In what is quite possibly the stupidest shit posted on the Internet in the past week, John “15 Year Olds Dude” Derbyshire reprints a reader email which begrudges Sotomayor’s so-called “compelling life story.”
What the LIEbrulmeandia just doesn’t get (but the Derb’s reader does) is that being a Puerto Rican female raised by a single mother in a South Bronx housing project in the 1960s and 1970s is yet another example of the rich getting richer. A timeworn tale of privilege, legacy and gold fronts silver spoons.
Derb — I’ve been hoping that someone might be bold enough to rain on the Sotomayor “compelling life story” parade.
The woman grew up in the capital of the world, went to two Ivy League schools, and was blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment.
This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.
Word.
For me, on the other hand, life’s been a non-stop hustle from the jump: grew up white, male and middle class in the suburbs, raised in a stable two-parent home with money for college…I marvel that I somehow managed to make it out alive and not end up just another statistic. The shit, as they say, was of the realest variety.
Despite surviving that ordeal, my ceiling is as low as my birth.
If only I could’ve caught a break, lost my pops, seen my mom scrub some toilets and moved to the projects, I’d probably be John Roberts by now. Cause that’s pretty much how kids from the projects roll.
(via)
June 2, 2009 at 11:47 am
You aren’t kidding. The pressure rich WASP spawn face in prep school is unbearable: irregular Latin verbs, sucking at lacrosse, dorm bakedown social pressure, and where to sit at lunch.
Why, if it weren’t for acid-fueled safety-schools, we might have had to work in trades from the time we were nineteen.
June 2, 2009 at 5:10 pm
As someone I wish I could remember once said: I might have done much better from a broken home.
June 2, 2009 at 11:59 am
There’s help:
http://www.spoc.tv/tv-sketches/niggerette-video.aspx
June 2, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I cry foul! The laff track in the background is obviously ALL-WHITE!
June 2, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I want to see her birth certificate.
June 2, 2009 at 2:21 pm
fyi: Dough cube re-revisits Liberal Fascism, Revisited.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MzhhZjQ4OTJlNTNhMzI1ZmMyNGUxN2U3MDhiZmIwZjA=
June 2, 2009 at 2:55 pm
In the South of a bygone era, a term was used that has since spread to broader usage. It was a term meant to distinguish what many Southern minds saw as persons of superior color not fulfilling what they saw as the promise or pledge or privilege or prerogative (or all of these) of persons of the color they deemed superior. It was a term meant to indicate that these persons of allegedly superior color were acting in a manner that many Southern minds associated with persons of a color that they deemed inherently inferior or at least fortuitously oppressable.
The term was “white trash” (or, among the more backwoods uphill cognoscenti, “peckerwood/peckerhead”. I inferred, from the many instructions in “right thinking” that my mother gave me as a child, that this term meant ‘white niggar’.
Apparently, among Southern whites, one didn’t associate the n-word with white people even if one so associated the meaning thereof.
Parsing these distinctions as an adult taught me an acute appreciation of the finely subtle nuances of duplicitous doublespeech that is racially sensitive terminology of all sympathies and stripes.
Not that I ever met any persons of striped color myself, mind you, but I can imagine their existence and bemoan their plight.
Ah, Obama: if only your respective genetically derived colors were neatly divided down the vertical middle or, for those who like to think that persons of darker color are more focused on their lower half while persons of lighter color are more centered on their upper half, the horizontal.
Or, better yet for certain views of the situation, divided into neat prison bar black and white stripes. It would make for a nice super-hero/villain dilemma in the minds of some people who like to view the world in whatever Stan Lee comix-colored view of reality is currently available to their subscription.
Alas, poor Obama is none of these; his skin color divisions are imperceptibly divided in a pixelated scheme of neatly wrought grey-scale intricacy. (My acknowledgment to one Mitch Richmond, who long ago authored the expression “neatly wrought grey-scale intricacy”.)
While I wouldn’t (today, at least, but maybe tomorrow) stoop so low as to call John Derbyshire “white trash” or “peckerwood/head, I *will* call him an Honorary Redneck and applaud his willingness to git’r'dun, whatever it is he believes he is getting, r, dun.
June 6, 2009 at 5:51 pm
I thought it was ‘high yellow?’ Thank you for the education…
Disclaimer:
I am certainly not one to claim to be an expert in anything, by any means…
June 2, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Quoth Derbyshire o(r reader thereof? I don’t know how to properly distinguish):
“Show me a Montana girl of un-useful ethnicity who put herself through law school waiting tables, after being left with two young children when her Army husband was killed overseas, and I’ll start oohing and aahing over her compelling story.”
