A Japanese dog and the Tea Party

This afternoon, Ryu and I walked the usual circuit around downtown. We approached the corner of Eighth Street and River Avenue where two people stood slightly bent forward, looking at a crop of tulips. The tulips are out en force before the first week in May. The woman in the pair had a camera in her hands, the man mimicking her movements but without a camera. They wore matching blue jeans and Pittsburgh Steelers windbreakers. Tourists. The two, seemingly satisfied with the documentation of the floral samples inside this one planter, straightened up in time to see us arrive at the corner. Now, before the story progresses, I want to share a useful set of metaphors prefaced by a bit of information.

First, Ryu is a beautiful dog. People across the age range and genders make cooing sounds when he prances past. If he and I are stopped at an intersection (or anywhere, to my chagrin, because he’s relieving himself), people exploit the interlude as an opportunity to pose a set of boilerplate questions: is it a boy or girl, what kind of dog is he, how old is he, is he friendly, where did you get him, my gosh he is so cute, can I pet him? Those questions belong exclusively to the realm of Yes and No, save for the ‘he is so cute’ bit which, of course, is not a question. To that, I grin and feel aggravatingly single.

Oh, the metaphor. Ryu is a total magnet. Were he a human and minus the leash, I’d be his wingman. (Full disclosure: I’ve never been a wingman. I had to read Urban Dictionary to confirm the word choice.) The situations wherein people tell me that he’s cute, what options exist other than to say “thanks,” comment in agreement, or provide a perfunctory grin? I can’t deny or lie that he’s a fucking awesome looking dog. Still, hello? How about some attention on the end of the leash wearing pants? Society -- and by that I mean the popular media -- teaches that animals ought attract attention to their carer. A dog projects a manner of unselfishness onto their human and, in Ryu’s case, a sense of style. So far, in a year, I’ve had not one bite. Which is unfair (and I don’t mean the pun). Always the wingman and never the... not wingman? How does that old saw work in the structure of the bridesmaids cliché...? Let me know, ladies.

I should note that walking downtown has practical and tactical value. Schlepping into town extends our range of both exercise and recognition. He and I walk a lot farther when in town than during our usual neighbourhood trek (at least, it seems farther, for his need to lift a leg every 30 seconds). He also gets to ‘chase’ the abundant foraging squirrels in Centennial Park absent my anxiety of car traffic. The downtown excursion is also tactical in that should Ryu ever slip away -- which his breed notoriously accomplishes like tragic Houdini-dogs -- it’ll give some comfort that a slew of people in both our walking areas would recognise a happily running Shiba Inu and know which weeping man to find.

Returning to the Steelers fans. The light to cross Eighth turned prohibitive as I came to a stop next to them. The woman’s face registered the familiar ‘I’m going to ask questions about your wonderful dog’ expression yet the man’s voice hit me first. “Is that a husky?” he asked. I looked at him, registered him as perhaps in the late 60s and, looking back to the now crouched woman, responded in the negative. “He looks like a baby husky,” she says from the balls of her feet looking at Ryu who is next to me and two feet from the couple. “No, he’s fully grown. Six years this summer,” I say. The man insists that Ryu looks like a husky. It’s then that a recognise his tone: matter-of-fact, as though the situation were switched and Ryu were in their care and I posed the questions. How odd. He asked whether Ryu is friendly, to which I deviated for the first time from the standard “yes,” to “he is friendly if you are.” When the man kept still and said “I’d better not risk it then,” I noticed a politically themed button on his baseball cap: white numbers 9 1 2 superimposed over an American flag. The white numbers sparked a backwards process of adding up the events of the past 1o seconds. These people are Tea Party activists. Holy shit. This hit me with force. The woman, still crouched and all smiles focused on Ryu, asks what ‘kind’ of dog he is, and I share that “he’s a Shiba Inu, a Japanese hunting dog; kind of like a fox.” She stands up yet remains looking down, enraptured. The man says, “well he can’t be Japanese or else his eyes would be all slanted.” I look not at the man’s face but at his political button. The Eighth Street crossing light turns. “Nos cruzamos, Ryu,” and we walk toward the park. The couple go east.

