So, we're starting to have a public discussion about race in the US, finally. There may have been a lot of discussion of such things in places like academia, but I think we're seeing the first real public discussion of it all now, at this late date.
I'm white, and I was raised (born 1961) by liberals to believe that race doesn't make anybody better or worse than anybody else, but that didn't mean that I was immune to all of the nonsense all around me. For one thing, despite the liberal attitudes of my parents, I met very few non-white people before I was full-grown, and there's only so much you can understand about race in an environment as segregated as that.
In the mid-1980's I was hanging around with a friend of mine who happened to be black, and I said something, I don't remember exactly what I said, but I said some ignorant thing about some people getting some advantage because they weren't white, and my friend, who had never said a cross word to me before then, went off, and made some very angry and direct and edifying comments which I've never forgotten, about how every single day he envied people who had white skin like me, and how he was constantly made aware of being judged by his race, and often harassed by the police for no other reason. I'm actually not sure whether he and I were good friends after that or if he ceased to consider me to be a friend because of what I'd said, and I have no idea if he ever had any idea of how deep an impression he'd made on me by what he said. He had beautiful glowing bronze-colored skin, and I had a pink face full of pockmarks, and he envied me for my skin. From then on I listened and looked a lot more carefully when it came to race.
In 1992 I saw the riots in LA after the police who beat Rodney King were all acquitted of all charges. I couldn't believe that people could look at that video and not see that something very, very wrong was happening, but of course since then we've all seen video after video after video of police doing very wrong things and then seen them be acquitted. If we're not blind, we've come to understand just how stubbornly blind many people are.
In November 1994 I moved to NYC, and was not yet used to being around lots and lots of non-white people all at once, and once I accidentally took a wrong subway train, and I ended up on a platform with a sign that said Flatbush, a crowded platform, and it seemed like everyone else there was black. And I was scared. I lived through that experience, and looking back on it I feel that I was a bit silly for being afraid.
I had moved to NYC with hopes of a career in acting. One of the shows I very much wanted to be in was "NYPD Blue." I'll never forget meeting a very wonderful actress, how she told me she'd been a trill in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and I responded, "I bet you were!" and I'll never forget the moment when she informed me that almost all of the filming of "NYPD Blue" was done in LA. This was still a good decade before I was diagnosed with autism. Autism no doubt had a lot to do with how I flubbed things like my attempt at an acting career, and like a shot at a relationship with that actress, who seemed to really like me, amazingly. (It amazed a few other people too, not just me.)
But anyway, in NYC, for the first time, I spent a lot of time in places where I might be the only white person around, and gradually it dawned on me that I didn't have to be afraid. And like I said, I was raised by people who were very liberal on race issues. So that makes me think about how screwed up the mentality of people who were raised by racists might be.
And then gradually it dawned on me that non-whites in the US have a lot more reason to be afraid of white people than the other way around. Around the time I moved to NYC, the episode of "NYPD Blue" aired where Lt Fancy (black) took Det Sipowicz (white) to a soul food restaurant in a black neighborhood, at the end of a shift in which Sipowicz has behaved with some racial insensitivity toward a black man suspected of a crime, who turned out to be innocent. "NYPD Blue" was on the air for over a decade, and one of the threads of the show was how Sipowicz, with the patient help of a lot of people including Fancy, gradually became less racist. Anyway, in the soul food restaurant, Sipowicz is the only white person in the place, and Fancy says, You don't know how these people feel about you. Maybe some of them dislike you, just because of how you look, and you didn't do anything to them. Now imagine if people like this surrounded you all day every day and they all had badges and guns.
A moment from a fictional TV drama. It's not a brilliant original insight on my part. But maybe it's food for thought.
Showing posts with label nypd blue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nypd blue. Show all posts
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Sunday, July 10, 2016
"He's An Irish-American Ex-Cop, Used To Drink All The Time, A Tough Guy But A Good Guy[...]" (Stop Me If You've Seen This One)
Has it ever struck you how dominant the presence of recovering alcoholic Catholic characters is in American dramatic TV series? Or is it just the shows I happen to watch?
