This Week In Social Justice Warrior-Dom

A fond look back at all the things that had ultra-P.C. jihadists outraged ... before they forget all about them in just a few days.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Director of acclaimed Nat Turner biopic may be done in by alleged 1999 rape

In the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite brouhaha, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences restructured its membership in such a way that it's practically guaranteed that a disproportionate number of African-American actors, directors, producers, writers, costume designers and make-up artists are going to get Academy Award nods next year. Of course, some may call this a wild overreaction, seeing as how the president of - and therefore, the most powerful person within - AMPAS is a black woman and that since 2000, not only have black actors been receiving Oscar nominations at a rate that synchs up perfectly with their ratio within the Screen Actors Guild, they've actually been winning them at a rate that far outweighs their overall share of both the SAG membership body and U.S. society as a whole. But then again, to dare question the motives or logic of people declaring something to be racist and prejudicial by default makes you racist and prejudicial yourself, so it's probably for the best if none of us ever mull on such unfortunate statistics. 

Anyhoo, the big beneficiary of the AMPAS overhaul, many predicted, would be a guy named Nate Parker, whose film The Birth of a Nation was sold for a record-breaking $17.5 million at Sundance. The biopic, which appears to be a VERY selective and VERY loose adaptation of The Confessions of Nat Turner, was pretty much pigeonholed as next year's Best Picture recipient. A hot, young, black up-and-coming filmmaker? A movie with contentious racial overtones (but the kind of contentious racial overtones Hollywood likes?) Lots and lots of black actors getting whipped and raped and slaughtered by caricatures of plantation owners? Oh, you know the big wigs in La-La-Land can't get enough of that. Barring some sort of absolute astronomical fluke, there seemed to be no way that The Birth of a Nation (yes, it does, ironically, appropriate the title of the infamous, unabashedly racist 1915 D.W. Griffith movie) wasn't going to pick up a backhoe's worth of statuettes in Feb. 2017. 

Well, just one teeny, tiny, teensy little problem reared its head in late August - as it turns out, Nate Parker and one of his The Birth of a Nation co-writers may or may not have raped a woman at Penn State in 1999. 

According to accounts of the supposed victim - who killed herself in 2012 - Parker and pal Jean Celestin took turns raping her after she blacked out from too much alcohol consumption. Furthermore, the victim claimed that both Parker and Celestin continued to harass her, up until she went to the police with her story. While Parker was acquitted of the crime, Celestin (who, I believe it is worth mentioning again, shares co-writing credits on The Birth of A Nation), was found guilty, only to have his conviction overturned on a later appeal. 

Making things worse? In an Ebony interview, rather than talk his way out of the rape discussion, Parker only made things worse when he said that, as a 19-year-old, he didn't really know what "consent" meant and viewed sex, as many a college frosh doth, as nothing more than a game of ejaculatory Command and Conquer. Eventually, Gabrielle Union, who co-stars in The Birth of a Nation alongside Parker (but not as Nat Turner's historically-disputed wife), went to the Los Angeles Times with an op-ed of her own, in which she aired how uneasy the whole rape flap makes her feel as an actual sexual assault victim (while continuing to keep her bridge only halfway burnt by plugging the "important and ground-breaking" movie as "an opportunity to inform and educate so that these situations cease to occur on college campuses.")

Oh, and the big old ironic cherry atop the sundae of get-the-fuck-outta-here, will 'ya? The alleged victim of the men - whose movie is a hyper-violent celluloid attack on white privilege - was, well ... kind of white. 

And now, we find ourselves struggling what the hell to do with a movie, set for national release this November, that was not only predetermined to be next year's Best Picture winner but indeed forever be remembered as THE definitive film of the Black Lives Matter era, a triumph of the cinematic form that would be remembered as a crucial turning point for People of Color in cinema (that the hero of said film is a man who boasted of murdering ten children, surely, is nothing but the idle chatter of racists.) But now? With Parker's past coming back to haunt him, The Birth of a Nation is a film surrounded by an entirely different discussion - this one, centered around societal constructs like "toxic masculinity," "rape culture" and "male privilege" instead of the anticipated and desired "whites against blacks" historical narrative. 

Instead of being hailed as hero of the African-American cause, it looks like Nate Parker has now been demoted to black persona non grata. This puts the hyper-liberal AMPAS voting constituency in a tough bind - do they give The Birth of a Nation a Hamilton-sized bag of trophies in the name of black solidarity, or do they shy away from the movie out of fear of promoting violence against women and the color-neutral institution of sexism? Even with the younger, hipper, less-honky AMPAS commission, something tells me that - the irony, how it burns - the politics surrounding Nate Parker will more than likely sink his big movie, which, honestly, was only puffed up because of the sociocultural circumstances of its time, therefore making its celebration a symbolic political statement rather than an endorsement of sheer artistry.

Which, in a roundabout way, could indeed lead to the single most ironic thing in the history of ironic things happening. With The Birth of a Nation knocked out of the running for Best Picture, the presumptive frontrunner now is a World War II drama about a pacifist soldier called Hacksaw Ridge. 

Which means - put on your best shittin' britches, boys - the Academy may indeed make the conscious choice to reward Mel Gibson over Nate Parker, because somehow, someway, he's the least toxic of the two heading into awards season.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book reviewer publishes incredibly prejudiced, offensive article demeaning and belittling the woes of an entire ethnic group ... but nobody gives a shit

Imagine, if you will, someone - working for any publication anywhere in America - did a book review of, oh say, Between the World and Me, and in his or her review, the critic chastized Ta-Nehisi Coates' writing because, as bad as blacks in America may have had it historically, the Native Americans have had it way worse. Oh, and in that same review, the reviewer harps on African-Americans in general for always complaining and feeling sorry about their lot in lives instead of doing anything about it. Well, odds are, that review probably would have been vivisected by the great online social justice hordes, and whoever wrote it almost certainly would have been fired - and subsequently, typified as a hideous racist - due to the public backlash. Well, that's pretty much what Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book reviewer Dan Simpson expressed in his overview of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir written by San Fran investment J.D. Vance about his childhood growing up in rural Kentucky. From the very first paragraph, we know that Simpson's agenda isn't to firmly assess and analyze Vance's work, but get the point across that, by golly, that dad-blamed Donald Trump might just exploit them and their miseries en route to getting elected. Which, naturally, segues into this neutron bomb of a blurb:

"There are two problems here, nestling among what seem to me to be the truths about hillbillies. The first is that there are other groups in American society, in different parts of the country, whose situations are just as troubling, if not more so, than the problems of the hillbillies. They were outdoors for the most part, not jammed into crowded urban neighborhoods like many African-Americans and Hispanics and undocumented immigrants. 

