so i watched boston public this week.

i notice that i've been talking a lot about tv lately, two entries in the last three days anyway, not sure if that's "a lot", i guess i'll let the public decide. so boston public, it's a weird show in terms of quality, it sort of reminds me of M*A*S*H in that, at its best, it can be brilliant, but when it hits a low, it becomes a melodramatic, nearly painful to watch caricature of itself. the lows are worse than that actually, they lead to the kind of experience that makes you long for a pot of scalding hot water for you to immerse your head into so as to avoid the experience of having to sit through the train wreck that's happening right in front of you, or at the very least make you wish that you lived in frontier times when you could do something better like shovel manure.

this last episode was one that would fall into the latter category. the big conflict was over a bake sale that was put on to prove a point regarding affirmative action, mostly that it unfairly gave persons of color advantages at the expense of qualified white people. there was a stink about people doing stuff like this on college campuses sometime last year. the way it would go was that some campus conservative group, somebody like college republicans would set up an innocuous enough looking bake sale table and peddle their pastries to the public. the much more nefarious (some would say) aim of the project came to light whenever the pricelist was displayed and showed different prices based on the customer's ethnicity. white customers would have to pay the most, and persons of other ethnicities paid less for the same items based on their ethnicity.

affirmative action is one of those issues that's rather polarizing. it shouldn't be, it's far too complex to be, for better or for worse, however, that's the case. it's also an issue that a lot of people presume to have an opinion on without really having a clue about its complexity or its scope, that's probly why it's so polarizing. the vast majority of people formulate their opinions based on the symbols they interact with in the mass media. that's not really helpful, mostly because those just serve to make people stupider.

so anyways, the next morning, i was talking to bone and he asked me if i was against affirmative action, to which i replied "i don't think anybody is." there's not a lot that would make me happier than shooting holes in the arguments of privileged type-A white kids who think they're oppressed because they feel like the system has gone too far. the same kids very likely would never think about raising a similar objection to the use of legacy or athletic talent as a factor in any sort of admissions process, well, the nerds might bitch about athletic scholarships, and they're probably right to, but that's an entire other entry for another day. back to the point, legacy and athletic scholarships, are the longest running forms of affirmative action, but since they favor people with advantage, people whose advantage benefits the system in such a way that it's a known quantity specifically, nobody seems to complain about them.

it cuts both ways though; and that being the case, it's equally misguided to think that taking ethnicity into account somehow makes things "fair" because of the held belief that all white people have somehow had an advantage simply because of phenotype. that is to say that simply being white doesn't preclude a person from being a member of the underclass. jim goad makes this point better than i ever could. basically his point is that the underclass has been exploited by the privileged class without any regard whatsoever to skin color, that race has been used as a smokescreen to cover up substantially more significant conflict between classes, and that there are huge double standards at work, specifically in the descriptions of members of the underclass, double standards that are fed by members of the privileged class to fortify their smokescreen.

basically if you're one of the dipshits who agreed with toni morrison when she said that bill clinton was america's first black president, you're acknowledging that jim goad is right and that you've been hoodwinked by the mass media.

so nobody's against affirmative action. that's not to say that people aren't against affirmative action when they perceive that it favors others at their own expense, but there's tons more to affirmative action than looking for people that aren't white to fill spots in workplaces and educational institutions. in any case, being either completely in favor of it or completely against it presupposes that apart from ethnicity, or legacy, or athletic ability, or whatever variable is thrown in, objective standards are being used in the first place to determine who is or who isn't deserving of a spot.

fairness is a shitty goal to have anyway.


feeling: gimpy kneed
thinking of: kleenex
music: "the lines of my earth" sixpence