We have a new AD, and he seems like a douche. Of course, I think everyone’s a douche, so my impression may be skewed. Then again, maybe he is a douche. So, I asked my fellow PA, and he said, “Yeah, that’s what you get when you have someone who’s an AD and a Jew.”
I was taken aback. I thought I must have misheard him, but when I replayed my mental surveilance tape, sure enough, that’s what he said. So, then I assume he must have misheard me. “No, no, I said, ‘douche,’ not ‘Jew.'”
“Yeah, exactly.”
Whoa.
I mean, yeah, most ADs are penis heads, even on the best of days, so I don’t mind an anti-AD mentality. (Digression– The other day, we shot in a fancy neighborhood that that wouldn’t even allow us to drive in trucks until after 7:00am. That put our call time at 9:00am, giving us only about ten hours of daylight. The solution was to skip lunch and pay everyone meal penalties. I said that that sucked, but the AD responded, “Don’t feel sorry for them. We’ll still have craft service, with sandwiches and snacks and stuff. Hell, we’ll even bring food to them, because they,” and here he did finger quotes, “‘can’t leave the set.’ They’re all going to get an extra $200 just to not sit on their asses for an hour, and they’ll get a shortened day. Fuck them.” I don’t think I’m properly conveying his vehemence and disgust he had for people who dare request a lunch break, but then again, I’m not an AD.)
Anyway, distaste for ADs I understand, but when you conclude that a douche is what you get when you have “an AD and a Jew,” the “and” implies the “Jew” is a necessary component of the equation (AD + Jew = Douche). This is obviously untrue (cf. above statements to the effect that AD = Douche).
I’m not one to worry about offending people, nor am I saying he’s breaking windows and warming up the gas chambers, but he made a pretty indefensible statement. So I said, “That’s a little antisemitic, isn’t it?”
I thought this guy would try to backpedal, but instead, he first denies that it’s even remotely antisemitic (a bold, but ultimately futile implimentation of the Nuh-Uh gambit), then starts in on me for being politically correct. Me.
I tried to persuade him with sheer force of logic, followed by the sheer force of condescending to him like a sad little puppy, but he would not budge. I guess “Jews are douches” just doesn’t count as anti-Semitic to some people.
PS: Will someone please explain to me why “anti-Semitic” has a hyphen and a capital “S,” but “antisemitism” does not?
4 Responses
Personally. I’d choose a meal penalty over a meal any day. That pay bump trumps whatever food they could give me.
Second: Besides being anti-semitic, mouthing off about Jews on an L.A. Film set is just plain dumb. Wanna fast track your way out of a job? Who runs Hollywood? Didn’t you learn from Mel Gibson?
Third: I never understood the word anti-semitic. The most popular semitic language is Arabic. In fact, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, South Arabian, Ge’ez, and Maltese are all semitic languages. So do Anti-Semites hate practically everyone that comes from the middle east, or just Jews?
James Ford- my wife IS a minority (Chinese). These damn Yankees I live around like to talk about their superiority to the hicks down South where I come from, but my wife gets crappy service in many places until I show up. She hates it when people assume she’s some Fillipina mail-order bride from the local military base and gets some condescending remark. (She has a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry).
AA – look at it this way -at least the Republicans don’t celebrate their ignorami. They might toss a bone to the religious right in a speech, but you don’t see Fred Phelps sitting next to a former president at a convention, the way you saw Michael Moore sitting next to Jimmy Carter in the previous election cycle. But as the late, great John Wayne once said – a lot of people who agree with me are jerks.
I get the same thing though. People assume that because I talk Southern, I’m either stupid or racist. They are quite surprised to find a Chemist with a Chinese wife.
I went off on a guy over at a conservative blog I frequent because he said “can’t they take a joke” about the Spanish basketball team doing the “me Chinese” eye thing in their official Olympics portrait. I told him the first adult who does that in front of my two kids is going to get a big ol’ can of Southern-fried whoop ass opened on him.
It was the PA that made the comment, but yeah, a good point. I think he assumed since we happened to vote for the same party in a two-party system, I must hold all of his wacky views.
I’m a bit disappointed he confirmed the leftist, pinko, commie, hippie, liberal media’s bias of Republicans. 🙂
wow. i am african/asian-american. you’d be appalled at the number of racist asian comments i’ve heard. i worked with an african-american woman who insisted you could refer to chinese food as “chinky food.” we let her call in her own orders. we prefered our egg foo yung without mucus. she made fun of a japanese guy’s name (like katsuhiro otomo which may be robert in japan for all we know) when her daughter’s name was something ridiculous she made up by combining two names. as an educated even-keeled black man, people love to make “n*gg*r jokes” thinking “i’m not like ‘them’ so i won’t take offense.”
political correctness has its limits but when it comes to race i like to put them on the spot and ask them just what words exactly would they like to use in everyday conversation? n*gg*r? k*ke? sp*c? it usually shuts them up.
also, if you really want to shut people down (this is my assuming you’re a white male), any racist comment someone makes immediately respond with either 1) you know i’m jewish? or 2) my wife is black. then get insanely pissed about it. people make racist comments because they assume you’re on the same page. your AD wouldn’t have made that comment in a synagogue.