Today, two women look at summer lady-blockbuster ‘Eat Pray Love’ in the context of other current movies with strong female characters. Previously: Michelle Dean on ‘I Am Love.’

Two movies currently in the theaters treat the subject of forgiveness-forgiveness of self, and of others. One offers a blissfully hopeful, “upbeat” message, and the other is on fire with truth and pain. But the first story turns out to be the cynical, destructive one, while the second is full of possibilities for liberation and even redemption. So it’s unfortunate that millions and millions of people will see Eat, Pray, Love and only some thousands are likely to experience Life During Wartime.

American women seem to either love or hate Eat, Pray, Love, the memoir of a divorced woman taking off for exotic places in order to “find herself.” There are over six million copies of this book in print. The mostly-female audience I saw the movie with, in Los Feliz, seemed to enjoy it a lot. It’s got a curiously seventies vibe, with its ashrams and its earth tones and meditation rooms and all that Me Generation self-exploratory bushwa, which is of course still very prevalent in our part of the world.

The oft-heard complaints that the character of Elizabeth Gilbert is spoiled and rich fell a bit flat for me when you actually see the movie. The journey depicted here is very different from the monstrous Middle Eastern circus of consumption that was laid on in SATC2. Gilbert’s crumbling Roman digs are literally propped up with bits of scaffolding, and she is required to fill her bathtub from a teakettle. Instead of being driven around by liveried chauffeurs, she tools around Bali on her bicycle. There are no Yay Expensive Shopping! montages, the way there usually are in these chick movies (cf. Pretty Woman.)

(An aside. One of the hardest things about watching a Julia Roberts movie, aside from the hundreds of huge teeth in closeup, is the unspoken convention that literally everyone of any consequence in a Julia Roberts movie must love and/or desire Julia Roberts. This movie is a little different, and amazingly, for the first time ever, my detest-o-meter didn’t redline. Well, I tell a lie, because I so enjoyed watching her crawling around the floor all foaming at the mouth and poisoned in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Anyway, at one point in Eat, Pray, Love James Franco turns Julia Roberts down in bed, and that is a great and surprising thing.)

Even though the movie tries to be about a woman finding herself, nearly every scene is about the pain of Gilbert’s sexual loneliness, and how Javier Bardem eventually comes to the rescue. He literally knocks her off the bicycle of her self-realization in one of those ghastly would-be adorable “meetings” that weaken the movie so profoundly, and would have sunk it entirely were it not for the skill (and, I daresay, the beauty) of Bardem.

The subtext, though, and the real message of Eat, Pray, Love, is about expiating guilt, “self-forgiveness” and “letting go of the past” and all that Oprah-type rubbish. It emerges that Gilbert blames herself for the end of her marriage-she wanted out and her husband didn’t, and the reason given for that is pretty blurry; that’s the movie’s biggest weakness. It seems to have something to do with the fact that he is hopelessly un-careerist. She doesn’t even discuss this with him, though, which he has the sense to bring up at their divorce meeting. It’s just suddenly, oh, by the way, “I don’t want to be married.” Then she goes off to Find Herself instead. Such a loathsome phrase. You’re right there! Where you are! What the hell do you need to Find Yourself for? I mean, who is the flighty one, here? Seriously.

This basic message, of finding yourself and looking after yourself and forgiving yourself, is very like that of the once-popular California philosophy, est. Werner Erhard, the egregious founder of est, got into all kinds of scrapes-messy divorces, IRS troubles and so on-but est wasn’t all bad. The putting of self first is good advice, for some; in fact, if you are a big doormat to begin with, it might help you a lot. Everyone knows people, men and women, who just never make it onto their own list because everyone else comes first. They let everybody else suck all the life out of them, supposing this to be “selfless” and good, but it’s really not good at all. That’s why some people love Eat, Pray, Love so much; they see in it the positive aspects of looking after yourself well.

There are a number of philosophies that advocate more attention to self. Some insist that you always be the very first or even the only one on your own list, like Objectivism, modern Republicanism and est. Other, more subtle philosophies-and surprisingly, the philosophy of the film Eat, Pray, Love falls into this class-suggest that you balance attention to self with attention to others. That seems a manifestly helpful way of thinking.

