Pearl Harbor: I promise I wasn’t there.
In 2002 I had my first radio job working for the HIV Talk Radio project. The mission of the show itself was admirable: provide up-to-date info on HIV treatment and positive stories of living with the virus. It was the first nationally syndicated radio show on the topic and in a world that hadn’t popularized podcasts yet, radio was a great way to reach people in communities that might not get the information otherwise*.
The boss, by contrast, was a giant racist asshole. He would scream and rant at the tiny office (4 employees), shout racial epithets and make incompetent stabs at race based “humor.” For example:
Boss calling in sick from home: “Hey Val”
Val (the black office administrator): “Hey Chris, how you feeling?”
Boss: “I just wanted to let you know I’m watching Planet of the Apes.”
Val: Oh yeah?
Boss: “Yeah…I thought it was a documentary about your family.”
So when he found out i was Asian, it was on December 7th. He came charging into the office and had some non-joke about it. ”You know what today is right? Best be careful, there’s people that are still angry about it and you might get lynched.”**
Flash forward 10 years later and I discover that this asshole was indicted for siphoning money off the non-profit that created the radio show and was gone after by the State AG. It’s not a warm fuzzy end to the story, but it’s what I think of when I think of Pearl Harbor.
*For example, I remember getting a letter from someone in a tiny town in Georgia thanking us for a segment we did on dealing with the physical changes of AZT, specifically the “Buffalo Hump” that sometimes happens.
**I could go on a long, dithering tangent here about racism in humor and how to appropriately deploy it, but let us just point out that amongst his many sins, regardless of controversial content, this guy was just flat out unfunny.