Last night, while channel-surfing, I happened to watch an entire episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." The episode was named "Hammered," and it originally aired on 14. October 2009. I'm not a big fan of the series. I think Mariska Hargitay is very good-looking, and that's usually about the extent of my interest in the show. But last night, I happened to pause on whatever channel was running a block of episodes of the show, a few minutes from the end of the previous episode, "Solitary," because Stephen Rea's face was onscreen and he was talking about how you can't know what solitary confinement is like without experiencing it, and I watched the rest of the episode, where Christopher Meloni decides to find out what it's like and spends 3 days in the cell Rea was in and goes a bit cuckoo, and then Rea is convicted and sentenced to go back to prison and back to solitary, and as he's dragged from the courtroom he screams at the judge to please just kill him instead, the way a suffering dog would mercifully be killed -- and I guess I don't have to spoil the ending for you in case you haven't seen that episode yet.
Anyway, I kept pausing my surf, which took me right into "Hammered," which begins with Scott Foley, whom I know mostly from his good work portraying Sean Kelly, waking up face-down on the floor in a big apartment with a dead woman in the next room and blood all over the place. Anyway, I guess I don't have to spoil that episode either; let's just say that it could've been entitled "An Extremely Unsubtle Argument For The 12-Step View Of Alcoholism."
The thing is, exactly the same title would fit very well on lots and lots of episodes of the shows in the "Law & Order" franchise, and "NYPD Blue," and "Ray Donovan," and, come to think of it, "Scrubs" as well, although it tends to fit better with drama than comedy.
Come to think of it: a whole lot of those recovering alcoholic Catholic characters on the tube are Irish recovering alcoholic Catholic characters. Add "Hack" to that list of shows.
I suppose it's possible that I've just stumbled across shows with such characters by accident, and that American TV as a whole does not feature Irish Catholic recovering alcoholics in 12-step programs all that prominently.
I used to assume that there were an awful lot of Irish Catholic recovering alcoholics among the higher tiers of the entertainment industry, where it is decided what TV shows will be made. But I've begun to reconsider that. Look at it this way: there are an awful lot of TV shows and movies with characters who are Italian gangsters. Does this mean that the Mafia runs a big chunk of Hollywood? I don't think so. Mafias shows are a genre. Westerns are a genre. Maybe all of these shows with Catholics (often Irish Catholics) who are recovering alcoholics and cops, or ex-cops, or other people who work with or against the cops, or sometimes with the cops and sometimes against them -- maybe that's all just another genre.
Westerns have elements like cattle drives and campfires, and one-street towns in the middle of the desert, and saloons and showgirls and shootouts -- elements which are familiar to viewers, and for which there are well-established rules about using them to build stories, rules you can follow or bend or satirize, but they're there in everyone's minds in any case.
In these shows I'm thinking about, alcoholism (as explained by 12-step programs) and law enforcement, and a protagonist (often Irish) who is a tough guy but a good guy, and is good friends with the same priest he goes to for confession (often not as often as the priest thinks he should), and the interesting visuals of churches and bars and police squad rooms and confessional booths and jails -- now that I come to think about, these are used very much like the common elements of other genres.
Maybe these kinds of shows have little or nothing to do with actual Irish-Americans deciding what kinds of shows get made, and much or everything to do with simply being another genre, like Westerns or Mafia shows. Maybe actual Irish-Americans react to these shows in ways similar to how Italian-Americans react to typical Mafia shows.
I don't know. I'm just sayin' is all.
Last night, while channel-surfing, I happened to watch an entire episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." The episode was named "Hammered," and it originally aired on 14. October 2009. I'm not a big fan of the series. I think Mariska Hargitay is very good-looking, and that's usually about the extent of my interest in the show. But last night, I happened to pause on whatever channel was running a block of episodes of the show, a few minutes from the end of the previous episode, "Solitary," because Stephen Rea's face was onscreen and he was talking about how you can't know what solitary confinement is like without experiencing it, and I watched the rest of the episode, where Christopher Meloni decides to find out what it's like and spends 3 days in the cell Rea was in and goes a bit cuckoo, and then Rea is convicted and sentenced to go back to prison and back to solitary, and as he's dragged from the courtroom he screams at the judge to please just kill him instead, the way a suffering dog would mercifully be killed -- and I guess I don't have to spoil the ending for you in case you haven't seen that episode yet.
