It all centers on the discussions of the behavior of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the chief of the International Monetary Fund currently sitting in Riker’s Island without bail awaiting trial for sexual assault and attempted rape.

At The Australian, Chris Bremner reports that “When Mr Strauss-Kahn’s conduct has crossed the boundary even by French standards, he has been protected by a team of powerful image-minders who have been grooming his candidature for his planned presidential run against Mr Sarkozy.”

Meanwhile, over at ABC, Marc Perelman stated, “It is certainly something that is very serious even by French standards which tend to be more liberal when it comes to politicians womanising.”

The Independent’s George Garvey concurs: “While the French public generally takes a more tolerant view of such peccadilloes than their counterparts in English-speaking countries, Strauss-Kahn’s private life has been an eventful one even by relaxed French standards.”

On one hand, things are different in France: On public radio’s The Kojo Nnamdi show, David Clark, deputy bureau chief with Agence France-Press, described Strauss-Kahn’s behavior in context. “And that he would often have multiple affairs ongoing at the same time with staff and with people on the outside, including several journalists. It’s extremely common, not to say banal, for French politicians, even at the highest level, to comport themselves in a manner which would be seen as an embarrassment in an Anglo-Saxon culture. On the other hand, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, if these allegations are proved true, has certainly crossed the line even by French standards because this is apparently quite a violent assault. It’s not a seduction by any means, if the allegations against him are true.”

This all leads to some questions. What are these ‘french standards’? Why must we be reassured that sexual assault and attempted rape would exceed the standards of any civilized nation?

Because, it turns out, Europe is less culturally progressive than the U.S. With the gravity of history pulling for tradition, there’s apparently less momentum for gender equity — as evidenced by the recent protests of hiring and promotion practice in Germany. I guess that despite our failing education system, despite our economic straits, despite our desire to pass off our least salubrious foods as European (Belgian Waffles, French Fries) and our obesity epidemic and our heinous politico-corporate hegemony, we do have some small victories to be proud of. Hallelujah, America.  You may release 95% of those indicted on rape charges, but at least we’re clear that rape is a crime, by our standards.

the practice of working with whatever materials are at hand, and making do with what one has. As a cultural practice, bricolage refers to the activity of taking consumer products and commodities and making them one’s own by giving them new meaning . . .  to create resistant meanings out of commodities. For instance . . . wearing sneakers unlaced or baseball caps on backwards can  . . . change the intended meaning of those products. The punk practice of wearing safety pins as body ornamentation is one of the most well-known examples of bricolage.

Over at the New York Observer, Sharon Elizabeth Samuel describes the wave (sorry) of racism/Orientalism following the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and horrifying nuclear catastrophe as “foot-in-mouth syndrome.” It’s an epidemic, though, more like Hoof-and-Mouth: from the AFLAC duck man Gilbert Gottfried to members of New York City Ballet. (Gottfried was fired from AFLAC, which does three quarters of its business in Japan.) The most egregious case, the vlog of college student Alexandra Wallace, has got people tweeting and squawking.ju

But if Mz. Samuels demurely refrains from calling out the hate that dares not speak its name, it’s because she can count on Jimmy Wong do do so with more bricolage. Samuels writes,

“Out west, one Alexandra Wallace, a UCLA student who posted a video on YouTube March 11, blasted her Asian classmates for talking on the phone in the library (regarding, she presumes, their relatives in “the tsunami thing”), among other crimes. Ms. Wallace imitated an Asian student’s speech—”Ohhhh! Ching chong ling long ting tong”—while priding herself on her “American manners.”

“The rant, which went viral despite being removed by Wallace on Sunday, promptly earned the third-year political science (indeed!) major a number of death threats. (None of this, by the way, is the lesson worth learning!)

“Enter Jimmy Wong, a 24-year-old musician who decided to take a softer approach. He posted a video response Tuesday, March 15, featuring “Ching Chong,” a humorous love song dedicated to Wallace. It garnered over 125,000 hits in five hours, yet Wong’s ultimate victory lies in the fact that over 100,000 viewers and thousands of page subscribers have since populated his other videos. He was yesterday’s #1 most viewed musician on YouTube.”