But if you have got narcissistic tendencies to begin with, being told to put yourself first is only pouring gasoline on the flames of your self-regard. That’s why so many people hate Eat, Pray, Love; they’re seeing the familiar spectacle of legions of self-involved people taking so enthusiastically to the idea that more and more self-involvement is great.

Though Eat, Pray, Love is nominally advocating balance (“not too much God, and not too much Self”), this message is not clear from events as they fall out in the film. It’s child’s play to fall for the easygoing wish-fulfillment on display here. But Gilbert’s self-forgiveness comes much too easily, even delusionally. She has a vision of her ex-husband dancing with her, and yay! now everything is great. There are no real consequences to her betrayal of him, so of course her guilt conveniently vanishes. I mean look, I have got a veritable herd of exes myself, and you know, sometimes it really was your fault, and you hurt someone, and you just have to know that and live with it. Your part in causing someone else pain is never going to go away, and maybe it shouldn’t. I mean, if the reality was anything like the movie, Gilbert was such a dick to this guy. Her self-forgiveness looks more like what you first expected from this movie-self-indulgence.

In a similar vein, the family of Gilbert’s friend “Richard from Texas” has fled his drinking ways, and now he regrets so much he’s gone to Bali to sit crosslegged and yell every morning, okay. He should and will forgive himself one day, maybe, the story is saying. He is really sorry! But what if he really had run his son over and killed him? People do stuff like that by accident every day. Sometimes they are drunk and sometimes they are just stupid and thoughtless, they leave the baby in the hot car while they get their nails done.

That is the sort of eventuality that interests Todd Solondz, the director of Life During Wartime. Wartime means both A) the post-9/11 world wherein nobody is openly admitting what a bloodcurdling mess this country has made in the Middle East, and B) our own time on this earth, with all these personal bloodcurdling messes we commonly make, which are also all swept under the rug.

Some of the characters carry over from the director’s earlier Happiness, which concerned itself more with simply exposing those hidden realities. The redemptive quality of Solondz’s work is somewhat akin to “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” (“to understand all is to forgive all”, an old sentiment evidently first given this formulation by Tolstoy, in War and Peace.) If we will persist in painting a pedophile as a monster, forbidding him human status, we are missing something crucial about what it means to be human. This too is human, he is saying, and it must be faced. The Solondz view is liberating because it is the truth, the point of departure from which we could be making better calculations about how to conduct our lives and our institutions. His regard for the truth is pitiless, and Swiftian. “I go for the cojones,” Solondz explained in a recent interview. “That’s what I want.”

Life During Wartime goes Happiness one better by requiring us to consider what we are to do with these unbearable truths once we manage to face them. Wow, does Ciaran Hinds do a spectacular job of taking up where Dylan Baker left off. But Hinds is a whole other kettle of fish. Dylan Baker could never have banged the magnificent Charlotte Rampling (whose performance provides something like a concentrated outline of the whole movie) with anything like the same excruciating, tormented, absent, testosterone-laced force.

The ruthless candor of Charlotte Rampling’s paint-peeling performance makes Julia Roberts’s attempt at a “realistic” portrayal of womanhood in Eat, Pray, Love look like an episode of My Little Pony. To say nothing of Allison Janney, who deserves one hundred Oscars for her performance here; you feel like you are being electrocuted when you hear the stuff that is coming out of her mouth and yet it is all so completely, utterly believable. The things that are unsayable, impossible, but are nevertheless what everybody is thinking.

There are things that cannot be forgiven, ever; that one cannot forgive oneself, that can’t be meditated away or drowned in any amount of green tea or attempts at “personal growth.” The cynical and really somewhat depraved Eat, Pray, Love philosophy tells us that everything can be made whole and healed. You just need a guru to give you permission, and off you zoom with Javier. That only puts an extra burden on real human beings, to pretend, and then to insist, that they can do what cannot be done. This cruel philosophy only exiles people to the hell inhabited by the worst of Solondz’s poor bastards, where everything must still seem to be “all right” despite torrential amounts of evidence to the contrary.

