Oprah a Victim of Racism? Not Necessarily

I suppose you boys have heard about the shop clerk in Zurich who refused to let Oprah see a handbag:




Oprah, naturally enough, thinks the clerk was prejudiced against her race, but your Head Trucker (who, by the way, is the same age as La Winfrey) is here to tell you that it ain't necessarily so.

When I was 21, on my one and only visit to Paris in the hot, dry month of August thirty-seven years ago right now, one day on the Boulevard Haussmann I wandered into some fancy store selling ladies' goods, thinking I might pick up a little bottle of parfum to take home to my mother as a gift. There was a long glass counter case full of paints and powders and such, and shelves behind full of every brand and variety of smell-um-good, in all sizes from tiny to enormous.

I saw some small bottle with an intriguing name - perhaps Bal à Versailles - and asked the youngish clerk behind the counter, Pardon, Mademoiselle, combien ce coute? She seemed to be following the conversation between another clerk and customer six feet away, but otherwise she was just standing there, doing nothing. With an admonitory look, she turned to me and said, Oh, c'est très cher. And turned away from me, just like that.

And I thought - you nasty little bitch. I was clean, well groomed, presentably dressed, and even used my best schoolroom French; there was no reason for her to brush me off that way. Granted, I was young, but for all she knew, I might have been J. B. Gotrocks the IVth, and loaded with dough enough to buy the whole goddamn store. Snotty little shit of a girl, being snooty just because she could.

Well, maybe someone else gave her a comeuppance sometime or other - I certainly hope so. The other shop clerks I dealt with in Paris were all perfectly nice, and I did eventually get Mama a little flask of her favorite cologne, at Galeries Lafayette, I think it was. But this is exactly the same thing that happened to Oprah, and there was no racism involved - just sheer snobbery and arrogance.

It occurs to your Head Trucker that the same kind of thing probably happens in New York and Los Angeles too, in the tonier shops, but I've never been to those places - have any of you fellas experienced such a thing in these United States?

Get Over Yourself, Mary

Via Andrew Sullivan, Time magazine on the now-discredited cult of self-esteem and its results:

New research has found that self-esteem can be just as high among D students, drunk drivers and former Presidents from Arkansas as it is among Nobel laureates, nuns and New York City fire fighters. In fact, according to research performed by Brad Bushman of Iowa State University and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, people with high self-esteem can engage in far more antisocial behavior than those with low self-worth. "I think we had a great deal of optimism that high self-esteem would cause all sorts of positive consequences and that if we raised self-esteem, people would do better in life," Baumeister told the Times. "Mostly, the data have not borne that out." Racists, street thugs and school bullies all polled high on the self-esteem charts. And you can see why. If you think you're God's gift, you're particularly offended if other people don't treat you that way. So you lash out or commit crimes or cut ethical corners to reassert your pre-eminence. After all, who are your moral inferiors to suggest that you could be doing something, er, wrong? What do they know?

Self-esteem can also be an educational boomerang. Friends of mine who teach today's college students are constantly complaining about the high self-esteem of their students. When the kids have been told from Day One that they can do no wrong, when every grade in high school is assessed so as to make the kid feel good rather than to give an accurate measure of his work, the student can develop self-worth dangerously unrelated to the objective truth. He can then get
deeply offended when he's told he is getting a C grade in college and become demoralized or extremely angry.

What I Say: Didn't we learn all this on the playground, early on? You remember the bullies who stole your lunch money, don't you, and never doubted they were kings of the hill? The same with the utterly snobbish and snotty Greek boys and girls in college. And the whole country-club set, and the shitty store clerks, and on and on . . . they all think they are just wonderful, you know? Self-esteem is not the fucking problem.

It just goes to show, once again, the eternal need for what my mama called "plain old common horse sense."

Update.  Of course, a prime example of an interstellar gap between self-esteem and actual ability is Sarah Palin.  Who, Joe Jervis reports, has just signed on with Fox News, no doubt for a handsome sum - more than any of you shitkickers will ever see in your life, I bet.

