All of these lives... rearranging themselves for me

A couple of months back I posted about a series of ads I noticed in the Atlantic monthly, and the subtle (or not so subtle) racist undertones I noted in them.

Now that the most recent fracas -- that being over whether Joe Wilson's outburst at the President was an act of racism or not -- is finally starting to die down, I figured it was time to say a little something about this:



Now, yes. I want to give this some benefit of the doubt. It is a stunning ad, and quite amazingly executed (assuming these are actual human acrobats, and not cgi). Be that as it may, however, every time I watch this I think the exact same thing to myself:

Look. Here's over a thousand black-haired, brown-skinned people, arrayed reverently (given the saffron-like robes, one might even say, worshipfully) around the supine blond white woman.

At her every whim, they whirl and shift themselves into new patterns around her: "All of them rearranging themselves... all of the time..."

It is hard, what with the visual imagery being what it is, not to think of all the gyrations and rearrangements that third-world economies have gone into in order to provide us (supine white folks) with the earlier generations of our American comfort objects, our shoes and our handbags.

The fact that she is the focal point is clear. The fact that she is the only one not working her ass off is also clear. What is even more clear is that she seems completely oblivious (or uncaring) to all this black-haired motion that is, quite literally, everywhere she might care to turn her gaze.

The technologies of the industrialized world's white reality -- whether we are talking about television (where it took us a long, long time to get from Father Knows Best to the Cosby Show) or the American electoral process (ditto) -- have always been geared to generate illusory results. White technologies obscure the plain realities of racial, economic, and class disparity that haunt the green meadows of our "civilized" world. We may present ourselves with prettied-up images of all this, but the actuality of it is actually much more grisly and horrific and absurd.



I'm not telling you anything new, of course. You know this. James Cone and Jacques Ellul told you all this a long time ago, and many others besides. But now here is the Palm Pre, reminding us again, only now in much more direct manner, of this simple truth: For every relaxing, oblivious white girl out there, there are a hell of a lot of hard working brown skinned people, rearranging themselves and their lives.

That the result of this disparity is sometimes beautiful for us does not obscure the fact that it is also obscene. Tote that around in your Blackberry, little Miss America.