Anyway, I kept pausing my surf, which took me right into "Hammered," which begins with Scott Foley, whom I know mostly from his good work portraying Sean Kelly, waking up face-down on the floor in a big apartment with a dead woman in the next room and blood all over the place. Anyway, I guess I don't have to spoil that episode either; let's just say that it could've been entitled "An Extremely Unsubtle Argument For The 12-Step View Of Alcoholism."
The thing is, exactly the same title would fit very well on lots and lots of episodes of the shows in the "Law & Order" franchise, and "NYPD Blue," and "Ray Donovan," and, come to think of it, "Scrubs" as well, although it tends to fit better with drama than comedy.
Come to think of it: a whole lot of those recovering alcoholic Catholic characters on the tube are Irish recovering alcoholic Catholic characters. Add "Hack" to that list of shows.
I suppose it's possible that I've just stumbled across shows with such characters by accident, and that American TV as a whole does not feature Irish Catholic recovering alcoholics in 12-step programs all that prominently.
I used to assume that there were an awful lot of Irish Catholic recovering alcoholics among the higher tiers of the entertainment industry, where it is decided what TV shows will be made. But I've begun to reconsider that. Look at it this way: there are an awful lot of TV shows and movies with characters who are Italian gangsters. Does this mean that the Mafia runs a big chunk of Hollywood? I don't think so. Mafias shows are a genre. Westerns are a genre. Maybe all of these shows with Catholics (often Irish Catholics) who are recovering alcoholics and cops, or ex-cops, or other people who work with or against the cops, or sometimes with the cops and sometimes against them -- maybe that's all just another genre.
Westerns have elements like cattle drives and campfires, and one-street towns in the middle of the desert, and saloons and showgirls and shootouts -- elements which are familiar to viewers, and for which there are well-established rules about using them to build stories, rules you can follow or bend or satirize, but they're there in everyone's minds in any case.
In these shows I'm thinking about, alcoholism (as explained by 12-step programs) and law enforcement, and a protagonist (often Irish) who is a tough guy but a good guy, and is good friends with the same priest he goes to for confession (often not as often as the priest thinks he should), and the interesting visuals of churches and bars and police squad rooms and confessional booths and jails -- now that I come to think about, these are used very much like the common elements of other genres.
Maybe these kinds of shows have little or nothing to do with actual Irish-Americans deciding what kinds of shows get made, and much or everything to do with simply being another genre, like Westerns or Mafia shows. Maybe actual Irish-Americans react to these shows in ways similar to how Italian-Americans react to typical Mafia shows.
I don't know. I'm just sayin' is all.
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
"Everything's A Situation"
-- that's my favorite line from "NYPD Blue," which, more than 2 decades after it premiered, is still the gold standard for American broadcast-TV partial nudity.
Gail O'Grady, Amy Thankyoujesus Brenneman, are you kidding me??? Guh...
Where was I?
Ah yes: "Everything's a situation." Scott Allan Campbell (IAB Sgt Jerry Martens) said that to Jimmy Smits (Det Simone) in some situation which also involved Dennis Franz (Det Sipowicz). I have no idea what the situation was, I'm sure I forgot everything about the situation pretty quickly except that line and what it meant. To Dennis Franz, everybody from Internal Affairs was a rat, you never told them anything, you didn't have anything to do with any of them and that was that. To Jimmy Smits, Scott Allan Campbell was a human being standing in front of him telling him that everything was a situation, and the two of them found a way to work together and get something done.
I recently quit a Facebook group because I was unable to resolve an argument with a group member, and the group member was an admin, so I couldn't block him. He insisted that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that you can criticize the beliefs without criticizing the believers. I don't think you can. I think a religion is a group of people, and that this stuff about a religion being a set of beliefs is a convenient excuse for bad behavior on the part of some atheists, who heap scorn and abuse on a religion, and then add, "Now, don't get mad, because I wasn't criticizing any people, I was only criticizing their beliefs."