Wong’s video begins with clips of Wallace, so that he can recycle them and provide new meaning. Bricolage is the ultimate expression of agency in the face of adversity; it acknowledges the presence of differing views while it challenges them on their own terms. In this case of objectification through racism, it positions Wong in relation to Wallace’s subjectivity/ego, and therefore into her definition of subjectivity itself. His romantic language may be read in reference to Barthes’ claim that “the lover’s realm” is the “paradisaic realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning. . .”

Enjoy! Hat tip to Esther for the link and Priyanka for A Lover’s Discourse.

Of course, the real epidemic is the Dap Dip. . . I am hesitant to post this as the medium-wack captions below this non-video aren’t awesome. Time for some bricolage, y’all.

Recently, Ana’s gone solo, and the homegirl has done her homework, incorporating elements of 90′s-style hip-hop from the U.S. into a fresh, personal art form. She’s comparable to artists like M.I.A who also incoporate geopolitics into their tracks, and to Lauryn Hill in her relentlessly personal, intelligent rhymes. Her hit single “1977,” from the eponymous album, may be the first music video to invoke Hannah Arendt and LL Cool J.

The “1977″ video begins with a hooded figure. The figure raises its head, revealing itself to be Ana, a visual tribute to LL Cool J’s early 90′s hit video “Mama Said Knock You Out,” which begins with a hooded figure in a boxing ring. LL Cool J’s “Mama” is an early 90′s hip-hop classic because it presents the speaker as an underdog at a time when hip-hop was not yet mainstream. He describes an underground MC’s battle to stay in the limelight -

LL Cool J in "Mama Said Knock You Out

Don’t call it a comeback! I’ve been here for years,
I’m rocking my peers, puttin’ suckers in fear.
Making the tears rain down like a monsoon!
[rest] Listen to the bass go boom!

Boxing was one of the first sports in which black and white contenders faced off against each other in the beginning of the 20th century. Joe Louis broke the color barrier when he became the first black heavyweight champion — and the first famous black athlete — in 1937. He held the title until 1949.

MIA in "Bucky Done Gun"

If hip-hop is about asserting authenticity, LL Cool J uses this boxing metaphor to present himself as the champion, taking on newer and less experienced MCs and the establishment. His self-aware hip-hop is connected to its cultural roots; he cites his family as both personal inspiration and vindicators of a multi-generational struggle, the tough momma who tells her child to knock out his opponent. He contrasts this ethic of defense of familial and communal honor with the selfish hypothetical opponent, just some kid who wants to get rich rapping.

Nas in "Hip Hop is Dead"

“Mama Said Knock You Out” presents the value system born out of that  struggle: self-motivation, innovation, and hard work — a value system which founded hip-hop, and some would argue, America. The camera in J’s video focuses on his powerful fists, associating him with the Black Panther movement. Later artists — M.I.A. in “Bucky Done Gun,” and more subtly, Nas in “Hip-Hop Is Dead” — drew on this boxing metaphor, opening with a hooded sweatshirt as a nod to LL Cool J.

LL Cool J is presumably amenable to those nods, since hip-hop is all about recycling choice samples — in “Mama Said Knock You Out” alone, he uses clips from The Chicago Gangsters, James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone, and his own track, “Rock the Bells.”

Ana Tijoux in "1977"

While the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that the use of the term ‘hood’ as in ‘hoodlum’ is an independent homologue derived from the Bavarian huddlelump, or ‘ragamuffin,’ the word hood comes from the Old Frisian hode, meaning “guard” or “protection.” Hoods can provide creepy anonymity, because they elide personal identity and erode others’ ability to hold the hoodwearer responsible: they create invisible people.

The blackness of LL Cool J’s hood countermands the whiteness of the KKK’s; we are reminded of the power of the invisible for good and for evil, of the ease with which social roles are donned and shed in a regime that secretly detains and ‘disappears’ dissenters. This is what Ana Tijoux addresses in 1977.

Ana grew up in exile in France (a fact referenced, at least visually, by the presence of the Eiffel tower in the 1977 video), where underground hip-hop is nearly as sophisticated as its U.S. counterparts — witness the collaboration and sampling of Wu Tang on various IAM albums, most notably L’Ecole du Micro D’argent (The School of the Silver Mic), a concept album structured like a course in hip-hop/martial arts which also heavily samples the French dubbing of Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, while playing with language and addressing gritty themes: street crime, prostitution, social injustice. Of course, Ana was 20 when that album was released, but IAM was already producing influential compilations in Paris in 1989, when she was 12.

