Mykel Puts the World in Context (MRR 330)

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You're Wrong
An Irregular Column
by Mykel Board

aka Mykel Puts The World in Context

“Will the Holocaust excuse anything Jews might do now or in the future? Did the Holocaust make them innocent? Did slavery somehow make American Negroes blameless? Did the patriarchy's historical crimes wash all sins away from the ladies souls?” --Jim Goad

Suck that thing. Suck it now. You love it, don't you. You know you love it. Take more. Suck it in. That's my little girl. Keep sucking. Yes!

I'm with my ten-year old niece. On the boardwalk... on Coney Island. I've just bought her a rootbeer float-- her first. In the beginning, she doesn't like it, so I have to hold the straw for her and encourage her to try it. It's not long before she's enjoying that most American of beverages... with strawberry rather than vanilla ice cream. Not my taste.

Re-reading that first paragraph, you see it now, right? Angie, there in her pink dress. Sucking away at that ice cream and soda. But I bet that wasn't what you thought when you first read it. Uh uh. Your image was more carnal, more violent, right?

You heard/saw the image in a different context. And you brought that context with you when you read those words. The context gave you an easy answer to what was going on. It was the wrong answer.

The confusion of context leads to wrong ideas all over the place. My jailbird pal Kyle sent me a clipping about Paula Oliveira, a Brazilian woman in Switzerland. Three skinheads, one with “a Nazi symbol tattooed on the back of his head,” attacked the woman outside a Zurich train station. One of the attackers cut the initials of Switzerland's right-wing party into her stomach and legs. The trauma made her miscarry twin fetuses. Pictures of her scarred body appeared in newspapers. Even Brazilian President Lula (my favorite political leader) condemned the “violence against a Brazilian woman abroad.” 

Given what you (think you) know about skinheads, Nazis, violence, and maybe Brazilians, you're justifiably outraged. But that's not the content of the newspaper article that Kyle sent me. 

 

After a series of tests, Swiss police said Oliveira was not three months pregnant at the time (of the attack) and Zurich University forensic medicine chief Walter Baer called it a “textbook case of self-mutilation.”

Get it? She was lying!

Last year, I wrote about the Duke University LaCrosse scandal in 2006. There, a stripper claimed that members of the team held her against her will and raped her in the bathroom. Later medical tests proved she was lying. The DA was found guilty of withholding information. You believed her. Why?

 

FLASHBACK: It's 1990. I'm in Japan, teaching at the Honda headquarters, in Tokyo. It's a class for freshmen in the company. They're required to take 6 months of me... once a week.

“Mykel,” says Yaru, a slim attractive young man, whose sexiness loses itself in the white shirt and tie he wears. “Why don't you come drinking with us tonight? We're going to a piano bar.”

“I'm not big on piano music,” I tell him. “You think they can do Screeching Weasel?”

He laughs.

“I've never eaten a screeching weasel,” he says. “But there's no piano at a piano bar. You go and some pretty girl comes and talks to you. She pours your beer and laughs at your jokes. She stays with you until morning.”

“Until morning?” I say. “Are there private rooms?”

Yaru wrinkles his attractive brow. Then he laughs.

“Oh no,” he says. “It's not like that. There's no sex. You only talk. Sometimes you can touch her arm.”

“Er...” I tell him. “It doesn't sound very exciting. How much does a night of arm-touching and laughing at your jokes cost?”

“About 30,000 yen ($300),” he says.

I don't go.

But now as I think about this, I wonder. Was it so bad? When I go out with a whore what do I get? If I'm lucky s/he gives me some time, some friction, juice pumping. It's over. I get my tube stroked, but not my ego. 

I can stroke my own tube... I do, often. But I can't stroke my own ego. Is it better to pay for something I do myself or to pay for something only someone else can do? The context of Japan made me think stupid, shy Orientals...” But were they? Didn't they get more for their money than I did?

As I type this, I sit in the laptop room at the public library. I'm in a little space on a large table. The room is open, yet quiet. 

There is an occasional KFFFF of a mouse button, an internal computer click, and the crunching sound of someone eating nuts. In the relative silence of the room, the nut-crunching is annoying enough to make me stop what I'm doing and look around for the cruncher. I figure that just standing up, with my arms folded and a stern look on my face, will silence the guy.

It works for a second or two. But then, the crunching begins again. 

There he is. A jerk in a corner seat, diddling his iPhone, black hoodie protecting his identity. I stare at the back of his hood. I think colored guy. I don't know why I think that. More whiteboys wear hoods than Negroes. 

But Negroes have less respect for others. Right? 

When I'm on the subway, one guy sits in the middle of the bench, legs spread apart like he's holding a football between his thighs, arms stretched along the back of the seats... one guy taking three (or four if he's fat) seats. And it's a Negro.

So I figure, okay, here's a rude guy with a hoodie, so... I'm wrong. This guy is whiter than Sarah Palin. Than Lou Dobbs. Than Michael Jackson. He looks like some California skater or any other Nike/Chuck Tailored straight-edge brat. I transferred the context of my subway experience to the library. I was wrong. 

This gets me wondering. Maybe I MAKE the contexts in the first place. For example, if I see somebody in the subway taking up three seats, it's just somebody taking up three seats. But if I see a colored guy taking up three seats, then it becomes A COLORED GUY... and taking up three seats is what he does. 

Maybe as many white guys do it as colored, but Negroes are associated with it in my mine... they're marked. So when they spread their arms and legs, they confirm what I already have in my head. When a white guy does it, I don't notice.

I often think about the president's penis. When George Bush was taking a piss. Did he think: This is the presidential dick right here. This cock rules the world. The piss coming out of it now, dribbling slowly, soaking my fingers... that's presidential piss. That's piss that pisses on the world.