The other problem is that we all know from country songs that there is a definite predisposition for feeling sorry for oneself that is a major characteristic of so-called hillbillies. The story was that if one played a country song backward, one found a job, the car started running again and one’s wife came back."

Oh, I see ... all of the pain and misery and abject poverty and wide-scale mockery and public scorn and social alienation and stereotyping is OK because some people of different colors have it worse. So yeah, fuck the fact that nine out of the ten poorest zip codes in the nation are predominantly white, with about a third of them consisting of 90 percent plus Caucasian inhabitants. And as we all know, poor rural whites are the only group in America that wallows in defeatism, self-victimization and total nihilism, with absolutely no aspirations to improve their own lots in life. And guys, totally fuck the fact that the very people Vance wrote about - largely non-college educated, middle-aged, white rural laborers - are dying off at a rate rivaling that of gay men at the height of the AIDS crisis. The black folks and Hispanics, Simpson formally declares, have traditionally had it rougher in their urban enclaves, so no need to pay any attention to what all those toothless, redneck sister-fuckers in Appalachia are saying about living on top of toxic waste sites and not receiving any of the same public entitlements that city-dwellers receive from the government like candy corn on Halloween. Alas, in the interest of fairness, perhaps I can take Simpson's logic and apply it equally to African and Latino-Americans - who, since they generally are in better financial shape than Native Americans and certainly much better off than the residents back in the third world economic disaster zones in Africa and South and Central America - really have no right or rationale to complain about anything that happens to them. I mean, that's only fair, per the editorial standards of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, anyway.

Kanye West experiences backlash for casting call seeking "only multi-racial women"

We here at The Internet Is In America feel very conflicted about Kanye West. On one hand, it's pretty hard to dislike anybody who randomly tweets about his love of Blazing Lasers on the TurboGrafx-16 and who, in the past, has made surprisingly thoughtful statements about heterophobia in the fashion industry and the nature of classism as a dividing line in U.S. culture. Then again, he also says he doesn't think white people should be allowed to write about "black music," so yeah ... looks like the official IIIA stance on the polarizing rapper will have to remain locked at "neutral" for the time being. Well, Mr. West's latest multimedia boondoggle involves his recent all-call for "multi-racial" only fashion models, which - surprise, surprise - a lot of people on the Twitter-sphere took offense to. Naturally, this lead to one Nigerian journalist (yes, you would) attempting to infiltrate the shoot to find out what nefarious intentions Kanye really had in mind ... only to find out that, well, no one on the set really knew what "multi-racial" meant visually. Still, other miffed black feminists decided to display their anger in a more innovative way. I mean, if standing on a street corner holding a sign reading "you ain't slick, Ye" with the phrase "they want black features, not black women" scrawled over your exposed breasts isn't the best way to bring about sociocultural change, I honestly don't know what is.

Time magazine dedicates entire issue to Internet trolls and online "hate speech"

The Aug. 29 edition of Time - a magazine that, for all intents and purposes, has not been culturally relevant since they turned O.J. Simpson the same color as a charcoal briquette for "dramatic effect" in the mid-90s - was anchored around a piece penned by Joel Stein titled "How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet." As you'd expect, the author of such journalistic triumphs as "I Now Have Scientific Proof of How Awesome I Really Am" and "Why Older People Shouldn't Vote - And Other Ideas Unpopular With My Parents" pretty much spent the entirety of the screed going after the much-maligned alt-right, whose modus operandi he describes thus:

"Republicans who don’t like Trump are 'cuckservatives.' Men who don’t see how feminists are secretly controlling them haven’t 'taken the red pill,' a reference to the truth-revealing drug in The Matrix. They derisively call their adversaries 'social-justice warriors' and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weakness to gain pity, which allows them to control the levers of power. Trolling is the alt-right’s version of political activism, and its ranks view any attempt to take it away as a denial of democracy."

For a moment, lets overlook Stein conveniently leaving out the fact that the term "troll," as an online pejorative, dates back to the 1980s and has, until the proliferation of 4Chan, largely been a term tied to anti-government liberals who used their computer know-how to wreak havoc on large companies, utilities and other targets of scorn. Let's overlook Stein picking the absolute lowest-hanging fruit - a self-identified neo-Nazi - as "exhibit A" in his wannabe expose (interestingly, the author never acknowledges the fact that antisemitism is every bit as virulently entrenched in online, black supremacist circles ... indeed, one has to wonder if Stein himself is even aware that a high-ranking member of the Department of Homeland Security somehow managed to keep his job despite posting online videos discussing the necessity to kill the white man.) In fact, let's overlook that there are entire websites out there dedicated to doxing people who post non-P.C. things online with the intent of harming them financially (a fact that Stein never gets anywhere close to declaring in his unabashedly one-sided spiel.) Indeed, let's even forget about the article's laborious non-ending in which Klein has dinner with a Vice columnist who brags about being on food stamps and once threatened to kick his ass (she kinda' gets the last laugh, though, because Time had to release a correction because Klein, irony of ironies, got her sexual orientation wrong.) Rather, let's take a look at the inherent hypocrisy of a wealthy, white man of the Jewish persuasion (historically, the absolute richest ethnic/religious group in America) deeming himself a "white knight" for all of the Intraweb's downtrodden blacks, gays and women - and in the process, using a national publication with a circulation of 3 million weekly to stereotype, mock and ridicule an entire arbitrarily-defined class of political rivals. And for those looking for a little poetic justice? In a piece dedicated to slamming individuals who make fun of people based on broad generalizations, Klein himself caught some flak from his own publisher for, and I quote, using "a reference to Asperger's Syndrome in an inappropriate context."

