This answer, taking into account Islamic legal thought, personal information about Obama, and the political realities of life in America, answered the question in a nuanced yet succinct manner.

In light of the furor over Obama’s wife allegedly having a deep animus towards white people (you know, like half of her husband), I feel obliged to point out a simple fact;

We still basically run everything.

You see the most powerful politicians in the country? The CEOS and stockholders of almost all major corporations? Cops? The NHL? Mostly honkies. The landlord you write a check to every month? Probably a honky. Even honkies from working class backgrounds like me and maybe you–we still have a leg up getting jobs, getting paid well at those jobs, getting into schools (whatever Rush Limbaugh tells you), getting good housing, and being able to walk to the corner store for a pack of smokes without being detained and searched by police.

Where am I going with this? Well, see, when you act like you’re going to throw a hissyfit because Michelle Obama may have said “whitey”, it kinda makes you look like a whine-ass. Because anger towards white people in total, while usually misdirected, isn’t exactly coming from a place of power and privilege. It’s usually coming from a place of deep frustration at a lifetime of injustice. Now, you might be saying “But I’m not responsible for it, I’ve never screwed over a black dude and all those Mexicans came HERE, dammit”. I used to think like that too. The problem is that most of us HAVE contributed to it in some way, and even today when I look at other po’buckers like myself, most of us are perfectly happy letting media and politicians exploit their fear of of our darker hued friends and blaming their problems on them. A lot of us defend a (white) public figure who made racist remarks with a “what’s the big deal, why’s everyone so PC blah blah blah” and then get pissed because a black woman may have said “whitey” and fume because Chris Rock can get away with doing his “I love black people, but I hate niggers skit” and we can’t. No fair!

It’s not as if class isn’t an issue in America, and it’s not as if some liberals haven’t dropped the ball on class by vilifying the white working class, and, eh, we’ll say overselling the virtues of the black and brown working classes. But race is a real thing every day in America, and ultimately while you can pretend it’s not (if you’re white) it starts getting ridiculous when, to you, its worst expression in America is black community activists in Chicago.

But what did Mrs. Obama say exactly? Let’s see;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZi6U811hxE

Sick yet?

Someday soon, regular people are going to start dragging rich people out into the street and shooting them. There’s just no way around it.

Sometimes, having cool and pleasant mountain summers has its disadvantages; I’m reminded of this anew every year when my neighborhood fills up with drunks. Most of them spend the cold months in Tucson and Phoenix or in a few cases with relatives on the reservation, then head back up here as it gets too hot for them down south. Suddenly I can’t walk to the corner store without being hit up for change, and every time I cut through the lot North of my apartment to go downtown, there are a bunch of discarded and often broken liquor and beer bottles. I clean them up occasionally but like a bad magic trick, they’re always back.

Last night on my way home, I got one of the fun drunks. I was about to cross Route 66 when a guy on the other side drunkenly yelled an insult at me. I looked to either side of me to see if he could have meant anyone else, but as Robert DeNiro observed, I didn’t see anybody else there, so he must have been talking to me. I was more puzzled than anything, since I was 99% sure I’d never met this guy and here he was, questioning my heterosexuality in an impolite manner. I started to cross the street towards him, not in a confrontational manner but because it was the direction I was headed anyway, and he sort of shuffled away from me, punching a street sign for no apparent reason. Then he fell down, tried to get up, and fell down again, staying there this time. I walked up and looked at the guy, who seemed to be just this side of passed out, and unaware of my presence. He was white, which makes my PC side perversely happy, because it becomes just a little easier to avoid associating being a drunk with being Navajo. The thought briefly crossed my mind that I could take the guy’s wallet, something a young me wouldn’t have thought twice about. I no longer feel guilty about thoughts like that, I figure it’s only bad if you can’t recognize it.