His eyes would be all slanted. The strange old man said that about my dog. My Japanese dog. Several issues here.

One, I’ve never encountered a self-identifying Tea Party activist. Last week I saw a white SUV parked outside the Curragh Irish Pub festooned with Michigan Tea Party magnets. I made mental note that the crazies are arrived. ‘Take back the government’? What does that even mean? It’s right there: where we the people elected it. My sole exposure to Tea Party supporters otherwise is through newspapers and the internet. If one discounts their leaders Palin, Limbaugh and Beck, the rank-and-file seem like average rednecks: poor, under-educated and racialist. Yet, the New York Times recently released a survey disproving that stereotype... at least, the poor portion. The survey also suggests that Tea Party supporters possess an average level of education (in 2010 America, what in hell does that even mean? I know college students who cannot conjugate a verb). Perhaps I’m on the wispy end of the 1970’s culture wars but possessing an education infers that one is aware of social acceptabilities. If Tea Party activists are indeed of average income and education (but totally racialist), then it boggles the mind to consider what for this man is socially taboo if describing Japanese things as ‘slanted’ is comfortably safe. Perhaps his mental calendar flips perpetually between 1944 and 1985?

Second, the man applied a human physiology to a dog without a discernible sense of irony. Slanted eyes - Japanese humans - Japanese dogs. I honestly don’t get the connection. Japanese people do not have slanted eyes. Their eyelids, like many East Asian people, have a double crease. So, yeah, not correct. The physiology of dog eyelids to their original nation makes no goddamn sense and negative a thousand sense in connection to the humans of that geography. Maybe this point links back to number one up there because, call me old-fashioned, an educated discerning person would not have made the inter-species analogy. It’s fucking clumsy, embarrassing.

Third, the man said the horrible bigoted comment in a didactic tone one uses when correcting a simple mistake. Try this exercise at home. Have a person say aloud, “we now have a lot of children so should by a Toyota coupe.” Then, you respond aloud with “no, we shouldn’t buy a coupe because it only has two doors.” Sounds reasonable, right? A sedan is defined by its having four doors and a coupe, two. No big deal here. Now, in that same tone say “well he can’t be Japanese or else his eyes would be all slanted.” Please, please tell me that you feel the wrongness of the words. English speakers should hear a similar wrongness of language not so much in tone as in time with the mistaken conjugation of ‘saw‘ and ‘seen‘ (I seen a Prius accelerate suddenly and then smash into an Audi vs I saw a Prius accelerate suddenly and then smash into a no you fucking didn’t you litigious liar, shut up).

The stinky cherry atop this anti-social cake is point four: he presumed that I wouldn’t taken offence to his comment. This upsets me most.

The bigot presumes that others of their group share their prejudices; therefore, all white guys are equally bigoted. NO. NO! That logic isn’t logic: it is racist. How does that obvious truth escape racialist people? This is an older, white married man ostensibly not from this city who yet possesses the peace of mind to conclude that an unknown white man also accepts bigotry. The adjective ‘unknown’ ought to activate his brain’s crucial ‘keep the questionable comments inside’ mechanism, but in this case the unknown might as well be ‘nephew.’ And that ‘quality’ about bigotry terrifies: the implied familial-like cohesiveness of racial identity. Remember, he and I are total strangers to the other. What we had in common are skin colour, language and shared space of an intersection. Yet, out of the stranger-ness this man found in me a familiar identity based on skin colour. That shared identity enabled the forging of a sufficient bond for him to comfortably share that horrible comment. His assuming my tolerance in hearing bigotry presumes that all white people are bigots -- that all white people think the same. Exactly zero white people agree with that presumption! Even crazies agree, if asked in a a sensible manner, that not all crazies think the same kind of batshit crazy. I’d bet other people’s money that this bigot would emphatically conclude that all whites do not think the same. He is a shameless racist and I am a heathen sodomite, yet we’re both white. ¡Viva la diferencia! No racial/ethnic/cultural/gender/sexual group appreciates that totality of prejudice by another group. Remember the calendar reference up there? It’s 2010 for fuck’s sake. But, go ahead and test my argument: replace any group in the gap in the following sample sentence as a test. ________ love to go shopping. Blacks? Racist. Asians? Bigoted. Persians? Ditto. Women? Sexist. Homos? (oh... shit...) Homophobic.