Iowa professor concerned "angry" mascot may trigger university's students

In today's world, college freshman have a lot of things to worry about. Student loans, whether or not their degree in Middle Eastern Puppetry will get them a $250,000 a year management position, just how much beer and flakka they can safely enjoy as a recreational activity and, of course, wondering if the girl they slept with really, really meant it after asking her if the over the bra nipple tickle was consensual for the 18th time. Alas, rather than consider the absurd notion that today's frosh are naively thin-skinned, grossly over-medicated on pharmaceuticals (be they legal or ill-gotten) and that the university itself is more concerned with indoctrinating them with a cheerily globalist mentality instead of teaching them technical or soft skills that result in them being employable, professor Resmiye Oral at the University of Iowa - a child abuse specialist that, in the past, has been condemned by judges for "rushing to judgement" about parental maltreatment incidents - has pinpointed a different locus for the woes of Generation Y: college football mascots that, by golly, are just too dang angry-looking. "Herky’s angry, to say the least, faces conveying an invitation to aggressivity and even violence are not compatible with the verbal messages that we try to convey to and instill in our students and campus community," she wrote in a letter to Iowa's athletics department decrying the disposition of the Hawkeyes' spokes-cartoon. "As we strive to tackle depression, suicide, violence, and behavioral challenges and help our students succeed, I plead with you to allow Herky to be like one of us, sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes angry, sometimes concentrated." Although one has to wonder, if Oral was truly concerned with the well-being of the student body, why isn't she pushing for the university to expand job-preparedness and technical skills development as a priority over worrying that a fictitious, roided-up Tweety Bird might be the core reason why kids are attempting to end their own lives? Hell ... she might even be able to reinvest the $167,000 a year she receives in public subsidies to better the youths she is so concerned about, wouldn't she?

Texas mattress store closes after airing commercial mocking 9/11 victims

Eagle-eyed viewers in San Antonio may have caught a glimpse of a Miracle Mattress commercial featuring three employees - just for the record, all of them well under the age of 30 and all of whom could be adequately described as "people of color" - gleefully hawking an upcoming twin mattress sale to commemorate, what else, the 15th anniversary of 9/11. That, in and of itself, would be in rather poor taste, but it's the commercial's finale - in which two of the employees find themselves tumbling into a stack of mattresses a'la the WTC, with the morbidly obese pitchwoman shrieking in feigned horror as the makeshift tower collapse before sarcastically declaring "we'll never forget" - that really irked more than a few viewers. Indeed, the backlash was so strong that the company's owner, Mike Bonanno, decided to simply close his business rather than put up with the fervent public backlash. If you want, here's a video of one of the employees trying to make amends for the ill-conceived promo. Alas, since she had no problem mocking the suffering and death of thousands of innocent people, obviously, she would have no problem with me mocking her sorry fat ass and her shitty mea culpa, right? 

Remember kids ... shit comes in every color of the rainbow. And some chunks, clearly, are much larger than others.

This week's top ten white-on-black violent crimes

Odds are, you've heard of the "racial achievement gap." Basically, it references the generalized failure of black students to achieve standardized testing scores or graduate from high school at rates competitive with their white counterparts. Of course, there are plenty of hypotheses as to why this is the case (Wikipedia's go you covered, if you are interested), but today, I would like to turn our attention to an area where African-Americans are clearly outdoing their mayonnaise-hued brethren - that being, the domain of interracial violence. Yes, true believers, black people are indeed committing violent crimes like armed robbery, battery, rape and murder against whites at a rate five times higher than whites commit the same violent offenses against black people - a rather astounding feat, seeing as how there are easily five times as many white people in the U.S. as there are black people. The Casey Kaseem of ethnocentrically-driven, honky-slaying, cracker-beating and peckerwood-raping I am, it's time once again to recount the most notable, nauseating and nonsensical incidents of black folks showing those white devils what for...

10. In St. Petersburg, Fla., 37-year-old Harold Stewart has been arrested for the armed robbery of 66-year-old Jeffrey Hardeman on Sept. 2. The disabled war veteran describes the attack, which occurred outside ... surprise, surprise ... the local Wal-Mart. "He grabbed me around the neck and started choking me, punching me in the side and the head grabbing for my stuff. Then, he threw me to the ground. Then, he took my walker and started hitting me with the walker, then ran with the walker and took off." 

09. In Jacksonville, Fla., 15-year-old Patrick Christopher Mack was charged with aggravated battery and grand theft after he attacked a female bike store employee and attempted to flee the business with an expensive bicycle. According to police reports, Mack asked for help with a flat tire on his bicycle before blasting the woman with pepper spray and bashing her in the skull with a chair, WWE-style. 

08. Yes, we have not one but two incidents this week involving black men beating elderly people to a pulp with their own walkers during robbery incidents. This one occurred in Indianapolis on Aug. 24, when three black young men invaded the home of 79-year-old Nancy Quest, beat her with her own medical apparatus until she was concussed and took off with several of her belongings. A trio of young men - who have yet to be apprehended - were caught on convenience store surveillance using Quest's credit card to buy sodas and potato chips just 20 minutes after the break-in. 

07. On Sept. 1, 41-year-old Jason Mikulak was shot and killed during a robbery in St. Paul, Minn. Police have charged 29-year-old Brandon Lee Harris, who at the time was already wanted for parole violations stemming from a 2010 armed robbery, with the murder. Harris was arrested for yet another armed robbery a few years earlier - according to the criminal complaint, he told  a victim robbed at gunpoint "he would have no remorse shooting him because he hates white people."