Insta-Google (aka ‘my fingers’), quickly found this:
“I have had the privilege of serving with Judge Sotomayor as assistant prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office almost 30 years ago. Judge Sotomayor and our peers were products of the Civil Rights era and Vietnam War generation, and became lawyers imbued with idealism and the desire to make the world a better place. Our desire to be prosecutors was profoundly influenced by growing up with television programs such as “Perry Mason,” “Dragnet” and “Naked City.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23203.htmlvia
Dragnet? What can I say, we Boomers are *weird*.
Alas, poor Sonya. Born in ’54 to “Juan Sotomayor,” (who) “had a third-grade education and did not speak English.[5] He was from the Santurce area of San Juan.[6][7][5] Her mother, Celina Báez (born 1927),[8] was from the neighborhood of Santa Rosa in Lajas, a still mostly rural area on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast.[7] They left Puerto Rico, met, and married during World War II after Celina served in the Women’s Army Corps.[9] He worked as a tool-and-die worker and she as a telephone operator and then a practical nurse.[10] Sonia’s younger brother Juan Sotomayor (born c. 1957) is a physician and university professor in the Syracuse, New York area.[11][12]”
Apparently neither her mother nor father had the decency to die in WWII, and her baby brother was regrettably fortunate enough to be born after the draft for Viet Nam had ended, after which we declared, for a nice (if unAmerican?) and restful period, a moratorium* on stupid wars that might senselessly kill or maim the husbands of upper crust privileged persons like Sonya.
Diagnosed with diabetes at age 8, she had to wait until she was nine years old for her father to unpatriotically die of a mere heart attack.
Sonya, in a fit of unpatriotic or privileged or bigoted pique, divorced her husband, Kevin Edward Noonan in 1983 before he had a chance to die in some ignoble war like the 1st Gulf War as an exalted 4-star general by an unfortunately mis-aimed gold ball on the Kuwaiti officers corps golf course.
*moratorium: massive irony alert!
June 2, 2009 at 3:45 pm
P.S. I grew up in public housing in Chicago. Mom had a hardlife in those early years. Nobody gave her nuttin’… ‘cept we the people whose tax-dollars subsidized those housing projects on Clybourn/Diversey (pretty nice, as I recall) and later, via Chicago machine politics circa Major Daley the 1st’s Golden Era machine politics, when a bit of door-to-door get out the vote politicking got her a job as assistant secretary to the President of the Chicago Park District.
we did pretty good after that, and then she married a fireman. Dare I say who paid his salary?* He was Irish-Catholic, by then no longer viewed by Northerners as ‘white *******’, not once Hizzoner duh Mayor was running the town, at least.
I visited that massive office often as a child. I don’t recall *ever* seeing a person of significantly dark color there except Gale Sayers, star Chicago Bears football player. The Park District office is literally located on the north end of the Soldiers’ Field stadium where the Bears played. Gale was something of their token black poster child in the late ’60s.
Persons of darker color were awarded jobs as what we once colorfully called ‘garbage men’ before redeeming them refuse collectors or solid waste removers.
*firefighter salary Let us ponder privatized fire fighters, shall we?
In distinguished Goldbergian summary:
White girls from Montana roolz!
Spic chicks from Jew York droolz!
June 2, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Quoth the Cubed Dough:
“Add to that all of the grief I got from the Left about it,” (Liberal Fascismo) “years before it even came out, and, yeah, its success is a nice vindication.”
Well, to his credit, nothing succeeds like succes. But then again, CAN Be Wrong:
White Chick Taught By Black Singers When She Was a Kid in the 30s
She totally kicks his ass. But wimminz weren’t allowed to shake their pelvises on TV back then, even when their image was truncated from the navel down.
June 2, 2009 at 3:59 pm
When I think of all the good men we lost back in my middle-class suburban white youth. Man, it’s gettin’ hard out for a honkie.
June 2, 2009 at 4:00 pm
honkie?!? Get thee to a mispellery, thou!
June 2, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Doughbob:
“What feels better than — or at least as good as — the commercial success of the book is the impact it’s clearly had. It’s very difficult to talk about fascism these days without at least acknowledging my argument.”
I believe Theeds are proof of this. And I say, with acknowledgment like that, who needs ignoble anonymity, eh? :)
June 2, 2009 at 4:08 pm
(from Niggerettes):
“..and listen to some John Coltrane…”
WHOAAA. Now that’[s mighty e-li-tist for a, you know, whatever that word is or might mean. Not the best and most defining kusic that USA ever produced? Not seriously elevated jazz?!?