Ana’s “1977″ takes a subversive approach to its dissection of fascism.  The video begins with a statement about how difficult it is to differentiate poisonous snakes from harmless ones — but states that the distinction is possible because of the marks they leave behind.

Ana’s lyrics tell us that she was born in the year of the serpent, and she elides the rhyme of her chorus, which should be “siete” of 1977 with “serpiente,” by “shushing” the camera with her finger over her lips, as if to elide both herself and Pinochet’s regime. In both form and content, the song brilliantly aligns her birth with the dictator’s rise to power, demonstrating the unity of the harmless and the poisonous snakes — both of them have the power to silence people. Ana’s hood in the video’s initial frames at once empowers her to speak for the anonymous people and puts them at her mercy: she is at once the venomous and the harmless snakes, as each community member can support or undermine democracy. Of course, the consonant hissing of the shushing sound also unites her with the snake. The chorus goes:
1970 y shhh
1970 y shhh
1970 y shhh

1977 no me digan no
Que uno lo presiente
Todo lo que cambia lo hara diferente
En el año que nacio la serpien shhh

[1977; don't tell me no
that one doesn't presage it
Everything it changes it will make different
In the year that the snake (shhh) was born.]

Woodie Guthrie's guitar

As Frost wrote, the poetry is what gets lost in translation: in Spanish the syntax is mutable enough to allow the word ‘snake’ to be last, so that when she truncates the line by shushing herself she occludes the “snake.” There are several potential readings of the verse: it could mean that she rejects the idea that the undercurrent of fascism isn’t palpable (‘presiente’ is a conjugation of ‘presentir,’ which literally translates as pre-feel, pre-sense), or that she’s being told that the undercurrent is palpable, insistently. This ambiguity increases in the last two lines of the verse, when the (completely permissible, Spanish) passive voice and ambiguous pronoun ‘lo’ combine to make the subject of the sentence completely unknown, unless it is the snake which is barely mentioned before it is hidden, too.

Tijoux’s revolutionary act is her self-implication. Not unlike Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror,” Hannah Arendt’s Totalitarianism proposes that it is personal soul-searching that prevents the rise of fascism: we must be on the lookout for it in ourselves: are we enacting our values? Tijoux doesn’t vindicate herself: in the 1977 video, a hand keeps leaning into the frame and depositing Ana in various scenes, often returning to straighten her clothes in motions similar to Jay-Z’s famous “get that dirt off your shoulder” gesture. This doll-trope in the video raises questions about the power of the individual in society — she describes growing up, becoming literate, and then ends her first verse,

Y fue cuando sentí mi primera impotencia.                                 And that was when I felt my first impotence.

The image of the snake is obviously tied in Christian ideology to the devil — it’s interesting that instead of allying herself with Eve in the garden, she designates herself another snake. It’s a secular, political statement about the loss of political innocence, in religious terms, about the necessity of being on guard against ourselves. She’s taking Woodie Guthrie’s guitar label one step closer: she’s the machine that examines itself for the taint of fascism. Enjoy! And hat-tip to Brad for the intro to Ana.

I wonder what it would be like to have video game skillz. It’s not Barcade that’s got me wondering; it’s Who’s That Brooown!, Das Racist’s hilariously low-fi html video game, with six levels of getting Kool A.D. and Hima from Queens to Williamsburg on their hunt for Heems, the group’s hypeman. On the way, the intrepid duo must dodge obstacles absurd and mundane, battling racism from the whites and pinks and dodging traditional tokens of interest with casual aplomb: nah though, nucca. Sarah Palin makes an appearance in front of a crowd bearing illiterate signs — I don’t want to give too much away, so obey DR’s command to “Check it! Hoverboards!” and then read the rest of this post.

Das Racist (Himanshu Suri and Victor Vasquez) have battled the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere- Jones and Farley Katz at predicting the death of hip-hop and cartooning, respectively. Das Racist’s genius lies in their refusal to distinguish between their public and private selves, in their refusal to bullshit. Hip-hop has long been the ideal medium for populist dissidence: it reaches the booty politic, offering it the joy of the perfect beat and a larger identity, a recognition that the personal is political.