By exposing that hypocrisy, Solondz’s work has given us a gift of immeasurable worth. Given that this is what we’re doing with our guilt every day, his clear-eyed worldview could not be more helpful or more redemptive; it is truly humanist.

This is how Solondz put it.

People say, “I love humanity,” but what does that mean? Humanity’s abstract. It has no real substance. We are all defined by our limitations. To what extent can we open ourselves up to that which is most-demonized; that which is most-”other.” Can we embrace everyone “except”? Except what? What are those lines? And what does it say about us?

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

by Michelle Dean

Today, two women look at summer lady-blockbuster ‘Eat Pray Love’ in the context of other movies with strong female characters. After this: Maria Bustillos on ‘Life During Wartime.’

If your experience is the same as mine, and you do not garner your cultural criticism solely from the pages of O: The Oprah Magazine, you’ve heard of Eat, Pray, Love largely through negative press coverage. A veritable battalion of sudden class warriors have emerged in recent weeks to bash Eat, Pray, Love for its portrayal of cluelessness in rich white yoga-lady form, a near-universal object of derision if ever there was one in this culture.

It’s not that I don’t have a certain degree of sympathy with the pile-on, of course.

Like any young white lady of a certain age who’s hit a stumbling block in recent years, I’ve dodged countless exhortations to read the book. In my opinion, a book that contends that the way to get away from the anomie imposed by modern professional life and its empty materialism is to take a year off and spend a whole boatload of money ought only to be read in a haze of mood stabilizers and blood pressure medication. Particularly when the reader is newly unemployed, like me.

And I’ll be honest: that’s not least because if Eat, Pray, Love is right, if travel and boiled down essentialist Orientalist “Eastern” mysticism is the only true path to meaning in this world, we might as well all throw up our hands now, because most of us, and by us I mean “people on Earth,” simply can’t do that. We might as well let the Gilberts continue on their quest to write the rest of us right out of existence, push us to the margins of whatever real story it is the rich are living, because we’ll never have a piece of it.

I do want to admit that this vein of “class-based” criticism has been extremely fruitful as an inspiration of snarky Internet remarks. (A personal favorite line was by Dustin Rowles, at Pajiba’s: “Fuck you, and your Buddhist Ayn Rand bullshit philosophy.”)

But dare I say that I find some of the criticism a overwrought? Here, for example, are some things that people have recently written about Eat, Pray, Love:

1. David Edelstein at New York, always notably, uh, sensitive to marginalized women’s concerns, described the plot as “… Gilbert stumbled into a scenario that resonated with women in search of their own autonomy-specially white women with a bit of money.”

2. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone remarks that “the movie left me with the feeling of being trapped with a person of privilege who won’t stop with the whine whine whine.”

3. Andrew O’Hehir at Salon gave a nicer and more nuanced thumbs down, noting, “[Elizabeth Gilbert’s] aware that her personal and literary odyssey contains potential contradictions: The tale of a well-connected New York writer traveling the globe on somebody else’s dime and sampling an array of seemingly disconnected experiences might strike many people as a symptom of our cultural dislocation and commodity fetishism, not a cure.”

Why, I don’t know that I’ve read so many reviews using first-year intro to sociology terminology in my life. Now, people are doing real structural critique of Eat, Pray, Love and related phenomena, of course, and I am not trying to lump their work in here-but the mainstream critical narrative seems to be coopting their rhetoric.

That appropriation of leftist language in these reviews has irked me. It’s done so even though I am also the kind of person who will agree to see Eat, Pray, Love only if someone’s paying me to do so, and no one has, as of yet, so no dice. I’m going to suggest to you anyway that all this blather about the “self-indulgence” and “privilege” of this film, when delivered by these white, and largely male, film critics, is disingenuous, and, even worse, philosophically empty. I’m going to do it having not seen the film, of course, but then again, I’m not so much interested in defending the film itself. It may very well be crap. The point, I think, is that if it is crap, it’s important to describe why that’s so without lazy rhetoric.

