...erm...

One thing I've noticed, lately, is the phenomenon of white celebrities with East-Indian names. What the fuck is with this? Did their parents think this would be cute? Devendra Banhart, Uma Thurman, Radha Mitchell (whose full name, by the way, is Radha Rani Amber Indigo Anunda Mitchell) this is so offensive, and so potentially destructive it's not even funny. It seems like, wherever I go, everyone has some ass-backwards highly idiosyncratic take on India. Either you have white hipster types talking about how "super spiritual" it is, who wear kurtas, decorate their rooms with Krishna and Buddha statues or batik tapestries, and visit their fucking "gooroos", or, turning away from this in revulsion, people who lash out at India itself to get at these hipsters, making the country itself effectively the battleground for some intellectual proxy war between competing bands of hip urban whites. For example, Matt Cale, the in-house movie critic for the website ruthlessreviews.com, in a review of the Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited once referred to Calcutta as "the world's largest open sewer". Matt Cale is sophisticated man who typically leans to the left, and so this was particularly jarring coming from him. Really, though, his beef wasn't with India, it was with the aforementioned vacant Western pop-Orientalists, desperately seeking meaning in their lives, who turn to India and other eastern
countries to find salvation in the exotic religions of these countries. Instead of saying that, though, he had to talk shit on India. I mean what did India ever do to him? What has India to do with the idiots who blindly embrace it or the bigoted cocksuckers who, just as blindly, shun it.

I mean are we all ready to throw in the towel with this whole cultural-relativism thing? Are we going to start measuring every society by the standards of the West? Has Matt Cale ever considered the fact that the filthy streets of Calcutta are almost identical to the streets of any post-colonial third world country and that maybe, both he and the orientalists he hates so much are more culpable, in a way, than the people who live in that "open sewer"? OF COURSE he fucking has! He's a well-read, educated person, so how the fuck dare he condemn India for the sins of a bunch of confused acid-burnouts and bohemian dipshits? And the worst part, is that there seems to be some mingling between these two categories of wretched fuckers. Recently, I saw hipster-orientalist swine Devendra Banhart's music video for his song "Carmencita", which takes-the-piss at Bollywood films and Indian religious serials, it reinforces all the most offensive religous and cultural stereotypes, and is, in short, Indian minstrelsy.

Even if "Devendra" was an actual Indian, which he's not, this shit would be unforgivably offensive. He'd be betraying his own culture and whoring it out to white audiences for cheap laughs. But as it stands, it's worse! It's fucking racist!

Who does this bastard think he is?

On another note, I see that, since the Democrats need an old-guard, salt-of-the-earth hero to rally behind (particularly one who's dead or dying) to compete with Republican Reagan-worship, that they've decided to suddenly canonize Ted Kennedy. I guess even dudes who let their mistresses drown to death deserve second chances.

Fuck!