Is it me or is Leo DiCaprio looking more and more like Clark Gable these days?
DiCaprio has the outsized swagger and glamour of Old Hollywood. Maybe it’s unfortunate that he’s so “big.” He’s ambitious as an actor, but looking at The Departed or Blood Diamond, his aura overwhelms the character he’s playing. Plus the movies themselves are terrible, but that’s a different story.
Filed under: culture
Growing up in New England, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were characters from a place and time I didn’t think or know much about – namely, the “Old (pre-war) South.”
Racist character stereotypes in advertising were not limited to Southern imagery however; I’m old enough to remember packets of “Injun Orange” juice drink mix, and The Frito Bandito was familiar too.
Don’t miss this incredible slide-show by David Segal at Slate
It traces the history and context of various, and often virulent, racist language and imagery in American advertizing.
Here is Segal on the origins of Aunt Jemima:
| Looking for a way to sell a self-rising pancake mix, Chris L. Rutt conceived a jolly ex-slave who lived on a Louisiana plantation and made legendary flapjacks in the days “befo’ de wah. Eventually, she’d be boycotted by the NAACP, attacked by Langston Hughes, and belittled by Public Enemy. But this quintessential “mammy”—a black woman who lives to nurture, clean, and cook for whites—was a marketing phenomenon from the start, mythologized in ads painted by N.C. Wyeth and impersonated by actors who toured around the country. One had a permanent residency at “Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House” in Disneyland. |  |
Fire up the Tivo, or just be home on Wednesday, April 25th at 9:00pm to catch a devastating expose by Bill Moyers of the US media during the run-up to the Iraq war.
The program is called Buying The War. Here’s the link to PBS - check your local listings!
Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher has a great preview of Moyer’s main allegations here.
It is now clear to almost everyone – not just those who opposed the war from the start – that the US media performed almost no independent, responsible reporting in the months leading up to the start of the war in march 2003. Print and TV reporters offered virtually no images of killed or wounded civilians, asked no hard question of the war’s most avid proponents, and ignored evidence that could undermine the case for WMDs.
A snippet:
There’s much more in the article, and the show sounds like it will make for eye-opening, if painful, viewing.
It’d all be criminal if it wasn’t so sad. And vice versa.
Filed under: politics
Today five men on The Supreme Court – none of whom are physicians – upheld a ban on late-term abortions. This procedure, deemed medically necessary in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is now illegal.
We should be clear here: Some women will suffer terrible physical and emotional harm because of this decision. Others will die.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote the dissent:
The NT Times editorial page made a separate, equally important point:
I’ve been away from the blog for a little while, but here’s a bunch of things that will prove worth waiting for.
This NYTimes article by Alina Tugend about ‘crazy-busyness’ offers a handy list of reasons we over-schedule every second of our lives:
¶It is so easy with cellphones and BlackBerrys a touch away.
¶We’re afraid we’ll be left out if we slow down.
¶We avoid dealing with life’s really big issues — death, global warming, AIDS, terrorism — by running from task to task.
¶We do not know how not to be busy.
And on a different topic, we see that David Hicks, the Australian Gitmo detainee who had accused his American captors of torture, will be handed over to Australia officials as part of a plea deal. The deal requires him to agree to some strange conditions:
From the NT Times:
The sentencing followed a day of proceedings in the first case under a 2006 law that authorized military commissions to try some detainees designated as enemy combatants. Those proceedings included Mr. Hicks’s amplifying on his guilty plea, acknowledging that prosecutors had the evidence to prove that he had been a trainee of Al Qaeda who, armed with an AK-47, was prepared to fight Americans in the Afghanistan conflict of 2001.
David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo sums it up nicely:
