You Big Dummy

A couple of weeks back, while on the Upper East Side of Texas,* we were leaving the largest and finest Wal-Mart in Wood County just as an intense-looking, muscled-up 30ish black man was heading into the store, pushing an empty shopping cart. As we drew closer, we noticed the guy, who had a faint resemblance to the actor Tim Reid in his younger days, was wearing only a T-shirt (in addition to pants and shoes, of course, and possibly socks), even though it was, literally, 23 degrees F outside. Then his T-shirt registered: On it was emblazoned a picture of Red Foxx-as-Fred Sanford, and underneath Red/Fred’s familiar mug was one of Fred G.’s signature epithets/catchphrases, either “Dummy” or “You Dummy” or “You Big Dummy” (we forgot our notebook and memory subsequently has failed us). We drew down on our storehouse of stereotypes––it is quicker, as George Clooney said in that movie––and a couple of quick orienting thoughts sped through our mind: “This guy must spend all his free time pumping weight––he’s gotta be a fireman,” and, ““This guy’s too young to remember seeing Sanford and Son, except in reruns.” As we passed into the man’s proximate space, the sheer frontal absurdity and classical timeliness of the message caused us to smile a friendly smile and let loose with an audible snort of a laugh, but the guy just shifted his eyes ever so slightly and shot us a look that we interpreted, probably wrongly, to say, “Not up for any BS today, my man” or, “I’d just as soon stab you in the heart as contemplate your continued existence.”**

We doubtless were way off-base, and it’s possible, even likely, that this hardy dude wasn’t aware of our presence and was actually looking off into space, yet the cognitive dissonance brought on by the guy’s hard look and the fun-stering T-shirt message caused us to immediately abandon plans to politely inquire about what we were dying to know: “Where can we get a shirt like that?”***

Instead, we kept on pushing out into the cold, bearing our White Man's Burden.

*A coinage we have ripped off, wholesale, from County Line Magazine.

**Come to think of it, Foxx’s schtick-in-trade, before TV rounded off his rough edges and transformed him into the lovable but irascible junkman, was full-frontal hostility, as we learned from brief but sustained exposure to his pre-Sanford “party records” while in high school. These were then deemed “adult” or “off-color,” although they more aptly were referred to as “dirty” and might even still be “dirty” by today’s lapsed standards. It’s unlikely, though, that Foxx’s Sanford banter with the comedienne La Wanda Page would be permitted these days, since it was premised on dark-skinned and extremely unattractive Page’s Aunt Esther being hectored and insulted (“You belong in the zoo!”) by Foxx, who of course was light enough to be known as “Red.” Who says humankind has made no progress?

***As we suspected, it is available on the Internet. Where else?

Blood’s Thicker than Mud: It’s a Family Affair*

When it comes to Gatesgate—the mock “scandal” that, having persisted long past its acceptable expiration date, is beginning to emit an unhealthy odor—our sympathies, limited as they are, lie with the cop. Unlike in this closer-to-home incident, which, based on the available public record, appears to have been an actual, authentic case of RACIAL PROFILING, one with near-lethal consequences for the profilee, the Cambridge, Mass. officer was not out trolling the streets for innocent black men to arbitrarily stop and hassle but was instead dutifully responding to an emergency call—one in which the race/ethnicity of the allegedly, possibly, but possibly not suspicious "gentlemen" (suspicious, that is, to the neighbor who didn’t recognize her neighbor—goddamn, lady!) was not even clear to the caller.

The best take on L’Affaire Gates has been one we initially saw voiced by none other than Mika Brzezinski, the comely sidekick to cable TV’s Morning Joe (it's probably been articulated elsewhere, we dunno), who suggested that had it been two women at the house in Cambridge the confrontation would ended much differently, or wouldn’t have grown into much of a confrontation at all (to which we’d say: most likely, but of course it depends on which two women you’re talking about). To embellish Brzezinski's theory with further truthiness we’d note that the two men in this manly meeting of the minds—a tall Boston-Irish cop and a short Harvard professor—are doubtless conditioned to being constantly deferred to by other men during the course of a normal day (cue T. Petty’s Won’t Back Down). Still, we must wonder what sort of Harvard professor would tell a cop, “I’ll step outside with your mama,” as the cop claims Henry Louis Gates did. (Answer: One who knew he could get away with it.) It’s a shame that Red Foxx is no longer with us, for many reasons—one of them being that he will not be available to portray Gates in the upcoming straight-to-DVD movie “High Noon on Ware Street.”

