Late Night: A Whiter Shade of Pule

NOT an Actual Arab!

Jay Nordlinger, NRO’s Renaissance Grandpa Simpson, Deeply Ponders the Message of History, and delivers himself of the profound insight that "America has always been screwy about race and ethnicity."

How true! Slavery, for instance, was completely "screwy," crazy, kooky, altogether ooky. And what was all that Jim Crow hoo-hah all about, anyhow? Wacky! It was off the wall! And don’t get me started on that freaky Scottsboro Boys brou-ha-ha! But still, who could deny that this nutty-nut-nut race stuff hasn’t given us some top-notch entertainment, like, say, Billie Holiday’s toe-tapping, charmingly light-hearted rendition of that old vaudeville standard, "Screwy Fruit?" Hot dog! That’s just some swell, super kidding around.

Nordlinger is moved to emit this affable prattle after receiving an e-mail informing him that Italians in Kansas did not used to be white, but now in California Italians are indeed utterly white, which information compels Nordlinger to conclude, more in sorrow than in sense, that Sonia Sotomayor is a real jerk for making it illegal for Rudolph Valentino to gad about in the manner of a "Latin Lover." Moreover, we are assured that Nordlinger’s correspondent is not a homosexual intent on soliciting casual sex in a public setting.

If you don’t find that precis especially lucid, don’t blame me, I’m just summarizing. Any confusion, rather, is generic to cranky wingnut meditations upon race, which are typically infused with the inchoate, festering paranoia that somebody vaguely reminiscent of George Jefferson might finally be getting a piece of the pie, and dammit, they wanted that piece of pie, even if they don’t exactly know what the pie is, precisely. THEY WANT PIE! Ergo, this from Nordlinger’s correspondent:

I can’t figure out if we got a promotion or a demotion. I mean, just as it’s time to line up for minority benefits, we get bumped to the back of the line for being white.

I dunno either. Tell you what, why not swap with, say, black people, or American Indians, or Haitians, for a few decades and get back to us? That would be Scientific.

But it’s the Valentino stuff that gets really, uh, fascinating:

Valentino would not be a “Latin lover” today — Sonia would definitely say no. He would be an unwise non-Latino, with a poverty of experience. America has always been screwy about race and ethnicity, of course. But you’ll agree that that screwiness moves.

Nordlinger seems to think this proves something about Sotomayor, though it more readily appears to prove something about him, namely, that the most screwed up (which is to say, more technically, "fucking weird") ideas about race and ethnicity in evidence here belong to him. Why wouldn’t "Sonia" (heh, he uses her girl name; they’re BFFs!) say Valentino couldn’t be a "Latin Lover" today? Because Valentino was Italian? But then wouldn’t Sotomayor, I beg pardon, Sonia Dear-Heart, respond that it was Valentino’s life, experiences, and ethnic background that gave him the "wisdom" he needed to cash in so spectacularly on his contemporary exoticism — which, one hastens to point out, he most famously pulled off not by playing a "Latin," but rather an Arab? "Screwy!"

The "screwiness" might not move so move nearly as fast as the goalposts, but I at least agree that those can be damn hard to pin down, those slippery fuckers.

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