Et tu, Mr. Destructo?

…and I started thinking about the permissiveness of this aspect of inanely reductive ethnic stereotyping. Do you think we’d do the same thing if there were a famous Korean liquor and Korean beer and a signature drink made from it?

Would we have conversations where guys say something like, “Damn, I was just gonna take it easy last night, but then my bro Dave started buying us all ‘Korean People Eat Dogs,’ which we were shooting like crazy. And daaaaamn, if I didn’t get totally fucked up.

“I mean, pretty soon we all had our arms over each others’ shoulders, singing classic Korean songs about Dear Leader Kim Il-sung.

“It’s okay, though, because I’m 1/16th Korean. My family came over on the water railroad that runs across the Pacific.

“Also, seriously, fuck the Japanese, dude. Fucking Tōjō. 

‘And stay away from ‘Korean People Eat Dogs’. They’re murder, dude.”

You’re watching The Walking Dead.

More Like This:

• Survivors
• Fear Itself
• Night of the Living Dead
• Aaah! Zombies!
• Jericho
• The Colony
• Arrested Development

Like, “I can’t believe you would question how seriously I take this marriage. What if the kids heard?”

Trust me, they heard, and five minutes later they went right back to obsessing over whether The Shadowman is real or whether it’s theoretically possible for:

a. sharks to live under carpeting;

b. carpet sharks to eat people;

c. them to leap from the threshold of their room onto the bed without touching the carpet, where the sharks are.

I will be more than happy to have to listen to her music in private, in public, and in film soundtracks for the next 20 years, so long as she doesn’t start doing weird, awful shit—like, say, anything Madonna’s done since 1990 or so.

Seriously: you want to write 20 years of soul ballads, I am totally on board.

You want to write how you feel, how you feel, how you feel like you just got home and you feel and you feel and you feeeeeeee-eeeeeeee-uuuuuuuh-uh-uh-oh-waaaaauuuuugh or something? DO NOT RECORD THAT SHIT.

“At Central Park in 2009, singing for ‘Good Morning America,’ her voice was frayed, and on the world tour that followed the release of the album ‘I Look to You’ that year, she was often shaky. Whitney Houston was born on Aug. 9, 1963, in Newark.”

— Whitney Houston, Pop Superstar, Dies at 48

As a rule, Americans’ grasp of African history isn’t too hot. Still, it’s depressing to see strangers rush to the defense of dead celebrities because no amount of joking—however deliberately absurd—is forgivable or in anything other than poor taste; meanwhile, they’re talking to someone who claims to be a person who tortured and executed political rivals in sports arenas.

It’s like registering your objections by beginning, “Dear Joseph Stalin: I am sickened by your attitude toward Joe Paterno’s legacy. This proves your contempt for human life.” I mean, really, have some perspective.