The definitive rebuttal to this stupid, stupid, stupid discussion
Props to Nichelle for digging this up. I really, really hate this debate. It makes my skin crawl. But here is Obama talking about identity:
He decided he belonged to the "community of humanity." I asked him whether that smacked of Tiger Woods' description of his biracial identity, which some blacks saw as a rejection of the black community.
"My view has always been that I'm African-American," he said.
"African Americans by definition, we're a hybrid people. One of things
I loved about my mother was not only did she not feel rejected by me
defining myself as an African-American, but she recognized that I was a
black man in the United States and my experiences were going to be
different than hers."
At the same time, Obama says, when he takes his daughters to
Hawaii to visit his grandmother--his mother is deceased--they visit a
little old white lady from Kansas.
They also spend time with his pregnant half-sister, who's part Indonesian and married to a Chinese Canadian.
"My daughters will grow up with a cousin who looks entirely Asian
but who carries my blood in him. It's pretty hard not to claim that
larger community."
Again, I don't agree with the Tiger Woods thing--though, at one point, I really did. We're all maturing here. A big part of that is to privilege actual people, instead of the essentialists on both sides, in the debate over their identity.
The question of Cablinasians
Commenter AMT writes:
I haven't seen a thread here on interracial marriage/dating. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.
OK, let's go. I've never dated interracially. When I was younger, and much less mature, I said I'd never do it. No that doesn't quite go far enough, I claimed that black men, specifically, should stick with their own:
I know a couple of black men who are honestly in love with white women.
They've dated black women before, but this is who they fell for. But
those who manage to shake off the cultural conditioning are rare
indeed. I stick with black women, not because of any aversion to white
women, not because of any "Nubian princess" mythology, and not because
I think crossing the line would necessarily conflict with my politics.
I stick with black women because I wonder, in this climate, if an
honest relationship with anybody else is possible. I stick with black
women because I know how men (black and white) routinely use them for
toilet stools. I stick with black women because I know to do anything
else, whether I meant to or not, would be to become an accomplice to
that crime.
Oh man. So young. So ideologically pure. What happened to me? I wrote that right after I turned 22. I had just become a professional writer. And I was pretty stupid. Not stupid like, ill-read, but in those days, I didn't understand the limits of ideology--namely that it can say so much about the world, and yet so little about your life, or your neighbor's life, or the girl on the train's life.
I am ten-years deep into my relationship, and here is what I know--a long term relationship will make pragmatists of us all. It is hard to find someone you even enjoy sleeping with, much less live with. But please indulge me in that former point for a moment, while I deliver a message to the youth who are of age: When you're talking about long-term, you better enjoy it. Not cold pizza enjoy it. Not Big Mac enjoy it. But hot apple pie with ice cream--after you just smoked a blunt--enjoy it. What's that TV On The Radio joint?
Oh but the longing is terrible Gentle heart under attack I wanna love you all the way off I wanna break your back.
Fuck what you've heard. Until those lyrics mean something to you, keep looking. Sorry, back to our programming...
Look it's hard enough to satisfy the basic carnal needs--it's even harder to satisfy those needs, and satisfy the basic emotional and mental ones too. There is a good chance that your long-term relationship will one day fail. A great way to up the chances of truly epic fail, hot grits, I'm talking hot grits fail, burn down the mansion fail, is to shrink the pool of your potential partners. [MORE]
Maria Arana wishes to alert you to this fact. Before we proceed, let us note that one of the unfortunate things about this campaign is that a slur that is universally condemned when used by poor black kid, is now acceptable for everyone else. Where are all the anti-nationalists, now? Where are all the ones who told us that the biggest threat to black America, was our penchant for telling people they weren't black? What? Nothing? Meh, I should have known. Moving right along, here's Arana:
To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama
is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural
president. He is more than the personification of African American
achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of
tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.
The logic here being that there are no black people who are biracial or bicultural. Whenever I read these jingoistic biracial arguments I wonder whether they're little more than attempts to take credit. Somehow, if, say, the Beltway sniper's mother was white, I don't think there'd be a throng of non-black people yelling, "But he's not really black!!"
I wish to highlight the authors parentage as "the child of a white Kansan mother and a foreign father." I mean no disrespect to her or her roots. I simply suspect this sort of thinking is most common among people who aren't likely to have been erroneously stopped by cops, endured fried chicken jokes, done the whop, been embarrassed by group of black kids acting a fool on the train, or snapped on someone's played-out Chuck Purcells--among other things. But you can judge that for yourself.
Look, the thing is this--or rather, the things are this. To be black is not simply to be the opposite of white. Black is a racial/ethnic/cultural/historical marker. Sometimes it's better to think of black people like you think of the Irish. Sometimes it's better to think of us like you think of the Jews. And still other times it's better to think of us as Southern. But mostly it's best to think of us as, you know. humans.
But nationalism--be it monoracial, biracial, or multiracial--has no respect for actual individual humans. And nationalism is really Arana's point--she simply seeks to substitute the strictures of one group (a charmed, rainbow of genes and cultures) and for another (a presumably, pure strain from straight out the Congo). But asserting that Obama isn't black but biracial, is really no better than asserting that he's black, but not biracial.
The arrogance of both arguments are quite stunning. As an African-American, I'd think myself far, far out of place to tell a dude whose mother was a Russian Jew, and father was a Muslim Arab, that he had no right to call himself a Jew or a Muslim or an Arab or even a Russiuan. What the fuck do I know about his life?
Everything flows from respect. Tiger Woods calls himself multiracial. The moral thing to do is not to launch into all sorts of diatribes about shame and blackness, but accept him as he accepts himself. But that cuts both ways. Barack Obama calls himself a biracial black man. The human thing to do, is nod your head and say "Got it." The human thing is to respect these dudes. Respect our own ignorance of their lives. And most of all, respect their humanity.
November 28, 2008
Chris Matthews for Senate
UPDATE: Sorry guys, in semi-vacation mode here. Anyway, as you've surely already seen Chris Matthews says he's not in prep mode.
Uhhh...this strikes me as a bad idea. Just based on his show, if I were in Pennsy, I might vote for Arlen Specter. I'm not one for gotcha journalism, but this is an attack ad in waiting. I guess this sort of thing isn't policy, so it shouldn't matter, but still...
November 27, 2008
The Great Ronnie Lott On Charlie Rose
Props to Wallyz for the tip. Fast forward som for Lott.
Billy Dee Williams says, "Where do I go to get my image back?"
Just when you thought Obama had made it safe for the public image of Negroes, Bob Johnson claps back:
Robert L. Johnson,
the founder of Black Entertainment Television, has asked the Federal
Communications Commission to approve plans for a new "urban" television
network that would cater to a multicultural audience interested in
health, lifestyle, education and other issues, a spokeswoman for
Johnson told Journal-isms on Tuesday.
An ill wind just blew over Harlem. An ill, ill wind.
Here's a story of the Thanksgiving spirit, forgiving and forgetting senatorial style.
When Democrats gathered last week to decide the fate of Sen. Joe
Lieberman (I-Conn.), a pair of senators-elect, Tom Udall of New Mexico
and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, stepped up to offer symbolically important
speeches.
Having ridden the wave of support for President-elect Barack Obama,
Udall and Merkley spoke out in favor of the spirit of reconciliation
and moving on from the campaign, in which Lieberman was one of the
highest profile supporters of the Republican presidential ticket.
But no one in the room knew, as Merkley spoke, that Lieberman had
supported Merkley's opponent, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.). Lieberman,
through his Reuniting Our Country PAC, gave Smith's reelection bid $5,000 on Oct. 10, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Lieberman never fails to dissappoint, no? Look, I'm still "meh" on the idea of Obama taking Lieberman out. But Connecticut needs to do this cat when time comes. That's just dirty.
November 26, 2008
Open NFL Thread
Since we've been turning every other thread into a football thread, let's go there. We can talk about whatever but let's start with this query from CitizenE:
Now I ask you--maybe they're a bit too clean, but Steve Young and Jerry Rice or Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin?
Look, don't ever let anyone tell you that a quaterback who wins three Super Bowls in four years, who goes to four straight championship games and wins three of them--one under Barry Switzer, no less--is overrated. Aikman was a great, great quarterback--the anti-Favre. Like Favre, he was a winner, but he didn't do the spectacular shit that Favre did. Of course he also didn't do the stupid shit either. He was just incredibly accurate. Irvin is the most physical receiver I've ever seen play the game. He also is one of the most competitive and hardest working athletes I've seen. He played reciever the way people play basketball--he'd catch passes with no separation at all, essentially boxing cornerbacks out. It was fucking incredible.
But let's be real here--Steve Young was basically the perfect quarterback. He could run like Mike Vick (almost) and throw like Peyton Manning. Jerry Rice is the greatest receiver to ever play the game. There simply is no comparison. I'm a lifetime Cowboys fan--but it's a weak-ass fan who goes all jingoist in spite of the actual facts. This following clip isn't a Rice to Young hookup, but it's what I'll always remember about Young. It is, to my mind, one of the greatest plays ever--look at T.O just laying there, crying like a baby. Listen to Summerall and Madden. This is why I love football. In another time, with a team that invested in him, Young would have been the greatest ever.
The very sharp Chris Hayes
On Gates, Obama and Brennan. Good stuff.
Presidents to represent me
Frequent commenter Rikyrah has an interesting piece up about Obama, not as our first black president, but as our first celebrity president. Of course there was Camelot before him, but there was no US Weekly, People or TMZ--at least not as they exist today. The point is that Obama is the first president that the celeb machine is actually obsessing over:
Barack Obama is the first CELEBRITY President. I don't mean that in
a bad way. I just mean it in a factual way. He's the first President of
the Modern Celebrity Culture that we live in today.
To be honest, that realization frightened me. I mean, look at the
magazine racks. Obama isn't just on magazines like Time and Newsweek,
the Obamas, or some combination of them are on People, US, Life &
Style, OK, The Star.
Look at that list.
Within days of the election, what did we hear about the WeeMichelles? Some offer from Hanna Montana?
Then there was the article in the Wall Street Journal about Malia,
her dress from Election Night, how it sold out, and maybe she's going
to be a trendsetter for the ' tween' set.
I turn on the tv and see Inside Edition doing a piece on Sasha's Dress - yes, SASHA, and how it's become a sellout too.
Meh, I knew it was over when I saw the tabs trading rumors about the First Couple's various affairs. It's pretty crazy.
I show you how to do this, son
I generally find weekly columns to be, uhm, unenlightening. I don't think that has much to do with the talent, it's just a really demanding thing to have to be interesting, in a set way, 52 times a year. You're going to fail. But this piece by Hendrik Hertzberg--who doesn't write every week--shows why he's king. The set-up is marvelous--Hertzberg recounts, in specific detail, how the Mormon Church helped push Prop 8. Then he goes through all the arguments over who's to blame. But instead of leaving it there, he circles back to the Mormon Church and gives us this incredible symbolism:
A couple of days before
the California vote, the San Francisco Chronicle's John
Wildermuth noticed a "No on Prop 8" sign on a front lawn. The lawn and
the sign belonged to Steve Young, the football Hall of Famer and former
49er quarterback, and his wife, Barb. Steve Young is a graduate of
Brigham Young University, which is named for his
great-great-great-grandfather. The Youngs still belong to the Mormon
Church. "We believe all families matter and we do not believe in
discrimination," Barb Young said. "Therefore, our family will vote
against Prop 8." It wasn't enough this time. But the time is coming.
I swear that ending was written to be quoted on this blog. Damn I hated Steve Young. Now, that hate was born out of great respect for his skills, and the toughness he exhibited throughout his career. Still, one of the greatest moments of my life was watching the Cowboys in 93 and 94 drive a stake through his heart, thus avenging "The Catch." But still, this is bigger than football. I can't believe I just wrote that.
OK, now I'm totally reaching...
But still, reading Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power has put me in the mind of the great, clear-eyed, philosopher of our time, Bill Withers, who once said the following:
I want to spread the news,
If it feel this good getting used
Just keep on using me until you use me up
Bacevich's book is another one of those "how did we end up in this mess" tracts. But, in addition to being very well written, the thing I like about Bacevich's critique is his refusal to
attack the usual suspects (big government, Wall Street, politicians
etc.). I mean all those people come in for criticism, but the real
villain of TLP is us. It's our desire to have luxury on the cheap, to drive big cars, to spend more than we make, Bacevich argues, that's taken us to war, ruined our economy and our environment.
I've been thinking about this for awhile. How
much of this current crisis is just a manifestation of the American--indeed human--will? We're always talking about politicians deluding us and Wall-Street
manipulating us, and predatory lenders conning us, into doing things
that aren't in our own interest. But maybe we don't want what's in our
interest. Maybe we like our gas-guzzling, credit-card charging, second
house buying when you can't afford it, commercial culture.
The thing I always liked about Bill Withers's "Use Me" was that it was a man's critique of a dysfunctional relationship. Unlike a lot of rappers, Withers doesn't blame the girl, he blames himself, going so far as to say, "It ain't too bad the way you using me, because I sure am using you to do that thing we do." In fact he laughs at the people trying to help him, much as one might picture people laughing at some lefty for telling them "they aren't voting their interest." In that respect, I think Bacevich's critique is a man's critique of another, very similar, dysfunctional relationship. It easy to think we've been conned into this current crisis. But what if this is the world as we want it? I think it's imperative to never forget that humans are animals. What if, in the words of Bob, we're just fulfilling the book? What if it isn't even dysfunctional? What if this is just who we are?
So it's hiddey-ho, as I pick out my 'Fro...
Someone mentioned this yesterday and comments, I decided to dig it up. Looking back on this, man this stuff is harsh. Talk about un-PC--you can even hear it in the audience's reaction. But still hilarious. And made all the more hilarious by the fact that the Smother Bros were doing the singing, as one of the commenters mentioned. Just to show how it's all connected, Bill Cosby once sucker-punched Tommy Smothers. I bullshit you not.
Glory to the Sin'Dorei
Folks I did all I could, but in the end I couldn't resist. Besides. Everyone knows that in the heart of every 6'4 black man, there lies a drug-addicted, vengeful, nationalist elf sorcerer just dying to get out. You can read about my back and forth with World of Warcraft here. I initially came in as alliance--for the uninitiated there are two sides in WoW, the horde and the alliance--playing a human mage and a Nelf hunter. But the more I dug into the lore, the more I felt out of place. There was something so familiar about Thrall's story--dude raised in slavery, educated by his enslavers, escapes, is schooled on his true heritage, rises to become a champion of his people. Heh, don't know where I've heard thatonebefore. Then there was Orgrimmir itself, there was something about that I'd seen before...
When the blood elves came out I was even more tempted. All fantasy fanboys want to be elves, let's just be straight about it. But these weren't Gary Gygax's elves. These guys had suffered a horrible massacre, been betrayed by mankind and were single-mindedly set on rebuilding their nation. They even had an Uncle Tom among them. Something about their whole way of being ("Hold you head high," the doyens of Silvermoon tell you. That and "We will have justice") put me in the mood of my rights-of-passage training, where, as young boys, we were drilled on our responsibility to rebuild the community. Plus the humans in WoW are kind of racist. Well everyone's racist, but...
Anyway, it's getting all racial up in this piece. The point is I'm back, playing a belf mage and an orcish death knight. If I disappear for a week, you'll know that my PC ate me.
The most important appointment decision Obama will make during the
transition, bar none, is who becomes, or remains, Secretary of Defense.
As I have noted in the past,
the Department of Defense oversees the expenditure of 52% of all
discretionary spending, rendering it literally impossible for any other
cabinet Secretary to oversee as much federal money. Further, keeping
Gates on would only worsen Democratic image problems on national
security, as he would be the second consecutive non-Democratic
Secretary of Defense nominated by a Democratic President. The message
would be clear: even Democrats agree that Democrats can't run the
military.
I think the budget point is valid. I'm less troubled by the image problem. If Barack Obama closes this thing out in Afghanistan and Iraq, everyone will remember that Bush started and bungled, and Obama cleaned-up and finished. My biggest question is what sort of job has Gates actually done? If he's sucked it up he should go. If not, given the current entanglements, I'm less inclined to skewer Obama over this one. Andrew is, obviously, pleased, Jason Zenerle debunks this silly notion that retaining Gates doesn't count as bipartisantship because Gates, evidently, isn't partisan enough.
