried about man-made climate change in his manifesto before he rendered the phenomenon nonexistent by mailing bombs to scientists. The ad was to be part of a series featuring public figures who expressed belief in global warming, including Fidel Castro, Osama Bin Laden and Charles Manson. It was to be classy. Then a bunch of debate-team types called in and forced them to cancel it, which—as Heartland’s press release explains—was what they wanted all along. “This provocative billboard was always intended to be an experiment,” Heartland President Joseph Bast said through his press agent. “And after just 24 hours the results are in: It got people’s attention.”

Friday links! Same planet, different worlds edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links May 4, 2012 1 Comment

Once again, Joy Behar cuts right to the essence of the story.

So yeah—Oral Roberts has a gay grandson, and his name is Randy. An ordinary person might find humor in the names Randy and Oral, just as he might predict that at least one lineal descendent of television’s most virulent homophobe would be gay. But Oral Roberts is not a normal person, and the whole thing blew his mind. One forgets that although we are all on the same planet, we live in emphatically different worlds. It’s Friday, and one person’s foundational assumption is another’s stunning discovery. This week’s link roundup is about the difference between how we live—and, by extension, how we assume others live—and how they actually do. I think you will find it touching and disturbing in turn.

Understand southern rap with this purple drank video

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media May 3, 2012 7 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b_Wzxo3wZY

Behold “Drank In My Cup,” which I first encountered in remix form on the excellent 2 Chainz & Future mixtape Codeine Astronauts. Be warned that Codeine Astronauts is perhaps the most ridiculous mixtape ever, albeit in delightful ways. One of the many entities involved in its release is Ticketmaster Tapes, so on the download version a white voice periodically says “Ticketmaster tapes! Real quality street music!” in the middle of the song. It kind of makes it all better. There is also a skit in which Big Moe discovers that some unscrupulous fellows have put Karo in the drank. Hilarity/violence ensues.