action figures sold separately

on august 18, 1982, i went with 74,999 other screaming teenagers to see iron maiden, loverboy, scorpions, and foreigner (and a band called girl school whom i don’t remember). every summer the big local rock station would put on this festival thing called “Day on the Green.” This one was in Oakland.

remembering this concert and hearing i think i’m turning japanese (with its “No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women / No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it’s dark / Everyone around me is a total stranger”) by the vapors on the local 80’s station got me thinking about the roots and strands of racism in the pop culture i grew up in through high school in the 80’s. Growing up in SF, the anti-latino stereotypes permeated the relatively conservative grade school and high school i went to. (the sexism and homophobia were severe as well, and that’s the subject of a blogrant soon to come). there was certainly a dearth of tools for challenging that crap, but these days thank dog there’s Rethinking Schools and a host of other progressive and radical educational resources out there. The web, despite all the crap one finds all over, also has a decent amount of incisive writings and resources designed to confront white supremacy wherever we find it in our culture.

i remember most starkly the anti-arab stereotypes in the first indiana jones movie.

conservative religious author gary north writes about the scene in the cairo market saying not only that it was the “greatest scene in movie history,” but fully glorifying the ideology of domination the scene reeks of, when he writes

Jones reaches into his pocket, pulls out a cheap revolver, and plugs him. He crumples, sword and all. The audience roars. In that scene, we see the confrontation between the West, which has adopted science, technology, price competition, and mass production, and the East, which has adopted mysticism, ancient technology, and personal self-mastery by an elite. The issue is resolved visually in that scene. One shot. All over the world, backward societies today are trying to get more of what the capitalist West has. Economic growth is spreading Eastward and Southward because a commitment to free market capitalism is spreading. “Raiders” came out in 1981, Reagan’s first year in office. Red China had liberalized its rural districts in 1979, but the resulting economic boom was not yet visible. The Asian tigers had not yet hit their stride, but soon would. That’s why that scene was not only definitive, it was prophetic.

wow.