Of course, anybody who knows me at all well knows that I occasionally insult people. But I freely admit that that's what I'm doing. Watch, I'm going to do it some more right now:
Earlier today I watched a nauseating video of some yahoo who's a rather well-known professional religion-baiter and winner of at least one Atheist of the Year award, spewing abuse on Catholics. It occurred to me that parts of his tirade could have come word-for-word from an anti-Catholic rant by a leader of the KKK; it ended up with something like "[...]the Catholic Church hasn't done good in the world, and fuck you for saying it has!" Huh. 1500-some-odd years, over 1 billion people currently, and they haven't accomplished a thing, eh, Perfessor? And fuck anybody who dares to say something different? As someone who's been homeless and given food and shelter from Catholic churches and clergy, I would be remiss not to point out that I have experienced things personally which seem to indicate that this particular atheist leader is full of shit. He's the epitome of the kind of atheist I don't want to be associated with, the kind of New Atheist who I hope will make New Atheism fail, when atheist leaders emerge who understand how everything's a situation. Atheist leaders who, for example, can appreciate some of the things which Pope Francis is doing.
When you ask a group of atheists what they think of Pope Francis, some will go into the standard Catholic-bashing rant, including, of course, a mention of pedophile priests and the standard charge that the Vatican isn't doing anything against sexual abuse. Some, on the other hand, might have noticed that Francis introduced laws specifically mentioning such abuse as criminal offenses in Vatican City. A year and a half ago. In his first action as Pope to do with the laws of the state he governs.
Some atheists view Catholics the way Sipowicz views Internal Affairs: they're all evil, they're the enemy, period, done, there's no discussing it with them. Some look at Francis the way Simone looked at Sgt Martens: they see an actual human being who wants to change a few things and help. I look at Francis and I see someone more likely to change things in the Catholic Church for the better than all the New Atheists put together. Yeah, I don't believe in God, and yeah, there are a lot of other things besides that I disagree with Francis about: gay marriage and priestly celibacy come immediately to mind. If I ever meet someone I don't disagree with about something, I'll be sure and let you know. I can't recall having met such a person yet. My world isn't black-and-white, it's all grey.
Everything's a situation. These groups that haters hate, they're all people. Most Catholics hate the child abuse and want it dealt with. Most Muslims hate terrorism. Most Germans aren't Nazis. Most Southerners aren't racists -- the yahoo I mentioned above, the one who sounds like a Klansman when he rants against Catholics, he's a white Southerner, and might well become indignant if someone assumed, because he's from the South, that he's a racist -- as well he should. Might mention some of the many white Southerners who've fought and continue to fight for civil rights -- as well he should. I don't assume that he's a racist because he's a Southerner. I don't even assume it just because he's batshit-crazy on the subject of Catholicism.
And I'm also not going to claim that I didn't just insult him, but only his beliefs. Yeah, I insulted him. I felt he deserved it. I stand by my verbal abuse.
PS, 14. January 2017: Apparently I'm not the only one who ever thought that "everything's a situation" is pretty deep for being just 8 syllables long: "NYPD Blue" itself quoted the line. These days the show is on TV about 70 or 80 times a week, and now and then I watch an episode, and recently I was watching an episode which must have aired a couple of years after the one described above, and once again, there was tension between the squad's detectives and IAB, and Simone said something like this to Martens (reconstructed from memory, not an exact quote) : "I try to learn something each and every day if I can. A while ago you said something to me that stuck: 'everything's a situation.' 'Everything's a situation.' That was my lesson for that day." And I don't remember what that particular situation was, but apparently, Simon and Martens were once again able to work things out.
Gail O'Grady, Amy Thankyoujesus Brenneman, are you kidding me??? Guh...
Where was I?
Ah yes: "Everything's a situation." Scott Allan Campbell (IAB Sgt Jerry Martens) said that to Jimmy Smits (Det Simone) in some situation which also involved Dennis Franz (Det Sipowicz). I have no idea what the situation was, I'm sure I forgot everything about the situation pretty quickly except that line and what it meant. To Dennis Franz, everybody from Internal Affairs was a rat, you never told them anything, you didn't have anything to do with any of them and that was that. To Jimmy Smits, Scott Allan Campbell was a human being standing in front of him telling him that everything was a situation, and the two of them found a way to work together and get something done.