November 25, 2008
Housekeeping
If you hate discussions about blog policy, just skip this and keep moving (Hi Sarah!). This is a message to folks who regularly or occasionally comment here. The trolling is basically at a minimum, at this point, which is good. I like the bunch I've got here--you guys are great. I just want to throw out a reminder fnot to engage trolls when they show up here. For whatever reason this blog is a magnet for the sort of sad antisocialite who's whole life is centered on the machinations of the Negro race.
Here's the thing, I generally delete these clowns--and fairly quickly, but I'd rather not have to. I'm fairly hard to offend, but I don't want every post devolving into a stupid back and forth over IQ scores. It makes for the most uninteresting reading on the web. Here's the thing--I believe that comments are part of the attraction here. I want comment threads that people enjoy reading. When the fools show up, I'd rather let them have their say--the very fact that there are people out there like this deserves light. But I can only do it, if I know folks are going to exhibit some self-control and not be stupid enough to get sucked-in. Sock-puppetry will still result in immediate deletion, and we have a couple people like that roaming around. But to everyone else here, I'd just say, please keep cool.
Flash the message, someone's out there...
Namely John Forte, who just got pardoned by George Bush. Gawker kicks the ballistics. Meanwhile, in a nod to John, let us remember the days of hip-hop past. Damn, we even make John Travolta look good...
UPDATE: One other thing--I didn't get that people were confused about how I felt about the picture. To be perfectly clear, I think she looks beautiful.
In response to the Michelle Obama post below, commenter Lebecka writes:
TNC, if you stop seeing her as a black woman, and see her instead as a
strong person, you will love this picture. She is such an important
role model for women and girls everywhere-- She is strong, intelligent,
hardworking person, who is also 100% woman. Very much like Condi in
this aspect.
This has been a constant refrain throughout this election. I get e-mails all the time asking why Obama has to be as the "first black president" when he's president of the country. Or why do I see Obama as "black man" instead of a "great American." Or in this case why I see Michelle Obama as a black woman instead of "as a strong person."
What I'm not understanding is the sense that by calling someone black, we somehow erase any other signifier of their identity. I think this says more about how black people are seen, than about how they actual live. Look, I'm a black man. It's that simple, it's who I am and how I was raised. But I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan. I'm a comic geek. I'm an amateur foodie. I'm a father. And so on. None of those things conflict with the other. But it's like when we're talking about race, and specifically in reference to black people who've achieved some level of broad cultural acceptance, somehow it's wrong to identify them as black.
Often what you'll get is "He wasn't just a black soandso, he was a great American soandso"--like somehow one cancels the other out. I understand this from a competition perspective. I hope to be a great writer someday, not just some dude who's "a great writer as far as the blacks go." But that goes for any group--I'm sure most Jewish writers hope to be compared with the best, ethnicity aside, same for women, gender aside. But in terms of identity, we are all so many things at the same time. I see Denzel Washington as a great American actor and a black man. I see Mel Martinez as Cuban-American and as a senator. One doesn't cancel out the other.
I wonder if, from a particular white perspective, this come from a sense of feeling excluded, of feeling that when someone looks at Michelle Obama as a "black woman" this cuts them out of the conversation. I don't know. That would assume a lot of arrogance, no? Like there's nothing good coming out of Trenchtown.
P.S. Lebecka, I hope you don't take offense at me highlighting your quote. It's all in the spirit of debate.
He beat Joe Louis's ass...
Someone asked about black impersonating whites. Eddie Murphy really is the gold standard.
Nepotism Watch
My man Neil Drumming's video for the MC, Junior. Nice beat. Weird lyrics. Weirder video. Weird is good where I come from. And me and Neil come from the same place. Not much diff between West Baltimore and Jamaica, Queens. Well Jamaica has Tribe...Anyway, as a bonus beat, here's Neil mulling over HBO's vampire soap. I'm telling you guys this shit has gotten out of hand. This is worse than Seven of Nine. And frankly, I kind of liked Seven of Nine.
This is what I mean...
Gawd I hope we never see anything like this again...
More on that in a second. I've been in conversation with a couple lefty friends over Obama's early steps as President-elect. I get why people were pissed that Obama would save Joe Lieberman. He truly didn't deserve it. Man, when Joe Leiberman says "bipartisan" I feel like someone is cursing at me. I also think Chris Hayes has a good point:
Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far
as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new
administration. Not one.
Of course this was before Melody Barnes, but I think the point still stands, and it also illustrates, again, why the whole "Team of Rivals" bit is such hokum. What you really have is a "Team of Moderates." Obama's a moderate himself, so I'm not sure how much he is going to be disagreeing with these folks. I think calling them "the center right of the Democratic Party" is a bit much. I'd go with centrists, moderates or even "progressive moderates," if that makes any sense.
I say all that, because I want to be clear that what I'm writing isn't any sort of rebuke to cats like Hayes who are disappointed. It's more me airing out my own thinking. In doing that thinking I've come to something kind of shocking--I didn't support Obama because of policy positions or who he'd likely appoint. That needs some explanation. I obviously supported the Democratic candidate because of policy--because I'm pro-choice, because I'm pro-gay marriage, because I oppose McCain's ardent belief in military force, because I don't believe tax-cuts, alone, make an economic policy, because I oppose the war on drugs etc. On all of those issues, I thought any Democrat would be closer to me than any Republican.
[MORE]
UPDATE: To be perfectly clear, I think she
looks beautiful. Sorry for the initial confusion.
I don't speak French, but I think I get the message...Man, it keeps hitting you doesn't it? This whole "black president" thing is like fragmentation bomb. And I keep getting smacked by the shrapnel. This is fucking embarrassing. Look, this blog is Ta-Nehisi thinking out loud. I say it's embarrassing because I'm constantly worried about getting sucked in and churning out hagiography--to the point that sometimes I find myself just looking for things to disagree with Obama on.
I was writing yesterday about the need to say something different. And yet when I see a picture like this, when I see a black woman, who isn't an entertainer, photographed like this I'm stunned. And the worst part is, as of this Fall, I knew all this was coming. I thought Obama would win, and I knew there'd be pictures just like this. Yet perhaps I've been too intellectual. I think intellectually, I was, and am, ready. But emotionally, I'm unprepared.
First for the obvious--you don't have to be black to do a good impersonation of a black dude. I like Darrell Hammond's Jesse Jackson a lot more than Keenan Thompson's Al Sharpton--but you do have to be good. Andrew nominated this cat (Iman Crosson) awhile back. I thought he was decent, but then I was over at Anovelista and saw this video. Awesome. Nichelle also nominates Aisha Tyler for Michelle Obama impersonator. I could go with that. No one will ever top Tina Fey's Palin--but this is still good.
November 24, 2008
The mind-numbing, stultifying, brain-freezing stupidity of precedent
I give you all permission to beat me with electric eels if you ever here me say anything like "Obama could be our Kennedy" or "our Roosevelt" or "our Lincoln." In the primaries, and early general, when fools were running around calling him McGovern or Adlai Stevenson, it wasn't wrong because McGovern and Stevenson were losers, it was wrong because it was ultimate in couch-potato bloviating. This brings me back to "Team of Rivals" which I addressed a while back. I was hesitant to go all out, but Fallows brings it:
...this is not the Civil War, Obama is not Lincoln -- and even if he were
and all circumstances were identical in every way, out of simple
self-respect you'd think people would get embarrassed about using the
catch phrase they'd heard a million times for the million-and-first. To
me, listening to this unvaried refrain is like hearing "bitchin' !"
among my fellow teenagers in the late 1960s or "groovy! " after that.
And I'm in China!
Slang goes out of style for a very good reason--at some point the words or terms of the day fail to properly describe a new day, a new situation, a new time. The reason why people who aren't a part of group sound stupid using slang, is because they often don't understand the words they're using on any deep level--they're just parroting what sounds cool. Ditto for all these cats running with this team of rivals notion. When you repeat that line--something which Obama is more than happy to see reporters do--what you're basically saying is "I quit. I refuse to respect my subject enough to think about what he specifically represents."
The best thing about the human brain is that it's original. None of us think the same. When thinkers amd writers refuse to employ that originality, when they opt against telling us what is particular, what is specific, what is unique about this moment in time, when they decide to go with the easiest received wisdom at hand, as opposed to deliberating, as opposed to banging their heads on the wall until they arrive at something new, than they are not writers or thinkers any more, but henchmen in the employ of propagandists. I say that as an Obama fan. Stop fucking pushing the cliches this dude is feeding you. Wake the fuck up and think for yourself. This is exactly how we got into Iraq. This isn't a damn game.
Totally in bad taste
It's out of flavor with the post-racial times, but I'm going to say it: I'm struck by the number of black people who are going to be working in the White House. I know these aren't cabinet-level jobs (excepting Holder) and maybe Valerie Jarrett will do an awful job. But I was taken aback watching a black woman lay out the agenda for the next president on Meet The Press a few weeks back. Maybe Holder is a complete bum, but look, I come out of the era of Rodney King, and from time to time will still play "Fuck The Police." Forgive me for having an emotional reaction to the top-cop in this country being a black man. I have been very hard on people who expect the mere sight of Obama as president to alter some things in the black community. Have I been too hard? I need to think more about how this makes me feel. On an emotional level, I'm sorry, it's fucking stunning.
Anyway, the latest is Melody Barnes. Here's some actual policy to cut through the cotton candy of a post you just read. I'm a damn teddy bear. Props to Matt for the link.
Things we like for no good reason
It says absolutely nothing to say that I like Beyonce. But it says quite a bit that I'm a fan of this song. It's kinda hot. Please don't attack me for being late. It's not nice to throw rocks at old people.
Here's John on Barack and black nerds. I obviously disagree. But it's fun to read about the fate of black nerds in TNR. I think some honesty is due in this debate--I've never fit squarely in the black nerd box, which may skew my perspective. It's true, I loved D&D, the Commodore 64, comics and Star Trek TNG. I also loved Galaxy Rangers, G.I. Joe and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. But so did most kids I knew. D&D and my interest in fantasy was the one thing that really marked me as different. None of my friends told me I was acting white for playing D&D, they just thought it was weird. But they thought it was equally weird that my parents didn't have a couch, that my house was basically covered in books, that my Dad ran a business out of his basement.
I never had the whole goth/mohawk/black trench coat thing working. I didn't really hear Led Zeppelin until I was well into my 20s. I loved football and basketball, was about as hobbled as most boys I knew when it came to girls, and a mediocre MC. Perhaps most importantly, I was terrible at school--I mean really bad. I almost failed the eleventh grade, and I dropped out of college as soon as I saw a viable out. Does all this mean I'm not really a black nerd? Or is it just that the rules are different if you're a black nerd in a black community.
I think different cultures have their rules and mores. I'd say the mores of the black community didn't all come natural to me--I was terrible at basketball, but I had to play because it was the official neighborhood sport. I was an awful dancer, but at a black party there is one person who will be ridiculed more than the guy who can't dance--the guy who doesn't dance at all. That last point is key. The thing I came to love about my community was that they didn't expect you to be a master, but they expected you to try, to fight--sometimes literally. If you saw ten dudes banking your homeboy, you had to help--not because you were Bruce Lee, but because that was your man, and you were expected to take the fall with him. Winning wasn't the point.
This is a rambling, rambling post. The point I'm making is about labels and how they're applied. I say that I was never a natural for the community mores, but I bet that's true--in varying ways--for half of all of us. Kenyatta dances like she comes from West Baltimore (or the West side of Chicago) but she can talk like anyone from the Oak Park of her youth. Me, I sound like where I'm from. I stopped bopping after my 30th--it didn't seem dignified. But I really don't have much else on the essentialism scale. And yet, for whatever reason, I've always been at home in Harlem, or--as Jay would say--on any Martin Luther.
Barry live and in effect
I am smiling...
Heh, the trailer for Black Dynamite is here. I never was much for blaxploitation, still looks interesting. I always thought Michael Jae White deserved more than Heath Ledger's razor. In a just world he would have been Jean-Claude Van Damme. Actually let's hope not.
The many moods of Conrad Black
Andrew points us to this truly fascinating take on the justice system penned by the now incarcerated Conrad Black:
The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people
(2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan.
US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private
prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically
influential correctional officers' unions that agitate for an unlimited
increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences. The
entire "war on drugs", by contrast, is a classic illustration of supply-side
economics: a trillion taxpayers' dollars squandered and 1m small fry
imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year; as supply of and demand for
illegal drugs have increased, prices have fallen and product quality has
improved.
I wish to advise Lord Hurd that when I return to the UK I would like to take
up more energetically than I did initially his request for assistance in his
custodial system reform activities.
Obviously, the bloom is off my long-notorious affection for America.
Whatever you think of the points, it is shockingly beautifully written. Read the whole thing. I think I most love the title--"From my cell I scent the reeking souls of US justice." Smells like Mordor to me.
More on race and fantasy...
We had a thread on this last week, and quickly became apparent that I was nubcake, tapping out on Dragonlance and Octavia Butler. Anyway here's an interesting piece of writing on the role of nonwhites in fantasy and sci-fi. I think I'll just follow the discussion below and take notes. It's interesting because, as a kid, I never gave this subject much thought. I remember my lecturing me and my brother Malik about the Drow. I also love that in WoW the "Drow" are the good guys, and the "high elves" are evil.
But I grew up in a house where the pantheon was Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Nat Turner. From that perspective, D&D, comics, sci-fi was almost a retreat, a vacation away from the real. Blackness was all around me, so I tended to cut some slack in the world of fantasy. I don't know. Maybe too much...
November 23, 2008
Open NFL Thread
Jets smack the Titans. My boys smack the woeful niners. What else folks? Comewiddit...
I feel like a black Republican...
Sophia Nelson makes the case for more outreach:
That relationship may be lost for generations, thanks to a campaign by Sen. John McCain
that seemed to simply concede the black vote. According to one senior
aide, McCain had been polling close to 20 percent of the black vote
before the primaries ended. But then his "Forgotten America" tour,
which started soon after, never seemed to go anywhere. I knew of only
one high-level black adviser or spokesperson on his full-time paid
campaign staff. The GOP convention was embarrassingly devoid of people of color -- among more than 2,000 delegates, only 36 were black.
The problem, former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele told the Washington Times
last week, is that party officials "don't give a damn." To them, he
said, "outreach means let's throw a cocktail party, find some black
folks and Hispanics and women, wrap our arms around them -- 'See, look
at us.' And then we go back to the same old, same old."
"The party has simply not understood the importance of having highly
visible black Republican operatives, elected officials and political
spokespersons working for it on an ongoing basis," adds an African
American who worked for the Republican National Committee during the administration of the first President Bush. "It's not our message as much as it is our messengers that are killing us."
I'd like to see a source on that 20 percent number. I'm not buying McCain getting anywhere close to that in this election. Anyway, it seems what Nelson is talking is diversity. She makes the case that GOP should look for blacks amongst its own and promote them more. Of course this exactly the kind of ID politics that modern Republicans argue against. Frankly, it does make good business sense to me.
I'd expect, over the next 20 years, for these guys to get better at it. The Dems nominated Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, a straight token move. But as I've said before, at least they were trying. From those failed diversity efforts you learn something. Ferraro may have been a token. Hillary Clinton is not. The most important thing, assuming the GOP even cares, is to start walking and keep walking. Black folks were not always property of the Dems. I see no reason why they always would be.
I am late on this, as usual...
But what a vicious graff from George Packer on Bill Kristol:
It's not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn't attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain's "suspension" of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouchingagain and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell--it was an unpredictable year.
And the Lord said let there be hyperlinks. The beauty of the web is that none of us can hide, these days. The more successful you become, the more people are watching. As for Kristol himself, I don't much care whether the Times replaces him. I love the paper, but I'd rather take a daily jaunt through the blogs than read their columnists. Blogs are just so much more alive.
November 22, 2008
Is it wrong...
...that I put down this Times story after reading this lede:
President-elect Barack Obama
won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left
wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to
invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate.
Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet -- Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy F. Geithner
as secretary of the Treasury -- suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to
govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with
pragmatists rather than ideologues.
