Everybody's going to jail this morning

[sovay]

1. Courtesy of Dean: Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham, "Here Comes the Judge." It's an incredible recording. I had never heard of either Markham or his most famous routine, although derspatchel started quoting the song the minute I mentioned the title; if someone had played it for me cold and asked me when I thought it was recorded, barring the Vietnam references I'd have guessed the early '80's at least. It has the vocal rhythms of old-school hip-hop, the percussive swagger, and it is play-on-loop catchy. It was recorded in 1968, after Sammy Davis, Jr. revived the routine for a white audience on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (Markham was later invited onto the show himself). The B-side sketch it leads into has a punch line that dates back to vaudeville, but it's so well-delivered I don't care. He performed in blackface—a black man wearing burnt cork—until 1943. America gonif?

2. heliopausa asked if I knew of any Allied novels or movies from World War II that acknowledged the humanity of the Japanese in the same way that The Moon Is Down (1943) acknowledged the humanity of the Germans: I couldn't think of any. Postwar films with wartime settings, yes: Sessue Hayakawa playing the honorable enemy in Three Came Home (1950) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), James Shigeta as a sympathetic American-married diplomat in Bridge to the Sun (1961), I assume-to-hope there were more and more nuanced portrayals as the years went by and Hollywood became incrementally less racist. (As of last year there is finally a movie about Chiune Sugihara, although it is ineligible for purposes of this discussion because it is a Japanese production and has yet to play somewhere I can see it.) Between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day, however, pretty much everything that I know came out of Hollywood was either a racist cartoon of the kind it still upsets me that Dr. Seuss ever drew or a faceless wall of the enemy in their numbers, not exactly surprising from a country that couldn't see the disjoint of liberating concentration camps while fencing its own citizens behind barbed wire.* I know there was some sympathetic reportage, but I don't know if it made it into art. Behind the Rising Sun (1943) was definitely not it. I should like to believe there was at least one humanizing novel written by an Allied author at the time, but I don't know what it is or where to look for it. Outside of the U.S.? Anyone got pointers? Or was it all just as bad as Our Enemy—The Japanese (1943)?

* I am still sad that I couldn't get to the theatrical broadcast of Allegiance when it came around in December. Tangenting off on Hollywood depictions of Japanese-Americans did turn up something interesting: Robert Pirosh's Go for Broke! (1951), which appears to celebrate the heroism of Nisei soldiers—and admit the irony of their circumstances—considerably earlier than I thought this country had gotten around to and cast real-life veterans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in major roles. It's in the public domain thanks to failure to renew copyright, so I may try to check it out. Hell to Eternity (1960) sounds fascinating but also as though it may have whitewashed its protagonist, so I'm still thinking it over.

3. I was just obliged to fill out a demographic form and was reminded that the definition of "White" according to the U.S. Census Bureau parenthetically specifies "Not Hispanic or Latino" and then goes on to apply to "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa." Huh? I thought. Outside of the contingent whiteness of Ashkenazi Jews, when has anyone with roots in the Middle East ever been viewed as white in this country? So I poked at the internet and discovered the answer was 1909, when Syrian immigrant George Shishim sued for the right to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, which at that time depended on ethnographically proving his whiteness because the United States couldn't be bothered to extend its rights and privileges to its non-white residents. So that was an even more fucked-up answer than I had expected.

These are the kinds of historical facts it makes me feel stupid to learn only now, but at least I am learning them. On the brighter side, teenybuffalo tagged a portrait for me and now I will happily learn more about both Romaine Brooks and Gluck, neither of whom I had previously heard of. Also there is now an Estonian ferry with Tom of Finland's art all over it and that can only be a good thing for the world. Apparently that was April Fool's Day last year. I maintain it would have been great business. The painters are still real, though.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

Even more fucked-up -- I see by your link that the reason Shishim had to sue for citizenship to begin with is that he was a cop and a suspect had tried the argument that the arrest wasn't valid. I was about to wonder if Chang Apana ever had to deal with suspects claiming a similar loophole, but then remembered that Hawaii wasn't yet a U.S. State in his day.

The reference to a "paint war" in Gluck's Wikipedia entry reminds me of Tumblr's current fascination with the feud between Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple over the licensing of Vantablack.

[sovay]

I see by your link that the reason Shishim had to sue for citizenship to begin with is that he was a cop and a suspect had tried the argument that the arrest wasn't valid.

Yep! Because in 1854 that argument had worked. America, America.

I was about to wonder if Chang Apana ever had to deal with suspects claiming a similar loophole, but then remembered that Hawaii wasn't yet a U.S. State in his day.

I have no idea how racial issues of that kind were handled in the Territory of Hawaii. The language governing citizenship in the Territory looks entirely geographic, with no racial requirement: all citizens of the previous Republic of Hawaii were grandfathered into the Territory as U.S. citizens. Citizenship in the Republic, however, had applied strictly to natural-born or naturalized citizens of the previous Kingdom of Hawaii, which kept most of the immigrants out, and the Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii had permitted resident aliens to vote but confined citizenship to white and Hawaiian men above certain economic thresholds; Asians were right out. So I'm not actually sure that Chang Apana in 1933, in the Territory of Hawaii, would have been a U.S. citizen. He was born in Hawaii, but unless his parents were citizens, he wouldn't have qualified as "natural-born." His eligibility looks like it depended on whether he had native Hawaiian background in addition to Chinese or whether any of his Chinese ancestors had managed to naturalize. The U.S. finally abolished purely racial restrictions on immigration and naturalization in 1952, which was stupidly late; at that point it became impossible to deny citizenship to Asian immigrants, but since the same act upheld a quota system based on nationality and ethnicity and permitted the U.S. government to deport or bar anyone it considered subversive or undesirable—including naturalized citizens—it has required multiple revisions since and I think we're currently in the middle of another one because of the attitude toward immigrants and naturalized citizens suspected of terrorism, whee.

This was the cheapass "I read Wikipedia" version of research, so if you find a better answer, please let me know!

The reference to a "paint war" in Gluck's Wikipedia entry reminds me of Tumblr's current fascination with the feud between Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple over the licensing of Vantablack.

Has that progressed? The last I saw, Kapoor had just given everyone the pinkest finger and Semple had forbidden him use of the glitteriest glitter.

[moon_custafer]

I think that's as far as it's got at present in real life, but someone on Tumblr jokingly commented under a photo of a pink car that had crashed into an expensive black car, "Stuart Semple vs Anish Kapoor." I doubt it's got back to the artists in question, however.