As I got home I got back to the perennial question of who I despise more, drunks or tweakers. Drunks are more plentiful and a constant reminder of why I pretty much stay away from the sauce, and probably the greatest example of the ways in which people will act horrifically undignified under the right circumstances. I’m sure junkies do stupid things when they’ve been shooting dope, but I don’t go downtown and watch junkies loudly and belligerently hassle a random person for looking at them funny, or walk by Mogollon and watch two people who have just met tottering around uncertainly making out in the back lot because they’re riding the white horse. Nope, just booze. I view pot pretty much the way I view people who smoke a lot of pot; dumb and slightly irritating, but essentially harmless.

On the other hand, I’ve never seen a trailer explode because of drunks, and I’ve seen this occur in two different neighborhoods I’ve lived in, and the aftermath in two more. Tweakers stopped living on earth a while ago and the mania for mean, horrific, petty crime that seems to accompany meth addiction makes it pretty awful. Meth hasn’t hit the way I feared it would, even in the meth-epicenters of the southwest (holla!) and the midwest, but I feel like it’s only a matter of time. If I saw tweakers in anything remotely resembling the numbers of drunks, it wouldn’t even be a question. It wouldn’t matter anyway, and you wouldn’t be reading this blog because I would be barricaded in my apartment, shotgun in hand, and ironically probably doing meth myself keeping the hordes of living undead away from my possessions.

People with a serious meth addiction really do remind me of the zombie type things from 28 days later, in terms of physical appearance and cleanliness but also the way in which they can switch suddenly from stupefied directionlessness to sudden manic savagery. Sitting down for a meal with someone going through meth withdrawal is probably one of my least favorite memories; when her tooth cracked in the middle of eating a hot dog, I visibly and unprofessionally shuddered; I don’t really do that a lot.

I wish there was a society where substance abuse didn’t seem so attractive to so many people, because they felt fulfilled already. Does such a society exist in the modern world? Doesn’t look like it.  I’m sure Ahmadinejad thinks there’s no heroin in Iran, you know, the way there are no queers there, but ultimately, has any such society ever existed? I’d like to think so, because it would mean we could get there again. Maybe we could anyway. Not going to hold my breath though.

When gods and devils walk through the street

And a red haired girl spits on you for no discernible reason

You might think the universe is chaos

You might; but you’d be wrong

When he picked up that pistol and brought an end to himself

You might have thought it was the ultimate proof

of a hard and cold wall at the center of everything

You might; but you’d be wrong

When you realized that those gods and devils were nothing

That you couldn’t see within yourself

And that the red haired girl was you, spitting upon yourself

And before the bullet casing hit the floor, he’d already landed somewhere soft

Maybe, just maybe

You were onto something

Like an idiot, I forgot to pay my internet bill. I’m usually pretty on top of these things but anyway, long story short, I don’t have uninterrupted access. More stuff coming in the next couple days.

A Tribute to a friend

I was told once that there were female warriors in ancient Arabia. They didn’t care what people thought of them, and they didn’t care what what was ‘proper’, they had hearts like lions. When I think about your face, radiantly brown with that mischievous smile,  with that little gap in your teeth, it’s hard to imagine you as one of them. Yet, when I close my eyes and I think of who you are, I have no problem picturing you as one of those Arabian Valkyries. Maybe this is because you have Fatima’s blood in your veins, but even if I somehow discovered that you didn’t have a drop of that long-martyred vintage, it would make no difference to me. To me you’ll always be a syida.

It’s funny; when I first met you, I think I fell the slightest little bit in love with you. It was hard not to; you’re confidant and charming without being arrogant, and you’re one of those beautiful women who know that they’re beautiful, but don’t make a big deal out of it one way or another. When you talked to me you were always so funny without being glib, and when I talked you listened and asked questions as if I was saying the most brilliant things you’d ever heard (which I’m pretty sure wasn’t the case). I never acted on this, and never would have; you had a man, a good man, and whatever else I am, I’m not a bird dog. But it goes beyond that, down to me just loving what we had too much. I liked that we could just take off and do whatever and laugh and talk like we’d known each other our whole lives.

