No news is good news but some news is just bad

Any publicity is good publicity, right? The Aqua Teen bomb scare in Boston last month was… Any publicity is good publicity, right? The Aqua Teen bomb scare in Boston last month was certainly a national triumph for that old, tired adage.

But Asian Week, a San Francisco-based weekly paper which presumptuously touts itself as “the Voice of Asian America,” may have discovered the hard way that there really is such a thing as bad publicity.

Bad, bad publicity.

It recently got itself embroiled in controversy when it published an op-ed by nut-job columnist Kenneth Eng titled “Why I Hate Blacks.” To summarize this briefly, his column is basically a heated, inarticulate rant on how he thinks African-Americans are an anti-Asian, weak-willed and stupid race that is undeservedly the darling of the white American media. It wasn’t long before the African-American community torched Asian Week for letting something like this go to print, and appropriately, the paper now has heaps of sizzling egg on its face for it.

By any professional editorial standard, it’s a wonder that someone who frequently announces himself as an “Asian Supremacist” was hired in the first place. Racism aside, Eng’s asinine writing reads like some high school freshman’s bitter Myspace blog.

Eng’s Asian Week columns are almost invariably illogical rants numbering off various over-generalizing reasons for his hatred of something or other. Before his “Why I Hate Blacks” column, he had penned such gems as “Proof That Whites Inherently Hate Us” and “Why I Hate Asians.” That last one sounds pretty odd coming from Mr. Asian Supremacist, but Eng contends that “every race has its inferiors.”

It’s all such painfully self-absorbed crap that I initially hoped his column would eventually reveal itself as some kind of crazed satirical act, that maybe he’s just a wacky pseudo-blowhard trying (badly) to emulate Stephen Colbert. But no, Eng is actually as lame as he sounds.

His main gig is that of a young New York science fiction writer whose main work is called “Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate” – the opening line of which goes “Time is not a concept. It is a word.” You can find his profile on Amazon.com under the heading, “Kenneth Eng, God,” where, among many other things, he claims to be “striving against the mass of conformity that is the flesh all around me.”

Hopefully, Asian Week editors are reappraising whether they’re really capable of running a magazine, as one has to wonder if they ever actually read Eng’s columns before this last one brought the wrath of thousands down on their heads.

Yet I also have to stop and think about the particulars in this controversy. Eng was certainly asking for a swift backlash when he wrote “Why I Hate Blacks,” but it has to make you think when you consider that it took this last article about black people to launch the controversy to national headlines. It’s worth noting that there was not nearly as much of an uproar when he printed his earlier columns bitching about white and Asian America. Asian Week has removed his anti-black diatribe from its online publication, but the other two racist columns are still posted as they were.

Eng probably notes this, too, and I can just bet that in some future blog-rant he’ll talk about this incident like it’s a badge of martyrdom and say he lost his Asian Week column because he merely spoke his mind about the wrong people.

I will also have to admit that, all his senseless ranting aside, the very nature of what it took to make him into a brief national controversy provides a grain of truth to his warped woes.

But then, the thresholds of censorship with regards to race and/or cultural relations seem invariably fated to work on a double-standard no matter how you look at it, because different groups will have different sensibilities to perceived slights. Islamic fundamentalists today, on average, certainly seem to have stronger, more confrontational reactions to offenses taken than fundamentalists from other religious groups. And for what it’s worth, it’s paid off in the sense that no one wants to mess with them. Then we have the case of Native American tribes that enjoy a few exemptions from regular state regulations (e.g. their casino businesses), which is technically an unequal right, but then you have to juxtapose it against their history of getting screwed for centuries.

So can we really pass judgment, and can we expect to ever find balanced “equality” in these intricate civil rights equations? Do two inequalities work to cancel one another out, or do they just compound each other? We are unfair if we bend more to a certain group’s demands more than others, but then every group will have its own rationalizing story. Eventually, you wind up with a bunch of bitter people like Eng.

Oh well. What can you do?

E-mail Konrad at klk27@pitt.edu.