I’d love to call this straight-out misogyny, and in fact I’d have backup, and not only from feminist blogs! A.O. Scott at the Times noted that “the kind of class consciousness that would blame Liz for feeling bad about her life and then taking a year abroad to cure what ails her strikes me as a bit disingenuous -a way of trivializing her trouble on the grounds of gender without having to come out and say so.”

But I think it might be a little more than that.

The other night I saw I Am Love. That film stars the much more filmsnob-acceptable-than-Roberts-but-also-female Tilda Swinton person! I am quite susceptible to that kind of snobbery, myself. With the exception of the Narnia movies, Swinton is the kind of actress I follow from movie to film back to movie without even needing to see so much as a trailer beforehand.

In any event: I hated I Am Love. This is not a popular opinion. Rotten Tomatoes tells me that 81% of critics loved it. Just as a contrast, if you click over to have a look at the reviews for Eat, Pray, Love you get a comparatively abysmal rating of 38%. No person with actual taste is admitting to actually going to see Eat, Pray, Love, of course, but like me, a significant snobbish subset is willing to watch I Am Love.

I find this interesting.

I Am Love is a story about rich white Italian people. Rich white Italian people, the movie informs you, live in stunning surroundings and hold lots of dinner parties with the aid of servants in matching uniforms. They have beautiful clothes and beautiful children and most importantly, they eat beautiful food. They are sensual people, these Italians. But they suffer from a certain ennui, from time to time. And thus, when their marriages become impermissibly frigid, they go and fall in love with their children’s friends, friends who are chefs, because food is sensual. (I hope you caught that totally subtle metaphor!) And the only thing that matters, you guys, is love. Lovelovelove. Love. We should all be so lucky to be in love. The End.

Sound somewhat familiar? Toss in some time in Bali and Javier Bardem and the surroundings start to look awful familiar, don’t they?

Of course, the reason why people of self-appointed taste and discernment might enjoy I Am Love but not Eat, Pray, Love, might be a matter of execution. I won’t deny that there’s beautiful cinematography in the former that I can’t imagine exists in the latter, though it’s mostly the gratuitous shots of flowers and food that provide the pretty there rather than any of the principal photography. I also won’t deny that you are going to have a hard time maintaining the same level of subtlety in your $60-million blockbuster summer Hollywood chick flick than you can in your low-budget independent European movie.

But that’s not what anyone’s actually saying, it seems to me, when Eat, Pray, Love is sneered at as a rich white lady movie. The objection underlying the sarcasm is about content-how dare this white lady write so much about such trivial self-absorbed matters-not style. And that’s where it starts to get messy, the criticism, not simply because it’s inconsistent, but because it cloaks itself in faux-leftist rhetoric that’s… well, to be blunt, kind of morally repugnant, no?

If any of the critics I listed above cared one whit about class in this country or any other, and thus hated the artistic treatment of privileged whining, they’d have to throw out what I’d imagine is more than half of Western cinema. This, they are not prepared to do, however. What Edelstein, Travers and the like do is a drive-by on class issues, for hating rich people (just as much as Sarah Palin does, I might add), without doing the hard work of interrogating actual social privilege. It’s self-congratulation for not being that kind of vulgar white (incidentally lady bits-having, not that there’s anything wrong with that except that it means “your” movies are suspect for self-indulgence) person who falls for this claptrap. It’s not structural critique.

It’s a common thing to talk a good leftist talk as a way of being socially acceptable to other liberals while being blithely unaware of just how deeply uncommitted you are to those issues. The curious thing about whiteness or richness, about social privilege of any kind, is that it’s not an attitude, not a pose, not just something you can shrug off if you like the right kind of movies and read the right kind of books and make your annual donations to the right organizations. It’s a thing you live every day, all the time, whether you choose to participate in it or not. It confers unseen advantages-advantages like the ability to reduce the experience of Bali as a place to what white Americans think and feel about it, blithely, without challenge, and be paid millions of dollars to do so. And you can’t vault yourself out of privilege rhetorically, not if you want to dismantle it. As a person who shares many of Gilbert’s privileges, you see, it’s unfair for me to try and claim I could never share her blinders. To reduce racism and classism to a matter of individual personality would let me sidestep the systemic nature of it. And whatever else is true, whatever tacit participation I have in the structure that makes this a racist and classist world, I care enough about dismantling it acknowledge it as a system, not a series of individual mistakes.