Having had some first-hand experience in police-community relations as a young person (a young white person), we know damn well that had we, even at our advanced years, suggested that we’d like to pursue a sexual relationship with a police officer’s mother, we, too, would not have beaten the ride downtown. More than likely we’d find our self face-down on the concrete with a bony knee in our back.

It was, of course, unwise for our president to wade into the matter, and in such seemingly uninformed manner, but as part of his lifelong quest to establish his bona fides as an Authentic Black Man he must occasionally offer up a little something for the brothers and sisters. Still, his gracious recovery the following day—and his manning-up and calling the officer from the department he had accused of acting “stupidly”—was welcome, and of near-perfect pitch. As for those Republicans fanning the noxious odor by calling on Obama to apologize to the cop: Yes, Obama should apologize, right after Bush and Cheney stand up and apologize for Iraq.

*Truism once propounded by Sly and the Family Stone, a multiracial musical combo from the late 1960s that later disintegrated because of the bandleader’s taste for cocaine.

Words Fail Her (And Us)

We suppose Wednesday’s “no contest” plea by Priscilla Slade (looking strangely like a younger version of Sanford and Son’s Aunt Esther in the daily newspaper’s front page photo of Thursday) brings her saga of taxpayer-funded home makeovers to an unsatisfactory conclusion, but as Official Grammarian-in-Residence of the Greater Houston Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area we remained unsettled by the tortured illogic of the “statement” the former TSU president was forced to deliver in court before she was allowed to, as she put it, “move on with my life to bigger and better things.” It was a strange little ditty that went something like this: "

"I accept responsibility as the president of Texas Southern University with regard to the expenditures described in the indictment as misapplications and not ensuring that Texas Southern University policies were followed. If I had the opportunity to do things differently, I would do so. My thoughts and prayers are with the Texas Southern University family to whom I apologize."

Ordinarily, a person admitting guilt or seeking credit would say she “accept[s] responsibility … for” some deed, not “accept[s] responsibility with regard to” the deed. The deletion of the preposition “for”---and you can bet it was deleted in whatever negotiations led to the parsing of Slade’s statement---also renders the second half of the first compound sentence nearly incomprehensible: “I accept responsibility … with regard to … not ensuring that Texas Southern University policies were followed.” Then check out the way the crimes for which Slade “accepted” responsibility with regard to are described: “the expenditures described in the indictment as misapplications … ” We know that "no contest" is not an admission of guilt, but this "statement" puts Slade about as far from an actual admission of responsibility/guilt/whatever as possible within the confines of the English language.

As we noted previously, that Mike DeGeurin (looking strangely like Prof. Irwin C. Corey in the daily newspaper’s front-page photo) is a hell of a defender. No wonder he and Aunt Esther were grinning so madly.

Me and Julio (and Fred and Lamont and Roberto and Dionny) Down by the Schoolyard, Then and Now

In episode 76 of Sanford and Son, recalled by posterity only as Julio and Sister and Nephew,“Fred's anti-Puerto Rican attitude suddenly changes after Julio's nephew is the victim of discrimination in school.” That’s according to tvland.com, the Web site for the cable network on which we viewed Julio and Sister and Nephew just this Saturday night.

Like most one-line summations, the TVLand listing fails to capture the nuance of Julio and Sister and Nephew. Julio, played by a rangy character actor you used to see on TV a lot, usually portraying a badass in some crime drama, is Fred’s noble Puerto Rican neighbor and often the target of the irascible L.A. junkman’s coarse ethno-racial repartee. In the aptly titled Julio and Sister and Nephew, Julio’s sister and nephew come to L.A. from the old country and, for reason or reasons we missed while in the kitchen fixing supper, wind up lodging temporarily in Fred and son Lamont’s digs. Fred treats the sister with something less than respect and puts her to work cleaning the Sanford Arms---are you hanging with us here?---but refuses to eat the ethnic dishes she cooks, explaining that “my doctor has me on a strict diet---no garbage!”