06. In North Carolina, 77-year-old Barbara Bigelow Wyatt has been charged with the vehicular homicide of 23-year-old Christopher Scott Askey. Wyatt, who fled the scene of the fatal collision, is starring down a litany of charges, including felony hit and run, misdemeanor death by motor vehicle (yes, in North Carolina, you can kill someone and only get charged with a misdemeanor) and "operating a motor vehicle without financial responsibility" - which, in layman's terms, means she didn't have automobile insurance. 

05. In Houston, 34-year-old Eric Pleasant has been charged with murder after several eyewitnesses spotted him dumping a large container inside a garbage bin outside a scummy looking motel. The contents of that bin? According to police, it's the head and at least one leg of an unknown white male, believed to be in his 40s. 

04. On Sept, 9, 26-year-old Lah'tijera Howard (pronounced "unemployable") was arrested by Las Vegas police for allegedly running over her 34-year-old live-in boyfriend, who - irony of ironies - was named Daryl White. Oh, and Howard was already arrested earlier for stabbing White in the thigh and threatening to suffocate her own child with a pillow.

03. And hey, don't think black dudes in relationships can't get pretty murdery with their mayonnaise-hued gal pals, too. Just take a gander at 52-year-old David Williams, who was arrested for allegedly murdering his 23-year-old girlfriend, Brittany Hackett, on Sept. 7. Per Houston police, Williams stabbed her multiple times before deciding to finish her off for good by running her over with his car. 

02. In Belleville, Mo, 50-year-old Samuel J. Johnson has been indicted by a grand jury for the triple murder of two elderly women - Dorothy Bone, 82, and Doris Fischer, 79 - and their 62-year old hairdresser, 62-year-old Michael Cooney, during an apparent 2005 robbery. According to police, the three victims, combined, were stabbed more than 50 times. As a plus, though? He's already in jail, currently serving a seven-year-sentence for a litany of narcotics and firearms offenses. 

...and this week's selection for the absolute worst instance of black on white crime goes to...

01. Marcas McGowan, 32, of Kansas City, Kansas! On Sept. 6 he worked out a plea deal to escape the death penalty for the 2014 murder of Cady Harris, his girlfriend's 5-year-old daughter. After threatening her mother's life with a handgun, McGowan kidnapped Cady and embarked upon a high-speed chase with the police, culminating with a shootout in Leavenworth. Although McGowan initially claimed Cady was struck by a policeman's bullet, forensic testing reveals the child was mortally injured by a point-blank range shot from McGowans's firearm. At this point, the best case scenario for McGowan is that he will spend the remainder of his life in prison. However, when sentencing resumes in November, the judge very well could toss out the plea bargain in exchange for the death penalty ... which, I believe it is safe to say, is the best case scenario we are all rooting for.

Amy Schumer cites Internet trolls as reason why new book sales are so lackluster

Even without getting into the whole feminists/anti-feminists dichotomy, I think it's pretty safe to just come out and say that Amy Schumer isn't a good comedian. Indeed, not unlike Dane Cook and Carrot Top, she's but the most recent in a long line of factory assembled, fit-for-mass-consumption pop comedians, only with the added annoyance of imbuing her whole schtick with a steady undercurrent of irritating, self-victimizing, "I make millions of dollars per movie but sexism is still holding me back" bickering, bellyaching and complaining. Oh, and she is a known plagiarist, but apparently, dismantling the invisible patriarchy is too important a social imperative to worry about trifling things like someone making tons of money by stealing the intellectual work of others. Anyhoo, Schumer's latest book, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, is being called one of the biggest literary fiascoes in years, having sold a paltry 36,000 hardcover copies in its first-week of sales (keep in mind, no-name YouTube star bios are routinely generating twice that in their debut weeks.) Well, the book publisher claims to have sold 170,000 copies of Schumer's latest manifesto across digital and print platforms in the two weeks since it was released (not that publishers would ever dream of inflating their numbers through suspicious means or anything like that), but even then, since they doled out an astronomical $9 for the rights to the screed, it's pretty much a given that Simon & Schuster will experience a massive loss. Of course, rather than admit that fact that nobody in their right mind gives a shit about reading full chapters about Schumer's stuffed animal collection and how she lost her virginity, the comedian instead pegged the lackluster book sales on ... what else? ... Internet trolls downvoting her tome on Amazon with a deluge of one-star reviews - which, in a rather self-defeating manner - pissed her off so much she refused to do publicity work for her own book.

Filipino president reportedly refers to Barack Obama as "a son of a whore"

For all the incessant talk we hear from the media and liberal ideologues about Donald Trump posing a "far right threat," no one ever really brings up the existence of truly far-right political leaders elsewhere in the world. We're not talking about guys opposed to TPP and want tougher immigration enforcement (which, according to the SJWs of the World Wide Web, is literally a hate crime on par with sending Japanese citizens to concentration camps), we're talking about hardline, hyper-militaristic conservative strongmen, the kinds of dudes who, depending on your perspectives, were either the real bad guys in cheesy 1980s action movies or the strongly implied antiheroes. Perfectly fitting into the vigilante-politician mold more befitting Sylvester Stallone's character in Cobra than Jimmy Carter is Rodrigo Duterte, the current president of the Philippines, who, by all accounts, is the baddest motherfucker to hold a head of state title anywhere in the world. Porting about an anti-drug platform so hardcore it makes the central plot of the old NES game NARC sound subdued, Duterte has been linked to the Davao Death Squad, who are believed to have "disappeared" more than 1,000 people alleged to be murderers, pedophiles, drug dealers and career criminals the normal judicial system just couldn't handle. Indeed, in public speeches Duterte has openly called for his constituents to take the law into their own hands and execute drug dealers and addicts, earlier this summer declaring "these sons of whores are destroying our children. I warn you, don't go into that, even if you're a policeman, because I will really kill you." Hell, he even promised to give citizens $43,000 for every "ninja cops" protecting crime kingpins last month (his comments when asked if his bounty was a violation of human rights? "Crime against humanity? In the first place, I’d like to be frank with you: are they humans?"

