A couple weeks ago I posted about a local struggle between the forces of grassroots human rights and the forces of corporate-media-backed racist/sexist/xenophobic hatred. This is just a quick update to mention a couple things: first, recall that hate-jock "Jon Justice" made some horrid little videos in which he molests a giant pinata/sexdoll of Garcia. The schmuck took down the videos after he realized how damning they were, then his employer got YouTube to remove the re-posts that Derechos re-uploaded to YouTube, on copyright grounds. Well, now they've reposted them again to a different site that apparently isn't caving in as easily to such specious legal threats. The 2 vids are here and here. They are also embedded on a post from local progressive blog, "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." In fact they seem to be reposted so many places that Journal Broadcasting will probably have trouble censoring them all. There are also transcripts of the 2 videos and other information on the Derechos site.
I also wanted to point out a few other references to this conflict, like a recent post on Feministing that mentions the situation, and cites some great feminist bloggers' analyses of the DJ's hate acts, saying it better than I could. And the Phoenix New Times' Feathered Bastard, known for regularly frying Sheriff Arpaio and other local facists, blogged expertly about it. I like how he refers to the hate-jock as "Jon Just-An-Ass."
Also worth griping about is the regularly worthless (except for the comics and Savage Love column) Tucson Weekly's coverage of the story - they mentioned it twice the week it started (in the editor's first-page babblings, and longer blurb further in), and once again the next week, and in all 3 instances, 3 different writers all used the phrase "paraded around" to describe what Garcia did with the Arpaio pinata head. The Weekly's take on the story is somewhat neutral, not really taking sides too strongly, their point being that everyone involved was just being kinda silly (oh except that John Hoffman, another schmuck from the talk-radio world who apparently works with the Weekly's racist asshole-in-residence Tom Danehy, said in his "guest commentary" that Garcia was being "tyrannical." Huh?). Besides the use at all of the rather un-objective, connotative term "paraded" you have to wonder about the repeated use of that exact same wording. Was there a staff meeting at the Weekly where dumbshit editor Jimmy Boegle told everyone to always use "paraded"? Were other words like "walked," "marched" or "ambled" tried by the other 2 writers and discarded by the proofreaders as being not inflammatory enough (I've seen the video they keep mentioning and I think any of those other terms, amongst a host of others, would be accurate to describe Garcia's actions)?
Or maybe all the authors associated with the rag are just lazy? Well, at any rate that's 4 more pieces of evidence (3 for each instance and 1 for the repetition) in my ongoing case that the Tucson Weekly is a hopeless piece of trash.
Posted by steev at Agosto 5, 2008 10:36 AM