World News Roundup

Actually just junk I read in the Denver papers:

Remember Colorado, the "Hate State?" We're back! Will Perkins, the "Colorado Springs car dealer" (a title that precedes the man's name like "Phillipine strongman" used to precede "Marcos") who organized passage of Amendment 2, is now pushing an initiative that would "outlaw civil unions or domestic partnerships."

The News' television critic Dusty Saunders has been with the paper for 53 years, most of them in that slot. The guy is a living repository of television history, which probably works well at parties.

Why, after breathlessly describing the thrill of securing a seat in the courtroom at the beginning of the "historic" Enron trial, and then of actually shaking ex-CEO Jeffrey Skilling's paw, is Post business columnist Al Lewis twiddling his, er, thumbs in Denver while Skilling is actually on the stand, testifying?

Rocky editor John Temple's blog shlumps along with three posts since March 31--if one counts yet another defense of his pet "citizen journalism" site, Yourhub.com, from yet another media critic. He hasn't mentioned it, so I wonder if Temple has seen Jay Rosen's (and his cloyingly named "Blue Plate Special" students') ranking of the best blogging newspapers in the U.S. The News is not among them. (Neither, to be fair, is the Post, which shares Yourhub with the News but doesn't go on and on about it like it's some revolutionary concept.)

Denver Baptists write to apologize for the recent visit of the verminous Reverend Fred Phelps' in his ongoing "protest [at] the funerals of fallen American soldiers, claiming that their deaths were God's judgment on our nation for condoning homosexuality." He claims to be a Baptist, and they don't like it.

Finally, in the Post cute sack o' crap Cindy Rodriguez wags her cute little poop-filled finger at us:

We all have some element of racism inside us and it will be passed on to succeeding generations unless we purge [oh, baby!] ourselves of it.

I try to work on my own [sic], which is what led me to an "unlearning racism" workshop at the Jewish Community Center in Boulder.

The workshop, led by Lee Mun Wah, an internationally known diversity trainer, drew 150 people. . . .

We watched "Last Chance for Eden," a documentary following nine people of different ethnicities as they participated in a diversity retreat.

In the film, two Caucasian men spoke about feeling like they are under attack. An Asian-American woman said people assume she's heterosexual but when they learn she's not they say to her, "What a waste."

An African-American man said people have made derogatory remarks about blacks in front of him and then say, "I don't mean you."

At the end of the film Lee asked us to pair with a stranger to discuss what we learned. The white woman I sat with talked about feeling frustrated that racism still existed. . . .

How unexpected.

After the workshop, people in the audience apologized. They didn't realize they had been accomplices in keeping the status quo. . . .

Stupid questions (a Drunkablog specialty!): What race were the audience apologizers, do you suppose? And were they smacked with Little Red Books while they made their self-criticisms?

Update: Rocky editorial writer Linda Seebach took iss-ee-uu in an e-mail with my gentle yet incisive ("sack o' crap") mockery of Rodriguez's account of Lee Mun Wah's "unlearning racism" workshop. Seebach attended a version of the workshop in 1995 and found it, to her surprise, laudable. I'll still pass. Can't find the quote, but wasn't it C.S. Lewis who said that (paraphrasing here) much of what is wrong in the world can be traced to the rise of the "workshop?" I'm stickin' with the C-man (as his friends called him) on that.