the stupid season

Good old double standards, what would our world be without them? Maybe next year we'll achieve independence from idiot columnists, but apparently we're still suffering. Happy July Fourth.

Did you miss the California Diaries? Here.

I have a lot of things on my mind, but I can’t seem to sort them out what with this goddamned summer weather. First of all is a lot of thinking I’ve been doing about a man named Lewis Grossberger, a man who writes things for Mediaweek. Mr. Grossberger has a sense of humor, and he used it as an excuse to call Col Allan bad names. Col Allan is the editor of the New York Post, a newspaper of no small renown at which I used to work.

Yes he did, right in front of God and all the media toadies who read that trade rag – he called Col Allan a “hairy sasquatch from the Outback”.

In other news, Jimmy Breslin, a man who strings incoherent sentences together for Newsday, thinks he has a sense of humor, and he also weighed in the other day with lots of outrage because the New York Post gave his recent novel a bad review, assumedly in retaliation for his expressing outrage over the fact that the Post would fire Lisa Baird, it’s only black editor, who also happens to have cancer besides being black.

Jimmy “The Ozone Park Bruiser” Breslin was challenging Col Allan, whom he called an “alien who needs a green card” to a war of words. He was trashing Allan’s Australian-ness, and generally expressing his dislike of Rupert Murdoch, who, as anyone without their head down a foxhole knows, is Australian as well.

There are so very many issues that I could explore here, so many things I’d like to say, but more important, I think, than going down the road of why-is-the-liberal-media-so-goddamned-afraid-of-free-speech, I’d like to take a moment to point something out that is not a problem exclusive to this situation, but a problem that plagues the American Media in general.

That is: Who, in this grandly, nauseatingly ‘correct’ nation, gets to decide which nationalities are allowed to be made fun of?

A case in point: The Sopranos. I love the Sopranos. It’s a great show. Lots of Italians are outraged. The media, right on down from the uber-liberal New York Times, told the dissenters to get over it.

If HBO announced a new show depicting Mexicans as sombrero wearing drug-dealers that broke out into a lusty rendition of “Mi Corazon” after a long day of drug dealing or whatever it is that drug dealers do with their days, everyone would be disgusted, and people like Jimmy Breslin would be first in line to register their distaste.

If a columnist columned, expressing his outrage over the recent influx of check-cashing joints and fried chicken outlets in his irish neighborhood, blaming the ‘blacks’ whom he wishes would just ‘go back to Africa’, well, that would be unspeakable, wouldn’t it?

How could I even even think to say such a thing? Well, what the hell’s the difference between calling a someone a sasquatch, whether he be from the desert or the outback, the rainforest or the jungle?

Why, the other day, was I drawn into a discussion between a greek-american and a black co-worker, a lively little bit of chatter, the subject of which was the Germans and their general despicableness. Having lived in the Vaterland for longer than I care to remember, I had plenty to add to the discussion, but I couldn’t help but wonder – is it okay to trash the Germans because Hitler was evil?

If we're indeed permitted to trash cultures that are responsible for atrocities committed against humanity, well, ninety percent of the world is fair game.

I’m Polish. Where do people get off trashing the Polish, saying how stupid we are? We’re not stupid, we’re just disadvantaged, we’re victims of The Man, that government that is holding our people down.

I’m so very tired. When will we stop being hypocrites? Either you can or can’t take cheap shots at people’s ethnicity. And that’s another thing. You can’t say “Ethnic” when referring to “people of color.” And what are people of “color?” I’m of color – I’m pink as the sunset over the New York Harbor outside my window is red.

So very, very, tired. I have to stick my head under a faucet, and pray for the Dominicans to shut that hideous Spanish Music off, I have to get over to KFC before the gangbanger scene spills over from the neighboring projects into the parking lot where undoubtedly, there will be lots of malt liquor being consumed.

Oh dear – am I being insensitive? Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson from Jimmy Breslin, the lesson in which I was supposed to learn that it’s okay to make cheap shots at other cultures if and only if the other cultures are white.

So..very..tired.