Alas, despite Duterte's really not at all symbolic at this point "War on Drugs" - believed to have produced at least 2,000 extrajudicial corpses since he was inaugurated earlier this year - nobody in the States really paid that much attention to him until he recently made some, well, rather blunt remarks about President Barack Obama. At a press conference, Duterte said he wouldn't put up with no jibber-jabber from Mr. O about his aggressive anti-drug policies at an upcoming world leader summit, declaring "you must be respectful. Do not just throw away questions and statements. Son of a whore, I will curse you in that forum." That statement irked Obama enough that he wound up cancelling a meeting with Duterte - this, despite evidence emerging that the "son of a whore" statement was directed not towards the sitting U.S. president, but rather, towards a pesky journalist who asked the "wrong" question in Duterte's presence. Regardless, considering Duterte's track record, it's probably safe to assume he's going to be saying plenty more outrageous, neo-con fascist fantasy dialogue in the years ahead. Indeed, seeing as how Duterte once called the Pope "a son of a bitch" for holding up traffic, by the time his presidency is up he might just have more quotables than Winston freakin' Churchill.

New study says Wal-Marts in richer, whiter communities are less shitty than stores in blacker, poorer neighborhoods

You know, as intelligent as sociologists like to think they are, one has to wonder just how mindlblind they are to their own researcher biases. Case in point? The latest study by Columbia professor Andy Reich accuses the nation's largest retailer and employer of "redlining" communities of color. How so? Well, he studied evaluated about 35,000 Yelp reviews for about 2,800 Walmart stores across the nation, and found that users in predominantly black zip codes were more likely to describe their customer experiences as negative than those who lived in predominantly white zip codes - even when other factors, like socioeconomics, were controlled. "The higher the percentage of black or Latino residents in a zip code," Reich bluntly declares, "the worse Walmart service becomes, regardless of whether this zip code is poor or wealthy." And then, he concludes his heavily flawed research with this puzzling call to action:

"For Walmart and other retailers, providing a pleasant customer service experience seems likely to be increasingly important to corporate profitability. For its own sake. then, Walmart should hire more employees, particularly at stores in low-income communities of color, and give all Walmart employees more reasons to smile through better wages and working conditions."

Say what? Didn't Reich himself say that socioeconomic well-being meant absolute Jack Dookie in determining whether customers like their local Walmart, and that no matter how rich or how poor a community was, consumers in predominantly black areas were much likelier to voice displeasure with big box mart service in general? There are a lot of potential takeaways from Reich's questionable findings, but the one glaring one - that, maybe, for whatever reason, minority employees may not give as much a shit about their job performance as white Walmart workers - is completely off-limits, off-topic, off-the-table and too dad-gum off-ensive to even mull as result finding. You know, maybe - just maybe - institutional racism isn't the underlying evil to all inequalities that exist throughout the universe; of course, getting guys like Reich to even consider the fact that some people falter and fail throughout life simply because they're just too shiftless, apathetic, entitled and stupid to succeed in a complex socioeconomic system sounds about as likely as ... well, the service at a predominantly black Walmart being better than the service at a predominantly white Walmart.

...and a few headlines that speak for themselves...

California State University Los Angeles introduces "blacks-only" student housing

UMass now considers Harambe jokes a form of sexual assault

Libertarian presidential candidate doesn't know what "Aleppo" is

U.K. woman jailed in Oklahoma for marrying own daughter ... after getting divorce from own son in 2010

"Mary Magdalene" accused of assaulting two Muslim women in New York

Ohio police department posts photos of parents overdosed on heroin with four-year-old left to fend for himself in backseat of van

Artificial intelligence program accused of racism for picking nearly all white beauty pageant winners

Three Utah Native Americans charged with raping 9-year-old

37-year-old illegal alien who tried to kill two police officers in Fresno wasn't deported, even after serving 16 years in prison for raping three underage girls

Georgia man tries to rape underage employee in Dairy Queen bathroom

Air China publication advises visitors to avoid areas in London populated by Indians, Pakistanis and blacks

Connecticut commutes sentence of woman who drowned newborn daughter in toilet in 2006

Twitterer of color wants white people to "get over" 9/11

Saddleback College history chair tears down university's 9/11 memorial posters, demands students go to "free speech areas" to complain

Three teenagers charged with vicious murder of 71-year-old St. Louis man

Black Lives Matter activist robbed in Texas, now demands more police on city streets

South Carolina Man arrested for impregnating 11-year-old

Brown University to start providing men with free tampons

Hilary Clinton campaign wants you to know that Trump is in league with a cartoon frog they think is racist

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B-MOVIE REVIEW: “Duck! The Carbine High Massacre” (1999)

It’s easily the greatest slapstick comedy ever made about a school shooting!

The April 20, 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School served as a real paradigm shift for American society. While there had been school shootings before -- and before that, nearly two decades worth of workplace massacres -- the tragedy in the suburbs of Denver really came to represent the dawning of a new era in American violence. It was the birth of the modern mass shooter era, a macabre spectacle that’s been replayed before our morbidly fascinated eyes many, many, MANY times since.

Of course, the cold hard facts behind the Columbine massacre have been fairly obfuscated by years and years of misinformation (a quick and dirty primer on everything the conventional narrative gets wrong can be read right here, enlightenment seekers.) Obviously, with an unparalleled event of the like -- which received nearly unprecedented around-the-clock Internet and cable news coverage -- it was only a matter of time before some filmmakers came along and decided to dramatize the incident. There’s actually a pretty large number of Columbine-inspired movies out there, ranging from the absolutely incredible (do whatever it takes to see 2003’s “Zero Day”) to the really, really good (Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” albeit with some horribly opportunistic anti-homophobia-politicking needlessly included) to the fairly forgettable (Uwe Boll’s “Heart of America” immediately springs to mind.)