When Obama takes a piss. Does he think: See this black dick in my hand? This thick piece of black manhood. This dick that you fantasized about... that's your dream and your horror. This black dick shooting out a hard thick stream, like a firehose. That's a BLACK presidential piss. And that's what pisses on the world. 

They say that black is the marked case. In other words, in America, people notice something as special... different... when it's done by someone black. It's not special when a white person does the same thing. Do black people feel that?

There was an article in THE NATION by a Negress professor who wrote about how her white colleagues refused to mark their race on the census... or else they marked other, putting in Jew or human or something else. She never heard of a black person marking other. Obama didn't mark other. The world is changing, she says. There are only two races: Black and other. 

To check, I google (safe search off) my black ass and get 140,000 sites. Then I google my white ass and get 1,590,000 sites.

Huh? That means that white is being specified more than black. White is marked more than black. A lot more. (My yellow ass, by the way, only brings 41,000 hits.) 

I'm confused.

In Arizona, Mexican is the marked case. Even though crime in general is DOWN in US border areas (El Paso Texas is the safest city in the continental US), Arizonans see MEXICAN when they commit a crime. 

Otherwise, it's just generic criminal. Arizonans bring context to crime... and because of that, are wrong.
(By the way, My Spanish ass gets 98,300 sites. My Mexican ass, 111,000.)

You walk around with these contexts in your head. If something happens to confirm the context, you note it as a confirmation. If something contrary happens, it gets lost outside your consciousness. In a day, you'll forget all about it.

Those contexts color everything you do or say. You see what you want. The world confirms your prejudices. See? You told me so.

The solution, of course, is to look for the opposite. Start from the other side. Assume you're wrong. If the girl cries rape, she's lying. If someone breaks into your car, it's some preppy from Stamford. If people in Tajikistan spit on their hand and rub the saliva into their eyebrows before crossing the street, that's the right way to go about street-crossing. 

You can and will ignore this solution. You'll continue to keep your old contexts, wear them like blinders against the world. It's you. It's the nature of your stupidity. It makes me sick and you can just kiss my Jew ass.

 
ENDNOTES: [email subscribers (god@mykelboard.com) or website viewers (www.mykelboard.com) will get live links and a chance to post comments on the column]

-->Different culture dept: Kyle wrote me: You go to a rave, the chicks don't give a shit if you grope 'em or dry hump 'em and will rub up on you. You'll never see that in a pit. Tis' taboo in the Hardcore scene. I had this chick rub up on me till I came in my pants at a Ministry Show. You'll never see that in a punk moshpit.
                  Hmm, I'm gonna have to start going to raves.

-->That's why they raised the drinking age dept: Supposedly the drinking age went up to reduce the number of younger drunk drivers killing people. BUT, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "alcohol use by weekend drivers has decreased over the past four decades (largely because of the higher drinking age), but there has been no corresponding drop in alcohol-related fatal crashes." Research shows that while there has been a 71 percent reduction in drunk driving on weekends since 1973, the numbers of alcohol-related fatalities remains the same.

-->How 'bout a Whack-A-Palin dept: The head of an Allentown amusement company has removed a carnival game in which players shot foam darts at a target resembling Barack Obama.
"It was just a big, big mistake in judgment, and I feel sorry about it," said the carnival's head, Irvin Good Jr.

-->Buying the context dept: BP oil has been buying Google search ads for "oil spill" and "oil spill claims."
Any questions? Go right to the PR department of BP! Who said that with the internet our news ISN'T managed?

-->PC World magazine reports that SONY has begun blowing a BOURBON scent into the "male oriented" areas of its stores. It should serve as a reminder that you'd have to be drunk to invest in one of their products.

-->A different kind of child support dept: Shirley Anderson, 71, is suing her son Ken, 46, in Vancouver, for parental support -- even though she and Ken's father abandoned him when he was 15. A British Columbia law requires adult children to support "dependent" parents. In 2000, Shirley sued, demanding $350 per month each from Ken, a trucker, and his four siblings. A judge awarded token interim support pending a final resolution, which after years of paperwork and delay was to come in early August. It has been postponed once again.

-->Is that a superbig spliff in your pocket? dept: South African drug lord Fadwaan "Fat" Murphy, speaking at a bail hearing in January in Cape Town, revealed that he was born a hermaphrodite and has a separate identity ("Hilary"). This became important when arresting officers discovered that Murphy was wearing a strap-on penis. Nonetheless, Murphy insists he is a man: "I look like a man. I talk like a man. I am a man."

-->Homos outing hets dept: According to the publisher of Philadelphia Gay News, gay state Rep. Babette Josephs "outed" her primary opponent Gregg Kravitz... as straight. Josephs claims Kravitz was posing in Josephs' gay-friendly district as bi-sexual.
               Kravitz said he is "attracted to both men and women” and found Josephs' comments offensive.
               I say, send me a picture and then we'll talk about proving your bi-tude.

-->My kind of medicine dept: The German newspaper Die Zeit reports that the Brazilian Health Minister, Jose Gomes Temporão, has found a solution to reduce blood pressure in the general population. He suggested that people have sex more frequently. According to him, five times a week is appropriate. The physical exercise lowers blood pressure, and is strongly recommended in view of the increased rate of high blood pressure among Brazilians.

-->Not my kind of Supreme Court dept: In it's decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project the Supreme court ruled that human rights groups cannot write Op-ed pieces, file Supreme court briefs or work with the UN, if they provide any (including 100% humanitarian) relief to an agency the government has declared as terrorist. This is a 100% rejection of the principle of free speech.
           So, the courts say corporations can BUY speech with no restrictions, but PEOPLE are prohibited from exercising that right. Of course, I'd like to tell you what I think about that, but I'd be put in jail!

-end-

Mykel's personal website is here.