So Funny I Forgot to Laugh

There’s a lot you can say about Ike Turner–like how he wrote and recorded what was ostensibly the first rock and roll song, how his influence on American music is immeasurable, and even how his relationship with Turner was tumultuous at best.  As we all know, a lot of not very nice people end up doing awesome stuff and we all have to make our judgments as best we can about whether the work of a person can be enjoyed separate from the truth of who that person was.

And yes, he denied that he abused Turner, but at the same time, he said, “Sure, I’ve slapped Tina… There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her.”

I’ve got no great analysis for what comes next, because it’s just vile.

“Sure, I’ve slapped Tina… There have been times when I punched her to the ground”–Ike Turner

“Ike ‘Beats’ Tina to Death”–NY Post

God damn.

Just god damn.

It’s not bad enough that the person who claimed to love you admits to slapping you and punching you, but thirty years later, to have that violence against you turned into a joke in a major newspaper?

What can you say to that?

(h/t Shakesville)

Hispanic Nashville Noteworthy Awards

Hey, John Lamb is putting out the call for nominations for the Hispanic Nashville Noteworthy Awards. If you have anybody or anything that deserves recognition, be sure to drop him a line or leave it in the comments over there.

The criteria are pretty loose:

Anyone and anything can be nominated – a restaurant, business, book, accountant, taco stand, newspaper, decision, party, church, mural, dentist, school, neighborhood, politician, song – anything, as long as it is noteworthy and among or related to the Hispanic members of the Nashville community.

In that spirit, I nominate Mack for his efforts to find a way to serve fideo with everything. Is that noteworthy? I would say it is if you regularly eat at his house.

I tease because I love.

Who Will I Leave My Stuff To?

The Butcher demanded that I take a picture of his room so that y’all can see how clean it is.  I wanted to take a picture of the dresser that he and my dad refinished, the one with the marble top that about killed me when I was a toddler.

But then I started to get depressed about how much stuff we have handed down through the years and how I’ve got no one to leave it to.

I know that having someone to leave your shit to is a bad reason to have kids, but who else is going to care that that’s the dresser that went out to Oklahoma and back on the Conestoga wagon and later fell over on me when I was trying to climb it and later turned out to be incredibly beautiful when the Butcher and my dad fixed it up?

It just made me a little sad.

And I couldn’t find the camera.  Which I just now remembered is in my bag.

Oops.

Not Replacements for Normal Children

Over at Alas, Kay Olson is talking about the weird ad campaign for the NYU Child Study Center which seems clearly designed around the idea that there are a whole host of things–ADHD, autism and related things, eating disorders, and OCD, for instance–that rob you of your normal children and replace them with fucked up kids whose lives are ruined unless you get help for them.

And I love what the folks from the Autism Self-Advocacy Network say in response to that:

Individuals with disabilities are not replacements for normal children that are stolen away by the disability in question. They are whole people, deserving of the same rights, respect, and dignity afforded their peers.

I know I go on about my dear, dead Uncle B. a lot.  But he was like a second father to me and I miss him dearly and so there you go.  Anyway, he always insisted that he was “crippled.”  To him, that felt like an accurate description of what had happened to him.  He didn’t feel “disabled” because he was still able to do everything he wanted to do.  And he would say that “handicapped” didn’t really feel right to him either, because he felt like it implied he was at some kind of disadvantage that other people around him needed to compensate for.

I’m not sure, but I think that, for him, terms like “disabled” and “handicapped” implied some kind of ongoing state of deficiency–of being seen as being in a state of ongoing not quite normal, not quite regular.

And for him, to call himself crippled (not that he would have stood for others calling him that, I don’t think), said that his life was going one way, something happened to him (he was crippled), and from that point, his life went another way and something different than before became his normal, regular life.

What I find gross about the ransom notes is the implication that your kids’ problems are problems because they’re not normal, because they’re not things that happen to normal people, that it’s a state of abnormality so severe it’s like having your child kidnapped.

When really, what they’re going through is normal–in terms of it happening to a lot of people and in terms of it being a component of their regular lives.

I’m not saying that people with these conditions shouldn’t get treatment or that parents shouldn’t seek treatment for their children.  We all need help of all sorts to get by in this world and there’s no shame in seeking it out.

But, it’s exactly because there’s no shame in seeking help that trying to alarm and shame parents (“If your kid were taken from you by kidnapping, you’d get help; your kid has been taken from you by [whatever], why won’t you get help?”) into seeking it is gross.