I must also point out, if it is not abundantly clear to anyone reading this, or who has ever read anything I’ve written, that no part of my decision is about apathy. Quite the contrary, in fact.  And so, if apathy is anyone’s reason for not voting, I would encourage them either to vote, or to truly understand the many legitimate reasons not to do so.

In random order:

1. I don’t support any of the candidates running in my state – that is to say, I oppose all of them
2. I question the wisdom of voting for the lesser of two evils
3. The outcome of the Citizens United vs. FEC Supreme Court case ensured that the next election would be more about money than the last, and indeed, 2010 is breaking all sorts of spending records
4. Republicans, or at least the social conservatives amongst them, openly act against my interests and everything I stand for.
5. Democrats pretend to act for my interests and in favor of the things I stand for, or otherwise remain completely quiet on those issues, and only to shift their position or compromise once in office.
6. In some perverse way I want to sabotage Democrats – who by default are the ones I’d be voting for as the only viable candidates who are even remotely amenable to my interests – just to show people on the left how utterly ineffectual they are and make a case for putting our energy behind actual leftist candidates
7. Along the same lines, I want to see people get what they ask for, and laugh when it blows up in their faces.
8. I refuse to reward any who continue to place the interests of corporations above those of the people – and that would be both Democrats (see ridiculous Healthcare bill, silence on marijuana legalization) and Republicans (see: deregulation, tax breaks, mass privatization).
9. Because I follow the money and don’t like where it leads.
10. Real changes – for the better or for the worst – seem to only ever occur during or in the aftermath of a catastrophe (See: Roosevelt after the Great Depression or George W. Bush after 9/11/2001)
11. Because compromises just aren’t enough for me anymore, which in effect aren’t small victories, but a maintenance of the status quo.
12. Neither party dares to challenge the moral hypocrisy of the Israeli government
13. Not much will change regardless of which of the two parties controls Congress; if a Democratic president and a filibuster-proof majority didn’t change anything, then neither will a Republican majority, which is not at all likely to happen, anyway.
14. My “right to vote”, as determined by my status as a citizen, is undermined by corporate personhood.
15. Not one candidate has the balls to address the issues with any real critical depth, that is, beyond the talking points
16. I am exasperated by the cheeky self-satisfied and utterly disingenuous self-righteousness of liberals (here I mean voters, not candidates)
17. I am exasperated by the raging self-sabotaging ignorance of conservatives (again, I mean voters)
18. Voting continues to be an excuse for people to believe they’ve “done their part” to affect change, even after it’s been shown that nothing has actually changed
19. Not one candidate speaks out against American Imperialism
20. Many of these points presume that my one vote actually makes a difference.  Statistically, it doesn’t.

This is me, sighing.

Maybe this is another case of me being “hypersensitive“, but so be it. If you’re a white person or a particularly assimilated person of color, then you’ll probably think this is a rather harmless video.

You may think it’s funny. Hilarious, even.

If you’re a person of color with even an iota of militancy, or hell, if you’re me then this commercial probably makes you cringe, or just plain annoys you.

But perhaps you’re not entirely sure why. So I’ll tell you why it irritates me, and maybe my explanation will make something click for you.

First of all, it’s cultural appropriation.  Which means that an element of a given culture is taken and used outside of its intended context – worse yet, in blatant opposition to the intended context.

From Wikipedia:

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of dress or personal adornment, music and art, religion, language, or social behavior. These elements, once removed from their indigenous cultural contexts, may take on meanings that are significantly divergent from, or merely less nuanced than, those they originally held.

Hip-hop, and rap in particular, by no measure of historical revisionism or denial of their contributions, is undoubtedly an African-American cultural product.

This, however, does not mean that it belongs exclusively to African-Americans, or that no one else can use it.  The rule, though, is that it should be used in the spirit in which it was intended.  That is, as an expression of positivity, uplift, counter-establishment, or justified anger towards historic and lasting inequality and/or injustice.

People around the world have used hip-hop brilliantly and properly – from the Palestinians speaking out against Apartheid conditions in Israel, to the righteous anger from the socially marginalized of the Parisian banlieues, to Somalian rapper K’naan speaking about abject poverty.  And let’s not forget M.I.A., who in spite of generating mainstream appeal, has managed to keep her message authentic and political.

There are countless examples of where hip-hop and rap are used incorrectly – just look at the majority of mainstream rap today.  By African-American artists, no less.  But remember that bit I told you about appropriation?  Well, as much as I despise commercial mainstream garbage rap, the fact of the matter is that, as an African-American cultural product, rap is free for African-Americans to do with as they please.

If you own a television, it is your right to use it as a surfboard, even if it means you are rushing headlong down a slippery slope towards self-annihilation.  That was not merely an analogy, but a metaphor.

