* Interview with Seattle MD: "This is the beginning of a police state" My name is Richard DeAndrea. I'm a medical doctor. What I saw up here was martial law. This turned into a police state. Everything you have seen on television regarding local news broadcasts including national public radio was a blackout. The police were using concussion grenades. They were shooting tear gas canisters directly at protesters' faces. They were using so-called rubber bullets. These are actually hard plastic. Some of the damage I saw: these plastic bullets took off part of one person's jaw, smashed teeth in other people's mouths. I saw the police arrest people who had their hands up in the air screaming we are peacefully protesting. The amount of looting that took place was so minimal I don't even know where they got the footage from. I am saying this beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is a definite sign that America is heading towards a police state unless people start standing up for their rights as individuals. I am actually shocked and ashamed. I am ashamed of the police force, I am ashamed of the mayor I am ashamed of Bill Clinton. I am ashamed of the whole thing. .... I used to believe newspapers were telling the truth. But now I am no longer behind that. This is the beginning of a police state. You can quote me on that.	j a n u a r y . 8 . 2 0 0 0 (9:37 am, san francisco) | the sunday new york times finally came today john rocker : tempted to send him a cargo freight ticket with a note "america, love it or leave it." i wonder if he would understand. i watched a little bit of CNN's TalkBack Live yesterday in horrified surprise... comments like "if rocker was black, jesse jackson would be defending him" and "i'm tired of political correctness." on the flip side, i wasn't so keen on the "as a gay/asian/black/latino, i was very hurt by mr. rocker's words" argument for why he should be punished. the main thrust of the victim argument reminds me a little of the whole national review flap three years ago with the coolie caricatures of the clintons and gore on the cover. abhorrent, certainly, and without a doubt emotionally and intellectually painful for some people to look at...but not the worst bit of racism we need to focus on by far. i would rather dismiss rocker as a 25-year-old intolerant shithead who'll have to play with men who will never trust him again, and use the hoopla to examine how prevalent racism really is in this fine wide nation of ours. rocker's comments carry weight because he's a baseball star and because they were published in SI, but taken as a tip of the ancient and provebial iceberg, they don't bode well. rocker's my generation, born after the civil rights movement, during the post-1965 rush of immigrants. what does it say about american culture and community that we can produce assholes like him. last night i finished jim sleeper's Liberal Racism which diagnoses the liberal obsession with race and racism as one of the causes of a continued racial divide in the U.S. he suggests energy should be devoted to creating and mainting a shared civic culture rather than seeing race as a defining factor. on some points what he says makes sense, i definitely have many allegiances, some parochial and a few more universal, and there are times when us as-ams sittin' around a fire have a hard time coming up with commonalities or a basis for asian american culture beyond rice, colonialism/neo-colonialism and the imposed "you all look alike" solidarity. but sleeper's contention that one sometimes needs to "make it a point of pride to mute and even abandon his or her racial affinities in order to stand, at least briefly, for the whole" is a kind of assimilation i reject. looking at the world through "slanted eyes" does not make me blind to humanity or morality, nor does it mean that i will favor asian ams over any other kind of american. but putting away my asian americanness in favor of some universal civic culture in a time when john rockers exist is a cop out. when i was little, i used to forget i was a "minority." that might have been a sign of my whitewashed life, but i would argue it was a sign of my innocence. ach. i could go on forever. i need breakfast. oops. just kicked my cat by mistake. honest. thurgood marshall can have the last word : "the law can open doors and knock down walls, but it cannot build bridges. we will only attain freedom if we learn to appreciate what is different and muster the courage to discover what is fundamentally the same." j a n u a r y . 2 . 