At the moment there is an emergency meeting of congress to discuss to future of Terry Schiavo. I will not discuss my issues with that to begin with, I’ll leave it for thousands of other bloggers, although it seems ridiculous to me that this is even going onto a higher court and so much effort is being placed on this one woman, personally I think that the parents’ desperate desire to keep her alive is a selfish act.
But this is about the news networks covering the debate. Right now, at this moment, our elected officials are conducting a debate on the floor of congress; it is a Sunday afternoon, millions of people are sitting down after dinner, turning to this major story. Instead of allowing us to watch our representatives debate, we watch pundits debate the issues of what is being discussed on the floor! The worst part is that they leave the video running on half of the screen on mute! So you know that there is a debate, a real, political debate going on, but that’s not important, the stupid fucking inane punditry is more important. Moreover you know that these pundits aren’t even watching the debate, they’re talking over it as if they’ve already seen it and have come to conclusions.
Unfortunately my building provides only C-SPAN2, not C-SPAN1, so I can’t even watch it there, on top of that, my computer is suffering from a broken headphone jack so I can’t hear anything online either [sigh]. I hate new media when it doesn’t work for me.
And just to top it all off, they don’t put the names of the representatives up when they do allow them audio time. Rather they continue to print the banner “house vote on schiavo bill expected within minutes.”
So I went to this show at The Mint last night and, well I starting getting very angry and depressed. Now that I think back over it, I was PMS-ing, so that probably had a lot to do with my emotional overreaction.
There were so many beautiful white women there that I began to feel, well…
Imperfect.
Welcome to LA where image towers over substance and I began thinking, it really doesn’t matter how much substance you have or what you have to offer, if your image isn’t perfect, you don’t have a chance. And my image will never be perfect because I’m not white. I guess I’ve been doing too much work in the area of race lately, race and beauty:
Race Ethnicity and Beyond
I became consumed by this last night, and began having overly emotional intelligent discussions, which often degrade into me hating society’s expectations and my inability to meet them. I began to bandy about the term “pretty white girl.’ I guess I’m writing this because I feel slightly guilty about it. I didn’t realize that “pretty white girl†could be a derogatory statement, especially when that’s what I wanted for the longest time.
Or maybe subconsciously I recognized that it was a derogatory statement, and I used it inappropriately in a bully fashion to hype myself up. Either way, it was wrong.
I realize now that “pretty white girls†recognize their position as such and what that means in our culture. Yeah, postmodern self-reflexivity! Funny how most of the things we desire most, are the things that other people are desperate to be free of. I think maybe I was just intimidated by them.
It’s a shame too because I started to have a potentially amazing conversation with a smart, sexy woman, who happened to be white. I think I opened with a confrontational statement, but that was the Jagermeister talking [smile]. Hopefully she’ll forgive me because I’m terribly interested in the experience of the Other.
NOTE: The Other is a psychoanalytical term which states that the Other is not the Self, which can exist with respect to all aspects of identity including gender, race, sexuality, etc.
Definition of the Other
I think I want to start integrating this term into my lexicon as a cultural studies term. My Google search has yielded only logic definitions. At the moment, my working cultural studies definition is this:
The consumption assumption assumes that first and foremost, we are consumers. Above all else, ethnicity, class, religion, occupation or location, we are consumers. This assumption is used regularly; it plays off of our most internalized needs and desires (many of which are media-induced) and encourages us to behave in certain ways. In the same way that being a dedicated New Englander may cause one to drop $500 on Red Sox World Series Tickets, or being a dedicated father causes one to purchase a new home security system; being a dedicated consumer causes us to be particularly affected by advertising that plays on our desire to consume, and little else.
Please respond with any and all thoughts or offerings.