Former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez is one of California's most gifted politicians; filmmaker Spike Lee is a remarkable American artist. This week, both of them made utter fools of themselves, and understanding exactly how they did so tells us something important about where we are as a people and as a country.
There was a time, not long ago, when the worst hypocrisy in American public life was the pretense that race and ethnicity somehow didn't matter. But that's not the case any more. Although race is still a factor in our national life, it's hardly a deterministic one and, today, there are few fallacies more corrosive than the assertion that only race matters.
That's part of Sen. Barack Obama's appeal to young voters. When he discusses race, it's in a language intelligible to a generation that has grown up in a nation where two successive secretaries of State have been African American and the last U.S. attorney general was a Latino -- all appointed by a Republican president. It's a country in which black men have held the top spots in the largest financial services and communications companies and Asian Americans occupy the corner offices in many of the economy's most forward-looking corporations.
A colorblind society? Hardly. But in 2008, Americans -- and particularly young Americans -- are not prone to be sympathetic when leading figures from politics or culture play the race card, as both Nunez and Lee did so clumsily this week.
Nunez went on Univision's Spanish-language political program "Voz y Voto" and lashed out at reports in The Times that he had spent lavishly from his campaign funds on foreign travel and luxury goods. As you may recall, last fall this paper's Sacramento bureau reported that Nunez had spent nearly $50,000 donated by "friends" on air travel to Europe and Argentina. He spent $5,149 for "a meeting" in the cellar of a Bordeaux wine shop. More than $2,500 went to buy "gifts" at Louis Vuitton in Paris.
One of the more interesting extravagances was the $8,745 tab the then-speaker ran up at the Hotel Arts in Barcelona, Spain. The bill included the services of a "translator." Although nobody expects the speaker of the California Assembly to speak Catalan, and although not all Catalonians speak English, they all speak Spanish, just like Nunez. (Actually, the apogee -- or nadir, if you will -- of the former speaker's generosity was the $2,701 handmade belt buckle Nunez bought as a gift for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The zillionaire former movie star returned it as "too lavish.")