All of this is what led me, the other day, to remark to a friend that I simply couldn’t listen to another white guy turn Elizabeth Gilbert into a symbol of What’s Wrong With Rich People In America today. She might be self-indulgent-though the more I hear that term the less sure I am of what it means, other than being a sort of literary swear word writers use for each other-and she might be clueless, and indeed I have very little interest in reading her work, myself. It’s not that I really want to mount a defense of her work. But the people who are criticizing her at the shallow end on the basis of “class” strike me as just as blind. Their work exhibits no more interest in a better world for everyone than hers does.

Michelle Dean has written for Bitch and The American Prospect. She blogs at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

by Robert Lanham

I remember the first time I heard the term “supergroup.” It was 1981 and my older brother Kevin, an avid Styx and Kansas fan, had just brought home a copy of a record with a blue sea monster on the cover. He was sitting on the end of his bed checking out the lyric sheet, the album jacket resting on his stonewashed jeans, and nodding his head along to “Heat of the Moment.” He kept a badminton racket beside the stereo for occasions that demanded heavy riffing. And this was most assuredly one of those occasions.

Me: What are you listening to?
Kevin: It’s this new supergroup, Asia.
Me: What’s a supergroup?
Kevin: It’s, like, a band that consists of members from other groups. That’s Steve Howe on guitar from Yes. I think someone from Emerson, Lake and Palmer is in the band too. [Picks up badminton racket]
Me: Awesome, can I borrow it when-
Kevin: Do you think you can shut up for five minutes, zit-fag? I’m trying to listen. [Shreds a power riff with badminton racket]

In the household of my youth, the name Steve Howe held deep significance. It was almost akin to bringing up the names David Ragsdale (violin, Kansas), Tommy Shaw (guitar, Styx), or Brad Delp (vocals, Boston). Mentioning these names was shorthand for saying “musical genius.”

Of course, I’ve since come to understand that the most unforgivable thing my brother ever did to me was to convince me-at a very impressionable age-that Styx, Kansas and Boston (his trinity of rock) were good bands. They’re not. How could he have done that to me, I have since wondered in dismay? I was just a kid. I looked up to him, for Chrissakes.

And here he was convincing me that Asia-the mutant stepchild of Yes (an okay band), ELP (a highly objectionable one) and a boardroom of A&R; executives who’d lost grip with reality after exposing themselves to large quantities of coke, fondue, and Dan Fogelberg during the Seventies-was the best thing since Electric Light Orchestra, a band he happened to love as well.

So given my history with bad classic rock and wailing tenors, you can imagine my alarm when I recently heard about the abomination known as Yoso, a supergroup blending the “magic of YES with the voice of TOTO.” Now you can hear “Rosanna,” “Roundabout” and new songs from Yoso’s debut record Elements all performed on one stage by veteran members of Yes and Toto! Who could ask for anything more?

Elements was released by the Frontiers label last month, but Yoso remains largely beneath the radar. Thankfully, Wikipedia offers some useful background information:

Yoso is a melodic rock/progressive rock supergroup combining former members of Yes (former members Billy Sherwood-bass/vocals and Tony Kaye-keyboards) and Toto (Bobby Kimball-vocals)…. For touring in support of their debut release, Elements, on Frontiers Records, out July 2010, the band announced a new line-up. Joining Kimball, Sherwood and Kaye are drummer Scott Conner (of Genesis tribute band Gabble Ratchet) and guitarist Johnny Bruhns (of Yes tribute band Roundabout). In their live shows, the band plays a mixture of classic Toto songs, classic Yes songs (mainly from 90125, on which Kaye performed) and material from their new album.

The band sounds more like Eighties-era Yes than vintage Toto, which is the closest thing to a compliment I can offer. And the cover art from Elements is reminiscent of work by Roger Dean, the man responsible for artwork from Yes’ peak period. If you want to check them out, lead singer Bobby Kimball, who looks like a cross between Freddie Mercury and Hank Azaria, will be on tour this month with the rest of the Yoso crew.

