Salon.com > Social Issues

Why are L.A. people so mean?

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

First, you are awesome! I'm so happy your health has improved!

Now, I live in Los Angeles. I moved here from New Mexico 10 years ago. Can you tell me what is wrong with everyone here? Where are the nice people? When I try to be nice they look at me like a hopeless simpleton. When they try to "act" nice it never feels sincere. Like part of a show.

Like dinner parties where everyone has to leave at 8 because the host is going out later with "other people." Or people invite you out with them to a play and then they spend the whole time on their cellphone texting someone and making plans to meet them "as soon as the play is over." And then asking you to drop them off at this other person's house. Is this normal behavior?

I'm 42. Female. Normal, boring job. Married. No kids. Don't want kids. Kinda nerdy. I try to make friends here at work. Give gifts. Make muffins. Make amusing remarks. Invite people to do a wide variety of activities with me. Sailing? Symphony? Hiking? Auto racing? Air show? No dice.

Paglia: Madonna’s protests are “gimmicky”

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:22:00 +0000

In light of Madonna's recent striptease, Salon contributing writer, art historian and critic Camille Paglia told "Say Anything!" host Joy Behar that the artist "has lost her instinct for performance."

Is “The New Normal’s” Ellen Barkin a female Archie Bunker?

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:00:00 +0000

On Jan. 12, 1971, Norman Lear premiered “All in the Family,” the sitcom that would launch an empire of shows soaked in the key social issues of the day — integration, feminism and patriotism — and establish Lear as the preeminent and pioneering voice of the modern television era. Anchored in working-class Queens, Archie Bunker reigned as the racist and sexist patriarch spewing anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, anti-woman venom that sadly mirrored the misguided indoctrination of many white male Americans like himself.

And while we’ve enjoyed some great sitcoms over the last 40 years, it’s been a while since one regularly used our funny bones to engage our intellects. We’ve seen Jon Stewart do this rather well, and “Saturday Night Live” still has its moments, but the sitcom, even groundbreaking ones like “Will and Grace” and “Modern Family,” have only pushed so far. Ryan Murphy has gone retro with his freshman sitcom, “The New Normal,” channeling the ghost of great television past to create what may well be the “All in the Family” of our time.

Huckabee holds his nose

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 03:03:00 +0000

Tonight, Mike Huckabee's job was to skillfully bring up a set of topics that the Romney campaign has never wanted to linger on, a fight they keep losing to their own party: abortion, contraception, gay marriage. He did it only briefly, hidden among references to the "liberty-limiting, radical left-wing, anti-business, reckless-spending, tax-hiking party of Barack Obama" and barely convincing professions of allegiance to Mitt Romney. But it was unmistakable to anyone who knew what to listen for.

He was there to give the evangelical seal of approval, a couple of years after he engaged in some casual Mormon-baiting. "Of the four people on the two tickets, the only self-professed evangelical is Barack Obama," a bizarre statement, since so far as I can see Obama never called himself that, "and he supports changing the definition of marriage, believes that human life is disposable and expendable at any time in the womb or even beyond the womb, and tells people of faith that they must bow their knees to the god of government and violate their faith and conscience in order to comply with what he calls health care." (The "even beyond the womb" refers to the antiabortion obsession with accusing Obama of voting for infanticide as a state senator, a claim Politifact rated "pants on fire.")

Redefining addiction

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:01:00 +0000

The proposed changes in the diagnostic criteria for addiction in the long-awaited DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, scheduled to be published next May, have proved unsettling to many in the treatment community. These largely professional disagreements assumed the status of a public controversy when a May 11 New York Timesarticle reported that Dr. Howard Moss of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism had resigned from the DSM-5 Task Force.

The controversy is hardly surprising. In many ways, writing a new DSMis a sisyphean task. Since psychiatric disorders don’t announce themselves with biological diagnostic data, the coherent organization of a huge number of complex disorders into a “manual” to be used by researchers, healthcare professionals and third-party payers is daunting. How do you capture, in a few pages, illnesses and patterns of suffering that manifest uniquely in every new patient? Consider also that many patients have more than one psychiatric illness and that diagnosis depends, to a certain extent, upon the patient’s own ability to articulate their inner experience. No revision to the DSM would be greeted with universal praise from a field increasingly polarized between viewing nature or nurture as the essential cause.