While Das Racist’s form is the traditional boom-bap, borrowing from cult figures — as they put it, they

took a lot of samples out
you don’t want to hear those
made a lot of weird raps
you don’t want to hear those.

Nah, though, nucca. It is actually that weird shit that we came to hear. We came because you call your tracks “neo-rap.” We came to hear you mention plus size models, weed, Nancy Reagan in a fancy pantsuit, and kombucha: “a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.” There aren’t enough people telling it like it is in popular music; hip-hop is too often the story of the “authentic” prodigy, self-made or corporate, while mainstream “indie” jams aspire to be some kind of wildly original high art which ultimately falls short of poetry as its artifice prevails.

It’s only in Das Racist where we get

Catch me in my borough chasing breezes with queens
Squeezes with dreams
Do you? I’mma do me
Catch me in my borough, burnin’ Ls, reading Rumi.

Here’s the cavalier union of high and low culture, not some pledge to be only one or the other:

Ek shaneesh, Cheech
Eddie Said speaks, sheesh
(Yeah, that’s what Ed said)
people follow like Deadheads

That’s right. Even Edward Said is so much PC bullshit indoctrination to Das Racist, who refer to people in their video game by color, as in “those pinks” or the eponymous “Who’s That Broown!,” which is also the painfully repetitive three-minute soundtrack to the game. If you’re serious about winning the dance competition, or even making it through Born Jamerican Apparel, I’d recommend that you turn the sound off — Tribe Called Quest this ain’t. It’s something else: check the link at the bottom for the free download.

Who are more legitimate comparisons? Das Racist nods to Kool G and B Real, among others. I’d say they’ve got more in common with other hip-hopsters of this same generation — Fear & Fancy outta Oakland, who rep environmentalism in their hit “Off the Grid;” Odd Future, a controversial group who want to admit that they’re not gangsters and still rap about it; maybe, to a lesser degree, Janelle Monae, who shares elements of Afrofuturism with their videogame; and a few standouts of conscious hip-hop, particularly OutKast and MF Doom, whose highfalutin nonsequitors blazed a trail for these kids’ claims of lampin’ in Jeruz with the Maccabees. (And of course, they rip Doom’s beats in “Deep Ass Shit – You’ll Get It When You’re High,” and Ghostface Killah’s in “Nutmeg,” and KRS-ONE’s in “Chicken and Meat” . . . and on and on.)

But while Doom’s technique is incredible, and while Fear & Fancy innovate their approach to themselves and politics, Doom is clearly a formalist, a beat and rhymemaker, while Fear & Fancy, like Das Racist, focus on the message. Fear & Fancy write about themselves as visionaries — which they are: who else is rapping about putting solar panels on their Cadillac? — but their stance elevates them above the Every[wo]man, instructing them* “the grid can’t save you!” For Das Racist, it’s not about simplifying themselves into a coherent, commodifiable image: it’s about calling into question the act of commodification.

Das Racist paint themselves the Harold and Kumar of the conscious hip-hop set, unapologetic about their drugs and their love of fast food. But for Das Racist, it’s a love-hate relationship. Their track “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” about being confused by being unable to find each other in a combo fast food joint actually pales in comparison to “Rainbow in the Dark” at explaining this. Wonder at the size of everything

I’m at the White Castle
(I don’t see you here, dog!)
Tiny ass hamburgers
Tiny ass cheeseburgers
Tiny ass chicken sandwiches
It’s outlandish, kid . . .

does not mean that DR spare White Castle their critical eye:

Ask whom the bell tolls for
(Ay yo) Where you get this place, from the hellhole store?

Or that they can ever fully escape it themselves:

While I’m eating lunch now
While I’m eating a burger
Metaphysical spiritual lyrical murder

The postmodern cultural critic is cursed with having no legitimate hierarchy of meaning. Instead, a multiplicity of meanings jostle for supremacy. The burger is the ultimate fix; it’s also murder. The blessing is that those critics can also create their own system to display their perspective. That’s exactly what Das Racist does in their game, presenting ethnicity as an arbitrary but entrenched cause of all of their obstacles, from traditional attempts to jump into marriage to drunk rich douche white kids’ racism. The consistent theme is made clear by their pronunciation of their own name: it’s “Dah’s Racist,” a patois spelling of “That’s Racist,” not the Germanic sounding “Daas Racist.”

