Dreamgirls a DISSapointment

I finally saw Dreamgirls, after hearing about it since the early 80s and having Jennifer Holiday's "No-no-no-NO WAY!" in my ears for far too long, the only relief being Will Smith's hilarious, biting and telling imitation. She sings it with unparalleled drama, and the cast of the original and the film version obviously are wonderful artists all around, but to what effect? With what lesson do we come away from the theater?

I didn't know the plot or the purpose until I saw the DVD the other day. Now I see it is a typical Broadway manipulation of the audience's emotions. I'm reminded of Jonathon Kozel's remark that in the 1980s he saw people leaving "Les Miserables" in tears over the portrayal of the poor suffering people of revolutionary Paris, yet snarling at the real poor begging outside the Broadway theater.

But it's more than manipulation. Dreamgirls' manipulation is made all too easy by having a heavyset African American woman with little chance of success get up there and "pour her heart out", in the process losing all sense of self-worth and dignity. Quite a difference from the message in Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" in which she declares her independence and determination not to be stepped on. We've come a long way - sort of.

People in New York have long been willing to pay good money to see colored folks lose their dignity and pride and minds on stage. The most incongruous moment was when Eddie Murphy as James Early drops his pants in the middle of his last song; just didn't make sense. Are we expected to believe that's what black folks do when they get too excited, even when they're on national tv?

I for one did not finish the DVD inspired or uplifted. My impression is that this is a typical example of West Side Story syndrome: a few European American folks got together and wrote up a storyline of life in the ghetto, a modern Porgy and Bess. I wonder if African Americans would have written the story and the music and the lyrics in just the same way? And if they hadn't, would Broadway still have invested in the show?

At least one other observer has found Dreamgirls to be somewhat racist.

Electric car vs Ferrari

Electric cars are slow? Not this one. Makes a Ferarri and a Porsche look like turtles.

World's Tallest Tree:

A beautiful film about this giant, 115.55 meters tall, in Prairie Creek Redwood State Forest on the Northern California Coast. I visited neighboring redwood preserves the same summer the tree was discovered (2006).

Useful: War Hurts the Economy

This Washington, DC, Center for Economic and Policy Research report documents the fact that war causes economic decline, contrary to popular belief.

After VT: Expecting the Worst

I wonder if the VT massacre will lead to a backlash against Asians? Is the race problem in America so severe that we have come to expect such a thing?Apparently the answer is yes. VT students of Asian decent left campus within a day or two after the incident, expecting the worst.

Racism has become routine, like dealing with hurricanes and tornadoes.

Making Racism Illegal

At the heart of the debate on the racist and sexist comments of Don Imus is the question: Where do you draw the line between acceptable free speech and unacceptable, illegal hate speech?

Before we can deal with that question, there is another: Is it even possible to legislate love and morality? The answer to this has usually been a resounding no. People’s hearts cannot be changed by the passage of laws, for no laws on matters of the heart can be enforced. So the reasoning goes. But a close look at American history shows that this widely accepted reasoning is simply untrue.

America legislated matters of the heart time and time again. Countless laws were passed to institute hatred and hostility where none existed. Our history is crystal clear: for the first five decades and more of slavery in North America there was no instinctual feeling of hostility between Africans and Europeans. Quite the contrary was the case. The two populations united so readily that by the 1670s slave owners feared they might lose slaves as a class. The children of black and white parents, so-called mulattoes, were far less likely to submit to slave culture, far more likely to rebel. It was as if calves and colts would simply walk away from the farm, an investment become lost because it gains a mind of its own.

The slave laws, and the later Jim Crow laws, were instituted to create systematic hostility between Europeans and Africans where none had existed before. They legislated that Europeans should hate Africans – and that they should love only Europeans like themselves. Social engineering at its worst.

So yes, you can idea legislate love and hate. But how to fix the Imus case? Simple. We make racism illegal, but we preserve First Amendment rights. If Don Imus wishes to use racist language that is his right under the First Amendment. But he does not have the right to jeopardize the community by subjecting the public to them. Free speech is a privilege and a responsibility. When speech becomes a danger to the public good then it is legally banned – the old “yelling fire in a crowded theater” analogy.

People who like to drink alcohol have the legal right to drink it; they do not have the right to drink it to excess and drive on public roads. People who hate have the legal right to speak racist statements; they do not have the to do so over public airwaves, for this, to mix analogies, would be yelling fire in a dry tinderbox.

What Imus Needed

Is it possible that the Don Imus show tends to cross over lines into offensiveness because there are no strong African American voices in the administration of the show? Wouldn't this fire be put by the diversification of the staff to include highly qualified people of African American and other non-European backgrounds?