 

Yeah, it's photoshopped, not the real thing.

But sometimes a well done parody conveys a certain truth better than the real thing, you know what I mean, boys?

The Get-Out-of-Adultery-Free Card

Brit Hume's smug, sneering come-to-Jesus plea directed at Tiger Woods gets raked over the coals by Olbermann and a radical-sex-advice-columnist faggot.  Way to go, Dan.



So many things I could say here, boys, but I'll confine myself to just one:  ya notice how these straight white skirtchasing men have it all set up so's they can fuck around all they want, when and where they please, but still get to heaven in the end?

Right.  What a convenient religion, huh.  For them.

Of course, the Old Testament prescribes death for adulterers, the same as for homosexuals.  But oh of course the first one doesn't apply anymore, you know.  Only the second.  Right . . . .

Update:  Evan Hurst writes a brilliant resposte, complete with scripture quotes, at Truth Wins Out; an excerpt:

. . . if we look at the fruit borne by so many born-again Christian leaders on the subject of infidelity, what we find is that we’re in quite a smelly orchard. Now, the Evangelical Christian stock response tends to be, “Well, their conversions must not be real!” How utterly convenient. The point is that born-again Christians don’t have any better track records on such matters than any of the rest of the population. Barna Research Group (a very Evangelical-friendly source) studied divorce rates and found that, indeed, conservative Christians have a far higher divorce rate than liberal Christians, atheists and agnostics. . . .

So, the contention of the original piece, that the on-air proselytizing of Tiger Woods by Brit Hume toward Christianity is absurd, stands. The data is in, and it shows that, for situations like that of Tiger Woods, a change in religious affiliation wouldn’t be likely to have any appreciable effect on his skirt-chasing behavior. The only thing it might do is give him an air of superiority and a more sharpened ability to pretend he didn’t just bed that pretty lady he met last night.

More data from this survey and others on divorce among conservative Christians at ReligiousTolerance.org.

P.S. - I really don't give a rap what Tiger did or didn't do.  He's a man.  He screwed up.  Like many millions of others all down through the centuries, in every clime and country.  BFD.  Not a news story.  Let him and the missus sort it out, it's not worth my time and attention.

Narrow-Minded People

One of Sullivan's readers, a Texan, makes this revealing observation after moving from Houston to San Francisco:

Having spent about year here -- in my experience, San Francisco is a gorgeous, historic, exciting city. But it is not an open-minded one.

For all the yuppie/hippie tension, there's really only one mindset, and you wear it like a uniform. Lighting up a cigarette at a party is frowned up. Suggesting that hey, maybe the free market can do things better than the federal government is heresy. And the insularity is shocking: New Yorkers love their city because they think it's the greatest in the world; people in San Francisco seem to love their city because they think everywhere else sucks. . . .

Not that everyone in Houston agrees on everything -- God, no -- but paternalism and condescension were rarely part of the conversation the way it is here. Maybe it's a "Middle America" thing, or maybe for some reason living in a smoggy, flat city just teaches you cultural humility. Either way I'll enjoy spending my 20s here, but when it comes time to raise my kids, I'm definitely buying a house back in Houston.

What I Say:  Texans are proud of their independence; and generally speaking, they respect your right to go your own way.  Your Head Trucker has never been to California, and has no particular desire to go there.  But every once in a while one of those types drifts through here, and they are just as offensive as any fundamentalist.  Your Head Trucker hates being told what he "must" think or how he "must" act; and the only uniforms I like are the ones you play in.

Which just goes to show what human nature is like:  it's entirely possible to be just as much an asshole on the left as on the right.  And all assholes stink.