What is the take away from this experience? I walked into Centennial Park with Ryu, the scene familiar: sunshine and trees, squirrels and tulips in the city I chose to call home. Yet, I felt different. A strange man infected me with his racial presumption. For the first time I felt bad for being white. The comment about my Japanese dog looped me into a colour-bound prejudice that I did not fight. It happened suddenly. I was unprepared. It took place in public. Whatever. The truth is that my goddamn liberal insistence on the goodness of people cloaked the man’s vile nature until too late. I acted in response to a traffic light instead of in defence of principles and so suffered in the aftermath. This is an education.

Ryu seems unaffected, I am pleased to report.

The semester ending

Two weeks remain in this semester. Tomorrow is the last meaningful class. I didn’t plan beyond the 16th. Luckily for the students, they get two weeks to meet with me in conferences and revise their major papers. Whether they *do* is another matter.

The department chair offered two summer courses. Two. In summer. That’s fucking amazing for a couple reasons. Summer courses are plums usually taken by full-time faculty and part-time faculty with a high seniority level. To get a single course during summer is a minor miracle. To get two looks more like a Godsend. I thanked the chair profusely and empathically accepted the positions. The classes are serendipitous for timing and placement. A 101 is full-summer Saturday morning course in the Grand Rapids main campus and the 102 meets in Holland, a Summer II course in session Tuesday and Thursday from 6-9p. That neither class conflict with JCI schedule or require a shake-up of my newly earned personal life, is a cause for celebration. The income? Also great.

My current students, the ones which stuck out the challenge, will go into their next level courses far more prepared than their counterparts. It sucks that the semester ends right after I memorised their names.

I keep losing weight

I lost approximately thirty pounds since January of 2008. Here is a list of changes that I believe lead to this loss:

Converting to vegetarian
No longer eating fast food
No longer drinking soda/carbonated beverages
Cutting out fried food
Cooking more at home (this waxes and wanes)
Switching work shifts from 4p-Midnight to 10a-6p
Joining a 24hr gym
Daily protein shakes
Reading labels in the grocery store

My weight hit 180lbs last year. This week, the gym’s medical scale (see how I eliminate possibility of error?) read 152. I ran an extra half mile to celebrate. Tonight I celebrated a little more in the form of a gluten-free chocolate cake slice at Uncommon Grounds in Saugatuck. The added bonus of being amongst feathered-hair lesbians makes the scenery change a welcome one.

Despite the possibilities I might cite when people ask whether I’ve lost weight (and how), I usually claim a tapeworm.

Face burn

So, goddamnit, my face is burned. I don’t know what caused it but entertain a theory. My dermatologist prescribed Retin-A for acne. She advised the lowest dose due to its nasty side-effect of drying and irritating the skin. Retin-A sleeps with the group of medications whose side-effects are possibly worse than the condition they treat. The advice says to use Retin-A at night in sparing amounts, only enough to lightly glaze the face, and only at night. Sunlight exacerbates the irritants, making Retin-A the evil twin of sunblock. Even at night though the doctor told me to follow application with a moisturizing creme -- nothing brand specific, but anything hypoallergenic and preferably containing aloe. Four times per week I put on the meds followed by a liberal dose of St Ives creme. 10 days back I noticed a strip of red roughly following my beard-line on the right side of my face. It itched like crazy. I reckoned my skin was telling me to trim a little, so I did. After trimming my beard I then noticed my cheek’s left side looked normal. Neither region gets a Retin-A application (for obvious reasons). I didn’t think much of it until the redness showed up around my eyes. Ten days since the first notice of red, neither patch disappeared despite my reducing the Retin-A to twice per week and applying the St Ives every night.