I still had this impression of you through it all though, of a spoiled rich Desi girl leisurely going to school here and not having to work. I think you knew and it’s incredible that you never told me to fuck off. In my meager defense, I didn’t know at that time what you’d been through in life. I like to think of myself as tough, but you’d survived things that would have brought me to my knees. I had a prosylite’s self-righteousness too, and you were good enough to ignore it and not take me seriously. When I called you a munafiq, a nonsense word from someone who would have been termed the same for maintaining close friendships with women in general and a hijab-less shia dancer like you in particular, you just shrugged it off. How ridiculous I must have looked to you, some silly ass white boy who’d taken shahadah all of two months ago telling you what time it was. And it was nothing to you, you just laughed and hugged me, and were still my friend.

There were times when we laughed when I thought that the world was still around me. Like when you were singing that Lynyrd Skynyrd song with that voice still more used to Urdu and still sounded better than me. Or the time you brought me to that Desi party and were a little tipsy and we were all talking and you told me that horrible but perfectly timed joke. When you were sad it broke my heart, because the things that made you sad were so alien to me, and there wasn’t much I could do.

I haven’t talked to you in a while. I found your contact information recently and dialed your number, but then never hit ‘call’. I didn’t really know what to say, so I left it at that. I’d send this to you, but this is mostly just me talking to me. If that period of my life was all the time out friendship had, I’m okay with that. This is no disrespect to you, or your man, or the woman who I’m sharing my life with; what we had was less than and more than that. But yeah, there’s always going to be a few little places in my heart that those who have touched me most are always going to occupy, and you have yours.

Dave

Thought I’d treat you to a little Bill Hicks. I’m sure plenty of people who spend the whole day eating bratwursts and going to furniture sales would be a bit put off by it, but thems the breaks.

-Abu Sinan’s eldest son, Sinan, is sick right now. Everyone please keep them in your thoughts and prayers. Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery.

-Some asshole just stole about $100 from me by using my credit card. I canceled the card and am trying to get the money back before the 1st, when I need it for rent and bills. I have to wonder what goes through peoples’ heads; the person ordered a bunch of things to be delivered to their place, which means they’ll likely be easy to find, which means they’ll probably be in big trouble for theft and for what? Some videos from Colombia House and some tracks off of itunes? Peoples’ priorities never cease to astound me.

-McCain has disowned Hagee’s endorsement. No, not because of the anti-Catholic or Anti-Muslim sentiment, or even the remarks about Hurricane Katrina being a punishment for homosexuals (a weird view to take, N’awlins is not exactly a hub of gay life). No, apparently back in the 90s, Hagee said this;

“Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said ‘I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.’ So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says — Jeremiah writing — ‘They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,’ meaning there’s no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don’t let your heart be offended. I didn’t write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

I don’t get the uproar. The statement is both idiotic and offensive, but it’s just a logical extension of all the evangelical nuttiness over Israel. I mean, Pat Robertson says that during the rapture the Jews “will call out in vain to the one they have so long denied” (and he doesn’t mean Jesse Jackson). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; evangelicals love Israel like child molesters love playgrounds, and any Jews allying with them are wading in some bad waters.

-As much as Tibet protesters piss me off sometimes and in my view acted disgracefully during the Olympic torch’s move to China (as if Americans have any fucking room to criticize anyone else for unjust occupations), I am also not a sinopologist and I hope that the recent controversy will bring some real attention to the issue. I would like to simply see an honest dialog for once where people don’t dismiss Tibet as a “hippy cause” or present the Dalai Lama as some sort of demigod presiding over a perfect state before the mean ol’ Chinese invaded. Change needs to come, but not in the form of a return to a medieval theocracy propped up by the CIA.

-Trying to stay eating healthy lately, and have discovered a great breakfast for that; ricotta cheese pancakes. Seriously, try them. Delicious, filling, and if you do them right, healthy.

-My USB cable is not working, so haven’t been able to put up the newer pics on my flickr page. Hopefully I’ll have some up later this week. In the meantime, though, anyone who reads the blog and has flickr, throw me a contact message. http://www.flickr.com/photos/parallel_sidewalk/

Back from a couple interesting days, which I’ll write about later probably. For now I just want to say; when I see someone with a ‘Calvin pissing on [whatever]‘ decal on their vehicle, or fake bullet holes, I just assume I could never be friends with them. Is that shallow of me?