Paradocracy

While seated at my gate at San Francisco International Airport, I couldn't possibly help but overhear the young lady seated beside me: “I want to be in a relationship, but I don’t know how to be in one. Is this how love feels? I’m just like, when I look at him, I don’t feel anything, and I feel like [sic] the more time I spend with him, the more I’ll dislike him.”  This aligns rather interestingly with an alarming monologue overheard months ago at my local Safeway grocery store: "Are my expectations too high? Perhaps I'm watching too much This is Us ." The growing accessibility of theater and technology appears to come with a tremendous downside, which has unfolded before our eyes in real time: today's human being is left to decipher between the beginnings and ends of theater and those of real life. All too often, the two appear to be conjoined, even indistinguishable. And where theater once existed as either comic relief or an artistic expression of pat...

In his latest hit Untouchable , Eminem censures the political right by invoking the " hands up " slogan and painting the portrait of a marginalized black man, as contrasted against the "untouchable" white boy. In this highly ironic gesture, Marshall Mathers only furthers the notion that there is some discernible difference between so-called whites and blacks, even advancing a false archetype by framing the black boy as a drug addict: "Probably comin' from the dope house." From the very beginning of this political diatribe, Mathers rushes immediately into the false white-black paradigm before carefully examining specific instances of implied racism. Of course, the hefty implications here point unambiguously toward extant institutional racism , believed to have been grounded in traditions woven into the fabric of the red, white and blue. However, had Mathers taken his history and statistics courses a bit more seriously, if he had even taken the...