The conflict, if you will, emerges when nephew Roberto (if we remember correctly) enrolls in the L.A. school system. He’s a fifth grader but is told by the school that he must go back to the fourth grade because, according to his teacher, he can’t speak or understand English well enough to “keep up”* with the class. This makes young Roberto angry, and tearful. “I’m not a baby,” he declares, in what sounded to us like perfectly serviceable English.

Then, sometime in the near future---we missed the transition on a return trip to the kitchen---comes word that acting-out Roberto has been suspended from school. Roberto’s mother prevails upon a reluctant Fred---Lamont and Julio apparently are “out”---to accompany her to the school to suss out the situation. There the pair meet with the principal, a dignified African-American gentleman with stentorian voice, who explains that there’s nothing he can do about Roberto’s problem---the teacher is adamant that the boy’s English skills aren’t up to the 5th grade.

Then Fred has a bold idea: “Why don’t you stay after school and help him [with his English]?”

“I can’t do that---I’m the principal!” sez the principal.

“Well,” ripostes Fred G., “how about forgetting about your principal and worrying about his interest?”

The studio audience applauds heartily, and the principal, moved by the junkman’s unassailable and punning logic, agrees: “Yes, I think I will!”

This obviously was back in the day, when a school principal just rolled out the balls and burnished the heavy wooden paddle and didn’t have to fret over standardized test scores. But what really betrayed the datedness of Julio and Sister and Nephew was the fact that a 1970s sit-com created and produced by Norman Lear, the consummate Hollywood liberal of the time, was sermonizing on behalf of pushing Spanish-speaking children to immediately learn English (albeit with the help of special after-hours tutelage from the school principal).

Yes, this was so long ago (we assume the episode was made sometime between 1972 and 1975), back before the Mexican economic dislocations of the late ’70s triggered the massive and sustained illegal immigration to the United States that only recently has shown signs of abating, and back before the perfessers down the corner College of Education misread Thomas Dewey and saddled the public schools of the land with bilingualism (which, as we have noted too many times previously, turned out to be monolingualism, the lingualism being español) and other flavor-of-the-month theories regarding child-centered education (as opposed to education-centered education).

Our viewing of Sanford and Son followed our learning of the news in Saturday’s Houston Chronicle that the Houston school district was for the first time to conduct University Interscholastic League academic competitions in Spanish (and not just for the subject Spanish, we should note). The newspaper explained that this was sort of a UIL-sanctioned experiment that could spread elsewhere in the state. The school district’s organizer, identified as Michael Fain, was quoted as saying, "There is not a single person that has said we should not do this."

Obviously Mr. Fain needs to get out of the house more often.

This struck as a fairly significant story, given the hallowed place of UIL competitions in Texas public education, yet it was written with the typical gee-whilikers, ain’t-this-wonderful approach the Chronicle invariably takes to such stories (it’s FOR THE KIDS, and how could you be against something that’s FOR THE KIDS, even if it’s bad FOR THE KIDS?) The human interest angle comes in the person of a competitor in the Spanish-language creative-writing contest, 7-year-old Dionny Rodriguez, who “came to Houston this year from Mexico, where [she] used to recite poems in Spanish” (which suggests that the youngster may have been getting a better education down in Mexico, recitation being rote memorization, which is roundly condemned down at the College of Education, ’cause, y’know, it could be too hard and boring and whatnot).

She came this year … couldn’t they find somebody who had been in the country longer than a few months? (We’ll pause here to catch our breath and point out what seems to have flown right past all the geniuses and their analyses of last week’s election returns: One reason for the narrowness of victory of the HISD schoolhouse-bonds referendum is a growing backlash, especially among blacks, against the metastasizing cost [new schools, bilingual teachers, summer school, etc. and so on] of educating the children of illegals---mark it and check it out.) What about all the Chinese and Korean and African and Albanian and Bosnian kids (and don't forget the Meshketian Turks!) in the local schools who aren't being served in their respective native tongues like young Dionny and therefore have to get strokin' in English? Wouldn't fairness dictate that they get their own UIL competitions?

But don’t worry. According to the Chronicle, this foray into UIL bilingualism (monolingualism) “doesn't mean football fouls will be called in Spanish anytime soon.”

Football fouls?

Hold on, Elizabeth, I’m comin’! (Grab chest, fall over.)

*Keeping up with the class---what a quaint notion!