OK, I went and read it after I decided to post. Am I the only one not surprised that, in the midst of economic calamity and two wars, Obama's going with some experienced hands? I feel like I keep reading this "Newsflash: Barack Obama isn't a leftie" story since the primaries. I never thought he was really to the left of Hillary Clinton. He just happened to be anti-war. That isn't the same thing.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama boasted of opposing the Iraq War from the start.
But as president-elect, he has come to the rescue of surge supporter
Joe Lieberman and flirted with the idea of keeping on Bush
administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates -- and now he seems poised
to nominate war-authorizing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to serve as his
secretary of state.
How are the things after the "but" in opposition to what precedes it? Buchanan opposed the Iraq War. Hitchens supported it, but thinks Hillary would be awful. The thing that's bugging me is Obama's early nominations had swung hard left, whatever that would be, there'd be a ton of stories with headlines like "Obama abandons bipartisanship" and ledes like "He ran on change and bipartisanship, but President-Elect Obama has veered sharply to the left..."
When they kick in your front door, how you gonna come...
Man I was feeling good and nostalgic last night, so I decided to throw on some Bob, and recall my teenage years, riding the 33 bus from Rogers Station to Poly, with Uprising rocking on the walkman. I had a good time and all, but the experience was tainted. A few years back I was informed by a very good friend of mine, who happens to be white, that no self-respecting person can play Bob Marley, because all his albums had been stamped "FRAT-BOY." Damn. I do love my Bob, but it just ain't been the same since then. I tell you integration is not an unqualified good--unless it's the Clash. Speaking of which, I can't decide if I like this or not...
November 21, 2008
You too can live like Salvatore Ferragamo
So there's no way to say this with modesty, so I'll just say it--I set up Facebook fan page. Please be a fan of mine. I'm a fan of yours. Mostly.
Maybe because of that Lieberman post...
...I got to thinking about this joint. Last Emp never got his props. I got a bootleg of his album back in 99. This cut was one of the weakest. It was a great album. Yes I know--TMNT ain't Marvel. And Duke never met the Beyonder. Yeaaaargghhhh! The Power Geekness is overpowering!!!
UPDATE: Added Do You Remember. I used to bang this cut when I was writing my memoir. This is like the black nerd anthem--"In this quiet night of quiet stars\And these quiet chords on my guitar\Kids out there, I know it might be hard\But I realize how live you are." That is just beautiful.
And so it's official
She accepts. I'm nowhere near qualified to tell you what all this means. But Spencer is:
During the Democratic primaries, the Clinton campaign attracted more
familiar Democratic faces from the foreign-policy community -- the
people derided by the liberal blogosphere as self-styled Very Serious People
-- who tended to be less progressive than their counterparts in the
Obama campaign. The foreign-policy wing of the Obama campaign, during
the primaries, considered itself as a force for redressing the timidity
of the traditional Democratic foreign-policy community that acquiesced
to disasters like the Iraq war.
Uhm, does this mean no return for Samantha Power? Damn, I'm a ditz. A 6'4 big black ditz...
Drugs, jewels and Versace, writers need therapy
I keep getting e-mails from people asking to respond to this Shelby Steele interview and this column from Stanley Crouch:
In an embarrassing commingling of radical politics, racism, and
anti-Semitism, faux academics such as Jeffries, Molifi Asante, father
of Afrocentrism, and Tony Martin of Wellesley taught unscholarly rants
given to claiming the impossibility of white America ever giving black
people a fair chance; that Jews controlled the African slave trade
trade; and that they also conspired in modern times against the black
scholars like themselves who could liberate the black mind. In short,
as much bull as the campus market could bear...
It should be obvious by now that hip hop--a black popular music
already degraded by violence, misogyny, and crude materialislm--was the
last spittoon in which those academic hustles found sympathy. Insecure
middle class black kids wallow in this version of "street knowledge" in
order to give themselves a feeling of "authenticity" and, in some
cases, to profit from their interpretations of this aesthetic junk for
white friends who never lose a taste for any version of
minstrelsy--black nationalist, revolutionary, thug life, you name it. The Birth of a Nation with a back beat.
Barack Obama, a fiercely accomplished student, Constitutional
scholar, and first class writer, may well provide a symbol of the way
out of this dungeon of propaganda posing as "authenticity" or "black
consciousness." As they used to say, "Crack them books, boys and girls,
you might learn something."
What no back-hand for Kente-Cloth, dashikis, kufis, Maulana Karenga or Ma'at? I keep telling this neighborhood kids that the Nguzo Saba will be the death of us all! Seriously is this like 1994? Am I back on campus, arguing with these Nation niggers over Kimet? I read these cats and all I hear is Gza, "Shit is played-out, just like neckloads of sterling\Suede-fronts, bell-bottoms and tricolor shearlings."
I think Stanley Crouch is the sort of writer who feels comfortable attacking the flawed identity politics of black nationalism out of one side of his mouth, while deploying those same politics out the other. It's all fine and good to tackle some shit Molefi Asante was preaching almost twenty years ago--there is some disreputable shit behind Afrocentricity. But Crouch is worst, because he hides his essentialism behind a veneer of humanism and respectability. This is the same dude who, only a couple years ago, embraced Alan Keyes's claim that Barack Obama wasn't black. But now Obama evidently is black, but only because Crouch has found a use for him--clubbing his ancient adversaries from culture wars past.
The dishonesty inherent in that approach runs right through Steele. Conservatives who give this dude a platform to basically call the president-elect of the United States an Uncle Tom (what else is a bargainer?) are not serious. I've said my piece many times on Steele, but I guess it bears repeating. Here is a dude who repeatedlyargued that white guilt was causing us to lose the Iraq War. Who subtitled his book "Why Obama Can't Win" and now plans to take that subtitle off in future editions. I am thinking out loud here: What is this if not intellectual cowardice? How are these cats not running a hustle? In what time are we living when the president is smarter, and more nuanced in his analysis, than the people charged with analyzing him?
Because It's Friday...
Alright folks let's discuss. Today's poem is here.
This week in the NFL
Oh man, I feel for Buffalo. It's a hard-knock life Bills fans. Anyway, what are we looking for this week? For my Lions fans, who have nothing to smile about this year, I offer the following. It was not always thus...
When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt
negotiated with People and other celebrity magazines this summer for
photos of their newborn twins and an interview, the stars were seeking
more than the estimated $14 million they received from the deal. They
also wanted a hefty slice of journalistic input -- a promise that the
winning magazine's coverage would be positive, not merely in that
instance but into the future.
According to the deal offered by Ms. Jolie, the winning magazine was
obliged to offer coverage that would not reflect negatively on her or
her family, according to two people with knowledge of the bidding who
were granted anonymity because the talks were confidential. The deal
also asked for an "editorial plan" providing a road map of the layout,
these people say.
The winner was People. The resulting package in its Aug. 18 issue --
the magazine's best-selling in seven years -- was a publicity coup for
Ms. Jolie, the Oscar winner and former Hollywood eccentric who wore a necklace ornamented with dried blood and talked
about her fondness for knives before transforming herself into a
philanthropist, United Nations good-will ambassador and devoted mother of six.
In
the People interview, there were questions about her and Mr. Pitt's
charity work and no use of the word "Brangelina," the tabloid
amalgamation of their names, which irks the couple.
For the record, People denies this, but I'm not sure what else they'd say. Unlike a lot of other celeb mags, People still holds on to a some sense of journalistic ethics. Or maybe not. I think this sort of thing is good in the short term, but bad over the long-term. Frankly, I've stopped reading celeb profiles in all magazines. What are you really going to learn? What really is the point? Why not just send the press release directly to the fans? Someday soon, Hollywood will figure this out and publish its own magazines--if there are any magazines still around.
Because It's Friday...
Here's a classic. Robert Hayden's epic Middle Passage. Comments will open this afternoon. Take your time with this one, and go slow. It will test you. Read after the jump.
Here's Hit & Run on Holder back in the Clinton days:
Holder wanted "minimum sentences of 18 months for first-time convicted
drug dealers, 36 months for the second time and 72 months for every
conviction thereafter." He also wanted to "make the penalty for
distribution and possession with intent to distribute marijuana a
felony, punishable with up to a five-year sentence."
I think the worst part of all this is you can bet that not a single Senator is going to question Holder about his views on the drug war. No one fucking cares. This thing is wreaking havoc on communities across the country, and yet it's left to the Mike Gravels and Ron Pauls of the world to tackle. Damn. This is not a good sign. Here's Obama during the campaign:
"I think it's time we also took a hard look at the wisdom of locking up
some first-time, non-violent drug users for decades. Someone once said
that '...long minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the
best way to occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease.'
That someone was George W. Bush - six years ago. I don't say this very
often, but I agree with the president. The difference is, he hasn't
done anything about it. When I'm president, I will. We will review
these sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the
blind and counterproductive warehousing of non-violent offenders. And
we will give first-time, non-violent drug offenders a chance to serve
their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation
programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing
bad behavior. So let's reform this system. Let's do what's smart. Let's
do what's just".
He needs to be real about that. I hope the Holder deal isn't an indication of his thoughts on drug policy. I also hope Holder doesn't still hold on to those neanderthal veiws.
November 20, 2008
The Last Tycoon
Damn. Dame Dash seems to have taken something of a fall. I won't revel in another man's misery. But the split between me and hip-hop has its orgins in Big Pimpin amd the Benjamins. Unlike most heads I wasn't bothered by the unvarnished lust for material things and money--I was bothered by the utter lack of respect for money. This is an old story stretching back to Frankie Lymon (Larenz Tate murdered that role, btw) and extending up though gold ropes and "make money, make money money money." But it's almost like when you don't come up around money, but live in a society that worships it, it lessens the chance that you'll understand it. What would I have done at 20 if someone had dropped a half-mil in my lap, and had no one around to really counsel me?
I remember when every rapper in the world was getting cameos from Donald Trump. It rubbed me the wrong way then, but years later, once I read up on Trump, I remember thinking, "This is who these guys idolize? This is their notion of wealth?" Anyway, it ain't a black thing, a hip-hop thing, or even poor people thing. Coming up around money doesn't mean rich kids don't burn their way through it. I think it's just a people thing.
So awesome
OK, this goes too deep for me. I'm a geek, but my powers are mere cantrips in the presence of this master:
Obama knows more Star Trek trivia than you ever will. He just doesn't see the need to talk about it and scare off the women.
Obama
would spend his time with Michelle and the girls whenever he came home
from the campaign. And then would stay up all night watching MST3K
episodes when they went to sleep.
Obama wants to start his inaugural address with "I have come here to govern wisely and chew bubble gum."
Obama knows that Hal Jordan is the best Green Lantern. But he'd rather hang with Kyle.
Uhm, no. He prefers John Stewart.
This will offend you
So if your idea of spare-time is clutching your pearls, please stay away. Moving on, I think I read the best case for white use of "nigger" in comments. Here's frequent commentr laborlibert:
I like
self-loathing Jew as well. In fact, I consider myself a self-loathing
Jew, and I'm not even Jewish (I am a Irish/Italian Catholic, although
I'm often mistaken for a Jew). I also think the term "Jew-face" is very
funny, and I use it to piss off a good friend who is black and Jewish
who for some reason only considers herself exclusively black.
But I don't like SLJ nearly as much as I like the word N-gg-r. Don't
get me wrong, I don't use it, even in all-white company. But I want to.
Not because I hate blacks, or I think its cool or I want to be black,
but because its probably the most dynamic and versatile word in the
English language. From one sentence to the next, it can be used to
express contempt, fraternity, Love, humor, racial identity, racial
inclusion (when honorarily conferred on non-blacks), and countless
other feelings and attitudes toward the subject. I can't think of any
other word that compares and it kind of sucks that I can't include such
an effective word in my arsenal. I could put it to great effect even in
my profession(for example at a deposition: "Objection to
form...N_gg#r").
I give you black folk credit for taking a word loaded with hate, and making it your own.
Labor's case for nigger is basically my own. Frankly, as I've said, I think it's a beautiful, protean, magical word. I love the ATCQ's slur "sucka nigga." I love the retort, "Nigger please." More than that I love, the trivializing disrespect of, "Nigger,what?" I love the fraternity of "Thar's my nigger." I had a buddy whose grandfather used to walk with a cane. But he called the cane his "Nigger-be-cool" stick. because he'd use it as a club, if he had to. My mother used to call brothers who stood on the corner "If I hadda had my gun niggers." She got this from one of my Dad's old Panther buddies who was always talking big about what would have done to some dude who disrespected him if he'd had his gun, "That motherfucker wouldn't have said that if I hadda had my gun." The point was that these were people who lived in this theoretical, coulda, shoulda, woulda world. But to my sixteen year-old ears, "If I hadda had my gun niggers" really came across as something I didn't wanna be. My Moms was a master of deploying language to motivate kids.
Anyway, the point is I love the word, like I love all words. I hate it's overuse, just like I hate the overuse of hot-sauce, sugar or wasabi. But I don't hate wasabi. I basically have decided that the whole "who can and who can't say nigger" should
be left to individuals. It's generally true that black people don't
like white people using the word, and the case for that is quite
obvious--just because my best friend gets to call his wife honey,
doesn't mean that I also get to call her honey. They have a particular
relationship, based on a shared history. Ditto for blacks.
That said, I've heard anecdotal reports of young blacks and whites--or young blacks and Asians exchanging the word without offense. If that doesn't offend the black people they're using it with, I don't much care. I see no problem with repeating rap lyrics or reporting on something someone said. (People who use say "the n-word" annoy me. We should ban "the n-word" not nigger.) But I'd rather you not use it in reference to me or my folk--unless you're willing to let me call your wife honey.
It isn't that culture doesn't matter. It does. But preaching to the
choir produces no converts. And shifting demographics suggest that the
Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out
unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it
belongs.
Religious conservatives become defensive at any suggestion that
they've had something to do with the GOP's erosion. And, though the
recent Democratic sweep can be attributed in large part to a referendum
on Bush and the failing economy, three long-term trends identified
by Emory University's Alan Abramowitz have been devastating to the
Republican Party: increasing racial diversity, declining marriage rates
and changes in religious beliefs.
Suffice it to say, the Republican Party is largely comprised of
white, married Christians. Anyone watching the two conventions last
summer can't have missed the stark differences: One party was brimming
with energy, youth and diversity; the other felt like an annual Depends
sales meeting.
With the exception of Miss Alaska, of course.
She continues and makes some pretty indisputable points about demographics. In terms of religion, I'm up in the air about that. The GOP doesn't just bank on the faithful, they bank on the sort of white faithful who tend to repel everyone else. Jerry Falwell wasn't just some white Southern preacher, he was segregationists who'd excoriated Martin Luther King. These guys didn't just push the heathens out, they actually pushed out some of the faster growing subsets among the god-fearing. They're taking their slice of the pie, but only a slice of their slice.
I do think that Terri Schiavo was a huge blunder. The thing that the GOP missed in all that is that the only thing Americans may respect more than religion, is the privacy of the family. Whatever you think about Schiavo, it had to have been a lot of people's nightmare to see their last days, not just weighed out in court, but subject to congressional resoloutions. I really think that Schiavo was, in Mobb Deep parlance, the start of their ending. It was a shocking, shocking overreach.
The Democratic party and the left won a stunning victory in this
election, and while they should be savoring it (and most are) a few are
busy trying to settle old scores. It's pathetic, but it's also cause
for some optimism: these people are a cancer on the Democratic party
that even a landslide victory couldn't cure.
Maybe. But if you're gonna take advice, best not to get from a closeted D&D geek who got sonned by Rick Sanchez. Shall we go to the tape? Lets!
Bjork Awesomeness
Meh because I feel like it. Me and Kenyatta saw her do All Is Full Of Love and Joga back in 2003 out on Coney Island (the first one might be from that show). I was like 27, and this was like the most romantic thing I'd ever done with a woman. Don't know if that says something about me or Bjork. In the words of Gza, "her mutherfucking style was mad murderous.
Anyway, Samori was in B'more with my folks (he'd recently advanced past the stage of saying "no" to any question you asked him). I had just lost, like, 40 pounds of baby-weight and was feeling Romeoesque. They were serving red wine at the concession stand. A buddy of mine was there with a disaster of a girl. I wrote a shitty review for the Voice. Heh, to be young again. Good times.
And since we're talking craft....
