Author / Edward Champion
Leigh Robbins — The Racist Exemplar
Leigh Robbins, a 35-year-old housewife, genuinely believes that she was fulfilling her maternal duties. The truly sickening aspect of her story, which delayed a flight for more than twelve hours, isn’t so much her fear of brown-skinned people, which is quite evident in Robbins’s attempt to get her sons off a plane that, lo and behold, happened to have seven Iraqis on board. It was the way in which Robbins justified her racism with these quotes:
“How can you overreact when it’s your children?”
“I’m very sorry, but I’d do anything to protect my kids.”
Robbins’s excuses are very much grounded in the hermetic seal of the nuclear family archetype. The horror from six years ago has so successfully indoctrinated its way into public consciousness that it is no longer a matter of remembering (“Never forget!” read many of the signs here in New York), but a matter of fulfilling one’s basic domestic duties.
9/11 is no longer the smoking gun. Hollywood is — to some extent. It is no longer a matter of accessing one’s general sense of reality. It is, as Robbins observed, a matter of comparative metaphor. “It was very frightening, like something out of a movie,” said Robbins.
There are important questions here which must be asked: Why didn’t the plane’s passengers stick up for the Iraqi men? They were questioned by American Airlines, as if they were the villains. Why was Robbins’s ostensible safety valued over that of the Iraqi men? Does Robbins truly comprehend the callous fury she has unearthed?
Never mind their ethnicity. Why in America were seven men — who served their country — considered lesser than one racist homemaker, who served nothing more than graham crackers and juice?
When Lounge, Lip Syncing, Smoking, and Bad Dancing Collide
[UPDATE: How dare Madison Avenue steal the absolutely kickass bass line from Pino d’Angio! This is a terrible musical crime, and I sincerely hope that Pino gets his justice! (Of course, it’s also possible that Pino lifted it from Risco Connection’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us.” Understand: the objection to Madison Avenue isn’t so much that they ripped Pino (and possibly Risco) off, but that they did so without the cheesy gravitas of the original tune!]
SFWA Enacts McCarthyism Revival
Cory Doctorow: “SFWA’s copyright campaigns have been increasingly troublesome. In recent years, they’ve created a snitch line where they encourage sf lovers to fink on each other for copying books, created a loyalty oath for members in the guise of a ‘code of conduct’ in which we are supposed to pledge to ‘not plagiarize, pirate, or otherwise infringe intellectual property rights (copyright, patent, and trademark) or encourage others to do so.’ What business SFWA has in telling its members how to think about, say, pharmaceutical patents, database copyrights, or trademark reform is beyond me. In 2005, SFWA sent out a push-poll to its members trying to scare members off of giving permission to Amazon to make the full text of their books searchable online.”