As my Uncle Andy Taylor used to say to my great-Aunt Bea: “Cayn’t B.”
June 2, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Ah, Obama: if only your respective genetically derived colors were neatly divided down the vertical middle
There’s an old Star Trek episode like that. I hadn’t realised it was about Obama.
The implications for the wingnut peckerwoods are ominous. If they are truly to be 100% anti-Obamist, they need to be that other guy, the one who was white-black instead of black-white. But if they thus achieve their goal of pure anti-Obamism, they will themselves have a black side (albeit the other one). Imagine their consternation at being, y’know, 50% one of those people. Will they feel compelled to eat t-bones (if strapping young bucks), drive Cadillacs (if wingnut welfare queens) or (in all cases) demand more motherfucking iced tea?
June 2, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Straight Outta the Which Only Serves to Make My Point school of non-sequiturism:
(Goldy): “For instance, when I was writing the book, I thought there’s no way all of this horrible stuff I was reading by and about Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly could be right. I checked the sources over and over again, and for the most part restricted myself to credible, mainstream historians or primary sources. Still, I was waiting for someone to say, for example, “No, no, no: Goldberg gets Wilson all wrong!” But to date, I don’t think anyone has written a detailed, fact-driven defense of the guy. One left-wing blogger rolled his eyes and simply said it was silly for me to call Wilson a liberal, which seemed idiotic and a huge concession at the same time. When the New York Times reviewed the book, the reviewer didn’t even object to a single accusation against Wilson. In fact, he didn’t disagree with anything in the book until I got to FDR. Well, by the time I got to FDR, I’d said that Fascism was left-wing, that Hitler was a man of the Left, and that Wilson was a would-be fascist dictator. That seemed like a pretty big concession to me.”
(WikiAnswers answering the question ‘Was Woodrow Wilson a conservative or a liberal or a moderate and did he make concessions to any type of group for political gain?’):
“It depends upon” (from) “which era one is judging Woodrow Wilson. If one is judging him by today’s era then Wilson is fairly conservative; however Wilson embraced many policies that a traditional conservative would never approve of, namely internationalism, joining an international peace group (The League of Nations), fighting in a foreign war against a nation that meant us no harm, and spreading democracy.”
So Woody was, as Russel Kirk, acknowledged father figure of the post-WWII conservative movement would agree, a neo-conservative.
Further:
“The answer to your question really depends on how one looks at it. Wilson was certainly a moderate in his era and a conservative by our own. This is mainly because over time our society has moved farther to the left to the point where many liberals consider FDR to have been a moderate when in his own era FDR was considered far left.”
Key words: “our socialism” which see: socialism, etymology, essential underlying motives.
Today’s so-called “conservatives” are the most anti-social bunch I’ve seen since Nazis stopped attending parties where good rockin’ klezmer music might be played, however derivatively and diluted, by lederhosen oompah bands.
Neo-Conservatism is fin de siecle Liberal Fascism.
June 2, 2009 at 4:26 pm
“demand more motherfucking iced tea?”
J’a demande!!!
June 2, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Somebody needs to get a blog.
June 2, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I got one. For which see my handle highlighted in brown html or whatever passes for internet code these days. Maybe it’s really just high yaller? I need a life not a blog. Every loser in town has a blog.
June 2, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I don’t have a blog.
Am I doubled or squared?
.
June 2, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Omigod. I just checked my blog to see if this thread has inspired any response.
Is that simply way too sad or is that the spring leaf-bud of hope resurgent?
Inquiring fungi want to know…
June 2, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Part of my suddenly ongoing campaign to defend Josh G. by pointing out his unerring idiocies (which only serve to make my point):
“I think the larger significance of this is that liberals are either unwilling or unable to defend the roots of what we call liberalism, and that speaks volumes and lays down an important marker.”
Well, you know, I DO think Dickens is underrated, especially as an ardent anti-Semite. But this is not to defend his reprehensible defense of poor lower-class white people working for Slavic houses of niggerish poverty and ill repute.
