The “Good” Racists

The Article: The Good, Racist People by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The New York Times.

The Text: Last month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from “The Great Debaters” to “The Crying Game” to “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can’t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he’d been robbed.

The deli where Whitaker was harassed happens to be in my neighborhood. Columbia University is up the street. Broadway, the main drag, is dotted with nice restaurants and classy bars that cater to beautiful people. I like my neighborhood. And I’ve patronized the deli with some regularity, often several times in a single day. I’ve sent my son in my stead. My wife would often trade small talk with whoever was working checkout. Last year when my beautiful niece visited, she loved the deli so much that I felt myself a sideshow. But it’s understandable. It’s a good deli.

Since the Whitaker affair, I’ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a “sincere mistake” made by a “decent man” who was “just doing his job.” I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” and Al Green’s “For the Good Times.”

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Exxon’s New Oil Lake

Following yet another awful oil spill courtesy of ExxonMobil, additional swaths of land are now mired in murky muck. This time, though, reporters are being blocked from the site and have been threatened with arrest if they do not leave. But yesterday one news team, JNL RadikalMedia, was able to document what they call an “Oil Lake” percolating through Arkansas’ land…as well as Exxon’s pathetic “attempts” at removing the oil via bona fide paper towels. What the fuck, indeed.

The Gay Marriage Prop

In May of last year, you would be hard-pressed to find a single soul in the country who wasn’t tweeting, texting or telephoning another regarding Obama’s so-called revolutionary (emphasis on “evolutionary”) stance on gay marriage. Earth shattering? Hardly, especially since a plurality of Americans at that time already supported the novel notion that homosexuals who pay the same taxes and abide by the same laws should also be afforded the same opportunities to marry whom they please.

And yet, it served its purpose. In the same month, as unmanned drones–another Obama endorsement–killed several “militants” in Yemen on legally indefensible and morally bankrupt grounds, most Americans were too busy replaying the hallowed Robin Roberts ABC interview on YouTube to notice, let alone care about our brave president’s markedly less courageous affairs abroad. Marriage equality, the 21st century response to the 1960’s civil rights movement, was finally upon us. Nearly four years into the worst collapse since the Great Depression, change, it seemed, had arrived. “Hope” was no longer tri-colored and two-dimensional, and the wave of social progress, inclusivity and tolerance had crested and its strength could not be stopped. And for your information, Ms. Palin, that hopey-changey stuff is working out great.

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Why Science Is Vital

The Article: To at Least One Earthling, Siberia Meteor Proved That Science Is Vital by Clyde Haberman in The New York Times.

The Text: Twice on a recent Friday, the cosmos intruded rudely on us earthlings. A meteor exploded over western Siberia, shattering windows, injuring hundreds and scaring pretty much everyone else. That same day, an asteroid passed within 18,000 miles of us, close enough to arch many an eyebrow among astronomers.

One earthling, at least, looked on the bright side.

“It allows me, when I talk about asteroids, to reference an actual event where people got hurt,” said Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan for going on two decades. Not that Dr. Tyson was glad that people had been injured. Far from it. All the same, he said over drinks in Lower Manhattan, this cosmic activity “gives punctuation to my sentence that the human race is at risk.”

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A Glimpse At Exxon’s LATEST Oil Spill

So much for May’s flowers. After over ten thousand gallons of oil have spilled into the soil of Arkansas soil courtesy of none other than yet another a burst Exxon pipeline and have thus mired its residents in the slow clean-up process, one has to wonder how much worse the nation would fare if the Keystone Pipeline were to suffer the same fate.