But I’ll stop teasing. I know you’re hankering for a taste of the Yoso magic now. Good news! The band has released a promotional video to whet your appetite:

If you can stomach it, here’s a live version of the band’s eponymous song “Yoso” from their debut.

And I’d be remiss if I failed to include a classic Toto tune. Here’s “Africa:”

Thank God it’s no longer 1981 and I’m no longer strumming dueling badminton rackets with my brother in his wood-paneled bedroom. We’d no doubt have been blown away by the sheer awesomeness of Yoso. And let’s just keep our fingers crossed that Yoso doesn’t spearhead a trend. The last thing I ever want to witness is Rush and Jethro Tull (my two most loathed classic rock bands) merging to form Rushthro. To quote Ghostbusters: “Don’t cross the streams!” The thought of enduring the extended drum and flute solos that would follow the inevitable “Tom Sawyer/Aqualung” medley is really just too much to bear.

To their credit, Yoso isn’t the worst supergroup to ever record an album. That title goes to Chickenfoot, a band that merges the talent of Van Hagar (Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony), Red Hot Chilli Peppers (Chad Smith) and Joe Satriani. If Stephen Ray Vaughan was still alive, he’d probably be in Chickenfoot too. As is, the foursome have created rock and roll’s equivalent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Of course, in this age of listicles, all this talk of supergroups raises a very serious question. Namely, who are the best and worst supergroups to ever unite? Wonder no more. Here’s my very subjective list of rock’s greatest and most horrible supergroups. I’m confident that my choices hit the mark, but I’m sure you’ll take my selections with a grain of salt. After all, I did just admit to something that might cause the average reader to lose faith. I grew up idolizing Kansas, Boston and Styx.

THE MOST HORRIBLE ROCK SUPERGROUPS TO EVER UNITE
1. Chickenfoot
2. Yoso
3. Damn Yankees
4. Emerson, Lake and Palmer
5. Don Dokken
6. Oysterhead
7. Mike and the Mechanics
8. Velvet Revolver
9. Audioslave
10. Power Station

THE MOST AWESOME ROCK SUPERGROUPS TO EVER UNITE
1. Crosby Still Nash & Young
2. Cream
3. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
4. Broken Social Scene
5. The Traveling Wilburys
6. Bad Company
7. The New Pornographers
8. Blind Faith
9. The Postal Service
10. The Dead Weather

Robert Lanham is the author of the beach-towel classic The Emerald Beach Trilogy, which includes the titles Pre-Coitus, Coitus, and Afterglow. More recent works include The Hipster Handbook and The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. He is the founder and editor of FREEwilliamsburg.com.

“I love the sound of the repeated long ‘a.’ The Brothers Grimm also found it fascinating. They practically had oral sex with vowels in any case.”
Nobel laureate Günter Grass discusses — oh, does it matter? That quote is gold! The alphabet is really getting its due these days.

Man, it really seems like everyone has had a pretty crappy summer, doesn’t it? Everyone’s just in a foul mood. The thing about Atlanta’s Cee-Lo, though, is that even when he’s in a foul mood, he can make music that sounds as joyous and terrific as this most recent single from his forthcoming Lady Killer album. Enjoy! And here are five other songs from this summer that similarly express very similar feelings: A full handful of musical middle-fingers!

In praise of light verse: “During the late 1920s and early ’30s, all of New York’s newspapers carried a daily column of light verse, most famously Franklin P. Adams’s ‘The Conning Tower’ and Don Marquis’s ‘The Sun Dial.’ They encouraged submissions from their readers, and it was in those hospitable columns that many men and women who later made their name as writers and playwrights and wits-Dorothy Parker, Russel Crouse, Dorothy Fields, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley-first saw their name in print. As E. Y. (Yip) Harburg put it, ‘We lived in an age of literate revelry in the New York daily press, and we wanted to be part of it.’”

by Charlie

Dear Black Diary,

I’m so glad I have you in my life so I can share my thoughts about black people and black things. Sometimes it’s hard to say how I really feel about the blacks because, well, I’m one of them, and since we all already look alike, it’s common knowledge that we all think alike, dress alike and act alike as well. But, thank God for you, black diary. You know my most inner-est of secrets! Today I want to talk about Greene, Rangel, Waters and Steele.

