And the Race Continues

JW,

I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on a year-old movie that no one saw—Rachel Getting Married, a plotless, interminable paean to multiculturalism and the spiritual deadness of the privileged American Left. Starring Anne Hathaway and a back-from-the-dead Debra Winger, Rachel consists largely of a cinéma vérité-style depiction of a rehearsal dinner and wedding reception. While there’s some editing, these meandering scenes together account for at least half of the movie, a fact that would be less problematic if the impression created weren’t of watching a stranger’s home videos.

But of course that’s the point, as this is a wedding party to make a liberal’s heart sing! Racially diverse, secular (except for its forays into Hinduism), and utterly lacking in ceremony, the wedding and its accoutrements are not a diversion from the film’s ostensible “plot” (Hathaway’s drug-addicted Kym returning home for her sister’s wedding) but the plot itself, a fact captured neatly by Roger Ebert when he skips talking about the movie in his review in order to move straight into its politics ("Apart from its story, which is interesting enough, Rachel Getting Married is like the theme music for an evolving new age.").

Look, I've got no problem with multiculturalism, as long as it's not asked to carry the entire movie (unless that movie is Coming to America). As you can imagine, however, I was already on edge when I started Rachel, having spent the day watching the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, whose celebratory air owes as much to the Democrats’ sixty-vote threshold as it does to the color of the nominee’s skin. Sotomayor is all smiles, of course, and while I’m willing to concede that her stunningly halting speech doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s stupid, she seems unaware that her placement on the court is a political ploy—an electoral buried treasure to be unearthed when Hispanics break two-to-one for Obama in 2012. Or maybe she is aware. After all, she’s clearly been taking courses from the Barack Obama Academy of Sounding Thoughtful While Saying Nothing (minus the stuttering, thank God), and her answers have practically shined with focus-grouped polish. As others have suggested, her biography, her gender, and her race are doing the work for her. Why risk a perfect storm of political luck by saying something interesting?

A final note. You know that the term “waterboarding” has lost its cachet when Chris Matthews uses it to refer to the length of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questioning sessions. It’s like the first time I said “fo’ shizzle.” An entire culture gasped.

-GM

GM,

I wish I could have been there to hear “fo’ shizzle,” as would anyone who knows how far removed you are from slang, fad phrases, and African-American vernacular. (I’m only attributing the phrase to African-Americans because South Park told me that’s where it came from; I’ve primarily heard white people use it.)

I really only want to respond to your point that Sotomayor’s biography is doing the work for her. Isn’t that the point?! I thought being a U.S. Supreme Court justice was just a lifetime achievement award anyway, like the NBA MVP award, the presidency (war hero vs. half-black guy), or any position in corporate America. Everyone knows that, in the Western world, you continue to elevate vocationally until you reach a position at which you finally fail, and there you shall remain. (Hey, it’s better than the caste system.) You become a CEO because you were a good chief financial officer. You become a head coach because of your work as an assistant. You become president because you made for a nice senator (or, in this case, because the opposing party’s execution down the stretch was Maverick-like; pun intended). And half of these people turn out to be complete failures. With politics, though, it’s tougher to judge failure, and with an SC justice, we wouldn’t be able to stop her anyway!

I understand and agree with what you’re saying, but as long as overcoming racism in what is now one of the least racist—and most hypersensitive—countries in history is considered an accomplishment, you should expect it to be rewarded by the guy who had the same treatment. I can only hope that one day I’ll be generously rewarded for overcoming my slothfulness, arrogance, and argumentative nature. It’s only fair.

-JW