I just want to highlight an incredible graff from an incredible writer. This Burkhard Bilger's lovely lede from a piece on brewing beer:
Elephants, like many of us, enjoy a good malted beverage when they can
get it. At least twice in the past ten years, herds in India have
stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and
gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four
villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted
themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In
Panama, they've been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of
ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol.
They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring
their larvae a pleasant buzz. Fruit-fly brains, much like ours, are
wired for inebriation.
Check out the whole piece. It really is quite gorgeous.
Lieberman and Couric
Same old Joe. The "partisanship" argument is such a dodge. There's been a lot chatter out there about the weakness of the Senate. I guess. But what I see here is the incredible weakness Joe Lieberman shows in this video. His defense of that "Is Barack Obama a Marxist" crap is, coincidentally, Clintonesque. He dodges, hedges, reframes and recasts, but never head-up addresses the question, "Was I wrong?" "Should I have answered that question differently?" I'll never understand what a man like that has to lose by saying "You know I was wrong to say that, I should have said xxxxx." I went over this with Ayers, but people who express a fake regret, who can't actually publicly and honestly say where they were wrong display a certain dishonor. He can't man up. It's sad. But as always, I really believe that's on him--not Obama.
It's also amazing how "ending the partisanship" is always code for "I am right" when Lieberman is speaking, like crossing party-lines is somehow, in and of itself, valuable. Lieberman is an opportunist of the highest order. I understand why they didn't take him down yesterday--it really isn't Obama's way. My man is focused on getting shit done--I really believe that--not meting out justice. But there is a time and place for meting out justice. 2012. Connecticut.
On Terry Gross
A commenter pointed out that I failed to credit Fallows
on this. Truth is, I didn't even see it till I went through the
comments. I'm kind of flattered that I independently came to the same
conclusion as Jim--Terry Gross is a beast. He's right that it's totally
conventional to say that. But sometimes the crowd is right. I spent
last summer hawking my book across the country and did a lot of radio.
After a while, you start to be able to see who's really, really good at
it. I thought Terry pushed just hard enough, without grandstanding.
Someone mentioned the Bill O'Reilly interview. I actually don't like
that one much. I thought she lost control.
Anyway here is a nice excerpt from Fallows:
At the most obvious level, Terry Gross succeeds in this interview
simply by avoiding the two most common, and laziest, styles of today's
broadcast interviewers: surplus aggressiveness, long ago made familiar
by Mike Wallace and now lampooned by Stephen Colbert; and lapdogism,
most recently on display in Greta Van Susteren's sessions with Sarah
Palin and the default mode of Larry King Live. Both of these extremes
reflect the confusion of toughness of manner -- do you
interrupt, are you scowling, are you borderline impolite -- with
toughness of inquiry, which is something altogether different and can
happen under the most polite and civil auspices.
She also
avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style
interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she
knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.
This really won't end well...
So predictable to see Joe the Plumber now attacking McCain for not defending Palin--even when he's defended her at every turn. Nativisim is about eating all the natives--even the nativist natives. The same lynch-mobs that showed up to McCain's rallies would have strung him up in a second. People often compared Obama's crowds to McCain's. The real difference is McCain's crowds, at the end, weren't there to support him--they were there because they believed Obama was a Muslim. Obama didn't draw 70,000 people who hated McCain, he drew 70,000 people who--mock them if you want--loved him. McCain's mob never loved him, they just hated a specter of the dude he was running against. Joe the Plumber has always been that rambling fool at the end of the bar. But McCain gave the fool a platform. How fitting that he's using it to now spit on McCain.
November 19, 2008
We are all House Negroes now
Zawahiri needs to keep Malcolm's name out his mouth. But more to the point, fools need to retire words like "house Negro" and "Uncle Tom." Not because they're mean, but because so few black folks actually talk that way anymore. There are many ways of insulting your fellow blacks for all manner of offenses. It's an insult to any black person whose ever played the dozens to have these weak cliched terms out there. I know we can do better than "House Negro." Personally I prefer, "Sucka Nigga," but hey that's just me. Also, in terms of other people, I've always loved "self-loathing Jew." Whenever I hear term I understand what it must feel like to be white and want to call yourself a nigger. I mean it's so poetic and grand--not fool, not idiot, not chump but "self-loathing Jew." Awesome.
The Rucker got a problem this year...
Go ahead, you know you wanna say it--She should be studying!!She could be the next Condie Rice!
But some of us are brave...
Not everyone rolled over on Lieberman. I would have, obviously, liked to have seen him gone. I have written much on this because I'm not that outraged by it, and I can't figure out why. I thought Rachel Maddow made a damn good case the other night for removing Lieberman, and offered a thorough counter to Evan Bayh. But for some reason, this one just isn't getting my hackles up. Maybe it's because of how I see Lieberman. He is, no doubt, self-aggrandizing, sanctimonious and self-interested. But I don't see him being an obstacle to Obama, mostly because I can't see how it would be in his interest. He's capped politcally, no? What does he really have to gain by being a thorn to Obama? That's a stupid question. Who can tell the future. Like I said, I wish he was gone. He's not. The world moves on.
The unrepentant Bill Ayers
Everyone should listen to his Fresh Air interview. It's just vintage Terry Gross, no hollering or invented rage, but she doesn't let up and repeatedly pushes him. The fascinating thing for me is his unwillingness to admit mistakes unless everyone else involved in the period admits their mistakes to. You know I don't disagree with him about the nature of Vietnam. I'll take this opportunity to again plug the Weathermen doc which does a great job of showing you how this guys decided to start planting bombs.
But I don't like his concept of atonement. It seems to hold that when you admit a mistake, you somehow hand something over to your enemy, you have somehow surrendered. It's a very Bush-like concept. Me, I've always felt like, if you think you did something wrong you should say so. You don't do that to make other people feel better, you do it to keep yourself clean, to keep your own honor in tact. It's not your responsibility to manage someone else's moral affairs. I kept getting this "I'll apologize if you'll apologize" vibe. That said, if he doesn't think he was wrong he shouldn't back down.
Snoop on Martha Stewart
And I say to myself what a wonderful world...
Maybe we won't welcomed as liberators
Andy McCarthy, one-time parroter of the "Bill Ayers ghost-wrote for Obama" theory offers us the following:
Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds
have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely.
And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi
democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam's
terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were
assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich
Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt,
the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything.
Because, of course, historically people have welcomed being invaded and
occupied by a foreign power whose actions lead to years of chaos, a
huge civilian death toll, and millions of displaced people.
This idea that Iraq should thank us for unilaterally invading their country is fascinating. Who said the colonizing spirit was dead?
The thing about Eric Holder
...I mean, besides this being the first step in Barack Obama's plan to institute a Mugabe-style transfer of wealth to the ghettos of America. I was talking to Kenyatta this morning, and she was making the obvious point that the "first black Attorney General" thing doesn't change anything for the average black kid walking down the street. I countered that this gets it backwards. Holder and Obama's "first" status isn't suppose to directly, 1 to 1, improve the lives of black folks, but rather mark how far black people--and by extension the country--have come. I know Obama is a product of many things. He is first, and foremost, the product of the home his parents and grandparents made for him. But he's also the product of the South Side of Chicago, the historic economic and political power center of black America.
The first black congressmen to be elected in the 20th century came from the South Side of Chicago. The first big black banks and insurance companies (at least in the North) were products of the South Side. Indeed, the city of Chicago, itself, was discovered founded by a biracial black man. The only other semi-successful run for president was Jesse Jackson--himself a South Side resident. My point is that all of these achievements were made possible by black people working in consort with many other people. In that light, I see Obama--and Holder--in light so unremarkable and cliche that it makes me shudder. They are both markers of what Negroes can do when they go out and vote.
UPDATE: I'm not sure why, but I think people are taking this as some sort of statement on the black vote in the past, or the lack thereof. I guess it is a statement, but the point in listing Jackson, Dawson, De Priest etc. was to give some historic context--in other words to specifically avoid the "Negroes don't vote" canard. Obama is obviously the most spectacular marker of us voting. But he isn't the only one.
November 18, 2008
Race and D&D
Here's an interesting essay on the presence--or lack of presence-of non-white folks in D&D throughout history. It's a funny thing to be a black kid into fantasy. Most of this stuff is ripped from Tolkien, and as much as I love LOTR, there is, indeed, something disquieting about the total whiteness of the movies. I don't blame that on Jackson or Tolkien. If someone was doing a fantasy epic based on Xhosa creation myths, I wouldn't expect to see any white people.
Some time ago, I stated that I'd offer an explanation for why me and Kenyatta aren't married. A few weeks ago, when the Prop 8 stuff hit, my Pops called to laugh at me. He was laughing at the irony that I, a dude who would not marry, could be so adamant about gay marriage. As I'll explain in a second, I don't see much of a contradiction. Then this morning, I happened to be hanging out over at Postbougie and saw this Cynthia Tucker piece arguing that Barack and Michelle will somehow improve the marriage rates in the black community. You guys know what I think of these Barack the Magic Negro arguments. Still, the constant harping on the marriage rates in the black community, and the brandishing of that shockingly dubious 70 percent stat (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) always gets me going. So you're in luck fellow travelers. Today's the day you get to read what makes Kenyatta and Ta-Nehisi tick.
I met Kenyatta twelve years ago on the yard of Howard University. I was walking with another girl (not my girl!) and she was standing out there in jeans, her hair wrapped in African fabric. Over the next couple years we got to know each other pretty well, but seriously, at that moment, right there, I was undone. We were good friends for like two years after that, and then we started dating. She was, in a word, perfect. Where would you find a black woman loved the Gza as much as Fitzgerald? Who could move from Paula Giddings's latest to Seinfeld jokes?
Anyway, I think we must have been together for about a year when she got pregnant. It helps here to know a little bit about me. I came up in a time of chronic absentee fatherism. I also come from a family of seven, by four women and one father. As I say in my memoir, I've got brothers born to best friends, brothers born in the same year. Still, in my house, and in the minds of all my dad's children, fatherhood was a sainted calling. Particularly in my mind, it marked the barrier between boy and man. That isn't fair, but I'm only speaking to my state of mind. In the late '80s, the community was going to seed, and I think a lot of us felt like black men had abandoned their posts, had just threw up their hands and said "Fuck it. Crack. AIDS. Saturday Night Specials. Kids dying over Jordans. Whatever. We're out." [MORE]
So it became clear that I couldn't leave Facebook. (*shakes fist*) Still, is it wrong to delete friends? I'd actually like to use my Facebook to keep track of people I want to keep track of. It's nightmare sorting through people you don't know, while trying to find the ones you do. Would I be wrong to trim my Facebook friends back? Only people under 25 are allowed to answer this question. The rest of us are too old.
Ever the curmudgeon
Hitch on Clinton as SoS. For the record, I'm not sure he's wrong. I'm not opposed to Clinton as SoS. But I haven't heard anyone make the case for why she's the most qualified person for the job. Is this just about healing old wounds?
Also on Prince
Several comments made a great point about connecting Prince and Prop 8--Jehovah's Witnesses don't vote. For the record, Prince claims he was misquoted. I think I agree with Andrew, in the sense that the NYers fact-checkers are tops in the business. I'd be shocked if they blew something this big.
Here is how it will get done...
..at least for black folks, I think. I don't think we'll get it until we see how close this thing really is.
November 17, 2008
Prince is a homophobe
The dude who sang, "If we can't make babies, maybe we can make some time" (a great, great line by the way) is anti-gay. I think Andrew is drawing a bizarre line between Prince's homophobia and Prop 8 and black people. In the 80s, Madonna wanted to be black more than Prince. Isn't he a Jehovah's Witness? Doesn't that likely have a lot more to do with his beliefs than being black?
The
origins of "meh" are murky, but the term grew in popularity after being
used in a 2001 episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer suggests a day
trip to his children Bart and Lisa. "They both just reply 'meh' and keep watching TV," said Cormac McKeown, head of content at Collins Dictionaries.
Now if we can only get some love for "stilo," "dunnie," and "weak-sauce."
A while back, in a debate with Peter Suderman that's vanished into the
American Scene's lost archives, I argued that the Trek franchise needed
a complete reboot - one that keeps the iconic characters, keeps the Enterprise's
five-year mission, and keeps the basic outlines of the
Federation-Klingons-Romulan political dynamic, but otherwise untangles
itself from the burden of maintaining real continuity with the five
television series and ten movies that have come before. I suggested Batman Begins as a model.
Meh, I always hear sci-fi writers bitching about continuity. Meanwhile, James Bond is still rolling. I'd be more sympathetic if the stuff they're churning out wasn't so awful. Continuity didn't kill the last few 90s Batman sequels--Joel Schumacher did. Continuity didn't kill the the last few 80s Superman sequels--Richard Pryor, God bless him, did. And sorry to go back to this, but Mary Jane isn't--nor was she ever--the reason Spiderman drifted into suckage. (Was the Clone War Mary Jane's idea?)
Star Trek has been bad because the storytelling has been bad, because they needed to make the Borg more huggable. These dudes have an entire universe to play with, much of it unburdened by Kirk, Spok, or Wolf 359. I understand that you need tent-pole characters to market with, and I'm not opposed to prequels or reboots. But people keep pointing to the artifice, even though the basics don't bend. Batman Begins was good because Christopher Nolan kicked ass. Superman wasn't because Bryan Singer basically didn't. Rebooting, like bringing in new characters, like killing off major characters, like time travel, is a device. It works well when done well, and doesn't when it isn't
NFL trash-talk
Damn my boys needed that one. It wasn't even the win--it was the method of it. Going into yesterday, I couldn't escape that feeling that we were soft. But they toughed it out yesterday. So let's go folks. How'd your squad do? Looks like the Titans are for real. Which means I get to post Earl Campbell footage. Damn those Oilers uniforms were hot.
A Yusef Komunyakaa Bonus Beat
This is a great lecture for young writers, and some beautiful reading for anyone who liked his stuff from last Friday. Komunyakaa isn't just a great writer, he is one of the best readers in the business. Dig the part where he talks about building a poem--it's true for all writing, and I think all story-telling. I remember watching Mad Men and getting the same feeling one might have admiring a great piece of architecture.
Here's a link to Venus's Fly Traps, which he reads in this lecture.
Greatest comment ever
Lawl. Just saw this in the C-64 thread:
Surely on taxes, for example, it works the other way around.
That might be why taxes are the one issue where the conservative
position has been wholeheartedly co-opted by liberal politicians (Obama
running to McCain's right on tax cuts)
This is just too predictable, but I loved my Commodore 64. From Loderunner to Bruce Lee (pictured above) to Mission Impossible Mission (Destroy him robots!) to Karateka to Exploding Fists. But what I loved most was the ability to program BASIC. My kid is asking for PSP for Xmas, and I guess I'll get him one. But he also has an interest in computer programming. The beauty of the Commodore and BASIC was that an eight or nine year-old kid could go for his. Is there anything out there like that now? Maybe I'll just get him a PC, throw Neverwinter Nights on there, and let him mess around building modules. We've done a pretty good job about encouraging the imagination in this house. LEGOs are shockingly expensive, but they really are classic toys--though we avoid the movie-themed ones. Anyway, I want to keep encouraging the boy to be a creator as opposed to a consumer. Is there anything out there now with the same programability as the Commodore?
Bama on 60 Minutes
If you haven't seen it, here he is. Best part is at the end where he's joking about his mother-in-law.
Abraham Lincoln really had to have a highly inclusive cabinet because:
a) the Republican party was still not a completely institutionalized
entity, and to keep it together in its first shot at power Lincoln
needed all the major figures in the party to be represented and; b) the
country was at war--a real war--and that almost always calls for
inclusivity, even to the point of having governments of national unity.
Neither of these factors apply in this case. Obama has massively more
control over the Democratic party than Lincoln did, and while we are in
an economic crisis, it's not nearly as bad as the Civil War or WWII. So
the conditions that necessitated a "team of rivals" don't apply. I'm
increasingly wondering if this will turn out to be a "circular firing
squad of rivals."
Not if Obama maintains his penchant for "No Drama." That is the key to so much. If he can keep the ego and petty squabbling out, he'll be fine. I imagine that's harder to do on a presidential level. I wonder how much of the Clinton entourage would be accompanying her to the White House.