I recently quit a Facebook group because I was unable to resolve an argument with a group member, and the group member was an admin, so I couldn't block him. He insisted that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that you can criticize the beliefs without criticizing the believers. I don't think you can. I think a religion is a group of people, and that this stuff about a religion being a set of beliefs is a convenient excuse for bad behavior on the part of some atheists, who heap scorn and abuse on a religion, and then add, "Now, don't get mad, because I wasn't criticizing any people, I was only criticizing their beliefs."
Of course, anybody who knows me at all well knows that I occasionally insult people. But I freely admit that that's what I'm doing. Watch, I'm going to do it some more right now:
Earlier today I watched a nauseating video of some yahoo who's a rather well-known professional religion-baiter and winner of at least one Atheist of the Year award, spewing abuse on Catholics. It occurred to me that parts of his tirade could have come word-for-word from an anti-Catholic rant by a leader of the KKK; it ended up with something like "[...]the Catholic Church hasn't done good in the world, and fuck you for saying it has!" Huh. 1500-some-odd years, over 1 billion people currently, and they haven't accomplished a thing, eh, Perfessor? And fuck anybody who dares to say something different? As someone who's been homeless and given food and shelter from Catholic churches and clergy, I would be remiss not to point out that I have experienced things personally which seem to indicate that this particular atheist leader is full of shit. He's the epitome of the kind of atheist I don't want to be associated with, the kind of New Atheist who I hope will make New Atheism fail, when atheist leaders emerge who understand how everything's a situation. Atheist leaders who, for example, can appreciate some of the things which Pope Francis is doing.
When you ask a group of atheists what they think of Pope Francis, some will go into the standard Catholic-bashing rant, including, of course, a mention of pedophile priests and the standard charge that the Vatican isn't doing anything against sexual abuse. Some, on the other hand, might have noticed that Francis introduced laws specifically mentioning such abuse as criminal offenses in Vatican City. A year and a half ago. In his first action as Pope to do with the laws of the state he governs.
Some atheists view Catholics the way Sipowicz views Internal Affairs: they're all evil, they're the enemy, period, done, there's no discussing it with them. Some look at Francis the way Simone looked at Sgt Martens: they see an actual human being who wants to change a few things and help. I look at Francis and I see someone more likely to change things in the Catholic Church for the better than all the New Atheists put together. Yeah, I don't believe in God, and yeah, there are a lot of other things besides that I disagree with Francis about: gay marriage and priestly celibacy come immediately to mind. If I ever meet someone I don't disagree with about something, I'll be sure and let you know. I can't recall having met such a person yet. My world isn't black-and-white, it's all grey.
Everything's a situation. These groups that haters hate, they're all people. Most Catholics hate the child abuse and want it dealt with. Most Muslims hate terrorism. Most Germans aren't Nazis. Most Southerners aren't racists -- the yahoo I mentioned above, the one who sounds like a Klansman when he rants against Catholics, he's a white Southerner, and might well become indignant if someone assumed, because he's from the South, that he's a racist -- as well he should. Might mention some of the many white Southerners who've fought and continue to fight for civil rights -- as well he should. I don't assume that he's a racist because he's a Southerner. I don't even assume it just because he's batshit-crazy on the subject of Catholicism.
And I'm also not going to claim that I didn't just insult him, but only his beliefs. Yeah, I insulted him. I felt he deserved it. I stand by my verbal abuse.
PS, 14. January 2017: Apparently I'm not the only one who ever thought that "everything's a situation" is pretty deep for being just 8 syllables long: "NYPD Blue" itself quoted the line. These days the show is on TV about 70 or 80 times a week, and now and then I watch an episode, and recently I was watching an episode which must have aired a couple of years after the one described above, and once again, there was tension between the squad's detectives and IAB, and Simone said something like this to Martens (reconstructed from memory, not an exact quote) : "I try to learn something each and every day if I can. A while ago you said something to me that stuck: 'everything's a situation.' 'Everything's a situation.' That was my lesson for that day." And I don't remember what that particular situation was, but apparently, Simon and Martens were once again able to work things out.
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