But the double entendre is telling. DR lyrics pivot on puns, highlighting the plethora of meanings in their language, and their name is an accusation of bias and an acknowledgment that they can’t avoid bias, that everyone has to recognize the role that race plays in America.

Are you understanding everything, do you got me?
Catch me in the trees where it’s shady like Lockheed Martin
Sparking in the shade of the trees in the park, B
Hark the angels stay singing in the dark
Like the rainbow in the Ronnie James Dio joint
Hit it from the back court
Like it was a three point
I don’t give a fuck, I’m a duck to a decoy
No trustem Whitefaceman like Geronimo
Tried to go to Amsterdam they threw us in Guantanamo

They made the Harold and Kumar parallel: and why not? It’s the most prominent stoner/brownsploitation film of our time. As DR asks, What can brown do for you? The answer, it seems, is make you shake that thinkin’ booty politic. Oh, and did I mention that all of their music is free to download from their site?

*consider this my abdication of the snooty position that this pronoun can only be used with a singular antecedent.

I’m still hard at work on applications. But here are some links for you in the meantime!

Over at Sociological Images, Marissa explores the implications of representing sex on bathroom signs for our understanding of sex and gender.

At AmplifyYourVoice, actual abstinence-only curricula meets animated bears.

The New York Times reports on the variety of financial penalties of maternity leave across professions.

Also at the NYT, Paul Krugman reports on the classism behind Social Security cuts.

My friend Ilusha Tsinadze’s first bluegrass/Republic of Georgia folk music video:

Texan Congressman Joel Burns tells gay teens that “it gets better.”

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart reports on McCain’s hypocrisy, and “that moody bitch, the Senate,” and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Dearest Interested Parties and Thinking People,

Here at ObjectifyThis, you may have noticed that we’re in the midst of a haitus. Suffice it to say that with the demands of applying to graduate school, the radical notion that people are people is not getting the attention it deserves.

And so, it is my pleasure to announce that while we will be taking an Official Haitus until January 1st, 2011, at that point you may expect that once again friendly and curious explorations of gender, race, society, biology, literature, the media, your mom, and your jams will join the jangling internets. For now, keep it real and/or imaginary!

Love,
Marina

Flavorwire describes the Be Yourself Movement as “an Italian art collective with an agenda,” by which it means a political movement. The BYM, as they call themselves, is a group of youngish people who reorganize billboards to say things like “Be stupid as these ads.” Their logo, which consists of the letters BYM with a slingshot for the ‘Y’, seems to reject the monotony of both advertising and the consumerism and conformity it inspires. You can check out a video of their antics after the jump.

Flavorwire tiptoes around the politics involved, calling their article “Be Yourself Movement: Corporate Collaborations or Pure Vandalism?” But unless the defacement and public derision of these companies and their property  is considered collaboration, there’s little chance of that.

The Be Yourself Movement began as a wonderful idea, but it has since taken a strange turn. At the risk of publicly inciting vandalism, I’ll publicly incite this kind of vandalism, this kind of diy, up-the-punks political aesthetic. In general, I support the expression of individual opinions in cultural commons and public space as much as the next member of the Church of Just Stop Shopping, but the Be Yourself Movement is a special case.

I initially support billboard amendments and the like that because they inject agency into a culture saturated with encouragement to buy, buy, buy your way to a better life. In the U.S., there’s little attention to the interior — and even then, you’re expected to pay for lessons in thinking your way to happiness at the School of Practical Philosophy or for therapy or for motivational speakers; you’re supposed to buy the book that Oprah endorses or that Amazon or Cosmopolitan recommends. But reading women’s magazines for just 1-3 minutes has been shown to lower women’s self-esteem. This culture of self-help undermines us by telling us, over and over, that we’re not good enough until we pay them, that being ourselves and doing our thing is inferior to some good or service they’re offering. In short, even our sadness is commodified.

Even the Be Yourself movement, which conjures images out of movies like Gilliam’s Brazil or Jeneut and Caro’s Delicatessen, in which the political resistance literally lives underground in strange masks, like scuba divers, is not new. Here’s footage of them in the subway in Milan:

What makes the BYM so strange, however, is that they are not just this group; they have been co-opted by the same international corporate interests that they purport to undermine. Their website is currently a collaboration with EmilytheStrange, an alterna-HelloKitty for the Goth and disaffected markets, which is available for sale wherever kids are seeking something that’s not quite identified with mainstream corporate culture — these days, I’d guess that that means alterna corporate culture, as in Hot Topic.

