Is change coming to your Thanksgiving table and to the White House?
All this talk about change these days. This year, is there going to be a change at your Thanksgiving meal?
I’m having Tofurky again this year. They’re not a sponsor like the good hair doc extraordinaire, Dr. Peter Panagotacos. Tofurky is just a good substitute. All the trimmings without the feathers. And it’s fun to say. Tofurky, toFURKY, TOFURKY!!!
It used to be a bit weird to say no to turkey at Thanksgiving. But my family has been doing it for nearly 20 years. As full disclosure, my wife is a PETA executive. When we want to see a horror film, we simply turn to the video shot by PETA’s undercover crew at turkey processing plants around the country.
This year’s investigation (getactive.peta.org/campaign/turkey_investigation) exposes the practices at Aviagen in Lewisburg, W.Va., a German-based company that calls itself “the world’s leading poultry-breeding company.” That’s a nice way of saying it promotes turkey sex.
Hot turkey sex, it turns out, is neither good nor bad sex, But it’s definitely not safe sex -not when you mix in the outrageous human behavior by workers at Aviagen’s plant. The video documents workers stomping birds heads, wringing their necks and thrashing them willy nilly with 2-by-4s. PETA estimates that hundreds of birds have been abused. There’s even a segment that shows a worker simulating turkey sex. Tofurky, anyone?
Pardoning Bush
It also made me think of all those politicians who love to pardon turkeys to show their compassion. George W. Bush, in one of his last great acts, officially pardoned a 45-pound Tom turkey last week. It was probably one of the only times Bush himself may have felt the turkey was actually luckier than he was. It gets saved and not digested, and then is whisked off to Disneyland where it will be grand marshal of the Disney Thanksgiving Day parade.
The bird gets to have fun. In the meantime, Bush gets devoured for a few more weeks as the lame duck president who steered us into the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Despite all that, I must admit a few pangs of compassion for Bush, even though he was a dismal failure as leader of the free world. It’s all because of Josh Brolin and his tour-de-force portrayal of Dubya in the movie W.
Currently limping its way out of the scene, much like Bush himself, and into that purgatory where so-so films go until they are reborn on DVD, Stone’s movie sure has a lot of Asian American producers on it. And there’s Hong Kong starlet Teresa Cheung, who as executive producer inserted herself in the role of the Asian American journalist at the White House. Now that’s a good merge of power and self-interest. Kudos to her.
The movie, however, rates but two of four stars from me. It neither gets deep enough psychologically to be a biopic of weight, nor does it delve deep enough into the recent history to be a decent show and tell. Maybe we need more information, like when Bush writes his autobiography. Or will it be his comic book?
The movie has pangs of truth that hit you as the history plays out. What could Colin Powell have done, you wonder? What would the world be like without a Karl Rove?
But the most endearing moments in the movie deal with the personal relationships between W., his dad, Laura, his dogs, his beer. After eight years of bad policy that makes you want to wring his neck (but not like a turkey’s neck), I actually felt far more sympathetic than I ever have toward W.
The movie is neither broad satire nor send-up. At this point, one more Bush joke would be piling it on. The election is over, the administration is packing up. Time to start piling off, and be thankful it’s all over.
Obama’s White House
To Bush’s credit, after his victory in 2000, he was damned sure he would make his administration “look like America.” It wasn’t lip service. Even in the movie “W.,” two African American actors got to play the two prominent African Americans who played a role in the last administration.
So why are Asian Americans barely bit players in this new upcoming one?
The AAA Fund (www.aaa-fund.org/), a political organization dedicated to the empowerment of Asian Americans seems to have picked up on my notion that the change in the Obama White House may be one of “limited diversity.” In other words, where are the Asians?
In a recent e-mail, Board member Gautam Dutta writes: “Almost two-thirds of all Asian Americans voted for Obama. Unfortunately, only one Asian American leader is seriously being considered for his entire cabinet: Illinois Veteran Affairs Director Tammy Duckworth.
The disabled vet is a rising star, but I thought she might run for Obama’s vacant Senate seat. For cabinet posts, DNC Vice Chairman Mike Honda’s name deserves to be at least thrown into the ring.
Could it be the Bush Administration’s cabinet, with Latinos, blacks and two, count’em, two Asian Americans, will be far more diverse than an Obama cabinet?
Mull over that one as you digest your tofurky.
And a Happy Thanksgiving to all.
See that Sarah Palin pardon a turkey, get updates, find out what really makes Emil go amok at amok.asianweek.com.
E-mail: emil@amok.com
Sorry, Emil, but I’ll up the ante here.
Turkey, tofurkey, the leftovers appear to dominate.
And I AM referring to all those “foes” Obama has been “naming” for his Cabinet AND “kitchen” variety, as in “advisors.”
The electorate, well, at least that 53.5% that voted for him?, has bought a pig in a poke, and sans lipstick at that.
Unless he demonstrates, as he proclaimed today, that he will prove the bottom-line “decider,” like Bush;?, on all things big and small, domestic and abroad, and actually implement the “change” he invoked to bring him into “power,” this half-baked Oreo seems to me to be one more sadsack grunt who has grunted his way to the top.
He is a professed “reader,” unlike his comic=strip predecessor who is even now admitting to a bit of rue, and SHOULD read today’s Info Clearing House piece by one Chris Hedges on “the terrorist within,” the institutional terrorist like the state itself, the benighted fundamentalist who believes in empire and superiority and exclusivity and the sanctity of his own whilst demonizing the “evil” of the “other.”
By all omens and forebodings and forecast shadows, Obama now stands to the “right” of both Billary AND Lieberman, that domestic version of Bibi, the yahoo of perk AND privilege.
Patrick Cockburn today warns one and all about the Paki opposites who are/were behind the Taliban AND muslim fundies. But he fails to note that theirs are no worse than ours, and WE have the firepower and “delivery systems” and THEY have only IEDs and suicide troops growing exponentially to our fears and hatreds and hopeless opposition.
Better stand at the water’s edge and command the tide to recede.
So long as “we” assume and presume to lecture and hector the rest of the world in our small and misguided ways, so shall we reap the dragon’s teeth harvest of eyes for eyes and bodies for corpses, whatever their “religion” OR provenance.
A pan-auto Detroit?
A still free-wheeling Wall Street?
A Rube Goldberg infrastructure of ravenous=greedy “private” contractors for the public services and the public weal?\
A public marketplace of snakeoil-salesmen selling patented and profit-oriented “drugs” they pr9mote in a “sickness” industry?
Backed by equally oderiferous, redolent for sure, “insurance” panderers?
Believe me, “race” has NOTHING to do with all this merde.
It’s money, honey. Or its evil twin, “power.”
And BOTH are figments of humankind’s worst nightmare.
Their fundies are no worse, and, of course, no better, than ours.
The only solution is to turn our backs on both, and we must begin with our own.
Barack Obama, if you are the man you claim or hope to be, implement the “change” you promised,, the “change” on which you gained office.
Not four more years of idiotic fumblings and bumblings abroad, with or without Billary, and, “God” help us, not eight more years of “free-market” rape of the economy AND tjhe people.
P.S.: Twenty-thou troops in our streets and byways sound very much like the Bushy threat of “martisl law.” If neo-Nazism can masquerade as civil “security,” can the Fourth Reich lag far behind?
i think Obama is good leader,and i belived him stil remember that has been leave in MENTENG_JAKARTA_INDONESIA.
…..Proved….