Pro-life and pro-family agendas can appeal to minority voters in an
increasingly diverse society. California, Arizona and Florida approved
amendments banning same-sex marriage. They did so at least partially on
the basis of African-American and Hispanic voters who "surged" for
Barack Obama and then voted against same-sex marriage. In California
(70%) and Florida (71%) black voters supported both traditional
marriage and Sen. Obama overwhelmingly.
The third core value must be a diversity agenda that aggressively
recruits ethnic minorities into significant involvement in the GOP. The
2008 Republican National Convention did not reflect America's ethnic
diversity. Demographics dictate that this must change, and decency
demands that it should. This must include a more proactive approach on
immigration reform.
So not entirely for the rest of us, but if it were inclusive it wouldn't be a southern strategy. I've thought that this was the way forward for the GOP for awhile--thought not that forward. In a parallel universe, where Hillary and Huckabee have gotten their respective party's nomination, I see Huckabee peeling off a solid 20--possibly 30--percent of the black vote.
That said, much like the original Southern Strategy, this is the sort of solution that bets on ignorance and the past, as opposed to education and the future. "Blame teh blackz" and especially "blame teh latinz," presents a demographic problem that "blame teh gayz" doesn't. But it still has the same limited returns, in that it bets on young people being as uncomfortable with gay people as their parents. I see virtually no evidence to support that idea, and a lot of evidence for the reverse. A bet against gay marriage is a bet against the future. These cats are going to have to come up with something that appeals to young people--not because young people are going to vote at the same rate as their parents, but because young people will one day actually be parents.
November 16, 2008
Team of rivals rant...
No disrespect to Doris Kearns Goodwin. I'm happy her book is in the stratosphere. Anything that helps with dead tree publishing is alright with me.
Still, there's something disturbing about how reporters have unquestioningly adopted Obama's line on this. I like the guy, obviously. I'm also excited about Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. But I know that has more to do with me seeing the world through the lens of the Uncanny X-Men than with any real world impact. (Remember when Storm's team reunited with X-Factor? Awesome.) I get creeped-out when I hear reporters repeating the politician's line. Barry's got YouTube. He's good. Tell me what you see in all this, not what he's telling you to tell me.
November 14, 2008
Even more Prop 8
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I can only write what I feel folks. I'm not entirely convinced by Rich Ford's argument here, but he's gotten to one essential truth, that has thus far gone unstated:
If we avoid the tempting but misleading analogy to race and look at
what's directly at stake, the combination of widespread opposition to
same-sex marriage and equally widespread support for other gay rights
is easier to understand. Gay rights in employment and civil unions
don't require the elimination of longstanding and culturally potent sex
roles. Same-sex marriage does. And while a lot of people reject the
narrow and repressive sex roles of the past, many others long for the
kind of meaningful gender identities that traditional marriage seems to
offer.
One guess at what group feels they were robbed of "meaningful gender identities," and thus likely long for them with a much greater intensity than the rest of the populace. It's quite likely that the same impulse that would attract men by the hundreds of thousands to the Million Man March--the sense that something had been lost--is the same impulse that would lead them to reject an expansion, and to their mind, a redefinition of marriage. I have been stuck on religion in this conversation--I've forgotten all about history. It really explains a lot. I know we're hurting folks. But it really is time to heal up and get it moving.
Yusef Komunyakaa's Thorn Merchant Poems. There are couple more than this--I think a son and a daughter poem, which are also lovely. Here is The Thorn Merchant, The Thorn Merchant's Wife and The Thorn Merchant's Mistress. Komunyakaa is, well, a bad ass. This is my favorite book from him. But almost all of his stuff is just killer. We'll talk in the afternoon.
UPDATE: Comments open guys. I have one thing to say:
Someone wrote me suggesting I cop it. Seems decent, so far. Good to hear him back.
You know your president is black when...
...he paraphrases Sam Cooke in his acceptance speech, has an office of urban policy, and gives Ebony the first photo shoot.
I'm sure it also has something to do with the fact that Johnson publications, Ebony's parent, has deep ties in black Chicago. You know all them bougie South Side Negroes run together!
UPDATE: J Starr points us to this dope, dope cover from Ebony
The Messiah Myth
Here I am in TIME tackling the debate over Obama and black culture:
Obama has made a particular point of invoking the individual will of
African Americans, but anyone who has spent time in a black church or
barbershop--or just watched the crowds when Obama puts forth the
message--can tell you that it isn't exactly a tough sell. When Jesse
Jackson claimed that Obama was "talking down to black people," there
was no real rush among blacks to defend Jackson. That's because, in
terms of their outlook, their belief in hard work and family, African
Americans aren't any different from white Americans.
The
belief in Obama as a force for moral reform rests on another shaky
pillar--the idea that people should get their values from what they see
on television. This goes for entertainers and Presidents. Obama can't
do the work of the family. It's not his job to buy your kid a belt or
teach him to box. His job is to monitor this nation's nuclear arsenal,
not your daughter's iPod.
In this post--civil rights age, with
the media hungry for a single black narrative, there is a strong desire
to have one voice speak to--and for--us all. But that impulse is wrong,
whether it's focused on Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or Barack Obama.
It's wrong because it distorts and flattens the very complexities and
contradictions that ultimately make black people human. In 2006, this
magazine reported on a University of Minnesota study that found, not
surprisingly, that blacks were more likely than whites to see racism in
the world. But the same study also found that blacks were more likely
than whites to blame the lack of black progress on individual factors
like hard work.
Most of you have heard this line from me before. Feel free to move along. Nothing new here...
The sad sad Dennis Miller
Women on the left hate Sarah Palin because she has a great sex-life. Right, it was all those lefty women in the McCain campaign claiming she didn't know Africa was continent, and had no idea what countries were in North America. He's joking, of course. But there's not even a punchline.
Last time
Seriously, no more on who's at fault and who isn't. But this piece by Will Saletan deserves mention. Two major things. First Saletan is forced to recant a major plank in his thesis:
I originally wrote that blacks "made the
difference" on Prop 8. I calculated this based on a margin of passage
of 4 percent. This was erroneous, because the final margin was 4.6
percent. To prevent Prop 8's passage, blacks would have had to vote
against it by a margin of something like 53 percent to 47 percent.
This is no small thing. If we accept CNN's flawedexit poll numbers it would require blacks to voted "No on Prop 8," not just at the same rate as the rest of the state, but more than any other ethnic group in California. Oh, I wish it were so. But this only leads to the biggest problem with Saletan's piece--the assumption that black community is a cabal of pinko commies:
Here we have a left-leaning constituency (blacks) that has become
politically pivotal on an issue (homosexuality) and is susceptible to a
reframing of that issue (seeing sexual orientation, like color, as
inborn) in accord with ongoing scientific research.
No we don't. Any writer who's spent significant time in the suburbs of Atlanta, on the South-Side of Chicago, or here in Harlem, knows that black people aren't "left-leaning"--they just think the GOP is racist. Surveys may show blacks leaning-left on certain issues (minimum wage? ending the war?) but take it from an actual black leftist, there is a conservative streak running through black America wider than the Mississippi. Don't confuse "enemy of my enemy"-ism, with actual sympathy. UPDATE: More thinking on that first point. Look at black folks by their demographic profile. Saletan is pinning his
argument on the chance that an undereducated, underemployed,
over-religious, disproportionately impoverished 6 percent of California's electorate
would turn the tide, not simply by supporting gay marriage, but by supporting it a higher rate than any other ethnic demographic in the state. Are you fucking kidding? Are we even trying to be serious here?
November 13, 2008
The future of the GOP Cont.
Or the past? Dig Buchanan on Latinos and blacks about halfway through. Again. Wow.
The future of the GOP
Wow. I'm not going to say anything else. I'd just be crowing. I try hard not to...But, seriously. Wow.
Should rappers get jobs?
My man Neil Drumming offers some career advice. I, personally, like Common as Emperor of Mongo.
Again it hits you...
...only this time you're hit by how incredibly they've fucked this thing up. I mean they basically went shopping on a credit card, and just handed the bill over to the next guy in.
More on Joe Lieberman
I have plenty of animus in storage for Lieberman. The worst thing about him, to me, is that he uses bipartisanship as a cover for rank political opportunism. His sanctimony is grating, and more importantly, deeply dishonest. I thought Evan Bayh made some good points on Rachel Maddow tonight. The strongest case against Lieberman is that you can not have a guy who claimed that the President-elect is for defeat in Iraq have subpoena power. Furthermore, there is a long-term question of discipline. If Joe simply gets off scott-free, what's to prevent other senators from doing whatever they want in the future? Moreover, anytime you penalize a caucus member you risk losing a vote, are you supposed to be held hostage to that?
Bayh's answer is that if Joe is unneccesarily obstinate or appears to be pursuing a vendetta with Obama, they can remove him. Frankly, I don't see Lieberman doing that. I don't agree that Lieberman was motivated by a particular hatred of Obama. I think he was generally pissed at the Dems for backing Lamont (the right decision) and maybe he resented Obama's swift ascent given the utter failure of Lieberman's own campaign. I don't know. I'm not in his head. I think they probably should take his chairmanship, because you have to have some sort of precedent, some sort of standards. But I don't think they will, mostly because they need all the votes they can get. Anyway, check out Bayh in the video below.
CHFF looks at Kurt Warner's assault on Ken Anderson's record.
Bill Belichick will, as they, beat take his and beat yours, and then take yours and beat his...or something like that.
Romo's on the way back to stomp one of the few teams worthy of Cowboy hate.
And Jim Brown will always be Jim Brown...though that ain't Wilson Pickett on the mix, it's Arthur Conley
Shep Smith sons some herb...
I was glad to see this. I think the power of media is, all-around, overstated. I don't think media had any love for Al Gore in 2000. They clearly had love for McCain that year, but it did nothing. I think the liked the Obama story--but one shouldn't misconstrue that with liking Obama, per se. "Obama felled by Rev. Wright" would have worked too. That said, it is a bad idea to go to war with media when you've got a VP nominee like Palin. Has anyone been watching her interviews? Whenever I hear someone using too many words in a sentence, I think they're trying to distract me while they slip their hand in my pocket. Or they're just lying. Anyway back to the mud-hole Shep Smith administers...
November 12, 2008
Get him a body-bag, Johnny
Will Smith's kid is doing a remake of the Karate Kid. Sam Jack is trying to play Sho-Nuff in a remake of the Karate Kid. I have issues with the latter, not so much the former. Busta Rhymes needs to play Sho'Nuff. That said, any day I can post video of Mr. Belding, Daniel-san, and the Cobra Kai is a good day. Also, who would be Mr. Myagi? Bruce Leroy?
UPDATE: Incidentally, there is some cool poetry here--"I was a super-hero, king of 1985\I showed no mercy, I was always Cobra-Kai\But I caught a Crane-Kick to the face..."
...And it keeps hitting you
An Office of Urban Policy? Damn. I guess Clinton and Edwards may well have done same thing. But I've got to believe that this has something to do with having a president who lives in a city. And, again, being a black man. Maybe it'll be one big bureaucratic clusterfuck. I don't know. I'm interested though. It's good to see they're trying.
The Reid-Lieberman dance...
So no one wants to take the hit for dumping Joementum. Am I reading it right? I don't believe the narrative about weak liberals not wanting to take a stand. I'm slightly out my area here. What does the room think? I don't have much of a problem with Obama punting. I wouldn't want to look vindictive if I were him either. Plus isn't it ultimately Reid's responsibility?
Dan Savage on Colbert
Thanks for the tip from Destro...
Colbert: The black man's keeping you down
Savage: A few black men have kept me down in the past
Yes, yes, Even I--the great ironist of this post-racial age--am prone to reversing the polarity on my irony detector from time to time. And so I completely missed the tongue squarely positioned in Maureen Dowd's cheek. I won't bore you with excuses. I don't think I have any. My SAT scores weren't that good. I guess this is why you don't take candy from saucy, red-headed babies.
Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.
I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length
at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried
chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.
And
I saw three white women asking a black bartender at the Bombay Club, across
Lafayette Park from the White House, if he was happy and what he
thought about Jesse Jackson's flowing tears at Grant Park, given his
envious threat to cut off a sensitive part of Obama's anatomy. "I think the tears were real," the bartender said.
And:
I saw a white-haired white woman down the block from me running out to
strike up a conversation with a black U.P.S. delivery guy, asking him
how he felt and what this meant to him.
And:
I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my
house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about
everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president. If you
don't count what Toni Morrison said about Bill Clinton, that is.
Hmm...waitress, bartender, UPS man, mailman. I'm sensing a pattern here. Is Maureen Dowd only concerned with black people who bring shit to white people? Wait? No?
It's cool that President-elect Cool has gotten everybody chatting, even if it's awkward small talk. And it's fun, after so many years of unyielding barriers, to feel sentimental.
"When suddenly CNN revealed its wall-sized announcement of the outcome,
I experienced a blissful and unembarrassed rush of racialism," Leon
Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic. "Only a hologram of Frederick
Douglass would have excited me more."
But is it time now for whites to stop polling blacks on their feelings?
I'll have to call my friend Gwen Ifill tomorrow and ask her how she feels about that.
OK, so we have Gwen Iffill. I guess that breaks the mold. Still, Maureen may want to give it a week before she makes that call. I mean, I bet Gwen has a lot of "friends" calling her this week.
There is so much more snapping to be done here. (Dude, white folks are wishing for holograms--HOLOGRAMS--of Negroes!) But I'm a gentleman, and this is like taking a candy from a baby--a saucy, red-headed baby--but a baby nonetheless. Seriously though, sometimes it's OK to just give a pound, mutter "respect, respect," and keep it moving. When in doubt, just keep it moving.
John McWhorter gives advice to nascent black nerds...
Whenever a black nerd gets teased for thinking he's white, all he has to say is four words: "Is Barack Obama white?"
Leaving aside the fact that, according to John, he, well, kinda is, this is the sort of retort that will get you slapped-up, beat-down and snapped-on for like a week straight. One thing I learned as a black nerd in West Baltimore: Get your tips on how to defend yourself from kids who know how to defend themselves, not from other black nerds....unless said nerds have figured out how to defend themselves. UPDATE: For the uninitiated, I offer this helpful dramatization of how John's theory may actually play out..
Nascent Black Nerd: [References some obscure episode of Battlestar Gallatica]
Daytwon: Son, why you always watching that white shit?
Nascent Black Nerd: Is Barack Obama white??
Daytwon: Baracka-these-nuts nigga!!!
UPDATE #2: In comments, Janine, shows us how to do this son:
A Black nerd, like any other nerd, has a backpack full of books. In 2nd
grade I pulled a Falling Down at my bus stop, swinging my back pack
around and was never messed with again.
And when he come up for air, or his boys start to stare
Just grab your Narnia and get the fuck outta there, yeah
Morality vs. Self-Interest
There is an interesting sub-debate going on the coalition politics thread that I wanted to bring out. Here are a few comments.
Me:
If you truly believe a
policy isn't in your interest, than you really should oppose it. I like
Andrew and all, but I don't support gay marriage because I expect him
to recant on the Bell Curve. I support it because I think family is a
societal good--which benefits me individually. Raise your kid right,
and I don't have to worry about him sticking up my kid. Pool your
resources, and maybe I don't have to worry about you defaulting on your
home. More abstractly, I simply don't enjoy living in a country that
discriminates. That's my feeling. That's about what I want, how I want
to live. I don't expect a reward for it. I don't expect a cookie.
DJ Moonbat responds to the point about not voting for policy that isn't in your interest:
No, you really shouldn't. You should try to behave in keeping with some
sense of morality. American democracy, contrary to popular
misconception, was not so spectacularly designed that it can produce
good outcomes with a completely amoral populace.
Morzer:
This depends on how you understand interest, not to mention morality.
After all, it may be in my interest to get eg. my rabid fox bite
treated in hospital, but my morality may insist that such treatment is
forbidden because of some religious imperative. Equally, one might
argue that by being polite to the guy on the street one gets better
directions, while one's morality might insist that a sincere, blunt
request for information would be more appropriate.
Jamal:
Do you really mean this? That seems like a really cold way to look
at politics, and it's certainly not the way I and a lot of other folks
in my particular slices of the demography see things.
I'm an Arab-American (and a Muslim-American, albeit a secular one),
and I can tell you that there's a tremendous amount of goodwill towards
the black community for sticking by us on Palestine and on profiling
and on all the other bullshit national security issues of the Bush
years.