If someone else were to come in and use your television as a surfboard, well…you’d be pretty justified in wanting to smash said TV over their heads.  The smash-impulse I speak of is neither an analogy, nor a metaphor.  Which brings me back to the Toyota commercial.

Here we have a fictional white family, with all of the privilege, normativeness, and inherent “rightness” their mere existence implies, members of the “dominant” culture, appropriating the music, language, and projected mannerisms of African-American culture (“minority” culture) and using it in a way that completely contradicts the intended spirit.

Hip-hop, should I need to remind you, was originally all about countering the establishment – an establishment built-in with various mechanisms and controls to ensure that African-Americans would never stand on equal footing with white people.  An establishment that would deny the average black family access to the so-called “American Dream”, which the white family in this commercial exemplifies to a truly laughable extreme.  I mean, they even seemed to choose the blondest babies imaginable to ram the point home.

Contrary to this “wholesome” symbol of white normalcy, hip-hop and rap for the most part – in spite of their mainstream commercial appeal – are regarded as less than ideal, unworthy, “not music”, “ghetto”, “stupid”, “irresponsible”, promoting all the wrong values.  That last bit – about values – is interesting, because of course hip-hop would never promote “white values” – white being “right” – where African-Americans were not given access to the same livelihoods and cultural environment within which such “values” would flourish.

This is not to say that such values – personal responsibility, emphasis on the family, etc. – are foreign or unimportant to African-Americans.  They are equally, if not more important, in an environment that regularly creates obstacles to achieving the ideal.  Hip-hop and rap, though, were the response to that environment.

So this video, in its promotion of white normalcy and wholesomeness, not-so-subtly implies a black/white dichotomy wherein the white family champions family values and the American Dream, in stark contrast to the mainstream rap music of today, which places a premium on materialism, excess, selfishness, and often violence.

“Where are the kids?” seems particularly meaningful when we consider the stigma against black families as being “broken” – having absentee parents, teen parents, or otherwise not “doing right” by their children.  No worries about the white family, though – their two little Aryans are close at hand.

The white family drives the station wagon, with the car seats in the back, while rappers show off their financially unwise and unsustainable Escalades or even fancier cars, symbols of their excess and irresponsibility.

The whole commercial screams – or maybe whispers for most of you – this paternalistic message of: “Here, let us show you what you’re supposed to be doing.”

It is important to note here that when hip-hop and rap were definitively anti-establishment, flew arms-swinging into the face of white normativeness, there were no attempts to appropriate them.  They were swiftly and decisively demonized, devalued, dismissed as invalid and inappropriate.  The average white person would have sooner taken a shit on a rap album as purchased one.  Their children who embraced the music or the culture were regarded cautiously at best- parents hoping it to be just as a fad (as it could only ever be) – or punished at worst.  They were ridiculed by their peers and regarded as niggers-by-association, the word of choice being “wigger”.

But then something happened.  White businessmen, as they had with Jazz, Blues, Soul, Rock, and other forms of black music before, saw the money-making potential of rap music.  They may not have wanted it for their own children, but they recognized it as perfect for consumption by other white children who could use it as the ultimate symbol of rebellion against everything their parents stood for – that is, everything white.  That the sizeable minority of African-Americans would also buy the albums in large quantities was an added bonus.

And so was rap music corporatized – warped and perverted into a commercial product far-removed from its original purpose; something achieved by the silver tongues of businessmen appealing to the sensibilities of those with very little, with promises of what they never had – and, for the most part, still wouldn’t have even after the deals were signed.

When deciding which of the wide variety of rap music to push into the mainstream market, the businessmen chose those who emphasized the black/white dichotomy in the most extreme way – the “gangsta” rappers – the music which further reinforced just how far black people were from the white ideal of family values and personal responsibility.  It was the portion of rap that the kids of white suburbia would most embrace, thereby generating the highest profit.

The rappers themselves, beneath a superficial layer of anger and violence, often had important messages to relay – but these messages were lost on a market that had neither any frame of reference within which to process them, nor any real interest in hearing them.  The music that stayed completely true to hip-hop’s original spirit, what we today call “conscious rap”, was kept in the margins.  Not only because it continued to speak against white businesses’ appropriation of hip-hop, but because their message, more readily accessible without the superficial layer of violence, was not marketable to white suburbia, nor was it something that the establishment wanted people to hear.

So make no mistake.  While much of mainstream rap music today disgraces the spirit of hip-hop, its popularity and mass-marketing is the direct result of cultural appropriation.  What little wealth or acclaim it grants a handful of African-American artists – often short-lived – is a mere consolation prize for the wholesale theft of a cultural product.

