Donald Trump vs. Joss Whedon

The Donald...and his hair

Joss Whedon, entertainer and feminist extraordinaire

So, it's been a busy two or three weeks on the world stage.  The royals put on a show that will rival all shows to come for a while.  Whilst I admit to having 'accidentally' watched the vows section of the ceremony, I am very glad that's done with.  And after all that, we still don't really know what it is the royal family actually does.

In other news, The (extremely loud, unbelievably obnoxious) Donald has been Shut Up! For now anyway.  Donald Trump, of Trump Towers and The Apprentice, has decided to officially 'flirt' with a 2012 Republican run for President of the United States.  This has involved many a rerun of episodes in the media circus that is The Donald's life, including a new episode centering on current US president Barack Obama's American citizenship.  For weeks now, The Donald has guffawed, hollered, whispered loudly, insinuated that Obama has perpetrated the ultimate fraudulent act against the American people (and bla bla bla) and concealed that he was born in Mombasa, Kenya and not Honolulu, Hawaii (which he would need to be in order to be eligible for the presidency job).  Finally, Obama had enough, and on Wednesday, he released a longer version of a document he already released three years ago proving that he is, in fact, an Amrikan.  So, The Donald has official proof and can now, hopefully, knock it off.  

This whole Trump kerfuffle, along with a few episodes of one of Joss Whedon's genius creations, Dollhouse, has led me to the conclusion that there are two kinds of privilege in the world: Donald Trump privilege and Joss Whedon privilege.  Joss is the creator of, amongst many, many other works of feminist genius, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  For years of my life, I tuned in to week after week of Buffy, watching her and her misfit gang (the Scoobies) defeating evils that ranged from insane gods intent on bleeding teenage girls to the death of a parent and depression.  Joss - and his all of his colleagues and all of the heroines they created - helped hold me together, and assured me that being a girl meant awesomeness and power, and was something to be celebrated.  Buffy and Joss also taught me that no matter how bad things were, things were never so bad that I felt the need to retreat into an alternate universe in which I was in a mental asylum, and all my friends were figments of my schizophrenic imagination.  The appeal of Buffy was that it was (as Whedon himself puts it)
"the story of a young woman's journey that involve[d] a great deal of horror, and some heroics".  And really isn't that every woman's story?

Joss and The Donald are both American white men who wield substantial power in their respective fields.  And in their own way, the represent the best and the worst parts of American white male privilege.  Where Joss privilege is marked by a keen awareness of the experiences of those whose world views are not central, Donald privilege barely knows you exist for anything other than serving its own ends.  Donald Trump took all of his privilege and his wealth and decided to lead a charge against the current US president.  Not a charge around the president's take on a social, or economic issue, not a charge of any national, global or other consequence, but a charge about how he may have been born in Africa.  I realise that that point has constitutional consequence, but seriously, think about it: had John McCain, a white man, born in Panama been elected, there would be no fuss over his legitimacy as leader of the free world.  Joss Whedon, on the other hand, chooses to create stories about women whose stories reflect the lives of real-life women.  In a world where popular culture is infused with super-skinny, vapid, (hopefully) unrealistic womanhood that usually defers to a male love interest, Joss rode in and created girls and women who run their own lives and the world, without fanfare, or male leadership.  Where The Donald's privilege exists to create a world of black and white, with little consideration of nuance, Joss's privilege (I believe) is painfully aware of its divisive power, and its ability to wreak havoc.  Knowing this, it chooses instead to provide platforms where 'others' who are not as privileged or powerful can speak.

If I have to live with privilege (especially that of the white male Western variety), and I think I might have to for a while to come, I choose Joss over The Donald anyday.

Dreams from Obama

Finally, after four months of hand-wringing - and a detour in the form of a quick re-read of Eat, Pray, Love - I finished reading Dreams from My Father!  As excited as I am about finishing the book, I think I may have to revisit it at least once more as I journey through my own race, space and place.  The book is a rich and thick description of Obama's struggles with belonging, or the lack thereof.  And it is well-written and compelling, with just the right amount of schmultz and zero politicking.  I loved it!  And yet I trudged through this book: I sped past the 'Chicago' section, where he details his efforts as an intrepid community organiser, but I slowed to a complete stop (enter Liz Gilbert, who is also an amazing author and speaker - check her out) when I hit 'Kenya'.  In 'Kenya', Obama tells the story of his father, his father's father and what it was like going to the place from whence they came with his brothers and sisters.  He does not sugarcoat Africa.  The story is told in plain speech, and his descriptions of a country not quite recovered from the ravages of that centuries-old evil, colonialism, conjures images of my own Africa.  In short (before I begin to gush), he manages to go into details (including an episode of gastric misadventure) without sounding like a 21st century travelogue writer.

So, why did it take me four months to finish this impressive book?  Well, maybe it was that it was that good (yes, alright, that may have been slight gushing).  The honesty about Africa, and the psychosocial effects of socioeconomic, cultural imperialism was difficult to swallow.  The story contained in Dreams from My Father, and particularly in 'Kenya', is not just Obama's, but is the story of most Africans struggling to eke out a coherent identity on a continent crippled by structural racism.  In the following passage, he describes what he now understands about his father, and his father's father:

"I see my grandfather, standing before his father's hut, a wiry, grim-faced bot, almost ridculous in his oversized trousers and his buttonless shirt.  I watch his father turn away from him and hear his brothers laugh. [...] And as his figure turns, I know that for himthe path of his life is now altered irreversibly, completely.
"He will have to reinvent himself in this arid, solitary place.  Through force of will, he will create a life out of the scraps of an unknown world, and the memories of a world rendered obsolete.  And yet, as he sits alone in a freshly scrubbed hut, an old man now wiht milky eyes, I know that he still hears the clipped voice of a British captain, explaning for the third and last time the correct proportion of tonic to gin.  The nerves in the old man's neck tighten, the rage builds - he grabs his stick to hit at something, anything.  Until finally his grip weakens with the realisation that for all the power in his hands and the force of his will, the laughter, the rebukes, will outlast him.  His body goes slack in the chair.  He knows that he will not outlive a mocking fate.  He waits to die, alone.
"The picture fades, replaced by the image of a nine-year-old boy - my father.  He's hungry, tired, clinging to his sister's hand, searching for a mother he lost.  The hunger is too much for him, the exhaustion too great; until finally the slender line that holds him to his mothernsnaps, sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness.  The boy starts to cry; he shakes of his sister's hand.  He wants to go home, he shouts, back to his father's house.  He will find a new mother.  He will lose himself in games and learn the power of his mind. 
"But he won't forget the desperation of that day.  Twelve years later; at his narrow desk, he will glance up from a stack of forms toward the restless sky and feel that same panic return.  He, too, will have to invent himself.  His boss is out of the office; he sets the forms aside and from an old file cabinet pulls out a list of addresses.  He yanks the typwriter toward him and begins to type, letter after letter after letter, typing the nevelopes, sealing the letters like messages in bottles that will drop through a post office slot into a vast ocean and perhaps allow him to escape the island of his father's shame. 
"How luck he must have felt when his ship came sailing in!  He must have known, when that letter came from Hawaii, that he had been chosen after all [...] He had almost succeeded in a way his father could've never hoped for.  And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped after all!  To discover that he remained trapped on his father's island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother gone, gone, away..."

This is who we are, Africa.  Constantly running, trying to escape the fear, the humiliation, the anger of our continent's demons.  As hard as it is to read about, it is almost impossible to live it.