And so on...
Perhaps this is where I break with my fellow lefties, I don't know. But I don't think people really do things--en mass and maybe even individually--that isn't in their interest. I don't believe whites began supporting Civil Rights in the 60s strictly out of an attack of moral conscience--they were not interested in being a member of a community which sanctioned the fire-hosing of children. It's clear that Jim Crow and segregation worked to the immediate advantage of some white people, but I've never believed that it worked to the long-term advantage of most white people. The price of international embarrassment, of essentially shrinking the middle-class, of destroying valuable brain-power, of sowing resentment amongst a substantial minority of the populace, of creating ghettos is high.
I firmly believe that the case against racism is not just that it's unfair to black people, but that it doesn't benefit the country as a whole. When I look at the large numbers of black men in the justice system, I'm not very interested in how much the justice system hates blacks. I'm interested in whether our justice policy is in the best interest of the country.
Perhaps, I define "interest" too broadly. I include in that definition, not simply your short and long-term well being, but how you want to live your life. I hear people say that they support "black issues" even when they aren't in their interest. Hmm, I guess. But that's like saying it wasn't in my interest to be a writer. I should have gone to law school. Certainly I would have made more money. But I include in my interest what I want to see out the world, what makes me happy, what makes me smile, what I like and love. I guess it's not in my interest to spend a whole day watching football games--I could be making money. But it certainly makes me happy. [MORE]
Jake De Grazia poses the question that is on everyone's mind:
The Cowboys? You're from Baltimore, right? I request a totally
transparent (and possibly apologetic) explanation of why you root for
the Cowboys. Please.
Yup from Baltimore. Been a Cowboys fan since 1980. When I was five, I saw football on TV and fell in love. Who can know why? One of the first teams I saw had this big beautiful blue star on their helmet. I don't have anything deep to say--it just looked cool. And they had this guy--Tony Dorsett--who looked like he was dancing up and down the field. Man, even that young, not understanding the game, I thought Dorsett was incredible.
I watched the Cowboys in the playoffs that year, right up until the championship where they were promptly smacked by the Eagles. My Dad was from Philly, and an Eagles fan--he razzed me the whole damn game. I learned a valuable lesson that year. When the Cowboys lost, I told my Pops I was switching to the Eagles. He gave me this lecture about how you can't switch teams. I told him I was rooting for the Eagles anyway--and of course the Eagles were destroyed in the Super Bowl. That was a very early lesson in why don't ever, ever switch teams.
So I was a Cowboys fan--I don't even know if I was aware of the Colts at the time, and I probably would have rooted for them later. But they left town, and until the Ravens, we had no team. By the time I got to middle school, most of my friends, coming up, l became Redskins fans. But that just seemed weak to me. "Fuck them D.C. niggers," I'd think.
Anyway, as any Cowboy fan can attest, being a Dallas fan in the 80s may have been the worst possible decade to pledge. The Cowboys were two things in 80s--really awful, or a game away from the Super Bowl. I think we went to three straight NFC championships--and lost. Shit was rough. Imagine being a six-year old kid when "The Catch" happened. But I've been there for it all--for Hogeboom, for Landry brining Ed Jones back out because of fans, for Jerry firing the whole lot of everyone. That 92 game against the 49ers was such great payback--the 49ers ruined my childhood, and to beat them in that way had me floating for a week. The thing is this--I'm old school like Dexter Clinkscales, Rafael Septien, and Tony Hill. How can I switch now?
And now I have some good old fashion smack to talk. I actually didn't even realize how much the Cowboys were hated until after college. I still don't get the hate. For my money, only two--maybe three--teams have the right to hate the Cowboys. The Redskins for obvious reasons, and the Bills for maybe even more obvious reasons, and 49ers because we played some classics. All other people who hate the Cowboys--especially people who are, like , Seahawk or Panther fans, or some other off-brand team--have no lives. Us Cowboy fans have so little respect for the Giants and the Eagles that we don't even return the hate. Call us when you're on your fourth Super Bowl. Until then, you have no right to speak.
Gay marriage and coalition politics
Pam reports some racist invective at a Prop 8 rally. It doesn't help, but it also doesn't matter. People need to support gay marriage because it's the right thing, not because they have some expectation that gay people are less racist. There's considerabledata that a large swath of Latino America is more racist than white America. But, for my money, that has nothing to do with where you should fall on immigration policy. Ditto for this e-mail I got yesterday:
I am an educated,
upper-middle-class, white, Christian man who can easily "pass" as
straight. For most of my adult life, I have voted against the
self-interest of my own socioeconomic class in favor of affirmative action,
public school funding, and all sorts of other issues and programs that benefit
the African-American and other minority communities. I think that a lot of
the anti-black anger that has been expressed in the past week has been, in part,
out of a sense of betrayal by communities that gay people have long
supported.
I guess. But no one should ever cast a vote as a quid-pro-quo. If you truly believe a policy isn't in your interest, than you really should oppose it. I like Andrew and all, but I don't support gay marriage because I expect him to recant on the Bell Curve. I support it because I think family is a societal good--which benefits me individually. Raise your kid right, and I don't have to worry about him sticking up my kid. Pool your resources, and maybe I don't have to worry about you defaulting on your home. More abstractly, I simply don't enjoy living in a country that discriminates. That's my feeling. That's about what I want, how I want to live. I don't expect a reward for it. I don't expect a cookie. UPDATE: Responding to Morzer's comment below, I added some hyperlinks. Still, "large swath" is probably too strong a phrase. I hope none of my brown folk are too ticked off.
European racism toward Obama--their problem not ours
It's been weirdly delightful to watch the racist invective roil out of the worst corners of Europe. I say delightful because it has no real sting--these guys are the dead-enders of the deadest of ends. They are rabid fans booing the visiting team--after the visiting team just stomped them 51-0. But this is the sort of thing that European folks need to remember the next time they're lecturing Americans on racism. As someone said in another comments thread, these people throw bananas at black players--their own black players--during soccer matches. The beauty of it all is that this it's their problem, not ours. This country should be proud, not that Obama won, but that he actually had an opportunity to compete. I can't imagine an Arab--or West African--President of, say, France. But maybe it'll happen. I don't know.
UPDATE: On another note, I better watch what I say. Didn't realize how many Euros I had reading. Better come hard if you're gonna go after the French.
America officially "working as intended"
What, you expected him to spec holy? Are you serious?
Obama will melt faces as the first brother to be CNC...
November 10, 2008
What can men do against such reckless hate...
Fred "God hates fags" Phelps plans to boycott Madelyn Dunham--the President-Elect's grandmother--at her homecoming. Wow. I have nothing to say except props to Pam for the link.
Especially the blacks and the gays--and the black gays...or the gay blacks...
I got this e-mail from a cat who'd read my piece in the Washington Post on Sunday. The note comes from a totally different cultural and historical perspective. It's worth publishing in its entirety. More after the jump:
I'd like to pass along some thoughts about the, "shocking, almost
certifiable faith in humanity, something that subsequent generations lost,"
and the people who live next door.
A native New Yorker, I'm coming up on my 52nd birthday. I was born and
raised in the Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan. For as
long as I live, I will remember what I saw when I was a boy: the people who
lived in my neighborhood, people much younger then than I am now who looked
older then than I'll look in thirty years' time, if indeed I am blessed
enough to live that long, people with numbers tattooed into their arms,
tattoos put there by the Waffen-SS in the Nazi concentration camps. The
couple who lived next door to my family was luckier; they were the only
members of either of their families to escape Germany before the war,
everyone else -- all of them -- died in the camps. The Nazis tried to
exterminate the Jews because they claimed they were somehow different and
therefore deserving of unremitting hatred, something less than human and
therefore unworthy of life. That's what horror truly is.
I saw a lot of tears election night. I'm a weird cat, emotions burn
slow in me. I didn't get 9/11, emotionally, until months later when I
started reading the individual stories. I think I was most sad, like a year or
two after the towers fell. Ditto for our First Black President. I felt good Election Night, but mostly numb. But
all this week small things have been pointing me to the importance of
this moment.
I saw this picture over at TPM. I don't think a lot of folks understand
how hard black people take their portrayal in mainstream media. We
probably spend more time bemoaning the latest R. Kelley affair, than bemoaning racism. America is like the NFL--without the salary cap. And some days to be
black, is to be a Detroit Lion. Before they fired Matt Millen. And then
something like this happens, and after years of feeling ashamed you look up and you see what you represent on your best days, what you hope your fam represents--vision, courage, competition, confidence--is represented at the highest levels of this country. You wake up and realize that your best face, is the face of the country, is the face of the world.
I'm broadcasting live from Harlem at five in the morning. The boy has to go to school. I've got to go run my miles. I haven't done a lick of work (as my mother would say) and yet. already, I feel the need to have a drink. Damn. Black people, are ya'll ready for this?
November 9, 2008
@Stacy
Damn dude. At least you guys beat my Cowboys. Consider this an NFL open thread.
Poland's foreign ministry on Sunday condemned an opposition member of
parliament who said U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's victory was a
triumph for al Qaeda.
"Someone regarded by the (American) Republican right as a
crypto-communist has become the leader of the world's greatest power
... and al Qaeda are rubbing their hands with glee that the new
president wants peace, not war," Artur Gorski of the opposition Law and
Justice (PiS) party told parliament last week.
"The black messiah of the new left has crushed the Republican
candidate John McCain, and America will soon pay a high price for this
quirk of democracy," he added.
"Obama is an approaching catastrophe. This marks the end of white man's civilisation," he said in an address.
To which, I say...wait for it...Awesome.
When I read this, I kept thinking, "Does the fool not realize he can catch a nuke for that?" And then I thought of that scene in Don't Drink Your Juice In The Hood where O-Dog, spoofing Ice Cube, pulls out the ICBM...."We got a problem here? We got a problem here???"
Yes, yes, I'm dead wrong. So very very wrong.
Real Issues
There's a tendency to get caught up in all the symbolism of Obama. But I realized the reality of things reading this piece--stem-cell research is coming folks. Damn.
UPDATE: Link fixt. Thanks guys.
Black people--whiners
I find this piece by Johnetta Rose Barras problematic. I should say I have great respect for Barras--she was actually quite instrumental in my early years of journalism. But I think her Outlook essay on Obama is, no disrespect, riddled with issues.
Obama isn't like the leaders who have traditionally spoken for black
America. As president, he's unlikely to embrace the confrontational
identity politics that have defined black activism for so long. He
won't tolerate an African American brand of racism or a culture of
violence. Nor is he likely to be patient with the long-standing
narrative of victimhood that has defined black America to itself and to
the mainstream for more than a century.
And
Obama is already constructing a new black political and cultural
narrative -- gathering together the best of the past, including the
coalition politics that characterized the early civil rights movement
and an image of strong black males that doesn't involve bling-bling or
hip-hop misogyny. He has decried the low-hanging pants fashion so
popular with young black men, blasted rapper Ludacris for offensive song lyrics and called on fathers to take responsibility for their families.
Are African Americans ready to accept all this and respond positively? Are they ready for a truly post-racial America?
And
One thing seems clear: Domestic issues such as health care, resolving
the mortgage crisis and creating jobs in a recession will seem piddling
compared with the treacherous task Obama faces of traversing the
rickety bridge between mainstream America and the various factions of
black America.
Is she serious? Does Barras really believe that a dude who just won 94 percent of the black vote, whose tee-shirt they're hawking from hood to hood, will have more trouble with black people, than with resolving one of the biggest financial crisis in American history?
I got a president who's calm and plain. He goes by the name of Barack Hussein
Damn it feels good to see people up on it, Cause I remember when, at first they wasn't...
Just a few weeks ago, at the height of the campaign, Representative
Michele Bachmann of Minnesota told Chris Matthews of MSNBC that, when
it came to Mr. Obama, "I'm very concerned that he may have
anti-American views...."
Attending an event with Mr. McCain in York, Pa., in August, Mr.
Lieberman said the race was "between one candidate, John McCain, who
has always put the country first, worked across party lines to get
things done, and one candidate who has not."
Now look what they caught from my cousin...
But there she was on Wednesday, after narrowly escaping defeat because
of those comments, saying she was "extremely grateful that we have an
African-American who has won this year." Ms. Bachmann, a Republican,
called Mr. Obama's victory, which included her state, "a tremendous
signal we sent..."
And what about that whole bit about Mr. Obama not always putting his
country first? "He believes that President-elect Obama -- and, then,
Senator Obama -- is a genuine patriot and loves his country,"
Respect the architects
One thing I'd ask for folks, who enjoy the poetry they read here, to do, is support the writers we highlight. I know a few folks have commented that they've purchased the books. In most cases you can get them pretty cheap on Amazon, or even better, at your local independent bookstore. Just a note on keeping the art of alive. The audience for poetry is, regrettably, so small these days. But the art is so important. Frankly, I believe all writers, starting out, should study, and write, poetry. You will most certainly not end up being a poet, and most of what you write will suck--I know this all too well--but when you go to other forms, you will know things that your peers don't. Poetry focuses on many of the essentials of writing, but it does it in a concentrated form. The great Thomas Sayers Ellis once told me poetry doesn't belong to poets. In other words other writers can benefit from spending some time studying--and deploying--the art.
For those of us who are black and gay, a group too often marginalized
within a marginalized community, I see this as a clear signal to the
LGBT advocacy community. There hasn't been enough outreach to those
groups who voted against us. We haven't reached them; there hasn't been
enough effort expended.
There is a difference between blaming African Americans
and recognizing that the black community needs to be engaged more energetically on this
issue.
As a member of said community, expect me to be more engaged--and perhaps more importantly, engaged with people I know may not want to be engaged. I believe in the moral obligation here. But there's something else. I have repeatedly said that it's in white people's interest to confront racism, that they shouldn't do it as a favor, that they shouldn't lend us a hand, but that they should recognize that it's the best thing for their kids. This is even more true for black people and homophobia. We need all the community we can get. And in these times--like white people and racism--dissing people who want to make family is a luxury we really don't have.
And then there's the obvious detriment of homophobia--the appalling HIV stats in our community. I always thought the absolute worse part of the Rev. Wright fiasco wasn't his quasi-damning of America, but the pushing of conspiracy theories in regards to HIV. It didn't make it better that it came from a guy who's been doing exactly the sort of outreach we need more of from the black church. Talk to black health professionals out in the field--they understand where the notion comes from, but they hate it all the same. Our unwillingness to talk pushes serious issues under the table. This shit will kill us. It's not a game.
Coates on The Man of Tomorrow
Here I am reflecting in the Washington Post on that clip of Joe Lowery, which I've posted umpteen times, and what it says about Obama and the rest of us. Check it out:
I'm not a religious man, but I've been enthralled with that sermon
since the day I saw it. I posted it on my blog four times. To the
chagrin of my partner, I wandered around our house muttering, in a bad
imitation of Lowery's Georgia accent, "Crazy things are happening." I
woke her up at 5:30 a.m. on Election Day, woke my son, plugged my
laptop into the speakers and played the sermon again while I got
dressed. When I got home, I posted the clip on my blog again.
At the time Lowery made that speech, I was one of those skeptical
African Americans who doubted Obama's national potential. I had always
prided myself on being "good crazy," on being a little different. I
didn't go to my senior prom; I boycotted my high school graduation. The
moment I found writing, I dropped out of college, convinced that I'd
discovered my vocation.
On any weekend, you can find me on the sidelines of a Little League
football game, urging my young son to throw himself at some kid twice
his size. On the evening of Election Day, I took him to tryouts for the
local swim team and marveled as he backstroked his way through
14-foot-deep water. Only afterward did he tell me that he'd never swum
in water that deep. He didn't make the cut, but I could care less. The
boy was clearly "good crazy."
He takes after his Pops! I know a lot of you were voicing your opinion on the kid's prospects as the next Mark Spitz. He needs more lessons--and much bigger lungs. The swim team he tried out for was no joke. But he has no fear of water, which to me is the biggest part.
November 7, 2008
But your enemies closer...
I don't have any love for Joe Lieberman. I want to be clear about that. I think he grandstands and covers for rank ambition with bullshit talk of bipartisanship. His attacks on Obama were disgusting, especially given that Obama supported him in his losing primary effort. His support of McCain seemed to be much more about his wounded ego than anything else, and in typical self-centered fashion, he's now waffling between the Dems and the GOP.