The Swagger Wagon Toyota commercial, in implicitly pointing an accusatory finger at mainstream rap music, and African-Americans by proxy, again aims to make a profit by promoting a black/white dichotomy that reinforces white righteousness.  And anything that validates the current social pecking order is ripe for consumption by those at the top.

As an added bonus, the commercial even elicits a few hearty chuckles.  Hee mother fucking hee.

While I have zero doubts about what this commercial is saying, implicit though it may be, I cannot say with any conviction whether or not this loaded message was intentional.  White privilege, white normativeness, white standards, white values, and the black/white dichotomy – these things are all built into the foundation of American society.  This video may truly have been an innocuous attempt at humor, but one that echoed from that foundation.

I’ll ignore, lest I get carried away with my analysis, the fact that the commercial itself is in black and white.

The people who made it, having already embraced the dichotomy, may not even have been aware of all of the implications – just enough in the abstract to recognize how it would speak well to the sensibilities of other white people.  Such is the essence of good marketing, which as any self-aware capitalist will tell you, is often mutually exclusive from any ethical or moral good.

1. BP CEO saying that the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill is relatively tiny compared to the size of the ocean. By that logic, someone could argue that the over a million people killed in a war built on a false pretext is tiny compared to the 6 billion people in the world.  Oh, wait…
2. SB 1070 – more popularly known as the “Arizona Immigration bill”
3. Arizona banning ethnic studies
4. Texas conservatives working to revise history along Biblical/American exceptionalist/racist lines in textbooks
5. Corporations authorized to buy U.S. elections after the Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission case
6. The surge of people “tweeting” and “microblogging” about nonsense while remaining dormant on things that matter
7. People wasting their time talking about Jay-Z is a devil-worshiping Freemason.  Even if he is, who cares? There are bigger things to worry about.
8. Republicans and Democrats both screwing the public through bankrupt policy, while continuing to trick people into thinking there’s any substantive difference between them.
9. The fact that legally, BP may only be obligated to pay no more than $75 million in damages, which doesn’t even begin to cover it, and that they’re fighting even that.  You want to know what’s “tiny”?  $75 million compared to the hundreds of billions^PDF that BP makes every year
10. Open racism coming back in style
11. The mainstream media continuing to report on sensationalist bullshit, rather than covering the stuff that really matters – the corporate version of #6
12. Omar al-Bashir “winning” the election in Sudan, in spite of being convicted of war crimes and genocide by the U.N.
13. People chasing conspiracy theories, while doing nothing about evil acts being committed every day out in the open
14. How perfectly the “divide and conquer” social strategy is continuing to work
15. All this talk of Iran having nuclear weapons, while no one says anything to Israel
16. The betrayed promise of “change” from President Obama
17. How the people around me don’t know and don’t seem to care about what’s going on in the world
18. Facebook’s new privacy policy violations
19. Obama authorizing the targeted killing of a U.S. Citizen, setting a dangerous precedent
20. How people are pawns of their respective political parties, rather than thinking critically as individuals

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play some Torchlight, as an alternative to shooting myself in the head…

1. Why should we only pay special attention to our significant others on a certain day?
2. The holiday is just part of a consumerist scheme to support the “industrial complex”

Blah blah blah.  Whatever.  It’s all true, of course, but I wasn’t going to post anything about it until I came across this promotional offer from XBox Live.  It offers some free Microsoft Points if only you’ll watch one of the offered movies with your loved one on Valentine’s Day.  Sounds like a good deal, except for the wording of the advertisement.

It annoyed me right away on a subliminal level, although it took me a bit of time to rationalize why exactly I took issue with it.  At first it was the dichotomy between those who have “someones” and those who do not.  I must either a sentimental sap who likes frilly pink hearts simply for having a girlfriend, or I’m some chest-pounding “manly-man” type who “don’t need no stinkin’ girlfriend! Guys rule!”  Is that it?

I couldn’t possibly be a guy who is between relationships, or a guy who for the sake of career, livelihood, or personal choice, just doesn’t have a significant other?  I couldn’t be a girl who is single for any of the same reasons?  Or a girl who doesn’t like frilly pink hearts?  I couldn’t be a gay man or woman in a relationship where such cave-painted gender roles aren’t so clearly established?  I couldn’t be a person of any gender and sexual orientation who appreciates a romance movie, even watched in solitude?  Maybe I’m some basement-dweller with the social skills of an empty pizza box and movies are my escape from harsh reality, in which case, thanks for reminding me of that.