Democrats’ gay marriage excuse

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:22:00 +0000

Headlines transmit information in its rawest form -- and the best of headlines crystallize indelible truths. Such was the case this week when the New York Daily News blared this simple but iconic headline: "Cuomo: Minimum Wage Harder to Get Than Gay Marriage."

The story quoted New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) claiming that the effort to raise wages for the poorest of his constituents represents a "broader and deeper" divide than the recent successful fight to legalize same-sex matrimony in the Empire State. Though the piece quickly dissolved into the ether, it should have received more attention because it is an important Rosetta Stone -- one that translates this era's inscrutable political rhetoric into a clear admission that money trumps everything else.

Decoding this Rosetta Stone requires just a bit of contextual information from Siena College. According to the school's surveys, only 58 percent of New Yorkers support legalizing gay marriage, while a whopping 78 percent support raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.50.

Movie assailant punches a kid, becomes a folk hero

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:59:00 +0000

It's a general rule of thumb that a grown man doesn't get a lot of support for knocking out a 10-year-old child's teeth. But Yong Hyun Kim has won himself a few fans lately for doing just that.

Back on April 11, the 21-year-old Washington state man settled in with his girlfriend to enjoy "Titanic" in 3D -- right in front of a boy known only in police documents as KJJ. What ensued led to a night in jail and a charge of second-degree assault.

According to the Associated Press, the boy, who was at the theater with three friends and his mother, says "they were watching the movie and talking when Kim told them to be quiet." KJJ maintains that they settled down, but when he later whispered something to a companion, Kim "jumped over the seat, threw an iced drink at them and punched KJJ in the face." He says Kim told him something like, "You know what, I paid a lot of money to see this movie."

What killed social conservatism?

Tue, 22 May 2012 20:37:00 +0000

Growing public support for gay rights, including gay marriage, is the latest example of the moral liberalism that has transformed advanced industrial societies in the last few generations. The social traditionalists who claimed to be a “moral majority” in the United States in the 1980s are acting like an embattled, declining minority in the second decade of the 21st century. A few years ago the conservative activist Paul Weyrich declared that the right had lost “the culture war” and called on social conservatives to withdraw from mainstream society into their own traditionalist enclaves.

Many paranoid social conservatives blame the triumph of moral liberalism on a conspiracy of sinister secular humanists, using the media and the public schools to indoctrinate their children and grandchildren in a godless morality. But the truth is that social conservatism has been undermined by technological progress, which has increased the opportunities for freedom in matters of sex and censorship while raising the costs of enforcing traditional norms.

Mitt’s favorite new dodge

Fri, 18 May 2012 19:27:00 +0000

One of the most overused metaphors in a writer’s arsenal is the one about “walking and chewing gum at the same time.” As a hiker and Big League Chew enthusiast, I particularly hate this cliché. Nonetheless, I feel it is fitting right now because it so perfectly summarizes the argument being made by Republicans. They now insist that America cannot simultaneously walk the walk on equal rights and also chew economic gum.

In the last week, Colorado was the testing ground for this talking point. At the presidential level, Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized a Denver television reporter for daring to ask about his position on, among other issues, same-sex marriage. Before restating his opposition, he scoffed at the question, asking: “Aren’t there issues of significance that you’d like to talk about [like] the economy? The growth of jobs? The need to put people back to work?”

At the same time, Colorado's Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

Mitt Romney proposes “partnership agreements” for gay couples who happen to be emotionless cyborgs

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:28:00 +0000

Mitt Romney once celebrated gay pride weekend when he was running to be the governor of liberal Massachusetts, but now he is running for the Republican nomination for president, and so he does not like to talk about his shameful history of tolerance (or at least willingness to pander to a potential constituency). But at a recent New Hampshire town hall, Sam Stein reports, the audience peppered Romney with questions about AIDS funding and gay marriage, and Romney did not seem thrilled. Still, he has a great proposal to completely defuse the entire gay marriage debate in a way that will surely please everyone.

"What I would support is letting people who are of the same gender form, if you will, partnership agreements," he replied. "If they want to have a partnership with someone else and have, as a result of that, such things as hospital visitation rights and similar benefits of that nature."