23 January 2007

The idea of race

Bear with me, this will end up being a bit jumbled.

I was listening to the Beeb this morning, my local NPR affiliate broadcasts World Service at 5 am and 7pm weekdays. (OT for a second, I love the Beeb. Love, love, love. Give me a solid English accent to deliver any form of news, good or bad, any day.) Anyway, they did a story this morning about Turkey, and how it is illegal in Turkey to insult Turkishness, the symbols of the realm, or the Turkish race. Then, the very next story was about the public relations nightmare that the United States finds itself mired in, the diminished standings that the US has worldwide. They were talking to some PR fella, a Brit, about how he would go about correcting the image that 'Merica has courtesy of President Idiot. That struck me as funny, them asking the opinion of a PR firm in England rather than a PR firm in the US, but then I checked my humor when I realized that most 'Mericans couldn't or wouldn't be able to admit that there's a problem.

The two reports, back to back, with the PR guy talking about Americans and the report about it being a crime to insult Turkishness made me think long and hard about race, if only for a minute or two. Here in the US, we think of race pretty clearly as a black vs white issue most of the time, in fact, the words "race relations" used in any context usually is code for "there's a bit of a problem between a black person and a white person". What I got to wondering was if Americans could be considered a race. I don't think so....but it has me thinking again about what it means to be an American.

And here is the best answer I've been able to come up with. Wrapped in a neat little package, showing two sides of one American coin; today, the Motion Picture Academy announced the Oscar nominations in Los Angeles, California. And today, W gives the annual State of the Union address, as required by the Constitution. If those two things don't represent some of the basic schizophrenia that it takes to keep pace with current events in this country, I dunno what does.






In other news; lab results came back today for the blood work I had done last week. No Type 2 Diabetes, no thyroid problems, NO PCOS, no apparent reason why my weight loss is moving slow. Also in the good news column, my cholesterol is way, way, way down, everything else is within normal limits.


Listening to: DMB, Stand Up, Stolen Away at 55th & 3rd

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

YAY on the good medical news!!! Can we celebrate this Friday?

Anonymous said...

By the way, I left you that anonymous comment. Smart, huh? ~mm