Then there’s the matter of which movies are offered to either side.  If I’m the romantic type, I must want to watch some trite garbage like The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past or the insufferably pointless and overrated Paranormal Activity.  But if I’m not – if I’m the skull-crunching manly-man type, or the lonely lurker type – then I must want something involving drunken stupidity like The Hangover, the pulp sensationalism of Inglorious Basterds, gangsters in Public Enemies, explosions like G.I. Joe, or a healthy dose of racism like we find in The Goods - you know, because the target market probably isn’t Asian or anyone else who might be offended by Asian stereotypes.

Because all real chest-pounding manly men enjoy that kind of stuff.

As a guy in a successful heterosexual relationship, his ad was tailor made for me, right?  Except that I hate most romance movies no matter who I’m watching them with, because of their hackneyed storylines and characters who are either unrealistically beautiful or exaggeratedly hideous only to – by way of magic or hard work – become unrealistically beautiful.  Except that I don’t buy into the idea that ideals like love or tenderness or sensitivity or – you know, generally not being some chest pounding machismo asshole – are mutually exclusive from my identity as a man.

Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, but the shit just annoyed me.  Maybe me and my girlfriend, instead of exchanging frilly pink hearts, like to share a cocktail inside of a flaming skull right before we headbutt each other.  With love.   You don’t know.  It’s just more evidence of how the consumer culture is so oblivious or indifferent to the many different types of ways that people can choose to interact with one another – and not just on Valentine’s Day.

Mass Effect 2 is every bit the middle game of a trilogy.  It lacks the impact of the first game – the introduction to a galactic-scale conflict, the first look at a thoroughly conceived sci-fi universe, that first unnerving dialogue with Sovereign.  And it necessarily reserves all of the big surprises for the finale.

For those who did not play the first Mass Effect, this game amounts to little more than a pretty-top notch shooter built on the pretext of a galactic recruitment drive, with a meaty chunk of story seemingly added on as an afterthought.  That is to say that there seemed to be no connection between the quests to acquire Commander Shepard’s teammates and the greater adventure.  In terms of story, there were few surprises – the only “big” revelation completely underwhelming, and the one intriguing bit of lore development – the bit about the Geth – left mostly unexplored.

Back in October of 2007, when BioWare fans first heard that the company had been acquired by Electronic Arts, there was a collective sigh of dismay – or perhaps even a roar of indignation.  The fear was that creativity and originality would be traded for whatever best fit EA’s business model.

Mass Effect 2 provides case in point.

Everything was streamlined, dumbed down, simplified for the “casual gamer”, who the big-wigs in marketing assume have the attention span of gerbils.  Casual gamers, surely, could not be bothered with such tiresome things as inventory management or deep character customization.  Strangely, though, it was determined that the casual gamer would not find it at all tedious to drag a slow-roaming cursor across planet after planet to collect resources – a rough equivalent to earning money, although there is already a money system in place.

The galactic codex remains in tact for fans who want to soak up every last detail about the Mass Effect universe, and Bioware kept the elaborate dialogue trees  – albeit within a weaker narrative.  But Mass Effect 2 is entirely a shooter, with some RPG elements thrown in, as opposed to the original game, which was an RPG with shooter mechanics.

So why has the balance shifted?

Probably because the sales figures of games like Halo and Gears of War suggest that the market is fertile for more of the same. And if EA was going to put its formidable capital and marketing power behind the franchise (e.g. higher production values and the 2 minute television spot during the NFC Championship Game), then there needed to be some serious risk vs. rewards calculations.

Mass Effect gained the role-playing genre even more ground in the collective attention of the mainstream – it was a game that almost everyone could enjoy.  The critical acclaim was near-unanimous.  But clearly its success wasn’t enough for a company that has proven that it is safer and more profitable to churn out the same game year after year (Madden) than to take risks on things like creativity and originality.

Furthermore, the sparse narrative in Mass Effect 2 highlights another aspect of EA’s business model – the focus on downloadable content (DLC).  This game provides us with a sort of main course – maybe even only the meat of the entree – and undoubtedly within a few weeks or months we’ll have a chance to purchase the sides, the drink, the dessert, and perhaps the appetizer after the fact.

I say all of this knowing full well that I’ll be amongst the first to snatch up every bit of DLC the moment it is released – hoping beyond hope that they’ll serve to fill in some of ME2’s missing details.  So, if nothing else, it does represent a strong business model.

In spite of all of this, I can say that I did enjoy Mass Effect 2 – but perhaps only because it allowed me to return to the universe I had come to know and love in the first game, to once again take the reins of Commander Shepard and save the galaxy from certain peril.  As a standalone game it does just enough right to as a shooter and as a basic RPG to hold its own in the market, and to enroll a new corps of casual gamers into the franchise.  As the middle game in a trilogy, it does just enough to satisfy fans’ two-year hunger.

So overall is Mass Effect 2 a success?  Certainly.  Is it everything I expected?  Not even close.