Apparently, a bunch of sluts were running around my city recently.
I’m talking, of course, about the SlutWalk movement, which began earlier this year when a Toronto cop implied that women who dressed like “sluts” deserved to get raped. Outraged at the cop’s statement, women all over North America hit the streets both to protest the Neanderthal mindset that afflicts so many males, and to repurpose the word “slut.”
My old neighborhood in New York City has become a bit of a yuppie den. My current neighborhood in Los Angeles is apparently being overrun by hipsters.
Can any of us escape gentrification?
As I wrote recently, Latino neighborhoods have increasingly become gentrified as white people move into what used to be called the barrio. This process is either a solution to urban blight or a desecration of Hispanic culture, depending on whether you’re the gentrifier or the gentrifee (yes, I made those words up, don’t bother to comment on them).
Like all Americans, nothing makes me happier than arguing about emotionally loaded, extremely volatile political issues that have no clear solutions. Yes, that’s why I write about immigration so much.
However, I now realized that I haven’t been fair. I’ve simply assumed that racism — directed toward Latinos — is a primary motivating factor in the debate. But is this true?
I live in a gentrified neighborhood.
At least that’s what I found out recently, when I spoke to a longtime area resident who informed me that “the damn hipsters came in and ruined everything.”
He didn’t consider me an invader, even though I moved into the neighborhood just two years ago. I presume my Latino status prevents me from being one of those evil hipsters (well, that and the fact that my iPod doesn’t have a single Belle & Sebastian song on it).
Like many ethnic minorities, I have been accused more than once of hating white people.
But for someone who despises the white race, I am seriously guilty of fraternizing with the enemy. I don’t want to get into the whole “some of my best friends” are this or that, but I’ll just mention that my wife (of German ancestry) would be a little peeved to find out about my deep-seeded hatred of white people.
I guess I’m also wracked with self-loathing, because (as I’ve pointed out many times) I’m half-white myself (on my father’s side).
I once hurt someone’s feelings, and not via my usual method of making an ill-timed, biting joke. No, I disappointed my friend because I said that eradicating racism is impossible.
She is a hippie type who inexplicably thinks that someday humanity will get its act together and take a break from the self-slaughtering. But that will never happen — at least not completely, everywhere on the globe.
Well, there is one solution…
When I was in college, my editor at the student newspaper called me with an assignment: I was to cover a speech by a radical professor who, my editor breathlessly said, was brilliant “and so PC!”
I asked what that meant, and she said, with some amazement at my naivety, that it indicated “politically correct.”
I had never heard this term before. Of course, it wasn’t long before those juxtaposed letters entered the language and, in the process, went from leftist praise to conservative insult.
Well, that was close.
A couple of years ago, it looked like the United States was in real economic trouble. But now everything is great… yeah, just great… yup.
You’ve heard of the luck of the Irish. So what is the luck of the Hispanic?
Personally, I think the Latino propensity for serendipity is symbolized by Hugo Reyes, also known as Hurley, from the show Lost.
Despite being a fun-loving, friendly Latino, Hurley kept seeing everybody around him get killed in some random or grisly manner. He constantly bemoaned the fact that he was cursed.
Certainly, many Americans relate to Hurley. For the last decade or so, we’ve all felt jinxed. It’s been a nonstop joyride of economic turmoil, endless war, terrorist threats, and political chaos.
I watched my mother hammer a nail into the wall. She missed, hitting her thumb.
A stream of Spanish obscenities leaked out of her. I was alarmed, and not just because she was shaking her hand and hopping around. I had never heard so many undecipherable words at once. Then again, I was six years old.
When my mother calmed down, I asked, “What did you say?”
“Never mind,” she said.
“But what does ‘puta’ mean?” I asked.