2 0 0 0 (10:48 am, san francisco) | won't you be my neighbor this morning i was woken up by the sounds of shouting. for a moment it felt like 7 am junior year again, when my windows faced my landlord's towing agency. people tended to get pissed if they had to pay to get their car untowed for the pleasure of going to work. miette and i hurried down the ladder to kirstie's room and peeped out the windows. a neighbor with a garage who had very nastily scolded me early on for attempting to doublepark (a minute, no more) my car in front of his garage entrance was screaming at another driver who had tried to do the same (to let out his girlfriend, i assume, who lives across from cranky ass fuckhead). the driver was threatening to call the police, both men were saying something to the effect of "do you want to get hurt." the girlfriend finally prevailed upon the driver to get back in the car, who said something (once again i assume, i only heard the loud shouts and obscenities) to cranky overreacting neighbor who then proceeded to shout even more angrily and try to open up the driver side door, while the car was backing out. the driver gets out, whereupon the girlfriend of the cranky ass neighbor (who also lives across the street, maybe even in the same building as girlfriend no. 1) shrugs off her jacket and shoves the driver. "you hit women too?" cranky hoots. the driver's girlfriend goes from party to party holding out her hands, "come on, just stop. please just stop." having not instigated a violent reaction from the driver, cranky's girlfriend puts her jacket back on. cranky and girlfriend shout in unison "don't block the garage!" or something akin. the driver gets back into the car. "just go away, just leave!" says the driver's girlfriend. cranky's parting shot to the driver as he leans toward the car "you're nobody!" the driver's girlfriend tries to talk to the pair some more, yells at her boyfriend "just go dammit!" and finally gives up and goes into her apartment. i know my bias is unmistakeable. it's not that i don't think cranky, the owner of the garage, has a right to tell people to move their cars - even when it's clear they are going to be there less than 5 minutes and he has no intention of moving his car. it's his garage, he ought to have free access from and to it. but he comes out of his house with 2 barrels blazing when a simple "hey that's my garage. please do not park in front of it, not even for a minute" would suffice. maybe he has medical reasons, maybe he's medical. but just because you're technically right doesn't mean you get to be an asshole. j a n u a r y . 1 . 2 0 0 0 (11:44 pm, san francisco) | inventory, part two no resolutions. cat hair on the keyboard. new order in the tape deck. it's [expletive] cold this side of the bay. like thousands of slow-pokes before me and with me i am trying to get accustomed to the idea of 2000, trying it out on my checks, turning it over in my mind and poking its flabby unused legs. my clock says only two minutes left in this first day of first days, which was spent pretty much like any other day. refereeing the cats. assembling more furniture. i got to luxuriate in my cousin's house in the n. oakland hills which resembles a photo spread from a design mag (wall sconces!) if the photographer let the debris of life with a kindergartner remain. i did eat traditional sul-nal umshik - duk guk (rice cake soup w/ dumplings), no black eyes peas though. sometime last year i read an injunction to write down all the things you want to accomplish: 1)in this month 2)in this year 3)in the next 30 years it might have been an article in an inflight magazine, or one in a glamour i picked up at the newstand on the way to the gate, but i took their suggestion and scribbled down my three lists. i can't find the notebook i wrote in now (though i did finally locate where my alarm clock was) but i suspect i accomplished maybe 1% of what i wanted to do. i'm not too fraught with underachiever guilt because the unexpected has happened this year - i found someplace to make as my home. reading : the idea of public journalism | edited by theodore l. glasser p. 73 : Tears flowed in the screening room after the first exhibition [of the classic documentary of migrant farm workers, Harvest of Shame]. The sorrowful song at the end tore into every conscience in the room. But Murrow did not seek pity; he wanted responsible action, civic transformation. So he reworked the final scenes consistent with a documentary formet: "Is it possible we think too much in terms of Christmas baskets and not in terns of eliminating poverty? . . . The people you have seen do not have the strength to influence legislationg. Maybe we do. Good night and good luck." Murrow knew that great television news does not end with pity of fear but is actionable toward community building. He realized that holding up injustice is to trivialize it. d e c e m b e r . 2 9 . 1 9 9 9 (5:23 pm, san francisco) | cine annie's best of : afterlife, the insider, boys don't cry, three kings i feel vindicated when my tastes coincide with the year end "best of lists" cuz then i get to feel avant-garde and perceptive. psh. lately my dreams have been blockbusters, dabbling in shallow cinematic pain and gunplay, or they've been obvious plays on waking concerns. i even had a y2k preparation dream where i had to break back into the supplies bunker because i had forgotten to pack any underwear. i'm not sure what that says about me. in high school i used to dream dreams that ran something like "annie takes a nap. stef walks into the room and asks if she can borrow the stapler. annie says yes." then i wake up from my nap and ask stef for my stapler and she looks at me blankly.	home now *10.31.99 *11.03.99 *11.13.99 *11.19.99 *11.25.99 - 12.3.99 *12.06.99 - 12.28.99 and then weblog