On a related note, Sullivan publishes numerous excerpts from readers' comments on Southern culture that are very enlightening.  Some of them are written by Yankees, and of course they fail to get it entirely right:  you fellas have been misunderstanding us ever since day one.  But some comments are right on the money, as this excerpt from a Southerner shows:

I was raised Southern Baptist (still practicing, or at least doing my best) in a county that had only one red light (still probably only has about 10 or so). One thing that most people who are not from the South, simply cannot fully appreciate about many parts of the South, is just how deeply religion permeates the culture. I don't mean this in a bad way, it's just that, for many people who live in very rural, small towns, the church, and their church family, is..simply put... a deeply significant part of who these people ARE.

There are no museums or opera houses, concert halls, or live theater in these small towns. Just one generation ago, there were no counselors; the local church provides ALL of these functions. The local church pastor IS the counselor many turn to. The Christmas play is the ONLY "theater" many of these people have ever seen, or care to. This past year's Easter pageant IS the concert outlet for them. Now this is not true everywhere in the South, you will find splendid museums in Nashville, and dozens of music and theater outlets in the megapolis of Atlanta, but small-town, rural areas that make up much of the South's countryside are definitely like this. This is why, criticizing or challenging one's religious beliefs in the South is tantamount to challenging their entire life and culture.

Of course, things are very different now; every home, even the poorest, has color television (I guess that shows my age, when I specify "color" - a thing my family never had till I was 21), and usually an Internet connection; and of course there are movies and cell phones and big-box stores and all the paraphernalia of modern life, even in remote towns like the one I live in. And of course, there are Interstates and automobiles: small-town people do get to the big city for shopping and even for "culture" now, much more often than their grandparents did.  Lots of people here in North Texas work in the Metroplex and commute a hundred miles or more every day back to their home towns.  So they aren't nearly as isolated as they used to be.

But as the writer says, a generation or two ago - down until the time of the Andy Griffith Show, whose Mayberry is really a tribute to a way of life that was vanishing even then - until the 1960's, white anglo-saxon protestant culture in the rural areas of the South, which is to say 90 percent of the region from the Potomac to the Rio Grande - was largely church-centered.  As I heard an Episcopal priest say once, "When you grow up in the South, you end up being half-Baptist whether you want to or not."  Pretty true.  And that attitude, that culture still lingers on down here in the backwaters of the modern world.  Trust me on this one, guys.

The Oral Roberts video I posted yesterday - that stern, uncomprehending, dominating attitude to everything that was not handed down from one's grandfathers - was the way life was when I was growing up.  You had to conform and be like everybody else, in large part; or get your ass out of Dixie, as bumper stickers in the 60's used to warn.

I used to be fiercely proud of my Southern heritage.  You boys from the frozen North don't really understand about having a separate, distinct subnational identity like we do.  It took me till I was past 50 to really and truly see it for what it is; and I'm over it now.  The South is a green and pleasant land, a place of charm and beauty and history:  but built upon centuries of hatred, ignorance, and intolerance that turns my stomach when I think about it.

But in a way, that leaves me as a man without a country, because I still can't identify with being a Yankee (which is different from being an American) - and if y'all heard my Southern drawl, you'd agree wholeheartedly, I tell you what - so who am I now?  Maybe I'll blog more about that sometime.

Beau Soir

Seeing a Barbra Streisand CD offered by Joe.My.God for his "Swag Tuesday" giveaway somehow reminded me of her Classical Barbra album that I bought and enjoyed many years ago. I thought I'd share my favorite from that with you, a lovely piece to close out the evening.

Side note: One time in college I briefly dated a tenor, the darling of the music department, who starred in their productions at the college theater. One night I had him over to the house and played this album, thinking he would enjoy the classical pieces; but oh how he hooted and hollered and turned up his nose at that awful sound Barbra was making - oh that's terrible, she's not doing it right, he said, smirking and grinning like an ape. He did this with every single song on the album.

Which rather spoiled the evening for me.

At the end of that year, his degree completed, he went on to New York to have his big career. He never wrote or called. But it does give me a certain satisfaction to be able to report to you that after all these many years, everybody still knows and loves Barbra Streisand.

But nobody has ever heard of Jim B. again.

And so, my friends - good night.