The first movie to really focus on the Columbine incident, surprisingly, wasn’t “Bowling for Columbine.” Rather, it was an incredibly obscure New Jersey flick called “Duck! The Carbine High Massacre,” which -- unbelievably -- was released just months after the mass shooting in Colorado.

It seems like a film coming out so soon after the tragedy would’ve garnered more media publicity -- indeed, that had to have been the intentions of directors William Hellfire and Joey Smack (obviously, their birth names), who also played the film’s lead characters. Strangely enough though, the same media conglomerates that produced maudlin special after maudlin special on the massacre steered clear of covering the movie’s release; and if you think it’s because of taste, tact and respect for the families of the dead, clearly, you don’t know much about American media.

Then again, the mass media leviathans may have avoided the film for an altogether different reason: namely, the fact that “Duck!” absolutely annihilates the news industry for their hypocritical and exploitative take on mass killings. Although indelibly crude and unpolished, there’s no denying that there’s a real set of brains behind the film, and for all of its amateurish faults and flaws, it’s a shockingly profound and poignant movie, with an absolutely biting satirical message that, in my opinion, does a better job of explaining why Columbine happened then any of the films that followed it.

Just imagine what these kids could have gotten their hands on if they had
stuck around long enough to see the Silk Road!

Following a smart-alecky disclaimer for the easily offended, we jump to a scene in which a bunch of teenagers (played by thirty year old actors, of course) pretend to freak out while their teacher, wearing one of the worst wigs you will ever see in any movie, bleeds to death. The kids call 911, but the operator thinks they are all high and ignores their cries for help.

Yes, that’s right, folks … “Duck!” is an “Airplane!” type comedy, of the utmost brass-balled variety.

So, the dying teacher yelps “why?” and the credits -- which consists of a high number of adult film thespians -- roll. We jump to two kids, Derwin and Derrick, sitting in their cavernous basement, drinking, smoking, and looking at online weapons while wearing Nazi helmets. They look over a Chinese website that sells supposed nuclear weapons, and here comes mom and dad, who much like the REAL Klebolds and Harrises, somehow had no goddamn idea their kids had enough firepower in their possessions to overthrow a banana republic. The parents overlook their “science project” and briefly discuss a “violent English assignment” that perturbed the school administration. One of the kids asks them to scram, and dad -- who has a literally violent reaction to techno-metal a’la KMFDM -- slugs his wife across the face for no real reason.

From there, we get a look at the eclectic high school cast. There’s your bullies, your jocks, your greasers, Goths and despondent losers of all varieties -- much like a “Friday the 13th” offering though, it’s probably for the best that you don’t get attached to any of them as a viewer.

Man, is it ever reassuring to see kids take up an interest in reading, no?

In a technology class, a Christian goody-two-shoes girl tries to recruit people to come to her youth group meeting, while a special ed student gives everyone a lecture on the merits of “Dark Star.” The teacher goes on and on about how great the Web is, and the only black dude in the entire movie rebukes him by saying the Internet is only for white folks. Derrick and Derwin talk about “The Poor Man’s James Bond,” and they’re accosted by a mysterious, faceless janitor, who says some very ominous things to them (believe it or not, this could be a highly prescient criticism of Internet absorption … more on that later, readers.)

So, the two kids try to detonate their nuke, but it’s a dud. One of them kind of insinuates he’s a teen alcoholic (which was very much the real life case with Dylan Klebold, a little tidbit that somehow gets lost in the standard media narrative.) Then, one of the kids receives an absolutely savage mauling at the hands of literally everybody in school, culminating with one of the jocks carving the term “freak” on his stomach. The janitor then comes to the kid’s aid, and tells him it might finally be time to exact a little revenge on his tormentors.

At school the next day, the other kid has his copy of “Mein Kampf” ripped up by the black kid, who literally wears a shirt that says “I hate white people” on it, because the book promotes, and I quote, “hate literature.” A folksy hippy girl sings a song called “An Ode to the Internet,” and Derrick (or Derwin, not that it really matters) scribbles “How to Make An Atomic Bomb” on the chalkboard and freaks everybody out. Since his comrade is at home nursing his wounds, he can’t do the presentation, so he gets an F from his teacher.

On the universal creepy meter, this guy scores a 9 out of 10 ... or, about a
2 out of 10, if we're adjusting for the New Jersey average.

At home, the other kid watches really violent anime, takes his dad’s drugs and rubs cream he bought off the Internet to mask his wounds from the previous day’s pummeling. The two then have a conversation about how much they hate “pig cities” and “escapist bastards.” They decide to take drastic actions to send a clear message to the masses: “We owe it to society,” one of the characters creepily states, “to show these people their lives are a lie.”

At the alleged church group meeting, the evangelical girl -- who brought your stereotypical Jersey girl skank-ola with her -- Today is the Day does a performance and freaks her out. Meanwhile, Derrick and Derwin visit a black market dealer, who tries to sell them sex slaves to go along with their firearms. Then, there’s a fairly lengthy satirical segment where the dealer shows off his wares, which are held by a bunch of naked women in gas masks -- talk about the fetishization of violence, no? He concludes by dropping the best line in the entire movie: “You kids don’t get hurt while you’re killing some people.”

Derrick and Derwin chug alcohol, smoke cigs and load their arsenal. Meanwhile, the Christian girl’s parents read an all-too telling biblical passage about casting pearls before swine, while one of the jocks delivers a monologue about his love of canned meats.

And then, we get to the massacre scene. It’s pretty much what you would expect, with ample dollops of super morbid humor -- and also, we learn that black people have brains that are blue, for some reason. I’m still not sure what the message there is supposed to be, honestly.