In an additional twist, even EmilytheStrange isn’t being herself — in 2009, her owners, the skater brand Cosmic Debris, settled out of court with the authors of a children’s book from 1978 called Nate the Great and the Lost List, which featured a physically identical character named Rosamond who, according to the text, “did not look hungry or sleepy. She looked the way she always looks. Strange.” Meanwhile, when Emily  debuted in 1991, her tagline was “Emily didn’t look tired or happy. She looked the way she always looks. Strange.”

While the tone of the artists’ statement after the settlement makes it sound like they got their due, there’s something unsettling about the idea that even a movement focused on undermining corporate culture would allow itself to be bought. Maybe they were getting older, and needed to settle down, or maybe they believe that they’ve conned corporations into promoting vandalism — the website itself is an image of a town which you can adjust with your own messages. But there is no triumph in virtual vandalism; there is no audience to have their horizons broadened, and without a body politic, it ceases to be a political act.

This Cinco de Mayo, Arizona’s NBA team, the Phoenix Suns, will denounce their state’s immigration policy on their uniforms.

NBA.com reports that the Noche Latina tradition includes uniforms displaying the team name “as spoken by the Latino population. . .  The Miami Heat, for example, is called “El Heat”; the San Antonio Spurs are “Los Spurs.”

The Suns will wear their Noche Latina uniforms today to show their solidarity with Arizona’s Hispanic/Latino community. In the 2000 census (the last time the question was asked, according to Businessweek) 34% of the population of Arizona was Latino or Hispanic.

That affinity with the Hispanic population is more important to the NBA, it seems, than to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 on April 23. The New York Times reports that “It requires police officers, “when practicable,” to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal officials, unless doing so would hinder an investigation or emergency medical treatment.

“It also makes it a state crime — a misdemeanor — to not carry immigration papers. In addition, it allows people to sue local government or agencies if they believe federal or state immigration law is not being enforced.”

In other words, some citizens are now second class citizens. Those who are legal residents or citizens of the U.S. who in any way resemble immigrants are being forced to carry identification. This kind of “Pass Law” was the first step in the Apartheid Regime’s systematic segregation and mistreatment of black South Africans.

While such procedures are arguably threatening individual citizens’ constitutional rights to “liberty”, the larger problem is the blatant incitement to racial profiling.

The American Civil Liberties Union had already reported that racial profiling was “a widespread” and “pervasive problem” in 2009, when they submitted a study to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination explaining that “Government polices are a major cause of the disproportionate stopping and searching of racial minorities by law enforcement.”

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Geraldo Cadava, a history professor at Northwestern, argues that while Arizonans have historically”attempted to justify [their actions] in nonracial terms”, they have a consistent record of racial discrimination.

Yet this law goes a step further. As an explicit mandate for state and local police to enact racial profiling against immigrants in Arizona, it represents a formal indictment of immigrant communities in general and Hispanic and Latino communities in particular, in a time when the country is lead by Obama, whose ethnic makeup embodies the ‘melting pot’ metaphor.

It’s ridiculous from lots of angles: Mexico used to own Arizona, so Latino Arizonans potentially have an older claim to the state than white residents; the University of Arizona estimated in 2007 that immigrants add nearly $1 billion to the state’s economy. This law bars communication between over a third of the state’s population and the law, which stands to endanger public safety.

The NBA’s Senior Director of Marketing, Saskia Sorrosa proudly reported, in 2009, that it “has one of the largest and fastest-growing Hispanic fan bases in U.S. professional sports, and we want to continue building their interest in the game through participation, programming and events.” She stated that Noche Latina “celebrates the NBA’s unique and dynamic fan base with a focus on our Spanish-speaking communities.”

It is in that same spirit that the Phoenix Suns will bring back their “Los Suns” jerseys for their game against the San Antonio Spurs this Wednesday, in honor of the Cinco de Mayo holiday and “to honor our Latino community and the diversity of our league,” the team’s Managing Partner Robert Sarver stated in an interview with Businessweek.

He continued, “However intended, the result of passing this law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question.”