But here's the thing--in terms of pushing forward a progressive agenda, is booting a dude who votes with Dems on every issue except Iraq really the best move? Lemme add one other thing: What impressed me most about Obama's run is that when so many of us wanted Obama to bring the battle-axe, he held back. People scorned him as weak, but really he was smart and knew when to unload and when to be magnanimous. I strongly believe that talk of "anger" and "respect" won't be the keys to our future. This is business. And is booting Lieberman the best business move? I am willing to be convinced here. I'm seriously just asking.
UPDATE: I'm convinced. The comments on subpoena power got me.
I really couldn't pick anything else. This is Cornelius Eady's sprawlingly beautiful Victims of the Latest Dance Craze. Eady is one of my favorite poets. You can read a mediocre feature I wrote on him when I was 22. Damn, so long ago. Anyway, if I can find it, I'll post another favorite of mine by Eady--"Jack Johnson Does The Eagle Rock." It's a play on the Titanic and racism. But to the poem at hand. As always, comments are closed till this afternoon. We can talk then. Follow the jump to read it. UPDATE: Comments open guys. It's funny I was reading this this morning wondering if it was too sentimental. Then I hit this lovely stanza:
In the next room
Their mother throws her dress away to chance.
It drops to the floor
Like a brush sighs across a drum head,
And when she takes her lover,
What are they thinking of
If not a ballroom filled with mirrors,
A world where no one has the right
To stumble?
Truly gorgeous. Though I still don't know what this piece is about. Maybe it's just a version of Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day," put on paper...
With heartbreak all around. I swear I don't believe in the death penalty. But the psychopaths do test your convictions, no? Why did they think they'd get away? My reaction is prejudiced, emotional and wrong. All I can think when looking at those boys, Where was your father?
Prop. 8 and thinking before we write
Yesterday, I tried to outline a humanistic case against the whole "Teh blackz did us in!" argument. I also linked some math. Now we have better math. The basic idea is that you need black folks to have been about 10 percent of all votes cast on Prop 8 to make a difference. Black folks are one of the smallest minorities in California, making up about six percent of the total electorate, which numbers at about 17 million. At 6 percent, black folks are worth about a million or so votes. There were just over ten million votes cast on Prop. 8. For blacks to cast ten percent of those you would need a turnout of 90 percent in the black community. Lemme repeat that--90 percent. It's possible, I guess. I leave it to you to weigh the odds.
I'm still embarrassed by the fact that 70 percent of those who did vote, voted yes. It means we have serious work to do. But I'm seeing a makings of a disreputable trend to turn a problem into a black problem. We use disproportion as a crutch--what's important is that blacks are disproportionately poor, not that there are large numbers of white poor people. Ditto for homophobia. What's important isn't the large minority of whites, and the influential majority (barely) of Latinos who passed Prop 8, but the roughly 5 percent of the California electorate who voted for it.
Something is very very wrong with that. The anger is justified, expected, and human. But it's not how we're going to fix this.
Some thoughts on Will Smith, sorta...
I've basically sworn off big movies, and big stars. But for some reason, I'm a devoted fan of Will Smith. I was just watching the trailer for Seven Pounds, which may be awful, and yet there was a voice inside me that said, "We're going to see that film." I thought the first half of Hancock was pretty damn good, but it went to seed when it started explaining itself. Too bad to, because I also like Charlize Theron. But that's another thread.
I think part of the appealing thing is watching this black dude walk through a largely white world without compromise. I think a lot of folks missed the importance of how Barack Obama ended his victory speech. His subject, Ann Nixon Cooper, a 106-year old black woman who'd voted for him. But instead of simply casting her story as a black woman who'd suffered racial oppression, he talked about cars on the road, and planes in the air, he talked about the dust bowl and the depression, he talked about women's suffrage and he also talked slavery and the bus boycott.
Andre 3000 has this great line in one of his songs where he pretends to have a conversation with a critic of hip-hop who says "I thought hip-hop was only drugs and alcohol" and he responds by telling her hell no, "but yet it's that too." That's the thing about that story--it's not that Obama white-washed Cooper and ignored race, it's that he weaved race into the larger story of her as a human being and an American. She was not just a victim of racial oppression--and yet she was that too.
I see a lot of that in Will when I watch him acting. Dig his style in Hancock or I Robot. Whatever you think of those movies, you can see hip-hop oozing out of dude's pores. I make no brief for black exceptionalism here--this is how identity works. But I think one of the things that's so cool about this generation--the Andre 3000s, the Jay-Z's, the Colson Whitehead, the Junot Diazes--is how we claim our heritage but not to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
I want to be clear--this is about freedom and opportunity, not some special quality of this age. When he was kid, my Dad loved Dostoevsky, Dickens and Dumas. But history called him into Vietnam and then into the Black Panthers. Didn't mean he liked Dickens any less. He'd give Booker T. Washington/Malcolm X lectures on the importance of black business one moment, and then head down to the Charles Theater to see the latest French flick the next. He was always complicated, but the times called for a particular part of him.
Hmm, this was supposed to be how much I like Will Smith. I guess it's about how cool it is to get a little more free.
November 6, 2008
And now Affirmative Action
The always sharp Richard Kahlenberg nudges Obama toward class-based Affirmative Action. Count me in as a supporter. I just wonder how much it will be on the agenda.
The Question is Moot!
Haha. I saw this when I was like four. So. Awesome.Jesse Jackson killed on SNL.Dig the Elaine Benes appearance.
What, Barack? You're bugging. You know I've maintained Jim Brown was the greatest, but looking at this video man, I don't know. Sweetness was the truth. It's so weird so see a dude running holding the ball in one hand like that, and doing that high step join in mid-run. He was sick, and apparently an incredibly, incredibly kind person. Gone too soon.
I'm done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there--and they're out there, and I think they're scum--are
a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge
numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever
their color.
Fair enough. I have no way of judging how much of a problem "gay racist white men" are for me. I don't even have a way of knowing whether gays are more or less racist than straight people. Moreover, I don't much care. But Dan's logic basically only works if you see black people strictly as a group who've been shitted on. In other words, if you believe that racism is a singular and uncomplicated variable, that black folks aren't effected by any other factors, than you'll probably agree with Dan.
But if you believe black people are not just receptacles for bigotry, not just automatons programmed by centuries of racism, if you believe they consume oxygen like the Irish, that they ingest solid food like the Italians, that they enjoy a good drink like the denizens of Appalachia, that they like to party like gays of any color, that they like to dance like white women, then you understand that no group, anywhere, ever was ennobled by oppression. (The Jews, maybe? No?)
Groups of people who end up on the bad end of history aren't heroic, they aren't better for it, they're just down--and, in most cases, they'd put the victors down if they could. What's the old saying? Black folks didn't object to slavery, they objected to being the slaves. Heh, we don't regret the Middle Passage, we regret the Sahara Desert. We regret not having guns and ships. We regret not being first. And so it is for most of humanity. It's true that individuals sometimes draw wisdom from suffering--but nations tend to be all about the zero-sum.
Look, rightly or wrongly, I'm embarrassed by whatever role black folks played in Prop 8. But that's not because I necessarily think black people are the crux of the problem, it's because I'm black and I want us to fucking represent. I'm not gay, and Dan is grappling with something that doesn't affect me in the same way. But I do know a bit about anger and generalizing. I know that, together, the two are likely responsible for some of the biggest blunders of my career. I know that they generally lead me wrong. I know that whenever I lead with broad statements like, "huge numbers of homophobic African-Americans"--or conversely--"huge number of racist Appalachians" instead of precise questions, people tend to shut down and stop listening. As well they should.
UPDATE: Sebastian shows us all how to math. It's worth reading.
Two ways of being an intellectual
I was watching that Ralph Nader clip with Kenyatta yesterday, and telling her, I don't understand why people find it hard to say, "You know what I fucked up." I don't get the obsession--especially keen among public figures--with digging the ditch even deeper. And then this morning I saw Glenn Loury on bloggingheads doing the right thing.
Africa Dumbatta
I just typed up a post dissing Sarah Palin for not knowing that Africa was a continent. And then I deleted it. There's been a lot of stuff reported around Palin--a lot of it true. But the horror of that Katie Couric interview and Palin's general cluelessness make it easy to believe almost anything. I don't know why, but the Africa thing just smells fishy. I've got one reporter saying that Palin, essentially, knows less about the world than my eight year old son--when he was five. Maybe it's true. But I've played myself before. I'm gonna try not to do it again.
As first reported by Newsweek on Wednesday, McCain aides said some of
that money was spent on clothing for Palin's children and husband,
Todd, who may have received between $20,000 and $40,000 in wardrobe
purchases. The money also included thousands of dollars in shoes.
Several aides also said the items included jewelry, but a Palin aide
disputed that.
Top McCain aides Schmidt, Rick Davis and Nicolle Wallace were
flabbergasted by the magnitude of the spending as the receipts began
trickling into the Republican National Committee, aides said.
Wallace had arranged for a stylist to shop for Palin before the
convention because the Alaska governor did not have a chance to return
home after she was selected as McCain's running mate.
Aides familiar with the campaign's internal discussions said Wallace
and other top aides authorized the purchase of three outfits for Palin
to wear during convention week and three ensembles for the campaign
trail. But cost was to be kept to no more than $25,000 to $35,000.
When Schmidt learned that Palin's staff was putting clothing purchases
on personal credit cards, aides said he called them to stop it.
One word--ghetto.
Umbragefest--the Joe Scarborough edition
I'd likely be more sympathetic to this impassioned plea, were it not coming from Scarborough. I agree with him on the merits, sorta. It's a great day for America whenever a lot of people participate in the process, no matter who wins. I also think that are quite of few of us writers on the left, or wherever, who would benefit by living somewhere else besides New York or Washington, D.C. I don't think we always understand the diversity of the country. I'm talking beyond race, gender and sexual orientation. I think more of that understanding is better for us as writers, and is better for the debate in general. Furthermore, the idea that education makes you more enlightened is noxious.
That said, beware the man who castigates closed-minds, while taking time to celebrate the openness of his own. Seriously, I don't know how to take a plea for more intellectual subtlety and empathy across ideology, from a cat who routinely uses the Upper West Side and Georgetown as short-hand for liberal America.
November 5, 2008
Owned--By Shep Smith, no less
This is, like, a mixture of tragedy and humor. I laughed, and then I was embarrassed for Nader. Tragicomic, I guess. Sorry, I'm not making thoughts...so. .good. Anyway, what's truly tragicomic is that I can't not blog. I love the O.C. shout-out at the end... Time's Up indeed.
I don't know but today feels kinda odd...
Johnathan reminded me of this joint. That's it, I'm off.
A note of thanks
Well it seems we've reached the end of a long journey. I actually was going to shut this blog down after the election. Then the Atlantic came along with their contracts and their wage-slavery. Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to say two things.
1.) There will be no more posting today. I take that thing about black folks and Obama winning and no work seriously. It's not a game, white folk.
2.) I owe all of you more than you know. I think my overlords would kill me if I divulged any traffic secrets. But I think I am free to tell you that, since joining the Atlantic, the viewership level has surpassed my wildest expectations. I expect to return to Earth with the end of the election. But I'd ask that those of you, who've liked what you've seen here, consider sticking around. I really do love a packed house party. I don't know what I'll do if I have to go back to DJing for myself.
Open Thread...
Seems like a good idea today, no? Also, I think I'm on BET at 10 AM EST. Check it out, if you've got a second.
Work to do
I've been working my way through this thing on blacks, homophobia and marriage equality. I don't regret any of my arguments. But, this is hard to take:
Every ethnic group supported marriage equality, except
African-Americans, who voted overwhelmingly against extending to gay
people the civil rights once denied them: a staggering 69 - 31 percent
African-American margin against marriage equality.
I've given my take many times, and I stand by it, though it should be said I was wrong about Latinos. Still on a gut, emotional level, this makes me sick. If someone wants to give me a reason why gay people shouldn't be able to marry that doesn't, at its root, boil down to "yuck," I guess I'd love to hear it. But really that isn't the point. I've always maintained that you don't have to like black people to do the right thing. Same thing here. I'm not very interested in folks's homophobia. I'm interested in why they think they should be in the business of dictating terms of love to two consenting adults. It's disgusting. And we need to let this shit go. There may be great, sound reasons beyond--the blacks are pathological!!--to explain this. But there are no great, sound reasons that excuse it. Cut this shit out. We know better. Even if other people didn't.
UPDATE: Shutting down this thread. We need to breath. We'll return to this in the morning.
November 4, 2008
One last time--We need more folks who've got a good crazy
Presidents to represent me...
Live-blogging commences soon. For now, go ahead and start talking. I'll jump in like 7-ish...
11:27 WTF?? This is the cleanest John McCain has sounded ALL election. Is this the same dude that gave that horrid "That's not change you can believe in" speech? He sounds almost unburdened in defeat.
11:18 Is anyone watching Jesse on MSNBC? He's bawling. Who can blame him.
11:08 Woke the boy up. Kenyatta just came in the door. I'm out in Brooklyn with my great, great editor Chris Jackson and his lovely wife Sarah. We are about to toast. Samori is holding a glass but falling out. Folks, here we go. What did Nas say? If I ruled the world?
10:53 CNN calls it--we did it guys. It's done.
10:52 FOX calls Virginia for Obama. Oh my. Fox just wants this night to be over with. That said--a black Dem taking Virginia is just gigantic.Â
10:49 Will.I.AM. discussing Obama via hologram on CNN--scary on multiple levels.
10:00 Iowa goes to Barry. The sleeper hold tightens a little more...
9:51 From the Dept of Can't Beat 'Em, claim credit. I'm listening to Karl Rove and Chris Wallace claim that Obama "moved to the center" and didn't campaign as a liberal. Last week he was a socialist. Now he's Reagan.Â
9:36 From Andrew:
Ohio! Obama won every age group under 60. He won 64 percent of the under-30s. This is Obama's achievement; but it is also Karl Rove's.Â
9:24 Fox projects Ohio for Obama. The sleeper-hold tightens. And NBC.
8:49 Yglesias has the goods on the dishonorable Joe Lieberman.
8:38 Listening to Smerconish talk Pennsy. Man Palin killed them. Absolutely murdered them.
8:36 Georgia to McCain. I know you tried Hotlanta.
8:24 Grats to Kay Hagan.
8:10 Just saw Pennsy went for Barry. That's curtains.I'm serious. It's curtains.
7:46 Si se puede, Katai! And T.D. Jake wasn't so bad...
7:41 Wait, T.D. Jakes is an election analyst???
7:37 Exit Poll Data. You guys are probably up on this, but here it is.
Please take this as what it is--early indicators. Could be true. Could not be true.
Huey Newton rises from the dead to an ensure Obama victory
Sigh....
The moment I went all in...
Iowa got me no doubt, but I still kinda seeing John Edwards. But this speech, after such a brutal race in SC, just got me. It was the end really--"the same message we had when we were up, and when were down, that out of many we are one." I often hear people talk about needing to relate to politicians beyond issues. I never got that before now. It's been great watching this election with my son, because I see a metaphor in Obama has conducted his campaign and how I try to teach him to go through life. Intelligence over bluster. Toughness over machismo. I don't need him walking in the room saying "I'MBLACKI'MBLACKI'MBLACK." Truly, there are so many more important things.
He ain't a crook, son
Just heard on MSNBC--for the 111th time--some fool claim that Dems should fear controlling Congress and the White House, because they won't be able to blame the GOP for anything. Any politico who talks like that deserves to get their head kicked in today. It's not that I don't think Dems can fail--they most certainly can. But this idea that somehow standing on the corner theorizing about what you'd do if you had your gun, is superior to being fully armed and taking some shots--and potentially missing--is silly. OK, so I was single eons ago. I know how this goes. I've been the herb sitting across the way with the gorgeous brown-eyed girl staring at him, and thinking, "If she talks to me, I'll most certainly disappoint!" But had I stayed that way, I'd be a man without a family.