While half the school gets riddled with bullets, a news crew shows up to bemoan the “exciting … I mean, tragic” event, with a police chief blaming the shooting on minorities. A clueless SWAT team arrive, and so does the principal, who mugs it up for the camera. Meanwhile, the news station replays footage of a kid being shot and stumbling over and over, while a pair of teens who do look suspiciously like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold watch in awe at home.

Umm ... yeah, now might be a good time to put down the Lunchables, fellas. 

Derrick and Derwin then find a broom closet, share a final smoke, and blow each others brains out. They tell one another they “love each other,” and their hands kind of touch after they commit dual suicide. Meanwhile, the principal and the police survey the cafeteria mayhem, with an innocent goth kid getting killed because, apparently, that’s something the po-po have an unfortunate tendency to do in high-tension situations. Then, a propane bomb prepped by the mysterious janitor detonates, and presumably, everybody in the building gets blown to smithereens.

The film concludes with a litany of TV interviews with oblivious parents, naïve teachers and even a crackpot who believes “alien influences” may have had something to do with the shooting … yet another eerily prescient observation on the future impact of fringe media on the lives of the disaffected.

The end credits roll, as more and more gifts are added to a memorial placard. The final scene in the film is a throwback to the Harris and Klebold doppelgangers, who proclaim they should “blow up our high school and be on TV.“ Intentionally or not, that is quite possibly the most revelatory moment of any film about a school shooting, before or after.

Well, not that I need to tell you this, but “Duck!” is most certainly not a film for all tastes. With its crude “shot on videotape” look, terrible acting, subpar special effects and a narrative that will probably piss off a good 95 percent of the populace, I can’t say this is a people-pleaser picture.

That said, despite the film’s obvious structural failings, I still think it’s a damned poignant movie, and one that REALLY cuts to the meat of mass murder more than most “serious” films of the type.

Rather than regurgitate what’s already been said, this film is absolutely spot-on when it comes to identifying the two likeliest culprits for all youth-instigated mass killings in the U.S. -- a longing for mass media glory, and Internet-assisted desocialization. It’s downright eerie how a film that came out so soon after the shooting was so quick to pinpoint the catalysts that took everyone else a decade and a half to figure out. This movie doesn’t even toy with the idea of a political cop-out -- it makes its point front and center, and as a collective society, we would be wise to heed what the filmmakers (who were arrested after the film was released for bringing weapons on to school grounds) are saying here.

No matter what your personal definition of "good" resembles, "Duck!" probably won't fulfill your criteria. That said, it’s a remarkable film nonetheless, with an incredibly intelligent message cloaked around 90 minutes of hokey mayhem.

It is far more in-tune with the sociology and psychology of mass shootings than  just about any film of the like that I’ve seen, and it’s a movie that -- as much as we hate to consider -- remains oh so relevant today.

Odds are, you’ll hate “Duck!” But at least you will hate it for all the right reasons -- namely, because you can’t help but agree with its core hypotheses on mass killings, no matter how badly you want to point the finger of blame on much more convenient scapegoats.

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Double Review: "Tammy" / "22 Jump Street"

Looking for some laughs this summer? Well, here are two big budget movies that are about as funny as concentration camp footage! 

It's been a while since I've been to the movies, and that's for good reason. For one thing, even matinee tickets nowadays cost in excess of ten bucks American, which is at least five or six dollars too many. Secondly, new ownership at my beloved Starlight Six Drive-In has implemented some downright Hitler-esque policies as of late (the Nazi scum got rid of the tofu dogs!) and rather than support their goose-stepping business practices, I'd rather take my wallet elsewhere (and by elsewhere, I mean nowhere, 'cause there's a shit load of free movies I can watch on YouTube whenever I damned please.)

But those aren't the primary reasons why I've avoided the cineplex like an AIDS-infected barbed wire fence lately.

Between the three hour long "Transformers" rehashes and the shameless Disney cash-ins and the increasingly dumb comic book offerings and the needless "Godzilla" remakes starring the dad from "Malcolm in the Middle," this may very well be the single worst summer at the box office EVER.

Given the option of watching Disney hokum, crappy CGI kids movies or whatever Tyler Perry's crapping out these days, it SEEMED like going the R-rated adult comedy route was the right path to take for a weekend double feature.

Folks, I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

FEATURE NUMBER ONE:

Tammy (2014)

Director: Ben Falcone

When it comes to box office draws of the 2010s, none are as unlikely as Melissa McCarthy, the dough-faced anti-Sandra Bullock who became an unexpected star after her breakout (and sink-clogging) performance in 2011's "Bridesmaids." After "The Heat" and "Identity Thief," McCarthy seems to have found a niche of sorts playing semi-sociopathic dunces -- in short, they're the kind of roles that we're tailor-made for Roseanne Barr 25 years ago.

The thing is, although Barr's pseudo white-trash psychosis would be believable (if not all that far removed from reality), McCarthy's characters just come as painfully one-dimensional. "Tammy" is McCarthy's worst vehicle to date, a really, really uninspired CINO (comedy-in-name-only) that may have one or two cheap chuckles within its 90-minute run-time. The rest of the film is dedicated to inconsequential background dressings so bland and uninteresting, you tend to wonder if the filmmakers couldn't have made a better, more focused film in a 22-minute sitcom pilot.

Tammy herself is a crude, dumb and completely unsavory character. The film begins with her losing her job as a burger flipper (and for good reason), and then segues into that old chestnut/convenient plot mechanic for lazy writers, the coming home to find your spouse cheating on you sequence. She then meets up with her mother, and decides to embark upon an aimless road trip with her alcoholic and diabetic grandmother -- played by Susan Sarandon, in a role about as far removed from "Dead Man Walking" as you can conceivably get as an actress.

To say the film is "directionless" would be an understatement. The two end up buying a jet-ski, and granny ends up shacking up with some blues bar patron while Tammy tries to put the moves on his less-than-interested son. Eventually, Tammy and grammy both wind up in the slammer for getting into a supposedly comedic brawl outside a liquor store. The saving grace there, I guess, is that it actually contains one of the few truly funny moments in the entire film, a scene in which Tammy encourages some underage drinkers to take up bath salts instead.

