Andy Hutchins
Sweat's the technique, don't sweat the technique.

kingjaffejoffer replied to your post:

is calling the Kings “the queens” really anti-gay? It seems like a pretty juvenile play on their team name at best.

I always thought that Shaq’s intent in calling the Kings “the Queens” was to paint them (and especially Vlade Divac) as soft. It was, at the very least, othering — and that it was juvenile made it more so, not less.

The Choreography of Coming Out

Questions I have about Jason Collins announcing he is gay and Sports Illustrated covering it not answered by the story or the behind-the-scenes explanation:

• Would SI have given final approval to the subjects of any of its other cover stories like it says it did to Collins and his family? If not, how is this journalism and not public relations?
• Why did Collins and his PR team choose now? Because his season was over and this was a soft spot in the media cycle when he could get tons of coverage? Because he was no longer bound to a team that would moderate how he could tell his story? Both, and also some other reasons?
• Collins explains that his coming out is partly preemptive. DidKerry Rhodes’ very public gay rumors affect his decision to come out?
• What are the best and worst things Collins’ teammates have done to create fraternal or anti-gay environments in the locker room? What can be done in the future to foster the former and prevent the latter?
• Does Collins think that his stature (both figurative and literal, at seven feet) helped him in his journey?
• How did his background (college at Stanford, which connected him to the Clintons and the Kennedys) help Collins with his journey, and with his planning for this announcement?
• Is Collins’ shot at Shaq (“Note to Shaq: My flopping has nothing to do with being gay.”) going to open a dialogue about how Shaq has routinely been anti-gay and anti-queer? (TW: Complex link, but it’s also at 2:14 of this video.)
• Does having Bill Clinton on the side of the first openly gay active Big Four (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) athlete trip out anyone else after DADT?

I have literally had a conversation about what racism doesn’t exist and a conversation about why ghosts exist with the same person tonight.

I give up.

I have been meaning to make a list of things that I will be thankful for when I am not living in this damn apartment (it will be long), but somewhere near the top of that list is “Not being subjected to Macklemore being played as white noise while Black Ops 2 is being played on my TV in our living room.”

amillionbillions replied to your post:

It’s more likely that someone with a sense of humour edited the picture of Gucci Mane for comedic effect, than it being a case of “bullshit photo retouching” — ‘Bitch I Might Be’ is the refrain in his song ‘Pillz’.

Wow! I hadn’t considered that someone putting a rapper’s lyrics into his mouth in a context where those lyrics would be comical might also describe the bullshit photo retouching that was done with that picture. Thanks!

The Wrong City, The Worst Week, and The Power of Lies

After an act of terrorism at a public event that likely could not have been predicted or prevented, one that was likely calculated to happen on the day that would most damage the city and its people, Boston’s response to the bombing of the Boston Marathon has been a stiff upper lip and macho posturing that “They messed with the wrong city,” which the smarter of Boston’s tale-tellers are careful to try to clarify as anything but. This is bullshit, obviously: For there to be a “wrong city” to attack, there would have to be a “right city” to attack, and the contrast drawn between Boston and that hypothetical place is disturbing. “Trust me, we won’t be giving up any of our civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this,” writes Dennis Lehane in The New York Times, an author whose best-known work is partially about the blurred lines of police work. Forgive me for not trusting you implicitly, sir.

Last night, video of a superb, stirring rendition of the national anthem as performed by 20,000 Bruins fans before Tuesday’s home game, the first sporting event in Boston since Monday’s bombing, popped up from Twitter and Facebook friend alike. A Facebook friend wrote “If this doesn’t tug your strings … you’re missing a heart”; someone I follow on Twitter deemed it “required viewing.” It’s not, no more than any other video of 20,000 people reacting to or singing a thing (the Soldier Field crowd joining Jim Cornelison for the final several lines of the anthem on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks is significantly more hair-raising, personally), but I get that it feels good to see that Americans can be tied together as a people and think that we are capable of suffering tragedy and marching on. These are the lies we tell ourselves to feel better, ones that let us believe things get better despite others’ best efforts.

The continuing tragedy that is the American addiction to guns produced another dark note on Tuesday, as a bill that had majority support in the Senate failed to even come to a vote in the Senate. (FOX News’ Fox Nation website, predictably, wrote a headline that suggested that the majority of Senators voted against the bill, not for cloture that would bring it to a vote.) President Obama blasted the defeat of the bill as the product of “a shameful day in Washington,” and suggested that the bill’s foes “willfully lied” about it to prevent its passage.