They provide a valuable lesson, black diary, and that lesson is this: when a black does something wrong or is accused of doing something wrong everyone notices (even if it’s nighttime and you think you can make an easy getaway).

I’ve always known that the key to black success is not about slipping through the cracks, it’s about slipping past the crackers. That’s why I was surprised to read about the charges against Alvin Greene, the candidate for Senate from South Carolina.

The whites hadn’t even noticed him up until now (in part because he never really campaigned before he won the nomination) and going unnoticed by the whites is a valuable skill for a black to possess! But then Greene had to start showing college girls pictures of titties in computer labs or something. Deep down, I’m convinced he was begging to be exposed.

And then there’s Charlie “up to my eyeballs in ethics violations” Rangel. I’m not sure how one inadvertently fails to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets and income or mistakenly grabs the congressional letterhead to solicit donations for a building with your name on it. What I do know is that Rangel picked a bad time to get caught. All the crazy whites are itching for reasons to blame us black devils for trying to drag the land of the free and the home of the brave down into our black devil tar baby hell. And now they have one more idiotic thing to gripe about.

You know what else is idiotic? Maxine Waters and her fugly glasses and wigs. Clearly she can’t think straight or see straight or do anything straight with all that business up top. Okay, wig bias aside, I really hope Waters’ name is cleared and that she is right to come out and pre-chide the ethics committee for being a bunch of racist dirtbags. I hold her in high esteem because she voted against the Iraq War Resolution in 2002. (We have to preserve human rights for all shades of darkness.)

And then there’s my favorite, Michael Steele. Why am I the only one who finds it offensive to see a public figure in black face nowadays? Not that I can’t enjoy a good minstrel show, it’s just that this disaster is so obviously not a real black. He’s not fooling anyone, black diary! A bad tie does not a brotha make! (Although he is going into debt, so….)

It’s all very disenchanting. Just because we have a black for president doesn’t mean we’re going to start magically blending in and getting away with all the crimes and violations the whites have mastered for ever ever ever (*echo*.) So, I guess what I’m wondering is, what’s a black girl to do?

I’m sorry to put so much pressure on you to answer that question when you’ve already helped me solve some of life’s greatest mysteries. Remember that time you explained to me that Weezie actually loved George as a person and not because he had less melanin in his skin? That was a powerful moment. I’m sure things will calm down soon and the blacks will go back to being invisible, until then, thanks, black diary, I know I can always count on you.

Love,
Charlie

Charlie is the pen name of a professional young lady in New York City.

A reader writes: “When I first saw this story about a blind lhasa apso that has a seeing-eye chihuahua, I thought ‘Oh good, a happy story. I should send this to The Awl; they seem so down these days.’ Then I got to the part where their new owner has to give them up because she has breast cancer. Sorry. Still, cute dogs.”

I mean, COME ON. This week is totally not going down without a fight. Let’s all pull together and do what we can to get through it, okay?

This sentiment made me cry, but it is probably good to remind yourself of when you’re feeling down: “Sometimes people just do the right thing, and we don’t know why. They just do.”

In a time where the lines between advertising and editorial seem more blurred than ever, it’s nice to see a media organization where the two sides are separated by an impregnable wall.

The Croydon Advertiser’s front page last week splashed on the results of “an undercover investigation” that revealed the existence of “a seedy brothel.”

The article, Sinister brothel uncovered next to charity office, was written in the style of a News of the World investigation, with the obligatory use of a hidden camera.

[…]

Evidently, the Advertiser journalist was prompted to track down this den of iniquity after a complaint from an unnamed businessman.

But he could have found evidence much closer to home because page 52 of his own newspaper carried an advert for the very same “fantasy massage” establishment he went to such trouble to “reveal”.