Today I trolled websites looking for advice. Most people in a similar situation described redness lasting two weeks. They used Neutrogena products as moisturizer. One woman with whom I empathised completely described her red face as sufficiently embarrassing to keep her home-bound. The redness caused such embarrassment that going into public was off-limits. Jesus, do I understand that. My acne would flare so suddenly and viciously that, just months back this happened, I refused to go into public. I’d skip Krav Maga classes, insist watching DVDs at home instead of going to the cinema, making coffee at home rather than risk the stares at Lemonjello’s. Facial acne during teen years is one thing (and expected), acne at 30 is another fucking game altogether. And it’s another fucking world as a gay guy -- where looks are paramount. Anyway, I lost faith in the St Ives creme -- in part for it seeming to make the itching worse - and am heading to Meijer later to find Neutrogena. I had a personal embargo against Neutorgena products back in the late 90’s because of Norway’s resumption of whaling. I’m refusing to look up this issue right now for entirely selfish reasons.

Atavism

I promised myself years ago to write a response to William A Henry’s 1994 book In Defense of Elitism. Phil recommended that I read it, so I promptly bought it. It then waited on a bookshelf for a year. I’ve read it twice, the most recent one recently. This post is not the self-promised response to the book as a whole but rather of a single paragraph. Henry’s finest paragraph lies almost hidden and unassuming within his most controversial chapter, “Affirmative Confusion” whose topic any any reasonable person can deduce. The paragraph is reproduced below (with all due respect to Henry and his publisher’s intellectual and property rights):

The error is in looking for a group basis, a categorical basis, for pride. One’s worth and self-regard ought to come from individual competitive performance, not from group identity. Pride based on clan or tribal connections is atavistic. It appeals to people who fear they cannot succeed as individuals, and by diverting their energies it all but ensures that they will will not succeed as individuals (91).

The chapter is obviously addressing American Affirmative-Action programs. Henry claims from his position of anti-egalitarianism that the AA programs play into group identity politics to the detriment of all involved. Blacks, he writes, will subsume individual responsibility to the quota system. That instead of studying, hard work, building social connections, and community service upon which one builds a platform for future (and continued) success, individual blacks will rely on the quota system to guarantee a position of employment. Whites, then, will notice less-qualified blacks working amongst the professional ranks and wonder why a double standard exists for excellence. The resulting tension pushes racial reconciliation even further down the timeline instead of the intended sooner. The pernicious, camouflaged land-mines of identity politics litter the ground on which American racial groups are destined to share. AA programs result in, according to Henry, an atavistic impulse amongst contemporary generations of Americans. People for whom the Civil War and Civil Rights are chapters in high school textbooks instead of lessons on social revolution experience present racial problems in a cognitive dissonance. In other words, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and whites reach backward, rummaging through history’s closet, and from their group’s narrative derive their individual attitude. White’s (rightly) say that neither their families nor themselves owned slaves, voted to segregate Asians along the coasts, or used Hispanic nannies. Blacks will reach back to conjure up the spirit of oppression -- none of which matters to Hispanics and Asians. Hispanics wonder aloud why blacks deserve special programs when Hispanics constitute a larger slice of the population and have that whole language barrier to work out. Asians, well, I don’t know enough about Asian-American culture positions to say (and frankly, neither does Henry). The atavistic impulse that Henry disdains is individual’s use of historic events on a racial/ethnic scale as rationale for present individual problems. In other words, the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. If a black woman, Hispanic man, white man, Asian woman cannot qualify for professional and secure jobs, the applicant should not cast a net backwards to find explanations. The problem does not lie in the past but in the present. One’s resume is nearly all that matters in our time, not our excuses.