it's saturday night. as usual, my friend and i are watching the history channel. (i love the history channel.) after years of him bartending in the lower east side every weekend and me running around with a gig somewhere, it's nice to stay in and avoid the unwashed masses downtown, yearning to be trendy and chain smoke and get trashed. besides -- everyone knows that if you want to go out in new york city, you don't do it on the weekends.
a promo comes on for the dark ages, their latest series premiering sunday (tomorrow) at 9pm.
the announcer says, "over 600 years of degenerate godless inhuman behavior," and as his pithy authoritative voice rang out in my apartment, my friend goes, "that's not what was happening in asia. or africa, either." and then he sighed and shook his head and said matter-of-factly, "it wasn't the dark ages for everyone. europe is not the world."
it was an especially wiggy moment because that's exactly what i was thinking, almost word for word. so my eyebrows went up and i said, "you sound like a black militant." he agreed. but when media constantly says things that are so blatantly eurocentric, who wouldn't be? evidently, it's enough to turn the most mild mannered episcopalian white guy into an indignant black woman in a new york minute (which, from what i'm told, is about five seconds).
"would it kill them to talk about what was happening elsewhere in the world?" he asked. hm. maybe they will. they certainly should. we'll see when it airs tomorrow night.
so nice to know that i've finally rubbed off on him. then again, he was probably always like this, just below the surface.
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