People who think losing is preferable to winning everything fall into one of two categories: One--utter and complete Shook Ones. Two--losers trying to make themselves feel better, when they should be trying to understand why they lost. It's hilarious logic. Could you imagine Tom Brady saying, "Man, if we win the Super Bowl, we'll have to defend and then everyone will be gunning for us!!" Or Ali saying, "Man, if I win the belt, I'll have to fight the best boxers in the world!" It's laughable. Of course Dems might fail. So what? Are we bout it or not? The GOP would swap places with them in a second. And if they wouldn't they need to get another profession.
A little more on Crouch, but not quite...
Not to pile on, but I thought the following comments were really perceptive and get at a fundamental problem with comparing Obama to other black people on TV. From commenter Ben:
In the mind of Stanley Crouch, Barack Obama is a black politician,
and Louis Farrakhan is a black politician, and therefore they are an
obvious pair to compare and contrast.
That's pretty ridiculous, in the sense that there are plenty of
people one could compare Obama to and learn more than comparing him to
Farrakhan. These include both white and black politicians of Obama's
generation. And Farrakhan's illness has basically removed him from the
national scene. Obama and Farrakhan really don't have much in common
beyond the ability to draw a crowd. Oh, and blackness. Which seems to
be the main thing Stanley Crouch sees. If a white pundit was obsessed
with making this comparison, even favorably to Obama, I would pretty
much call it straight-up racism, or racialist thinking at best. Maybe
we shouldn't call it that from Crouch. But, maybe we should.
What I'm seeing is
that Crouch is stuck on the Farrakhan bogeyman as a crutch for his
arguments. Again, I don't think he's using it against Obama; actually I
think he's disregarding all the other political figures who weren't
Farrakhan or Jesse Jackson. He's slanting the argument by using
Farrakhan as symbol of the old, when there were plenty of non-extreme
black politicians 20 years ago too. Harold Washington or John Lewis
didn't get crowds of hundreds of thousands of people when they ran for
office, but if it wasn't for people like them, Barack would not be
where he is now.
I don't disbelieve his argument about increased diversity and
post-simplicity. But I don't think one can prove that the attitudes of
the country toward race have changed, by comparing an extreme figure
like Farrakhan to a mainstream one like Obama. Of course they have
different appeals, because they're very different people.
A more interesting evolution in politicians, to me, is from the
generation of big-city black pols who got elected as pioneers, often on
civil rights cred (Harold Washington, Marion Barry, Tom Bradley, Andrew
Young, ...) to a new generation who get elected as technocrats (Cory
Booker, Michael Nutter).
There's been this weird temptation to compare Barack Obama's style of leadership with Jesse Jackson's and Al Sharpton's. I've done it myself many, many times. I think Ben gets to the heart of why that comparison is bogus, sloppy and lazy. Obama isn't an activist. He reps for the state of Illinois. Civil Rights leaders, likewise, rep for whatever cause they chose. Farrakhan isn't running for office. He isn't passing any legislation. He isn't holding any hearings. Likewise, I don't expect Obama to be leading a protest march. If you're going to compare him, it's best to juxtapose him with other actual politicians. Compare him to Edmund Edward Brooke or Doug Wilder. If you want to dis the past, at least give me a Sharpe James.
The "Obama v. Farrakhan" thing or "Obama v. Sharpton" thing or even the "Obama v. Jesse" thing appeals to two types of people. White people who despise those three. And black people, frankly like me, who get sick of those dudes being stand-ins for "what the Negroes think." But it's sloppy thinking that gives no regard to either party--it just lumps them together in a box called "Famous Black People Interest In Politics." I remember Tim Russert foolishly asking Barack Obama about something Harry Belafonte said. I remember thinking, What the fuck does Obama know about Belafonte? He's representing Illinois. That's his job. Let Harry be Harry.
The best dirty trick ever
Oh come on, you gotta give it up for this dude. Hilarious.
We don't believe you, you need more people
Yglesias on the strange, strange Joe The Plumber strategy:
It's fascinating to me how McCain, who spent so much of 1999-2005 at
loggerheads with elements of the conservative base, keeps forgetting
the distinction between things that make the base excited and things
that help his campaign. Sarah Palin is the obvious example, but Joe is
in some ways a deeper and truer example. The idea behind the Joe the
Plumber saga is that Barack Obama would be bad for people like Joe, a
small business owner who is (putatively) prosperous enough to be hit by
Obama's tax hikes on people with over $250,000 in annual income. Of
course Joe doesn't actually earn that much. But if he had,
Joe would just be the very model of a hard-core Republican. Whites are
more Republican than non-whites. Men are more Republican than women.
Small business owners are more Republican than any other occupational
group. High-income people are more Republican than are middle-class and
poor people. And among white people, those with no college degree are
more Republican than those with college degrees.
Thus, a white male small-business owner practicing a blue collar
trade and earning enough money to be hit by Obama's tax hikes is
nothing other than the Platonic Ideal of a Republican (think Tom DeLay
when he owned a successful bug-killing business). Republican crowds go
wild for Joe because they can identify with him. But by the same token,
the people who identify with Joe are the Republican base. They can't
turn this thing around. And they're certainly not the people you're
supposed to be talking to in October. It'd be as if Barack Obama were
criss-crossing the country with a young, hip lesbian acting as his main
surrogate to attack McCain's health care plan.
Basically. I think it comes from drinking your own Kool-Aid. To these guys, America is still Joe the Plumber. This is why you hear them disqualifying whole swaths of the country with phrases like "the pro-America parts" or "real Virginia." They have mistaken their little retreat in the forest, for the forest itself. Is it not a good thing to live in a democracy? Every four years you get to show your leaders exactly who you are.
Went and voted this morning in Harlem. The line was like an hour or so. Charlie Rangel was like ten or fifteen places back. He stood in line the hard-time. I tried to snap a picture, but it came up all fuzzy.
November 3, 2008
The twitter renaissance
I know nothing about twittering. I don't even pretend to understand. But a buddy here at the Atlantic has requested nothing but Wu-Tang shout-outs. I think I can oblige. Taking suggesting. Here's some inspiration.
Barack speaks on his grandmother
Classy, beautiful and most importantly, human.
From the department of confusing 2008 with 1988
Stanley Crouch just can't quit Louis Farrakhan. Or Jesse Jackson. Or Tawana Brawley. Or gangsta rap. It's always nice to see a writer who has repeatedly physically assaulted folks for the crime of disagreeing with him, get on his moral high horse. The sad thing is that I agree with some of his point--but they're buried beneath his contempt for the 90s. These guys are going to be fighting with each other until the end. It's like their only way of seeing the world. The young people who organized for Barack ain't thinking about Farrakhan.
Barack Obama's grandmother has died
I guess I've already said my piece. I don't know that I've got anything to add.
Crazy things are happening
I was reading Sean Wilentz piece in the Daily Beast and got pissed off readin him defend Andy Young and Bob Johnson for the dumb shit they said during the primaries. Wilentz actually called Johnson "one of the most respected deacons of the African-American community." But I decided I wasn't going to be pissed. In fact, it was actually quite small of me to be pissed. Instead I'd remember that the best meditation on Barack Obama I've heard--bar none--was delivered, freestyle, by a disciple of Martin Luther King. The fact is that Barack Obama would not have been elected, not just without the past struggles of our greatest generation, but without their current support. They don't want to all be Bob Johnson. We don't want to all be Pacman Jones. Don't believe what they tell you about a "generational struggle." Even when the "they" is me.
Get used to this clip. I may post it ten times tomorrow--though I wish I had better video. Who can tell, indeed.
They don't don't dance no mo'
Folks, I present the Obama Hustle. Somehow I don't think we'll be seeing a Sarah Palin Electric Slide. Props to Nat Moore for putting me on...
The future from the right
I haven't been following the "future of conservativism" debate as well as I should have. But I thought this was a pretty interesting, and more importantly, self-aware piece of writing by Ross. I'm interested in where these guys end up:
Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty
problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time
when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design
puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the
socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising
health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly
undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How
do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often
perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an
increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from
racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an
increasingly multiracial America? etc.
Billy Dee Williams says "Young man, pull up your pants..."
Hah, Obama on the question that vexes all black people over 40. You know where I am on this one. When I was a kid Negroes were wearing their pants backwards--literaly. A few years back, when I worked at the Voice, I couldn't walk through the East Village without seeing a young lady in low-riders with her thong showing. I didn't have a problem with that. Hmmm, that's not the same thing, I guess.
Uhm, moving on...I thought the "Brothers need to pull their pants up" line was pretty funny. It's good to see a dude operating at that level who still has a sense of humor.
Awesome
Yes, I'll have to stop saying that soon too. Anyway, msnbc.com is streaming live coverage. If you're like me, and have no TV, this is a god-send.
Ta-Nehisi sweats himself
Even more this time. Here I am making an appearance in a piece by Paul Frank Bruni (How embarrassing, I was thinking of my Dad as I wrote this. Ugh. Frank, if you're out there, my apologies. No disrespect intended.). I'm referred to as "the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates." Hmm, sounds important. I just as well could have been "that dude who lays on his couch, and orders his son to fetch his shoes, Ta-Nehisi Coates." Guess that's kind of long. And here's a Q&A with Bookslut. Oh yes, there will be Spiderman references:
I wanted to ask about Marvel Comics.
Beautiful.
The fantasy of those books is centered on the idea that you
have these kids who feel themselves to be freaks and they get to live
out this fantasy where their freaky nature is realized as having these
great powers. They end up being sexier, they get to wear tight clothes
and they get to beat people up. How does this fantasy play out for a
black kid growing up in the crack epidemic, living with a perpetual
fear of violence?
I think the important thing is to not internalize your own persecution. "Persecution" is too strong a word.
Oppression?
Yeah, that might be too strong a word too. [pause] Kids are
mean. They're beautiful. But they can be cruel. But for all of that,
there's the idea that you have more worth than they tell you you have.
So don't internalize what they tell you. That's the obvious parable.
That's X-Men, obviously. The greatest thing about Spider-Man is that
everyone in New York hated him. (laughs) I didn't know that at
first. I came to Spider-Man first through the cartoons and then I
started reading the comic books. And it was a shock to me that people
hated him. They threw stuff at him. They cursed at him. I don't know if
it's still like that in Marvel today. He's gone through some changes.
But in the '80s, you know, Spider-Man was not liked. That was just so
intriguing to me.
13 month old baby, broke the looking glass
Matt has an important post for those of who believe in things we don't understand, and well, are suffering:
Something funny happened in 2004 where a lot of progressives convinced
themselves near the end that John Kerry was likely to win the election
even though he was narrowly behind in the polls. Then a lot of people
have gone and misremembered that as thinking that Kerry was likely to
win because he was ahead in the polls, which he wasn't. Thus, many are left unable to believe that Obama's lead in the polls makes his victory likely....
The theory behind "Kerry's gonna win" was that undecideds were likely
to break heavily for the challenger -- heavily enough to make up his
small gap in the polls. That wasn't a crazy thing to believe, but it
clearly had a whiff of wishful thinking about it. At the moment,
though, Obama just has a big lead.
It's amazing how we've shifted the blame for our 04 heartbreak over to the polls. It's true the exit polls blew it. But the actual polls called it pretty right--and the gap between Obama and McCain is much larger than the gap between Bush and Kerry. One commenter in Matt's thread makes a great point--the GOP and the Dems have swapped places. This year, there is a class of righties dreaming of a tightening. much as so many of us imagined Kerry clossing in '04. We simply could not believe that the country would re-elect Bush. Now, I don't think a lot of them can believe that the country is going to elect a black dude named Barack Hussien Obama from the South Side of Chicago. And, I guess, neither can many of us. No matter, all this handwringing just gives me a an excuse to hit you with the old school Stevie Wonder.
A bad time for the empire...
Man, Wade Phillips is gonna be Wade Phillips, but my son's team lost yesterday 13-0. Last game of the season. Kinda horrifying to see 8-year old kids crying on the sidelines because they wanted to win so bad. The kid was damn near inconsolable.
In other news, the Titans look real. Consider this your NFL open thread.
November 2, 2008
The Cheney Endorsement
I've been informed that I can no longer use the term, Epic Fail,so I'll just say this, in a nutshell, is why these guys will lose. Who thinks the way to close the argument for McCain is to secure a Cheney endorsement? I would have loved to been in on that strategy meeting. Like, "Oh Obama's doing that Afromercial and is rallying with Clinton, but we've got something for them...."
These cats need to October Surprise harder. Plumbers with recording contracts? White-chicks who can't even execute the old Scottsboro boys joint? Aunts overstaying their welcome? These guys give good, decent tax-paying demagouges a bad name. They should be ashamed.
November 1, 2008
Awesome-sauce: White racists and antisemites for Obama
Courtesy of Andrew, here is the chaiman of the American Nazi Party on Obama:
White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who
happens to have a pale face. Personally I'd prefer the negro. National
Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is
almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the
globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who
supports the invasion of America by illegals--basically a continuation
of the last eight years of Emperor Bush. Then, we have a black man, who
loves his own kind, belongs to a Black-Nationalist religion, is married
to a black women--when usually negroes who have 'made it' immediately
land a white spouse as a kind of prize--that's the kind of negro that I
can respect. Any time that a prominent person embraces their racial
heritage in a positive manner, it's good for all racially minded folks.
Besides, America cares nothing for the interests of the white American
worker, while having a love affair with just about every non-white on
planet Earth. It'd be poetic justice to have a non-white as titular
chief over this decaying modern Sodom and Gomorrah.
I think the racists like us! Oh, no wait...
Finding out Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for president was
one of the saddest days in black history. Another legacy of black death
is about to begin, just like it began back in the '60s with probably
the greatest traitor to black people in modern-day history, Martin
Luther King.
Hmm, OK then...
I don't know what just happened..
But I'm sitting here watching Chuck Todd and the excitement just hit me. It is something when you actually allow yourself to contemplate it--this country could potentially have a black president. My God.
Be a credit, to your race
Also this nice tall glass of Awesome-Juice from commenter Leon Rogers.
Who wants to guess what's happening in this picture? OK, I'll start. This is the Fayettville chapter of the NAACP, after being informed that R. Kelly has been nominated for another Image Award. Any other guesses?
UPDATE--Win:
I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure it involves Flavor Flav and a Sarah Palin look-alike.
Stuff 33-year-old, quasi-literary, golden-age hip-hop loving, black people think they like
I could never shut down my comments. I just come across too much great stuff. A few choice haiku/tanka/sonnet/freestyles from the threads below:
Mid 50s overeducated white guy here, one who likes collards and
other greens just fine. My dad did too, especially served with dog
bread that he learned to cook growing up in east Texas during very
rough times indeed. His father, my grandfather, was for a decent number
of years a sharecropper in east Texas, but he was very picky about his
greens, he only liked the young tender leaves. He worked land owned by
an African American family. The sibling of that family who looked after
things had a day job as a Pullman porter, but he'd stop by my
grandparent's place from time to time to see how things were going
(which often was not well).
In the late 30s my father lit out for the territories and joined the
CCC putting in rail track across the Southwest -- he knew that nothing
there could be any harder than the work his father would put him to if
the stayed home. My father and uncle say that during WW2 (they both
served in the South Pacific) it was common for soldiers to engage in
"my family was so poor that...." contests, and "my family was so poor
that we sharecropped land that belonged to a black man" would trump
most anything else.
This is a total drudge manufactured story.Can you even wait for the
campaigns response? It was no secret that those newspapers weren't
pro-Obama before their endorsements. Those reporters were only on the
plane some of the time. It's the homestrech. His media people are
allowed some discretion. I'm sure all sorts of newspapers don't get on
the plane.
Here's a piece no one cared about. Meh, whatever, probably the most enjoyable article I did during my stint at TIME. Premiered a month before I got laid-off. The nail in the coffin? Ya think?
Here's me going after Al. I didn't so much have a problem with him, as I had a problem with media acting like this dude was the go-to guy for everything black.
This was my first real story at time. I was writing for the Business section, a real change of direction for me. At any rate, it's about Wal-Mart's attempts to colonize the inner-city. As much as I enjoyed this piece, I mostly enjoyed going out to Chicago, which is a beautiful, beautiful city.
This a piece I did about the cops just outside our nation capitol, in Prince George's County, a few years back. I wanted to offer a counter to the dumb, conventional wisdom that if you paint your police force black, you could eradicate police brutality. In fact, Prince George's--one of the richest, blackest counties in the country--also had one of the most brutal police force's in the country.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