NBA Executive Director Billy Hunter added, “The recent passage of the new immigration law in Arizona is disappointing and disturbing. . . The National Basketball Players Association strongly supports the repeal or immediate modification of this legislation. Any attempt to encourage, tolerate or legalize racial profiling is offensive and incompatible with basic notions of fairness and equal protection. A law that unfairly targets one group is ultimately a threat to all.”

Let’s just hope that pressure for justice in the basketball court will be felt in other courts as well, and that Arizona’s intolerance won’t be copied by Pennsylvania or other states. Read the ACLU’s denouncement of SB 1070 here or take action with them to stop it here. Hat tip to my bro Logan for the lead on this one.

However, it’s never too late to act. After all, limiting your actions on behalf of women to Women’s Day would be to cede the other 364 days of the year to men: a ratio that’s clearly imbalanced.

In the spirit of fairness, take action for women:

Urge the U.S. Congress to sign the International Violence Against Women Act, protesting violence against women. (Hat tip, Katie.)

Join Amnesty International in demanding justice for the women of Atenco, Mexico.

The group reports, “In May 2006, over 45 women were arrested without explanation in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico. Many were subjected to physical, psychological and sexual violence by the police officers who arrested them and then held in prison for days before being released on bail. More than three years have passed and they are still waiting for justice.

None of the officials responsible for their abuse have been adequately held accountable. The Mexican Supreme Court has already affirmed that human rights violations occurred at Sal Salvador Atenco. Before concluding that it did not have jurisdiction in the case, the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Women and Human Trafficking (FEVIMTRA) identified 34 members of the state security forces as suspects in the crimes. The investigation is now in the hands of Mexico State authorities.”

And, corny as it might sound at first, remember that, as Feministing’s Ann points out, women are the solution.

The American Dream is also bound up in those four words, “the pursuit of happiness,” an “unalienable right” guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and Franklin elided our right to “the means of acquiring and possessing property,” a phrase appended by the shorter-sighted or more egalitarian George Mason. For those guys, egalitarianism was only extended to other rich, anglo-saxon protestant males.

The idea of pursuing happiness without a material basis is so contradictory as to be comical to us, apparently. This fact should be sad, since not we do not grant everyone enough material goods to survive, let alone be happy. For brilliant blues/spoken word poetry on this topic, see Gil Scott-Heron (who wrote The Revolution Will Not Be Televised)‘s recent album, I’m New Here.

But the pursuit of happiness is a serious hunt. Witness this brilliant Nutrigrain advertisement (after the jump); which also demonstrates the hyperbolic humor of Sarah Haskins, Arrested Development, or The Mighty Boosh. It’s a shame that there isn’t advertising that’s this awesome in our lives every day. Hat tip to Davi and Katie for bringing it to me.

If it’s true that, once we have enough to survive, potential happiness has less to do with material possessions than with attitude, in the end, we answer to ourselves.

And that seems to be what more and more people are doing, at least in the U.S.. I should pause here and specify, since I apparently have not done so elsewhere in this blog, that Americans are technically those who reside anywhere in North or South America, as my South American friends rightfully point out. It’s a fairly significant oversight that our language doesn’t have an accurate adjective for ourselves which many languages do have —for example, in Spanish, it’s estadounidense.

But back to the hunt for happiness –a recent study by the Pew Research Center describes the “Millenial Generation” , who are now between the ages of 18 and 29, as the most diverse generation in U.S. history; only 61% white, 19% Hispanic, 14% black, and 5% Asian. That contrasts with those 30 and older, a group that is 70% white.

We “Millenials” are significantly more tolerant of others’ differences, and we generally believe that gay and interracial marriages are, or at least, can be beautiful things. We’re all about technology: 83% of us sleep with our cellphones nearby. We are also “expressive” (they explain: 38% of us have a tattoo), and more liberal than previous generations. We voted 2 to 1 for Obama. More of us are in school than ever before, and we are on track to become the most educated generation in our history. We’re less likely to have a full-time job, partially due to the recession and school—but we have good values. We are less likely to seek high-income work, and instead, we seek happiness, or report as much to researchers.

While it’s clear that this ad mocks other crazy ads suggesting that happiness can be bought, it also suggests, on some obvious levels, that it can. Take it with a grain of salt—to be honest, I’m just grateful that it advocates agency while mocking crazy gender stereotypes. Enjoy.