Bizarro Jerry

Holy cow, readers, what kind of bizarro world are we living in these days, anyways?

Darth Cheney is supporting gay marriage.

President Obama is refusing to release detainee photos

Michael Moore is a millionaire. GM is bankrupt.

Eminem has a sense of humor. (Seriously, I mean, wow, who’s next? Sean Penn?)

And white men are the victims of racist Latina women.

You know, I remember when the CTA finally put wheelchair lifts on the city buses in Chicago. At the same time, they also tore out several rows of seats in order to make a sort of wheelchair cubby – they’re everywhere now so you know what I’m talking about. But I remember, many years ago now, the first time I saw the new arrangement put to use. Many other riders that day were transfixed by the sight of the man being lifted in his chair by what I must admit was a very slow mechanism. Everyone was kind of staring. And this middle-aged businesswoman standing beside me made a point of looking at me and rolling her eyes. “I don’t understand why they can’t have their own buses like before,” she said. “They slow everyone else down, and if they hadn’t torn out all those seats for them, then we could be sitting down right now.” She paused, and then narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t you think so?” she said, rather aggressively.

“I think,” I said “we should get down on our knees and thank our lucky fucking stars that we can walk onto this bus on our perfectly functioning legs.”

Okay, maybe I didn’t really say that. Maybe I’ve only spent the last twenty years formulating the ultimate trepverte response. Maybe at the time I only glared back in a sullen twenty-something way. But even back in my sneering, snotty, black-clad, self-absorbed salad days, readers, I knew she was an asshole. Even I knew that.

And I feel similarly about the LEGIONS of white dudes who are complaining about the “racism” of SCOTUS nominee Sonya Sotomayor. It’s just so unseemly. It’s just…so fucking obscene that a white man, or a white woman for that matter, would hear the following quote:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

and would have the gall, the unmitigated fucking gall, to call it “racism,” instead of – hey, I’ll say it – instead of…truth.

Because isn’t it true? Isn’t it?

If you’re having trouble with her statement, perhaps it might help if you consider that she might very well have had someone like our current chief justice, John Roberts, in mind when she spoke about that nameless white male. Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote in The New Yorker:

“In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.”

Yes, it’s quite a record. No doubt influenced by his background and his heritage as a proud white male Bush campaign supporter and general legal toady for the right. That kind of influence is apparently okay, however, the influence of an upbringing that takes you from the Bronx projects to the Ivy League to the federal bench – fuckin’ Latina fuckin’ racist, y’all.

And if you buy that, then I got a La-Raza-is-the-Hispanic-KKK to sell you, cheap.

Also, I would just like to state once and for all, for the record, that no matter how many times the yammering idiots on TV say otherwise, you cannot substitute “white” for “Latina” or “black” and prove racism. It just don’t work that way. There are, as I noted previously, LEGIONS of bitter white dudes out there who desperately, desperately want it to work that way. But it don’t. It ain’t so black & white, white dudes. “It’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand” is not okay. “White power” is not okay. The National Association for the Advancement of White People is not okay. And if there were one, and you called it “The Race” (La Raza), it would be SO not okay that I’m pretty sure the Feds would be knocking down your fortress walls and blasting your compound with Jay-Z (with special guest Ciara) in order to make you and your similarly brainwashed comrades come out with your hands behind your heads, you fucking redneck racist AK-7 totin' motherfuckers.

Deal with it. And while you’re at it, get down on your knees and thank your lucky fucking stars that you were born white and male in a time and place where it remains, by far, the easiest thing to be.