To procure money to spring her grandma from jail, Tammy decides to stick up a burger joint. Now on the lam, the duo wind up at a mansion inhabited by middle-aged lesbians (enter Kathy Bates and that Asian chick from "Grey's Anatomy"), but of course, justice eventually prevails and Tammy winds up behind bars ... for all of like two seconds, before she's rescued by daddy Dan Akroyd. Apparently, the bail for armed robbery is a whole hell of a lot lower if you're a woman, I take it.

The film concludes with everybody going to Niagara Falls and having themselves a gay old time, with Tammy (now a convicted felon, mind you) somehow wooing the disinterested suitee from earlier in the film. If all of this sounds painfully uneventful, it truly is -- at certain points in the film, it feels like "Tammy" didn't even have a script, and they just dubbed in a plot in post-editing after filming a good 300 hours of ad-libbing.

Bad movies are one thing, but bad comedy films are an entirely different kind of animal. If a horror movie fails to scare you, or a romantic movie doesn't make you feel tingly or sentimental, it's not that big of a problem. Unfrightening horror films and unemotional romantic films, hypothetically, can still prove decent overall films, but an unfunny comedy movie? It fails at the core essence of what it supposedly is.

"Tammy" is an utterly lifeless film. It doesn't feel funny at all, and you can almost sense the displeasure the actors themselves feel being in it. It's stupid and uninteresting and completely unrefined, with paper-thin characters and a script so by-the-numbers, you half expect to see connect-the-dot markings show up on the celluloid. It's not the worst film of the summer (which should you tell something about the general quality of Hollywood films nowadays), but it's so utterly forgettable that odds are, you will have removed the film from your memory bank as soon as the end credits start scrolling.

This is a poor film, in just about every category. Worse still, it's not even an exceptionally poor film that embraces its own awfulness. Mediocrity is sometimes a grimmer fate than abject failure -- a truism that "Tammy" seems to go out of its way to validate for the summertime moviegoing masses.

Score:

Two Tofu Dogs out of Four.

FEATURE NUMBER TWO:

22 Jump Street (2014)

Directors: Chris Miller and Phil Lord

I never saw the first "21 Jump Street," but I'm a huge fan of the other works in Chris Miller and Phil Lord's oeuvre. Ultimately, the sequel is one feature length, self-referential gag -- what some would call "reflexive," I tend to prefer calling "lazy" and "half-assed" instead.

The big problem with "22 Jump Street" is that, despite its self-awareness of being a half-hearted sequel, it never really rises above being anything other than just another half-hearted sequel itself. The movie tends to go out of its way to remind us just how similar it is to the first film, and how its nothing more than a cash-grab-designed retread. Strangely enough, the film feels less an apology than it does the smarmy self-reflection of a student turning in a crappy term paper and boosting about their C-minus grade. The filmmakers, so it seems, can't even pretend to pride themselves on releasing such an uninspired production.

The film -- a really, really on-the-nose parody of buddy cop movies -- features Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as undercover cops trying to break into a drug ring at your all-American, cliche-filled college campus. Tatum's football aspirations, alongside Hill's under-the-cover exploits with an art school student, drive a wedge in their homoerotic-beyond-words relationship and throw a monkey wrench into the subterfuge mission. Hilariously (not really), no one in the film believes they could pass for college freshmen, yet no one in the film seems to have enough brain cells to put two and two together and determine they're narcs. I suppose you have to suspend disbelief for comedy films like this to work, but "22" takes it a step further and asks you to hang your intelligence on the coat rack as well.

I suppose there are some funny moments in the film. There's a great scene where Tatum flips out after finding out Hill is boning the daughter of Ice Cube, and there's a fairly funny split-screen drug trip sequence (featuring, of all things, Creed's "Higher") but beyond that, there's really nothing within the film too funny -- or intriguing, to be honest.

"22" is a post-comedy-film, and I mean that in the term's most negative sense. The intent of the film, ultimately, isn't to make you laugh but impress you with the scope of its own knowledge -- literally the entire film is one oblique pop culture nod after the other, with the self-aware "yeah, we know it's a sucky sequel" gimmick serving as the film's only real adhesive.  Interestingly enough, the same hook was used in another underwhelming sequel, the disappointing "Muppets Most Wanted," earlier this year. Methinks were seeing an emerging trend here, regrettably.

You may enjoy the TV stars galore -- that mustachioed guy from "Parks and Rec" and the Lucas Brothers, among them -- but you will rarely find yourself laughing because of the wit and insight of the script itself.

The absolute best thing about the film is its end credits -- which, yet again, really tells you all you need to know here. The filmmakers quickly give us previews of the next fifty or so "Jump Street" films, which of course, share the same plot device of the first two films. The best bit, probably, is the advertisement for "22 Jump Street" action figures, which feature a kid being shocked a plenty by the torrent of four-letter words flowing out of Ice Cube's plastic cakehole.

"22" is entertaining at parts, but as a whole, it's very underwhelming. I'd consider it a marginally better film than "Tammy," but not by much. As with "Tammy," the film just feels forced, like the people who made it really wanted to do anything other than work on the actual film. It's an uninspired, unenthusiastic flick, and that lethal lethargy permeates every second of the onscreen product.

Unfortunately, this appears to be where Hollywood comedy is headed for the foreseeable future. Whereas prior Hollywood genre classics like "Slap Shot," "Blazing Saddles" and "The Kentucky Fried Movie" had no qualms about shaking the politically correct hegemony, today's comedy's are just too god-damned full of themselves to be either compelling or funny.

The irreverent comedy film is dead, and the era of the post-post-modern self-reflexive comedy film is upon us. In other words, if you plan on having a good laugh, it looks like your local cineplex is going to be off-limits for the next few years, at least.

Score:

Two Tofu Dogs out of Four. 

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