Current TV

[Editor's Note: While I am on vacation I am reposting some of my old stuff. This one didn't get a lot of attention, but it did get a fair number of reads and seemed well received.]

I tend to tune in Current TV in the morning. In between my wife's intense study of the Weather Channel and leaving for work, I switch on Current TV. Good mix of news and culture in a short attention span theater format. Often something particularly good will be on.

This morning I saw an interesting segment on the difficulty of an Asian/African-American interracial relationship. A Korean daughter runs into trouble with her parents when her mother discovers that she is dating a black man. Her mother freaks out, leading to an ongoing harangue trying to convince her daughter that she is betraying her race and doing something unnatural, while her daughter tries to convince her mother than 2006 in America is different than living in homogenous Korea.

Neither mother nor daughter dare tell the father what's going on. Presumably he doesn't watch Current TV, unless this is her way of telling him.

The segment ends with the statement that the daughter still hopes for understanding from her parents because she loves them.

Racism is universal. I can't say anywhere I have been seemed to be completely free of racism. How race is defined varies. The percentage of tolerant people in the culture varies. But there is always a core group of people who finds ways of defining "us" vs. "them" and who will be horrified every time one of "us" falls in love with one of "them."

Current TV, Al Gore's innovative TV channel, has done some pretty amazing things. They got film crews into North Korea, into places in Iraq far from the Green Zone, and were the first journalists into a Somalia arms market before the Islamic Fundamentalists took Mogadishu. It is their willingness to go where most journalists don't have the balls to go that makes the network worth watching.

Back when they went in to film Mogadishu in chaos, with battling warlords and their factions making arms dealing a major industry, it was astonishing the constant aura of threat that permeated Mogadishu under the warlords. These are the people Clinton had nearly defeated, but lack of Congressional support led to a withdrawal that allowed a resurgence of chaos. And Bush sat back allowing that chaos to happen, making the Islamic Fundamentalists the ONLY option Somalis had for stability.

When I participated in a live radio broadcast some months back discussing the initial takeover by the Islamic Fundamentalists, most of the Somalis who participated considered the Islamic takeover a good thing for one reason: it promised stability. They expressed their appreciation for the American intervention and a sense of betrayal at the American withdrawal. In the absence of American influence, they saw the fundamentalists as the only way to end the chaos.

And so Mogadishu and the whole Southern half of Somalia fell to fundamentalists and Bush did nothing. By and large the Western Press did nothing but report from a distance. But CurrentTV went in to see what life was like under the Somali Taliban.

I tend to tune in Current TV in the morning. In between my wife's intense study of the Weather Channel and leaving for work, I switch on Current TV. Good mix of news and culture in a short attention span theater format. Often something particularly good will be on.

This morning I saw an interesting segment on the difficulty of an Asian/African-American interracial relationship. A Korean daughter runs into trouble with her parents when her mother discovers that she is dating a black man. Her mother freaks out, leading to an ongoing harangue trying to convince her daughter that she is betraying her race and doing something unnatural, while her daughter tries to convince her mother than 2006 in America is different than living in homogenous Korea.

Neither mother nor daughter dare tell the father what's going on. Presumably he doesn't watch Current TV, unless this is her way of telling him.

The segment ends with the statement that the daughter still hopes for understanding from her parents because she loves them.

Racism is universal. I can't say anywhere I have been seemed to be completely free of racism. How race is defined varies. The percentage of tolerant people in the culture varies. But there is always a core group of people who finds ways of defining "us" vs. "them" and who will be horrified every time one of "us" falls in love with one of "them."