As for that nigger-loving Abraham Lincoln:
“he Problem of Extreme Moral Conflict
The hope of liberal politics is that it can establish a tradition of fair dealing among people of different interests and views. At a minimum, when liberalism moves us to recognize that we usually have overlapping values, and overlapping stakes, even with those with whom we are at the moment in conflict, it makes it worth our while to deal with each other fairly. But the hope of liberal politics is more than this: it is that the habit of insight into the situations of other people that dealmaking and compromise encourages in us will move us to treat the tradition of fair dealing as itself a common interest and as the basis of a common moral life, a moral life which val-ues principled engagements across lines of difference. The ultimate hope of liberalism is that we will approach even our adversary dealings with each other not merely opportunistically, as occasions to talk our interlocutors out of more of what we want from them, but in a political spirit, as part of an investment in a structure of fairness which is an object of interest in its own right rather than merely a means of satisfying other interests. Interest may be a motivation for politics, but a polis-life, which involves the moral investments of different people in each other, is its purpose. It is common to think of large-scale cultural difference as the despair of liberalism, and to assume that liberalism is a kind of folkway that is only available in the West or in its cultural colonies. But cultural difference has been not the problem but the enabling precondition of liberalism since the end of the Wars of Religion (and indeed wherever people seek a modus vivendi among different traditions they invent something like liberalism). It is probably therefore a mistake to think of cultural difference as itself generally setting the limits to the availability of liberalism.”
Damn forked-tongue liberal lawyer. Bastard freed the…
June 2, 2009 at 4:41 pm
June 2, 2009 at 4:44 pm
When he was about 6 years old, my then kindergartenesque son, the one who now often calls me ‘Niggah!’, largely in reference to the fact that a) I am quite the male house servant and b) have always encouraged him to think for himself and behave accordingly, used to bounce-dance to this song on the conjugal bed whence he was first conceived, jumping high in the just in time to crash land and holler: FFFFUUUUCCCCKKKK!!!!!
I don’t think he even knew what a suburb was at the time.
June 2, 2009 at 4:46 pm
“high in the”… air. For those who are invisible substance challenged.
June 2, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I’ve probably posted this here before, because n one reads MY blog (as is meet) and I DEARLY love this itty-bitty Firesign clip:
because Everything YouKnow Is Wrong
(Gotta click the green text, muthahs. Anyone know the quasi html-code for ‘green’? Is it ?)
June 2, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Follow the yellow rubber line to your seat.
June 3, 2009 at 6:19 pm
In the next world, you’re on your own.
June 2, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Wanna learn how to make a bookcase out of a shoe box and a brick?
.
June 2, 2009 at 6:26 pm
U makah me laff out loud. Therefore you are now en route to Heaven, “which is already… in Progress!”
June 2, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Papoon for President!
Not insane!
June 2, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Don’t make me break out the killer lines from How Can You be In Two Places…
…like “… from the city of… EmphysemaH…”
Or No! No! Wait!
“Which one?”
‘The one w/ the ever -expanding hole in it…’
June 3, 2009 at 11:17 am
Hey, imagine how it is for me: white, middle class, nuclear family.
Nobody even believes me when I play the immigrant card and I have to jump up and down going, “but really, England’s a totally different country!”
June 3, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Are immigrant English being discriminated against? I mean is there a card to play?
June 3, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Meaning you’re still a White Anglo Protestant Male.
June 3, 2009 at 3:37 pm
No offense. I’m just curious.
June 3, 2009 at 3:35 pm
This is so handy.
http://www.republicanoffenders.com/index.html
June 3, 2009 at 6:34 pm
In 20 years, the kids will never believe it when people try to tell them what the ’00′s were like.
June 3, 2009 at 10:45 pm
I beg to differ with the right honorable Mr. curv3ball. This is the stupidest shit on the internet in, like, forever.
June 4, 2009 at 6:51 am
This has caused the committee to reconvene.
June 3, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Thas troo. Born in 1956, I still find it hard to believe that McCarthy got as far as he did, or the surreality of Eisenhower warning the republic to beware the military-industrial complex (as spiffy a 3-word definition of fascism as can be) in his farewell speech in ’61.
The 50s were too weird to comprehend.
The Oughts have been like a really bad made-for-TV movie titled If Idiots Ran the Nation in Its Time of Need.
June 4, 2009 at 5:38 am
It saddens me to note that the National Review Online is not regarded as the stupidest shit online, but it gladdens me to observe that it is arguable the biggest collection of turds to ever clog the intertubes.
I Not Mooslem!
June 4, 2009 at 11:40 pm
kenmeer: slow down, man. quality, not quantity, eh?
June 5, 2009 at 8:01 am
You don;t have to read qa word I write, Dr. M. The day I write any of this for *you*, I’ll let you know.
I beez mahseef: it’s what I dooze.
July 30, 2009 at 8:19 am
[...] of affirmative action – which doesn’t actually affect grades (and wasn’t she privileged to be born in the South Bronx housing [...]