That lies and untruths, willful or incidental, can be used to manipulate a populace is unsurprising: Saber-rattling based on trumped-up threats from and about Iraq made up three in five Americans think that war was justified in 2003, only for those numbers to reverse (at least) as the prosecution of that war laid the falsehoods bare, and that’s only the most consequential lie of my lifetime. Lies are part of our American cultural lexicon, whether in the form of bullshit photo retouching to make Gucci Mane look more ignorant (the real image) or a young woman lying about being attacked to make Obama supporters look violent, and they are powerful things, probably more powerful than the sunshine of truth that Snopes and others attempt to provide as disinfectant, as the lies that Mark Twain supposedly said could travel halfway around the world in the time it takes the truth to put on its shoes travel much faster these days, and are less frequently followed by truths as compelling.

For example: That quote is attributed to Twain most frequently, but has also been attributed to Winston Churchill, and is attributed to neither in the Seventeenth Edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, published in 2002, which I know because I read through the book’s Churchill and Twain sections while writing this post. You can only know that for yourself, though, because you trust me as a steward of that truth, and trust me to tell you truths, like that Bartlett’s suggests Twain did write “When in doubt tell the truth” in Following the Equator … unless you also look up the quote for yourself. Bartlett’s renders Twain as a defender of truths (“Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” is also from Following the Equator)with an eye on lies (“It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you” is yet another Following the Equator quote) but suggests that Churchill remarked “In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies” at the Tehran Conference in 1943. (The bottom of this page suggests the “A lie can go halfway around the world…” phrase may have been popularized by preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, but I’m not sure how much I trust that.)

That lies could be part of the repertoire of a police force in a time of paranoia was not lost on me yesterday, as CNN, FOX News, and a host of other news agencies reported an arrest in connection with the Boston bombings, only to have the FBI, an agency comprised of people that never lie, ever, admonish the media later. Of course, lies are certainly in the The New York Post’s toolbox, too, so the FBI was probably justified in striking back in this moment, given how one person was treated like a criminal because of a mistaken suspicion that he was a suspect and not merely a witness.

But we’re lying when we say that this is the worst week ever, despite terrorism in Boston and flabbergasting gridlock in Washington and a horrific night in West, Texas. The death toll from those two events combined is perhaps a third of the death toll from attacks in Iraq on Monday; on Tuesday, Iraq executed another 21 men on anti-terror charges, despite…

Al-Qaeda’s front group in Iraq said last month that it carried out a wave of attacks that eventually left 56 people dead as “revenge for those whom you (the government) executed,” referring to a total of 18 executions carried out by Iraq on March 14 and 17.

And the worst week in the United States is probably many times better than the best week in any of scores of elsewheres. We inure ourselves from the worst weeks, and produce them for others: Rand Paul, hailed as a hero for raising skepticism about drones, isn’t actually against drones, just their use against American citizens within our borders; most of us can have academic discussions about the consequences of flaws in research used to buttress austerity pushes without having lost jobs or been hugely inconvenienced by those pushes; we, mostly, haven’t lived through the worst weeks that tens of thousands of Iraqis have since our invasion, and our response to a hurricane is probably better-coordinated and swifter than the response to one in the Philippines.

When I consider attacks like the one on Boston on Monday, or the one on Newtown in December, I think about what compels someone to do a thing like that, searching for a rational motive that matches the rational planning behind an act. And I keep coming back to my own reasons for never wanting to harm people: I believe that life is worth living, and that I deserve to live a long and full life, and that working toward everyone sharing those convictions is an honorable thing to do.

I think, but cannot know, that people who perpetrate acts like this don’t share those convictions, and cannot believe in the promise of a long, full life, leading them to instead choose a shorter or more empty one with actions that either terminate their own lives or result in a severe diminution of the quality of them, and I think that better welfare and medical care for citizens would go a long way toward bringing the hopeless to parity with the hopeful. I think, but cannot know, that people who want the right to own guns totally unabriged in America do so mostly out of fear of a world beyond their control, and think that weaning those people off the sources of their fear, whatever they may be, would do wonders toward changing those opinions. I think people in power who have lied or played fast and loose with the truth generally do so without realizing (or thinking of) how many people those tactics hurt, and that people can learn and/or be taught to be more mindful of doing no harm. I hope the arc of history continues to bend towards kindness, as it has, painfully slowly.

But maybe I’m just lying to myself.

“If you go to a head shop, they have melatonin brownies!”